Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

The more I study affordable housing,

That’s a lot harder than I worked

the clearer it becomes that what we have witnessed in the last half-century is a revolution in just about everything our parents took for granted about their homes and cities. But this was an accelerated continuous change rather than any sudden breaks, one that has accompanied us narcissistic baby boomers [Hey, speak for yourself! — Ed.] through our lives; we see its movements better when we stand outside it and use constant reference point for parallax.

 

As you spin around your axis, the heavens appear to move.

So far I’ve identified a dozen:

 

When you buy blog posts by the dozen, they’re even cheaper!

Oh, wait a minute …

(By the way, in listing these phenomena, I make no comment on whether they are good or bad. They just are.)

 

 

“You do not have to understand it. Your comprehension or your lack of it, your approval or your disapproval, will in no way alter its operation.” — Anubis to Wakim, in the House of the Dead, Creatures of Light and Darkness, page 25

 

1. Cities flip from hand-based to mind-based work. In its 350 year history, my home town of Marblehead has been a whaling post, a fishing town, a white-bread suburb, and most recently a new-urbanist affluent enclave. But in between the fishing town and the suburb, during the first half of the twentieth century, Marblehead was a tannery, along with many of the mill towns whose football teams we usually played: nearby Peabody’s are still called the Tanners. As a kid I can remember the mills, just-closed and shuttered, that I walked past on my way home.

 

All our cities went through a similar transformation as manufacture moved south, west, or offshore. That migration and our infatuation with concrete flyovers nearly killed the cities, so that by the mid-Sixties the conventional wisdom despaired of the urban core. We hit bottom, I think, in about 1974, with its first oil crisis. Everyone wrote the cities off.

 

Some question about which was pushing and which was pulling

But — surprise — with the exodus of manufacturing, the cities flourished! Today’s modern cities exist because people like to rub elbows with other people. As wealth generation moved from physical (smoke, stench, and effluvia) to mental (computers, universities, and even affordable housing consultancies!), the byproducts of wealth creation shifted from pollution to culture. So developed-world cities, which at one point appeared to be the place that only the poorest live, reversed their economic and demographic spiral, and now threaten to become where only the richest live.

 

[The developing world is a different case; many of them still have huge manufacturing areas, often informally established, that surround the urban core like protoplasm.]

 

The world is urbanizing — not just the developing world, the developed. The result is tremendous job creation in the cities, job loss in the countryside, and immigration to the urban cores.

 

Convex of concave, it’s all in how you look at it

2. Land use rules proliferate and land development costs rise. America was founded on the principle of homestead: put down stakes, fence and plow the land, and it could be yours. (My dad, given to the occasional embroidery, always claimed that my male great-N-grandfather Richard ‘Bull’ Smythe founded Smithtown, Long Island, by marrying a chief’s daughter and receiving as a dowry all the land he could ride around on a bull in a day. He rode the bull until its heart burst, and that became the town.)

 

The nation’s founders would have quaked at the notion of local elected officials saying what one could and could not do on one’s own land.

 

He wouldn’t have suffered Federalist zoning!

That laissez-faire approach worked great so long as America was spreading it, as it seemed it eternally would, but with the cities’ reversal into suddenly attracting the affluent job-creators, local government realized that it could ill afford to tolerate the polluting industrial use, whose externalities drove off the high-paying employers.

Increasingly the urbanizing modernizing cities realized that zoning is destiny, and by taking control of government’s two products — zoning (law) and real estate taxation (money) — they could define their future city. That power could be used for good (redevelopment) or evil (NIMBYism), but either way, the city assumed an ever-greater role in the development process.

 

Meaning more regulation, more hurdles to development — traffic studies, environmental impact assessments, zoning hearings and zoning appeals. Good or bad, you can’t dam the stream for hydroelectric power without also slowing its flow, and in the simplest possible terms, compared with any time before now, today’s development of urban land:

· Takes longer.

· Costs more.

· Injects government more intrusively.

 

I think that’s the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection knocking

 

The result is cities whose very shape and health is increasingly susceptible to government benefice, neglect, or mismanagement.

3. Houses become larger, lots become smaller. The original America was agrarian. From forty acres and a mule onward, we have been blessed with a bounty of land — good land for agriculture, industry (rivers), transportation (waterways), or habitation (a friendly client). The original houses were small, one or two rooms, with no indoor plumbing.

 

Also known as the seat of ease.

Even as recently as fifty years ago, the American Dream house was a small thing, 1,200 to 1,400 square feet — still bigger than today’s European counterparts! But in the intervening half-century, it has doubled in size; the evolving modern house of 2006 is roughly twice as big as its 1956 counterpart.

 

And in 1956, here’s what they thought the house of the future would look like!

Meanwhile, even as the houses expanded, the lot shrank. From the acre to the half-acre, quarter acre, or even less. (Nancy’s and my first Cambridge house sat on one-ninth of an acre, just under 5,000 square feet, and we counted it a decent-sized lot.) Shrinking lots mean closer proximity to our neighbors, and a greater need for structural privacy: thicker floors, better sound dampening, and visual screens.

 

Back then, using your binoculars was okay

The ultimate expression of the shrinking lot is verticality — increasing density by stacking floors on top of one another. Going up has always been the only response possible in fixed-boundary urban environments from the Roman insulae to the present penthouses, co-ops, and high-rise condos. (Our cities have gone up because technology delivered to us the elevator … but that’s another story.)

 

4. Housing costs a higher proportion of income. As land increases in value, housing has to become more expensive in real terms, and since household income is what drives the price (land value being the residual), that means, with inescapable simplicity, that housing must take a bigger share of wallet.

 

You mean that’s what housing really costs?

So it has proven. In 1969 Senator Brooke’s amendment capped the low-income householder’s share of rent at 25% of income. Within fifteen years HUD had gradually raised it to 30% of income, and today at least one-third of all low-income households pay more than that for rent. In Europe, not only are the houses smaller, but the typical resident also pays closer to 35% of income for rent.

 

On this one, Europe is ahead of us. Urbanizing America is going to make housing more costly … but even as it does, earnings and employment are migrating back into the home (office), and potentially relieving traffic (and commuting cost) as they do.

 

At least, I hope so. As congestion rises, people will find ways to travel less. The other side of freedom to walk is being held hostage to the parking space.

 

Easily worth $30k in Boston.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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