Where are the metro's destinations heading?

Concealment: Art Alley in Uptown Marion

The last 15 years have seen dramatic transformation of three parts of the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area that are now destination neighborhoods: Czech Village and New Bohemia in Cedar Rapids, and Uptown Marion. (Cedar Rapids's MedQuarter is arguably a fourth.) These transformations have been driven by people with vision, Main Street districts in each town, increased appeal of urban experiences, and at least in the case of Cedar Rapids, an influx of government money in the wake of the 2008 flood.

To see these neighborhoods now, as at any time in the past fifteen years, is to view a photo that will be quickly outgrown. Each is in the process of becoming something, and what is now is not necessarily what will be. What is now is a combination of bars and restaurants, boutiquey shops, and vacant buildings and even vacant lots. There has been some new residential construction, particularly in the Cedar Rapids areas, tending towards apartments and condominiums. As such, these areas at this time provide both the advantages of delight per acre and the financial and environmental disadvantages of auto orientation. With a local economy primarily driven by non residents, all three areas have enormous amounts of surface parking, with all the attendant opportunity costs.

In Daniel Herriges's Strong Towns essay on delight per acre, he argues for city design "resulting in towns rich in sensory detail, intrigue, and serendipity [which] is an adaptation to the reality of a world in which many people want to occupy the same small area of land. It makes such living arrangements not only tolerable but appealing." He uses the example of Japanese gardens, with their rules of (1) concealment, (2) borrowed scenery, (3) asymmetry, and (4) miniaturization.

Borrowed scenery: the former landfill "Mt. Trashmore" looms over the patio at Kickstand

1. Is design an animating issue for people working on these districts? The neighborhoods are blessed with a number of activists who are conscious of design considerations as well as historic preservation, and they probably understand the value of small business, permanent residents, and not having parking craters or missing teeth. Do they have the political strength to make these visions reality, even in the face of developers who want to bring in a large store or "incompatible" building? 

2. What about connecting surrounding neighborhoods to the prosperity being built? New Bohemia in particular is an Opportunity Zone, because it's part of the poorest census tract in the county. The poverty is not in New Bohemia, of course, but in the adjoining neighborhood of Oakhill Jackson. Can development in New Bohemia improve the lives of people in Oakhill Jackson? Similar questions can be asked of Czech Village and Uptown Marion as well.

Asymmetry: 16th Avenue in Czech Village

3. What can be done to get vacant property owners off the bench? As we can see from the below, finished blocks in New Bohemia far outperform big-box stores when it comes to taxable value per acre, but large vacant properties nearby are barely competitive with sneezing.

AREA	# PROPER-TIES	LAND VALUE ($k)	IMPRVMENT VALUE ($k)	LAND AREA (acres)	VALUE PER ACRE
2645 Blairs Ferry Rd NE	1	1526.1	7514.1	17.970	503,072
3601 29th Av SW	1	4059.8	9496.6	23.890	567,451
1000 block 3rd St SE (even side)	5	119.4	2041.0	0.878	2,460,592
1000 block 3rd St SE (odd side)	7	74.7	194.6 (one finished bldg.)	0.769	350,195
200 block 16th Av SE (odd side)	5	98.8	789.0	0.769	1,154,486
200 block 16th Av SE	3	54.7	82.8 (one finished bldg.)	0.463	296,976

I understand flood protection on both sides of the river will not be completed until 2028 at the earliest. That's a lot of time for the Melsha Family, Acme Electric Company, and all to be sitting on a substantial amount of missing teeth. Can't anything be done to get them moving in the meantime? Is it time for a land tax?

Miniaturization: garden behind Little Bo's

These neighborhoods are, as I said, works in progress, on their ways to becoming something of which we're seeing only a little now. It's worth asking, even with our current limited level of knowledge, whether they are places to capture people's disposable income based on current trends and fashions, or on their way to being stable, diverse, resilient, walkable neighborhoods? Every project in the next few years needs to consider this question as a central concern.

