Toward A Legible Solution For Housing In The United States

My journey with housing has been a long one, stretching back to the 1990s when I was a community neighborhood planner and then worked for the City of Seattle to implement those plans. The work of Kevin Lynch, a visionary who wanted to democratize planning so that cities fit people rather than people having to fit into cities, was my inspiration. But that idealism ran headlong into politics and economics; getting to Lynch’s image of the ideal city was hung up by angry neighbors opposing growth and advocates hoping to waylay and extort new housing because of its costs. Solving housing issues in the United States will require changing public opinion and turning planners into visionaries rather than gatekeepers.

In the previous posts I’ve mapped out the path we should take, consolidate all federal housing programs, condition federal subsidies on abolition of zoning and local land use regulation, and, use subsidies mostly for direct rental assistance. As for homelessness, we should use what we save from making our housing policy and subsidy system more efficient to concentrate more resources on the greatest challenges in our economy, helping people on the streets now identify personal recovery goals and supporting their success and self-sufficiency.

But we can’t get there until we can come to some agreement, even if it is a grudging one, to accept some consensus on basic economics, that inflation, not greed, is the enemy of the poor. We need to regulate housing like a commodity rather than an entitlement; today we’re doing both very poorly. Even if we come to terms, the vast majority of ordinary Americans are confused about how housing works. They think rental housing is passive income, not a marginal business like any other, dependent on business cycles and being able to cover costs with incoming revenue.

Housing is a considerable expense to many families and individuals, as much as a third or more of total income. A deep resentment has grown over decades, even the last century, about having to expend so much income on simply having a place to live, especially when that expense is for rent. But resentment doesn’t pay the rent, no matter how much foment is created for interventions like rent control or declaring housing as a human right. In the end, housing is expensive and takes time to build, and until it is regulated in a more rational way, that will continue.

The good news, I believe, is that it won’t take centuries or even decades to change this underlying sentiment but years, if we start now and concentrate energy and effort on education and changing expectations. Housing can’t solve other problems in society; it should be considered necessary but not sufficient to reduce and eliminate generational poverty. Today the public has both deep suspicion of housing produced for a profit, even though profitable housing does not depend on poverty or cause it. The opposite is the case because when housing production is easier, more competition between producers and providers yields lower prices.

Planners, whether economists, advocates, or bureaucrats and elected officials need to stop thinking in terms of generating perfect outcomes. One of the inspiring things about Lynch’s studies of cities was that it was phenomenological not prescriptive. Lynch had an ideal in mind, but he knew that the ideal would be reached by people not with plans, at least that is how I experienced his greatest contribution, The Image of the City. In that book, Lynch used the word legibility to describe what made a great city. Great cities can be read, they tell a story, create meaning, and fulfill deep needs for human beings to know not just where they are, but who they are. He wrote in the introduction, that,

“Just as this printed page, if it is legible, can be visually grasped as a related pattern of recognizable symbols, so a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern.”

This is not the result of a top-down planning process or a formulaic approach, but the result of what Friedrich Hayek called, spontaneous order (think Adam Smith’s invisible hand and Hobbes concept of sovereignty), an assembly of meaning achieved by people without coercion or external direction.

Lynch goes on to say,

“The image should preferably be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where he can extend the drawing for himself. Finally, it should in some measure be communicable to other individuals. The relative importance of these criteria for a ‘good’ image will vary with different persons in different situations; one will prize an economical and sufficient system, another an open-ended and communicable one.”

To change public opinion we need to deeply research what people really think about housing and why, then we need to find the language that bridges those deepest thoughts and concerns with what they also already know and believe about basic economics, what I call “lemonade stand economics.” Any child knows the inputs and outputs of a lemonade stand; the price commanded must at least match the cost of the product and ideally would exceed it. If lemonade sells for less that it costs to produce, or is sold for more than competitors on the block, the stand will fail.

We can’t create a perfect equilibrium in the housing market. There will always be some disutility associated with housing just like there is with transportation, health care, and many other consumer products that have few substitutes. Moving to a new home is a hassle, paying for housing can sometimes feel like a burden, and saving to buy a home can take a long time. But we should work towards a world where people feel as though they have an opportunity to succeed in the market, and when they can’t that they can call on fast and efficient cash support. A housing safety net should not consist of a long waiting list for a subsidized unit but instant help with housing costs when needed.

Today, as I said, people too often see housing as somehow part of a rigged system run by developers and landlords when in fact the rigging is caused by restrictive policies that create scarcity. And planners and others in government want to program housing outcomes using more and more money, a technique that only fuels more housing inflation when subsidies act as an easy out for those restrictive local policies.

We can’t create a perfect housing economy by doing what I suggest, but we can turn off that annoying “check engine” light on the dashboard that indicates some kind of housing crisis. In that world, officials would be held accountable for the decisions they make and the impact they have on supply and whether they have provided fast and easy cash based support for people who need help and an investment strategy to end suffering on our streets.