Links Roundup: Making Housing Affordable Edition

+ Brandon Fuller

The Urbanization Project's Urban Expansion initiative works with fast growing cities to make room for their expansion. A key benefit of doing so is ensuring an ample supply of developable land. By planning for an ample supply of urban land, municipalities can help to keep housing affordable and to limit the sort of disorderly expansion that tends to be the most environmentally destructive. Because the vast majority of this century's urbanization will occur in developing countries, the efforts of our Urban Expansion initiative are focused there.

However, of the 21 countries whose urban populations will grow by more than 25 million in the next 40 years, there is one that fits the World Bank's definition of high-income: the United States. The US will add some 100 million urban residents over the next few decades. If American cities are to remain affordable and inclusive, it is imperative that they continue to expand the supply of housing. The stories at the links below focus on the challenges of keeping housing affordable in two of America's most productive cities, San Francisco and New York.

The Conflicting Housing Regulations and Norms in NYC

Largely written to prevent slum conditions and firetraps, New York’s housing regulations have not kept up with changing cultural norms and increasing financial pressures, some housing experts said. It is, for example, illegal for more than three unrelated adults to live together in New York City. That law is widely broken and infrequently enforced.For many students and new immigrants, sharing space has long been the most affordable housing option in the city. New economic challenges, the experts said, have spurred even more demand for such arrangements.“There are ways we can allow people to live in different kinds of configurations that would be cheaper for them,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

How to Attract the Middle Class to NYC

So New York has been successful in attracting rich and poor alike, and that makes the city unequal. The problem that should concern candidates across the political spectrum is the missing middle — the ordinary people who move elsewhere because real estate is too expensive, taxes are too high, and schools underperform relative to many suburbs.The next mayor should prioritize two policies that would make the city more welcoming to middle income Americans. He should promote housing affordability by reducing the regulatory barriers to building, and he should improve educational options. Housing will only become more affordable is if more housing gets built; draconian land-use regulations are the city’s biggest changeable barrier to new building.

Housing Becoming Unaffordable in San Francisco

But the city did not allow its housing supply to keep up with demand. San Francisco was down-zoned (that is, the density of housing or permitted expansion of construction was reduced) to protect the “character” that people loved. It created the most byzantine planning process of any major city in the country. Many outspoken citizens did—and continue to do—everything possible to fight new high-density development or, as they saw it, protecting the city from undesirable change.Unfortunately, it worked: the city was largely “protected” from change. But in so doing, we put out fire with gasoline. Over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it’s starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else.Whatever the merits of this strategy might be in terms of preserving the historic fabric of the city, it very clearly accelerated the rise in housing prices. As more people move to the Bay Area, the demand for housing continues to increase far faster than supply.

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