SEE ALSO
"What's Up in Uptown Marion (II)," 15 February 2021
"I Wish This Parking Was...," 27 November 2020
"Bridging the Bridge," 26 June 2019

Alexander Garvin, The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island, 2019), chapter 6, includes six "lessons for any downtown." His broad definition of "downtown" includes all the districts discussed here:

1. Establish a distinctive downtown image that is instantly recognizable and admirable

2. Improve access into and circulation within downtown

3. Enlarge and enhance the public realm esp. reconfiguring space used by pedestrians, moving vehicles, and parking

4. Sustain a habitable environment downtown (trees, parkland)

5. Reduce cost of doing business for both governments and private actors

6. Flexible land use, building use and new construction

Solving the scooter problem

Scooters are everywhere they shouldn't be. Perhaps you've heard?

 I

Why are the scooters among us? Rental scooters and bicycles are one way for cities to reinvigorate their downtown areas. Cedar Rapids, like most American cities, saw their downtown areas transformed in the second half of the 20th century from town centers into clusters of offices. Analysis by Costar shows the percentage of real estate devoted to offices in major American cities varies from less than a third in Nashville, San Diego, and St. Petersburg to two-thirds or more in Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington. In downtown Boston, offices occupy a staggering 83 percent of real estate (Badger and Bui 2021).

Offices provide a lot of use maybe 10 hours a day, five days a week, and hardly anything the rest of the time. (Think Cedar Rapids before the flood.) This might be a net-win for property tax collection, but wastes prime city space. Monocultures are not resilient, as we saw during the pandemic; as professionals shifted to work-from-home, it exposed cities' vulnerabilities to shifts in worker behavior. Services like restaurants that were dependent on a stream of office workers suffered. "Single-use office districts--that's not a formula for success," Philadelphia's Paul Levy told The New York Times (Badger and Bui 2021).

What cities, including Cedar Rapids and even Boston, have been trying to do for most of this century is to diversify the economies of their core areas to create 24-hour downtowns. Studies cited by Jeff Speck (2012: 17-35) show advantages of walkable urban neighborhoods over other development types: attractiveness of street life to mobile professionals, financial and health benefits of walking to individuals, more money stays in the local economy, more job creation, productivity and innovation. A substantial residential population can support ongoing economic activity, besides making the area look active and interesting rather than empty. Jane Jacobs (1962: 198) makes this part of her first condition for a vibrant city:

The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common....

For a humble example of the economic effects of people spread through time of day, I [offer] a city sidewalk scene: the ballet of Hudson Street. The continuity of this movement... depends on an economic foundation of basic mixed uses. The workers from the laboratories, meat-packing plants, warehouses, plus those from a bewildering variety of small manufacturers, printers and other little industries and offices, give all the eating places and much of the other commerce support at midday....  The enterprises we [together] are capable of supporting, mutually, draw out onto the sidewalk by evening many more residents than would emerge if the place were moribund. And, in a modest way, they attract still another crowd [who are] people who want a change from [other] neighborhoods.... This attraction exposes our commerce to a still larger and more diverse population, and this in turn has permitted a still further growth and range of commerce living on all three kinds of population in varying proportions: a shop down the street selling prints, a store that rents diving equipment, a dispensary of first-rate pizza, a pleasant coffee house.

In Cedar Rapids, census tract 19, which includes downtown, grew only 1 percent from 2010-2016, but vigorous construction in adjacent tracts accompanied 19.3 percent growth in tract 22 (Kingston Village) and 7.6 percent growth in tract 27 (New Bohemia and Oakhill Jackson) (density.website). We're getting there.

II

Part of reinvigorating downtown areas is providing transportation alternatives to cars. If all the people we need in our downtown and Main Street District came in their own cars, the congestion would choke all the fun away before it began, and we'd take up even more space for parking than we already do; more room for parking means less room for fun and/or economic productivity. Like bicycles and buses, scooters are a sustainable, resilient transportation alternative. City Observatory's study of Portland's scooter program found scooters were not only frequently used, but they had positive effects on traffic congestion and air quality, not to mention providing people downtown with an alternative to cars. (Scooter riders were also paying about ten times as much per mile as car drivers.)

