City Rising PBS SoCal series on gentrification

A couple years ago, the PBS station KCET-TV produced a short series called "City Rising," about urban change in cities across California.  Last night's episode was on gentrification, showing footage of community organizing interspersed with interviews with academics and activists.

(Since the original production, the station merged with other public television organizations to create the Public Media Group of Southern California, called PBS SoCal.)

One major focus was on Long Beach, which has almost 500,000 residents, but no significant legal protections for renters.



This episode repeated last night on the PBS World Channel--a cable channel devoted to documentaries that many PBS systems carry, but not any of the systems in the DC area.

It made me realize, once again, how the production values of locally produced tv programs by DC-area PBS stations don't measure up to the best PBS stations, especially in terms of the coverage of urban issues, where stations like Chicago's WTTW truly excel.

(PBS Utah too seems to do local productions and interstitial programming that is better by comparison to DC area PBS stations.)

Here's the thing about the episode:

1.  Most legacy cities were built out by the 1930s, but since then the nation's population has increased  by 1.5x.  (And communities built out after WWII tend to be built much less densely compared to earlier periods, further restricting housing supply.)

2.  Residents typically fight new development.   Even when new supply is added, typically it's high priced because it's built at today's prices for land, labor, and materials.  And because even with new additions to supply, demand is still unmet, prices for housing don't go down.

3.  So prices rise.

4.  More people want to live in the city, which further drives demand.  And ultimately, people with more money are always able to outbid people with less money.  This raises prices and in later stages of change, pushes displacement.  (Usually in earlier stages of neighborhood change, buildings taken by new residents tended to be vacant, so displacement wasn't an issue.)

5.  Since supply is constrained, it's reasonable to put in rent controls and tenant protections.  When demand is greater than supply, desperate people can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous property owners.

6.  But in return for rent controls, residents must agree to new construction of housing--market rate, accessory dwelling units, infill apartments, etc.

7.  To preserve affordability, governments need to be proactive in terms of purchasing properties, fostering land trusts, cooperatives, and other land tenure forms which prioritize maintaining affordability rather than price escalation.

8.  Ideally, priority for reuse of government-owned land should be 100% affordability, while balancing revitalization and other goals.

9.  Regardless, master planning should include specific planning for "social housing" and allocate lots within the master plan to social housing providers.  (Helsinki does this.  Vienna does a form of this.)