Introduction:
In my previous segment
on working-class new urbanism, I focused on the non-housing aspects of
the urban squeeze-out effect that the working and middle classes face
in gentrifying cities. However, it is true that housing is the leading
factor that causes cities to shift from a “bell curve” socioeconomic
distribution, where the city is anchored by a broad middle class and a
prosperous and mobile working class, to a “barbell” distribution, where
a megawealthy elite perch on top of a vast number of poverty-wage
workers.
However, the new urbanist emphasis on expanding supply through
higher density, while necessary, is not sufficient to make the city
safe for the working and middle classes.
Housing as Class:
Make no mistake, the politics of housing are the politics of class
(and race). To give one example, today the city of Santa Barbara where
I live recently voted on Measure B, an ordinance designed to lower
building heights from a maximum of 60 feet to a maximum of 45 –
effectively lopping off two stories of potential development, in an
attempt to prevent “canyonization” of downtown Santa Barbara. While on
first glance, this would seem to be one of those “non-ideological”
issues of good governance, the campaign over Measure B quickly became a
struggle about wealth and who controls it.
The Yes on B coalition named itself “Protect El Pueblo Viejo,”
framing the contest as one between Santa Barbara’s supposedly golden
past and its uncertain future. In its literature, the group emphasized
“the unique small town charm” and argued that “high buildings are
inimical to the basic residential and historical character of the
City.” In policy terms, the group made the patently false argument that
reducing the height limitation would make it easier to build affordable
housing without any impact on urban sprawl, and that smaller buildings
are more sustainable than larger buildings – which of course ignores
the fact that reducing the potential supply of housing close to a city
center when demand for housing is high will push affordable housing
outwards and that smaller buildings are only more sustainable if you
ignore the people inside the buildings (the more people you can put
into a building, the less energy they use individually; if fewer people
can live in a building, they require more buildings to live in).
However, the policy argument was never the main point – the
emotional thrust of the Yes on B campaign was to identify a particular
group of voters – namely, older residents who are homeowners of
single-family detached residences – and raise fears that their way of
life is under threat. While never spelled out (and it never is), the
threat is that denser development would make Santa Barbara a big city
with big buildings – which means a lot more (working class) people
living in Santa Barbara who presumably don’t get the “historical
character” of the City. It’s not an accident that the major funder of
the Yes on B side, a Texan subdivision developer named Rudy von
Wolfswinkel (not a joke), funneled his money (eventually $750,000)
through a PAC titled “Preserve Our Santa Barbara.” The
inference here is that by keeping Santa Barbara small, the people
already established would hang onto theirs, without any thought to what
would happen to people who weren’t able to buy a house back before the
median home price wasn’t over a million dollars.
After an enormous amount of work, Measure B was defeated on Tuesday
54% to 46%. But while we should deservedly take pride in having
preserved Santa Barbara’s ability to create affordable housing, we
shouldn’t forget that we still need to find new solutions to turn
capacity into reality.
The Problem of Supply in the Metropolis:
The Measure B campaign points out one of my problems with the new
urbanist approach to affordable housing – namely that it concentrates
almost exclusively on the supply side of the equation. Building up more
affordable housing through higher density is all to the good, but as
someone who grew up in New York, there is a basic problem with a
supply-only approach. Namely, it’s extremely difficult to build faster
than demand will grow, especially in larger cities. Demand for housing
in New York City and similar large cities is frequently (but not
always) inelastic – the sheer numbers of people who want to live in the
city can easily outstrip the potential supply of housing, especially
housing at the city’s core. Moreover, given the current systemic bias
to private market construction as opposed to public housing (an area of
social policy which America has always had an enormous difficulty
with), more construction doesn’t necessarily mean more affordable
housing, as new construction can cluster at the higher (and more
profitable) end of the market. Set asides can militate against that,
but a supply-side approach can easily become a Sisyphusian task.
Finally, there is the issue of spatial limitations – you can only build
on the space that exists, you can only build so far up, and you can
only sub-divide so much, before you have to build outwards.
So how then do we deal with housing costs? I believe that new
urbanism needs to balance supply expansion methods with demand
management.
Going the Full Henry George:
In the past, rent control was the major tool that the left used to
try to moderate the effects of demand. By limiting the rate rate of
growth of rents to a certain figure, the hope was to keep rents from
growing faster than incomes, allowing people to find and keep housing
within their means. However, rent control has long since passed out of
the realm of the possible.
I do think that there are more ways than rent control for making housing more affordable. In an earlier post, I discussed expanding the Section 8 housing program
to what Lyndon Johnson intended it to be – a national rental assistance
program that provided assistance to the poor, the working class, and
the middle class. By creating a program wherein renters and homeowners
who make less than 250% of poverty pay 25% of their income in
rent/mortgage, and the difference between that and market rate is made
up by the government, the government could dramatically shift the
affordability of housing in cities.
The problem then becomes one of how to finance the program (although
given that the national median is about 20% of income in housing, which
should limit the cost of the program), and and how to landlords from
ripping off the government. Here, I think a Henry George tax on land
would help - it would generate quite a bit of revenue, economists
agree that it doesn’t have any negative behavior-altering shifts like
rent control is supposed to have, and especially if the rate was tied
to the rate of increase in rents, it would essentially recover cost
growths as they happened, since rising rents increase land values.
Why This is Necessary:
The reason why we need to do something so dramatic is that, in the
face of constant demand for housing in the city, I can’t see a
sustainable alternative for working class urbanism to work, unless we
take some really drastic steps that I outlined last time. In short,
people need to be able to live where they work, and that becomes
extremely difficult for the non-affluent to do, and I’m highly
skeptical that you can build faster than people can move.
Moreover, for the “new urbanism” to succeed as a social model, I
believe that cities need to be places where the young, the new
(immigrants and migrants), and the struggling can survive and thrive.
Without tackling the crippling cost of housing, and especially the
phenomenon that makes precisely those neighborhoods that are the most
“new urbanist” to gentrify and push out the working class, cities where
people want to live turn into playgrounds for the affluent and the
people who serve them.
Conclusion:
In the end, it comes down to the choice between a democratic city
and an aristocratic city. In the latter, housing can be treated
primarily as a source of wealth-generating property. In the former,
however, we must treat housing as shelter, as a means to the end of
bringing together a great seething mass of equal citizens engaging in
the process of civilization.
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