3rd Av SE: 4 bikes and 8 scooters clustered around a bike rack

These are important considerations, but they're small consolation when you're being run off the sidewalk by an aggressive scooterer, or you have to step around, or push a stroller around, or maneuver a walker around, a carelessly discarded scooter. No wonder people want to see them gone. Yet, given their benefits, we should not be too hasty.

III

So what do we know for sure? Cedar Rapids's bike and scooter share program is run through a contract with Veoride. Veoride's website offers encouragement and general instructions like "Ride in the bike lane or vehicle lane unless local laws say otherwise" and "A bike rack is the safest place to park." Also, "The furniture zone of the sidewalk (where benches, lamps & the tree lines are) is a safe and visible place to park." 

Scooter in the furniture zone. Note the adjacent capacity for parking cars

The map with designated parking zones are only on the Veo app, not the website. This includes the service boundary, where you are allowed to park ("forced parking zones"), no parking zones, no ride zones, reduced speed zones, zones with special rewards for parking there,  It also says that "you have to take and submit a parking photo to end your trip..." That means the user is responsible for showing Veoride that they have stored the scooter in a safe and responsible way.

On Thursday morning, I walked 16 blocks of Cedar Rapids's downtown area, from 1st to 5th Street and 1st to 5th Avenue SE. I saw 29 Veoride bikes and 80 Veoride scooters that were not in use.

• Of the bikes, 18 (62.1%) were parked at a bike rack, 11 (37.9%) were in the furniture zone: 100% legal/proper
• Of the scooters, 32 (40%) were parked at a bike rack, 33 (41.3%) were in the furniture zone, 11 (13.8%) were on the sidewalk to some degree, 2 (2.5%) were down an alley, and 1 (1.3%) was in a parking lot. Two of those left on the sidewalk were in cutout areas that were not usable for walking, so I'm saying: 85.2% legal/proper
• There were 40 bike racks, some city-owned and some privately-owned but publicly-accessible. Of these, 16 (40%) were in use.
• I didn't count car parking spaces. There are many, many of them, not nearly all in use. No one parking a car has any excuse for not parking it properly. And yet people do.

Counted as improperly placed, but not really a problem 
even to the most infirm walker

A skeptic notes that Veoride has added staff to manage the bikes, so the problem now seems less dire  than it is, and that I really should do this survey on a Saturday night. Or maybe go to Redmond Park, or New Bohemia, or some place on the west side where they're more higgledy-piggledy. That would be interesting to do. However, it suggests the problem is confined to specific times and places, which makes management i.e. mitigation more of a viable option.

Counted as being in the furniture zone, which it mostly is.
Better where it is than on the rack, though, which would put it right where people walk!

IV

So how do we live with scooters, enjoying their advantages while minimizing the inconveniences? Scooter return is a classic example of an externality i.e. there is a cost to the transaction that is not borne by the user or by Veoride, but by innocent bystanders who have to navigate around improperly left scooters. The policy text I use in my introductory American government class, Public Policy by Michael E. Kraft and Scott R. Furlong (2020: 107-111), lists five general ways of addressing any externality: direct government management of the situation, regulating individual behavior, providing incentives to individuals, market mechanisms that account for externalities, and persuasion.

Government management: More Veoride or city staff could be in charge of returning vehicles to their proper spaces. Or rental could be done from a central location with an actual staff person, rather than a credit card. The bike program came with a lot of new racks, painted a prominent shade of green, but these might need to be moved around to make docking the vehicles more convenient.

Regulation: The rules for proper scooter return are on the app. They could be more strictly enforced, either through fines when the user does not provide the proper picture, or through police guidance. If the police are involved, though, I would hope they would not focus on scooters but address aggressive or unsafe vehicle use in general. 

Incentives: Free rides for people who successfully return a scooter or bike a certain number of times without fail.

