Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Friday, July 05, 2019

More on housing

I meant to reprint some citations suggested on the pro-urb listserv:


1.  The Spring issue of Jacobin Magazine is about housing

From Laurence Aurbach:

2. Yesterday Richard Florida wrote about the responses to Storper and Rodríguez-Pose's article. In particular, he covered a rebuttal by Manville, Lens, and Monkkonen. Their critique is very good (if you like that type of writing), but I think their discussion of housing filtering is more valuable. First they explain how filtering works in the abstract:

Storper and Rodríguez-Pose . . . say that while upzoning could reduce prices, it would do so only for the most affluent housing consumers. . . . . This contention—that new housing won’t help lower-income people—is common, and on some levels understandable. New development tends to be expensive, and the idea that it can increase affordability is counterintuitive. But it’s important to remember that new development has always been relatively expensive. Most people in most places cannot afford a brand new housing unit. The hallmark of a housing crisis is not that new housing is expensive, but that older housing, which used to be cheap, rapidly increases in price. Los Angeles does not have a housing crisis because new apartments go for over $3,000 a month. It has a housing crisis because apartments built in the 1980s, which used to rent for $1,000, now rent for over $2,000."

"So while it is plainly true that a low-income person will not move into a new high-end apartment, it may be true that a rich person who moves into a new high-end apartment will not, as a consequence, bid up the price of an existing lower-rent apartment. The value of new housing is not that it houses the poor, but that it immediately relieves pressure on the older units where the poor tend to live, and then over time becomes old housing itself, and thus less expensive."

"The relevant question, then, is how new housing interacts with older housing: does it relieve pressure on the existing stock?"

Manville et al. cite several empirical studies that show that housing filtering is indeed real and widespread. Then they offer a thought experiment:

"Think about what it means to argue that housing markets are so segmented that the activity of affluent consumers has no impact on lower-income consumers. At its extreme, this contention implies that gentrification is all but impossible. Gentrification, after all, requires that new housing first becomes old enough that its price falls and lower-income people move into it, and then requires affluent people to return and bid its price back up. In both cases, the actions of the affluent are influencing the price for the non-affluent. Both of those conditions violate the assumption of high segmentation. Since gentrification does in fact exist, the housing market segments must be fairly permeable."

There is a political proposal motivating these dueling articles: SB50, the proposed upzoning of large parts of California's cities to allow more development. Storper used his article to oppose SB50, while the article by Manville et al. argues in favor of it.


3. The article that Richard Florida talks about is more like an editorial than actual research. It mainly criticizes existing research as lacking empirical evidence. It provides only a small amount of original analysis, which consist of a few simple correlations that don't demonstrate any causation.

The study that Peter Dreier linked to from the NYU Furman Center is quite good and cites a substantial amount of empirical evidence. It was also published in Housing Policy Debate. and is available with open access here, "Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability."

Despite the headlines, both studies come to similar conclusions: Market-based supply is important but not sufficient by itself for affordability. Some places also need government support for lower-income housing.

The Furman Center study says cities need better advice about the range of affordability policies and how those policies can best be tailored to local contexts. One of the authors wrote this article ("What More Do We Need to Know About How to Prevent and Mitigate Displacement of Low- and Moderate-Income Households from Gentrifying Neighborhoods") that goes into detail about the gaps in knowledge and needs for research in this area. From the conclusion:

"The need for anti-displacement tools is acute and immediate, but policymakers considering potential remedies should be mindful of how little we know either about the problem those tools are being called upon to resolve or about how effective the potential remedies are. Without a better understanding of how gentrification affects existing residents of the gentrifying neighborhood, other neighborhoods, and other jurisdictions, our tools for fighting displacement are fairly blunt instruments, and may have many unintended consequences. That is not to say that jurisdictions should ignore the tools available; doing nothing is not necessarily better than trying tools that ultimately fail or turn out to have costs that outweigh benefits. Decision-makers often must act on incomplete information. Rather, the point is that researchers could provide significant value to policymakers by helping to fill some of the gaps this article has identified.".

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7 Comments:

At 11:27 AM, Anonymous charlie said...

just saw an amazing stat on Toronto, which is that the city had added net zero RENTAL units in the past 40 years; i.e. the construction boom has been in condos.

The supply/demand argument is a fools game; given how long it takes for the market to respond to pricing and build new supply it is a waste for urbanists to argue it.

You can see supply/demand work in Dubai or China; places with very little property rights. Zoning clearly slows down development -- adding a year or two to major projects -- but land acquisition is the one that takes 20+ years.


