CNU 28: Virtual Conference | Session: Housing Advocacy Amid the Affordability Crisis

I was a presenter for a session of this week's Congress for the New Urbanism conference. It was supposed to be in Minneapolis, but with the pandemic, it switched to a virtual format. The session is described thusly:

Housing Advocacy Amid the Affordability Crisis

As housing prices rose in the late 2010s, a growing body of scholarly commentary argued that the solution to this problem was to change zoning law to allow more housing in cities. But because of Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) neighborhood resistance, housing supply in high-cost cities continued to lag behind job growth. In some cities (especially in the West Coast) a Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) movement seeks to translate economic scholarship into zoning reform. Some scholars seek to split the difference between NIMBYs and YIMBYs, arguing for Public Housing In My Back Yard (PHIMBY)- a set of policies that promote public housing but not market-rate housing.

Presenters: Josh Stephens, editor of the California Planning and Development Report; Michael Lewyn, a professor at Pace University Law School, organizers of the session; Shaun Scott, of Seattle, a past Councilmember candidate; Patrick Condon, a professor at University of British Columbia; Laura Foote, Executive Director of YIMBY Action in San Francisco, and me.

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Here's how I started out:

I focus on center cities and these comments are based on that experience.

And are about what I think we can learn from contrasting yimbyism with nimbyism.

Most center cities were built up by 1930, when the US population was 40% of today's.

Compared to then, households are smaller, there are many more single person households, and dwelling units are bigger.

In 2020, lack of enough housing, especially in desirable places, is why housing prices have gone up so much.

When it comes to planning, I argue the processes are often set up to fail because they don't distinguish and define overall community planning goals, simultaneously, with planning goals of residents

City goals focus on benefiting from and managing growth. Residents aim to ward off change.

Planners try to optimize both sets of goals, residents focus only on their neighborhoods. There is no consensus.

This is complicated by the fact that planning generally doesn't make clear that most residential blocks won't change much, that growth is directed to commercial areas and areas served by high capacity transit.

Residents often complain too, that additions to housing supply don't decrease prices and pejoratively, make the claim only developers benefit. Why this seems to be true needs to be unpacked.

Today's housing is built at current costs, so of course it's priced at the top of the market. And even with additions to housing supply, if demand is greater still, prices don't decline.

And in a market prioritizing top dollar, low cost housing gets converted to high cost housing. If governments aren't actively supporting, maintaining and building affordable housing it disappears.

New housing additions do lead to price stabilization, but over decades, and people aren't thinking about their communities in decades.

Supporting new development is made even harder because planners, elected officials, and developers are terrible at articulating the benefits from growth and the addition of new residents.

Benefits include:

- more tax revenues;
- which fund the programs people say they want
- new, more and improved amenities of all types
- more customers for locally provided businesses
- improved commercial districts;
- more trips shifted to sustainable modes;
- the ability to accomplish more over shorter distances;
- greater equity and access opportunities;
- and economically more robust and resilient communities.

New urbanist projects can be a more welcome addition, because they offer city appropriate architecture and urban design, reducing some, but not all, of the objections to development.

Here's some complications:

We need to redefine and come to grips with changes in what is considered appropriate density, mass and height. Density doesn't mean 20 story buildings.

Note that in areas with weak transit, new development adds car trips categorically, so opposition is understandable.

Going forward, expanding the range of housing types in existing single family neighborhoods should be a priority, as it will make neighborhoods more resilient and accessible to a wider range of households. But this will be controversial.

Finally, market-based real estate development processes aren't great for delivering social housing. The government needs to be actively engaged in housing planning, and the government and the nonprofit sectors need to be actively engaged in social housing development.


Thanks. I look forward to the discussion.

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