Building Housing With Measure, Meaning, And Trust

This is the first post in a series about how I ended up working on the housing issue. It is more reflective and qualitative than quantitative. I’ve over the years about the many mistakes being made in housing policy along with ideas on how to make better policy. This series is a look back at my experience and how we got where we are today. It ends with some ideas about how to change how we think about housing

Why housing? If you have read the series, you would gather that I ended up in housing policy because my ship was grounded by the storm of affordability. When I began as a neighborhood volunteer it was with the ambition of reading and writing legible cities in the Lynchian sense. Instead, I hit the rocks first of economics, then of ideology and power. Housing is important, especially for people in the economy who earn less and who face greater peril when they can’t pay for it. But the housing debate has become more about trying to right wrongs that have nothing to do with the challenge of creating a needed product and service in a manner that makes it accessible to people work and ensure it when they can’t.

To rescue housing from the rocks, we first have to agree that the result of housing scarcity, lack of supply, is why prices go up. Housing price inflation is a problem because it is a consumer product with no substitute, and when housing prices rise, people with fewer dollars pay more and suffer greater hardships. The hardships and frustrations of people with fewer dollars in an inflationary economy are not the result of the decisions of financial institutions, developers, builders, or housing providers but conditions that make the financing, construction, and operation of housing more expensive. There is no consensus on this in today’s housing discourse, and if anything, the discussion is leaning toward trying to make housing an entitlement, something completely insupportable and undesirable.

Second, we need a better quantitative and qualitative assessment of housing inflation and other disutilities associated with housing. This would allow us to arrive at a better measure of what success looks like. We will never be able to remove the aggravation of having to move or find a new apartment or house. We can’t promise everyone they’ll get exactly the living facility and circumstance they want just like we can’t promise everyone the perfect car or bicycle. However, we can probably do a pretty good job of creating a housing economy in which people earning a pay check or two can find a place to live that doesn’t consume half their income or force them on a lengthy commute. And if a job is lost or there is trouble, we have the resource to provide quick relief in the form of cash. You can read about how to address homelessness here.

Third, federal, state, and local government leaders need to stop fomenting class conflict and agitation among the populace using housing concerns; outrage doesn’t pay the rent. Had the Growth Management Act passed a decade ago, opponents of the planning process would have been called racists by politicians and instead of a deliberative and inclusive period of building trust, councilmembers would have simply forced the issue, looking for a “win” for struggling communities. That would have failed, just like trying to find winners and losers hasn’t help house anyone in the United States over the last decade. The trust I mentioned earlier depends not on consensus, but a process that people feel is fair and where there is always hope of a better outcome, not defeat, legal challenges, and foment.

It’s been almost 30 years since I attended my first neighborhood meeting. Maybe I was just a naïve kid back then. But sometimes, here and there, I find some optimism that the last decade I have spent was not a total defeat, that leadership will emerge and that we’ll find a way to change the narrative to be about how we read and write cities and their housing economies together, using a common quantitative language to measure our progress. Not everyone will or has to be happy all the time, but when people are in trouble, I’d like a world where they can get help, not a spot on a waiting list or a promise of an attorney if they get evicted. Maybe I’m just a naïve middle-aged man now. Regardless, somehow, we’re going to find out.