Market mechanisms: Require a deposit for rental that would be used to cover loss or damage to the scooter, including the cost of transporting it to a proper location? Allow users to buy stock in Veoride's Cedar Rapids operation, which would understandably increase or decrease in value based on the overall performance of city riders at returning their vehicles?

Persuasion: Social media or other outreach explaining and re-explaining how to return a scooter properly, and stressing the importance of proper scooter return. As I understand the whole nudge thing, it is better to stress the number of people who do it right rather than the inconvenience to children and the elderly who have a sidewalk blocked.

These are some ideas off the top of my head. They assume that there are benefits both to having a local scooter rental program, and to having sidewalks, doorways, &c. clear for people to walk. If your attitude is, "Drivers are normal, scooters are different therefore bad eww eww eww get rid of them," then you  already know what you're going to do.

SEE ALSO:

"The Crisis of Authority and Our Common Life," 19 June 2021

"Here Come the Scooters!" 8 July 2019

Ben Kaplan wrote "The Scooter Problem" in 2021 and "The Scooters Are Good" in 2018

George Kevin Jordan, "Can a New Kickstand Help Curb the E-Scooter Domino Effect?" Greater Greater Washington, 9 August 2021

BOOKS CITED

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library, [1961] 2011)

Michael E. Kraft and Scott R. Furlong, Public Policy: Politics, Analysis, and Alternatives (Sage CQ Press, 7th edition, 2020)

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus and Giruox, 2012)

Dear America brings light in the heat

 

Dear America cover

Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. New York: Dey St, 2018.

The U.S.-Mexico border right now is a mess, which is not new. America has for decades winked at the movement of undocumented workers, families, and asylum seekers, while demonizing it and making it more dangerous.  Border crossings slowed during and after the 2008 recession, but ongoing anti-immigrant politics fueled a policy of gratuitous cruelty during the Trump Administration. 

President Biden has brought refreshing change in many respects, but the problems at the border persist. (For a critique of Biden administration policy, see Chacon 2021.) May 2021 saw the most Border Patrol encounters in over 20 years, while conditions at detention facilities remain bad. Republicans see immigration from Mexico as a potential political goldmine: border governors Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Doug Ducey (R-AZ) have called for states to send National Guard troops, with eager responses from Kim Reynolds (R-IA) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL). South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is sending that state's Guard, too, funded by a grant from Willis and Reba Johnson's Foundation. Meanwhile, Democrats are split on policy and hence over the administration's response. "The [Biden] administration is making Democrats look weak," said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wants increasing immigration from the South and terms the administration's ambivalence "disappointing" (Jaffe 2021).

A Quinnipiac Poll taken shortly after Biden's inauguration found only 20 percent of respondents preferring that undocumented people in the United States be required to leave, even lower than the 25 percent four years earlier. More than half of respondents to a 2019 Gallup Poll said Central American refugees should be allowed to stay in the U.S. (Polling Report data on immigration opinion are here.) Such data suggest there's room for maneuvering on policy, but the politics on the ground definitely lean to the restrictive.

Amidst the speeches and deployments, it is easy to forget that undocumented residents and asylum seekers are actual human beings. One man who's made it his mission to keep this in front of people's awareness is Jose Antonio Vargas, an independent journalist who is himself undocumented, albeit from the Philippines not Mexico. Vargas uses his personal story to describe the complexity of the larger situation, not aggressively but in a three-dimensional way that often goes beyond our country’s two-dimensional political talk. Dear America is a model of presenting a very personal topic with more light than heat.

Along the way, he raises many other issues worth discussing in themselves: in Part I ("Lying") he talks about  family (ch 2), being the new and different kid in school (ch 3), having responsibility at a young age (ch 7), and life choices (coming out, in ch 8). In Part II ("Passing") he talks about curiosity (ch 1), writing (ch 2), seeking and accepting help (chs 2-3 & 9), moral dilemmas (chs 4 & 6), identity (chs 5 & 10), and resourcefulness (chs 7 & 10). The themes of Part III ("Hiding") include home, belonging, and the privileges that come with fame. His snappy style makes for easy reading, but the issues he raises are not easy.