Was up in Burlington and again thinking many of your best practices have been implemented there and that planning as we know it in the US only works on small to mid size cities.



Your july 4th post was depressing; to badly quote John Das Passos, the shape of the republic is in your lives, fellow citizens, not your leaders.

 
At 2:22 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

also this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-condo-surplus-nyc-penthouses-los-angeles-mansions-real-estate-2019-7


and this:

https://real-estate-and-urban.blogspot.com/2019/06/supply-and-demand-do-explain-why-la-has.html

 
At 7:43 AM, Blogger Slice_of_Life said...

... I don't know if it's a waste to argue it, but there is no question that I seem to be one of the only people at least in our area making the point that only over multi-decade periods of time does adding housing "today" reduce prices. That the expectation that adding to supply will reduce prices "today" let alone in the "intermediate run" is out of sorts with reality.

This is partly because demand is still greater than the supply that is added.

2. WRT your point about Burlington (I've never been), you could be right.

I am stuck in my ways though in believing it's a matter of will. At least for the "smaller cities" of which DC is one. Not the 1000000+ cities, but the smaller ones.

Because most cities "aren't that big."

DC isn't that big.

When you break it down as a county, often counties aren't that big. (Although there is a huge difference between Baltimore County and Orange County.)

So to me there is no excuse in DC for planning and caring about urban design to be so invisible.

I guess it's not invisible but it takes decades.

I guess it makes sense that so far in the metropolitan area, only Takoma Park has legalized restaurant patios expanding into parking spaces. Something that cities like Vancouver probably did 10 years ago.

===
Am trying to get a major firm to bid on the Eastern Market RFP and to participate in the team. In talking with an architect not at that firm, but his and my conversation led us to decide to try to forge a team, we were talking about the Hine development across the street and the ongoing planning initiative for the Eastern Market Metro Plaza.

BESIDES THE FACT I'VE BEEN ADVOCATING FOR A MASTER PLAN SINCE 2007, the fact that these efforts including the EM RFP, and a newly launched separate iteration for a rehabilitated library, ARE ALL DISCONNECTED initiatives is f*ing incredible.

what a waste. So dis-coordinated. And just one of the ideas that the architect came up with yesterday, building on a point I made about urban design integration, was _incredible_. Simple, seemingly obvious, not done, in any of these iterations.

(Yet, DPR reneged on a job offer; DCOP never responds when I apply for jobs, DDOT I get interviews but never an offer.)

 
At 7:46 AM, Anonymous Richard Layman said...

Or the purple line writings as another example. It's amazing work. But the ideas won't ever get executed. Typical planners don't seem to think like that.

No wonder it's so hard for sustainable mobility to compete against the car.

 
At 7:51 AM, Anonymous Richard Layman said...

wrt Toronto, you mean no new rental "single family" houses but the addition of rentals via condos? (Also a huge involvement by investors, similar in Miami.)

That doesn't surprise me because in legacy cities land typically appropriate for SFH has already been developed, and in the modern age the cost of land is such that parcels that get recovered (e.g., interstitial development, grayfield redevelopment) aren't going to be developed as detached housing, or at least, detached housing with a yard.

A good example in DC of such development is out my way, e.g., a development of the old Methodist Home site on New Hampshire Avenue at Peabody NE, not quite on the border with Maryland. It's fronted by detached houses, backed up to by rowhouses. The rowhouses are zero lot, the lots along New Hampshire and Peabody have front yards.

Or the EYA rowhouses on St. Paul's College land in Brookland. Walked through one I didn't know about, to get a Car2Go after the CUA graduation in May. It was nice, and not the kind of place you'd be allowed to build an apartment building (very close to Franklin).

 
At 8:45 AM, Anonymous charlie said...

On Toronto, not clear; I read it as no new multifamily rentals (net).

On supply/demand; I read market rate housing can move much quicker than government subsidies housing in repose to prices; likewise very expensive market rate housing can move even quicker in strong market areas.

But the million dollar question is why the market is not responding to price signals right now and building a lot more based on price, and again that answer has little to do with zoning.

I've been internally modeling how I would feel if RE prices fell 45% in DC.

Agree, DC isn't that big (although it does have the population of Vermont., and Burlington has the population of say, Navy Yard/Waterfront.

But we are uniquely dysfunctional!


 
At 11:38 AM, Anonymous Richard Layman said...

world class...

my joke is that the big federal government trickles down and shapes local government in its image.

 

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