Two of the book’s themes in particular touch on our common life: the meaning of citizenship, and the struggles created for individuals by complicated legal frameworks.

Vargas discusses "citizen" as a role you practice, not as a status you possess.

If I was not considered an American because I didn't have the right papers, then practicing journalism--writing in English, interviewing Americans, making sense of the people and places around me--was my way of writing myself into America. (58)

He describes a "citizenship of participation:" Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience (199-200). That sounds a lot like a common life. And when FOX News provocateur Bill O'Reilly asserts to Vargas "You and the other people here illegally don't deserve to be here," Vargas asks himself, "What has O'Reilly done to 'deserve' to be here?" (151-152). O'Reilly was born in the United States, and thus by constitutional right is a citizen, but how does what he does contribute to our common life?

City planners, developers, and business owners contribute greatly to our common life, against strong headwinds of regulations. When it comes to dealing with absurd legal complexities, though, no group has anything on immigrants. As Vargas's profile rose in the 2010s, his undocumented status began to be seen as willfulness by those with whom he sparred. "It's something I want to fix," he explains to one man who confronts him on a plane, "and there's no way to fix it." The man is incredulous: "You want to get legal?" "Of course," Vargas responds. "Why would I want to be like this?" (160) After another encounter on FOX News, "I wanted to keep repeating: there is no line [in which to wait for legal citizenship]. I wanted to scream, over and over again: THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE!" (154)

[I]n April 2017, [Bill] Maher told me he was confused. "I just don't understand," he said, "why you just can't fix this thing," as if "this thing" is a chipped tooth or a dent in a Tesla. If Maher, of all people, doesn't understand how even someone high profile like me can't just "fix this thing," then it shouldn't be a surprise that most people, regardless of political affiliation, have no idea how the immigration system works. (131)

The legal process he needs literally does not exist, unless he returned to his birth country for ten years (82). (Even legal avenues were closed off by the Trump administration; see Rampell 2020.) Other technicalities frustrate him. When he finds out he could have been adopted by his (documented) grandparents, he has passed the maximum age of 16 (65). When President Obama announces Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012, Vargas is four months too old to be eligible. Even for those of the right age, "DACA is temporary and not everybody qualifies," and filing costs nearly $500 (146). Meanwhile, the tax laws certainly are flexible enough that undocumented workers pay substantial amounts in payroll and income taxes (124-126).

A common life involves laws, and boundaries, but it also requires seeing each other's humanity, and a set of laws that ordinary people can understand and follow. Vargas's snappy prose helps point the way.

SEE ALSO: "Eventually, We're Going to Have to Figure Out Immigration," 10 January 2019

Housing Policy

More like this? Rooming houses in the MedQuarter district

The Cedar Rapids Gazette headline Sunday ("41K in Iowa Fear Eviction as Moratorium Nears Its End") is overblown, but the reality is scary enough. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Housing Pulse Survey, about 11000 Iowans say they're very likely to be evicted from rental housing in the next two months, 21000 say they're somewhat likely to be evicted, and 9000 say they're somewhat likely to be foreclosed on property they own. Even 11000 is a lot of homeless people, relative to available housing stock in our state. Similar results are posted for other states. How about 1.2 million for a national figure? All told about 7 million renters owe accumulated back rent that has been estimated in a range of $11-53 million, according to Mary Cunningham of the Urban Institute (Urban Institute 2021, slides 16 & 19).

Despite a surge in construction both of single-family and multi-family dwellings in the last couple of years, the United States remains about 3.8 million units short of where it needs to be, and existing housing has accumulated $45 billion worth of needed repairs, according to the annual report just published by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (Sisson 2021). Rapidly rising home prices (Nicholson, Merrill, and Sam 2021) have helped existing owners while creating obstacles for first-time homebuyers and renters; other issues include racial and generational inequities and lack of housing near jobs.

The Census Bureau and Harvard Center reports testify to the persistence of housing issues in America, as well as to their complexity. Those challenges can be sorted into three or four buckets: affordability (supply of housing at the right price points); connections to jobs and the larger city, and the avoidance of concentrations of poverty; and stability amidst threats of job loss or displacement through gentrification. The physical condition of existing housing might be a fourth set of issues.

1. Affordability/Supply

Nationally, the home price-to-median income ratio is rising; currently it's 4.4, though that contains a wide range of differences. San Jose, California, leads the country with a ratio of 10.9, and cities like that face a different set of problems than cities like Cedar Rapids, where it's about 3 metro-wide, or Iowa City where it's about 4 (Hermann 2018). Everywhere the market for for-sale homes is "red hot," said Daniel T. McCue of Harvard at the report's June 16 rollout, with demand overwhelming supply as millennials enter the market, resulting in higher real prices than any time this century. 

Rental prices are also up nationwide as well, with well over half of those making less than $50,000 a year paying more than a third of their income on rent, meaning they're one setback away from eviction. Rental vacancies have increased in high-rent urban areas, though that seems to have peaked. Sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted [Crown, 2016] showed a chart at a Bipartisan Policy Council webinar showing that median rents have doubled in the last twenty years while incomes are steady: 

I can't get this chart out of my head...

In locations like Cedar Rapids, discussions of housing affordability focus on people at the low end of the pay scale, those with disabilities, and those with criminal records. A 2017 forum noted federal funding Section 8 vouchers don't come close to covering all those eligible, local resources for those experiencing homelessness are limited, and non-profits like Habitat for Humanity have limited production capacity. Those landlords who do accept Section 8 vouchers are subject to extra mandates and inspections, and might could use funding to help them with repairs and updates. Beyond this, there might still be different kinds of issues higher on the income scale; unlike in San Jose, teachers and firefighters in Cedar Rapids can afford homes, but do they face different financial issues once they've bought them?

Urbanists have long advocated making accessory dwelling units (sometimes called "coach houses" or "granny flats") legal; Chicago enacted a three-year trial run this year with impressive response so far. Narrower streets would allow more land to be put to productive use (Merrefield 2021)--among many other benefits. Cambridge, Massachusetts passed an Affordable Housing Overlay ordinance in 2020 that loosened zoning restrictions on construction citywide (Gibbs 2021).

Shane Phillips argues increasing supply while maintaining affordability and stability requires some form of government intervention in the housing market:

A well-regulated private housing market can serve a large portion of our population, and tenant protections paired with rental housing preservation can assist even more. But there will always be people who are left behind by these efforts—sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Acting through the collective will of our local, state, and federal governments, we have a responsibility to provide support to those who need it and to live up to our professed belief that housing is a human right. This may take the form of rental assistance, publicly subsidized housing construction and acquisition, and a host of other programs (2020: 33).

Awareness of policy consequences is important: Cities can avoid San Francisco's infamous tenant protections that are blamed for constraining supply, but prices--and displacement--have also risen in less restrictive cities like in Texas and Washington even though housing supply has increased (Phillips 2020: 24-28).

Anthony Simpkins of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago told an Urban Institute panel that rental housing won't close the racial wealth gap, but homeownership policies will.

Affordable rental housing does not generate generational wealth. It's never going to close the racial wealth gap.... Today, in a high-cost city like the City of Chicago, a homeowner can pay less for their mortgage than they pay for rent. But when you look at the rules and regulations [related to affordable housing policy], they all skew towards supporting rental housing. There's very little room and very little ability to use these resources to build and expand homeownership among people of color.... It's all about access to capital (Urban Institute 2021, at about 59:48)]

2. Connection

A great deal of the new construction is in the suburbs and in non-metro areas, where it's easier to develop by the batch, and where zoning favors single family homes. You can also get more home for the money, although the savings can get eaten up by transportation costs; in metropolitan Chicago, for example, the closer a median-income household is to the city center, the less their total housing-plus-transportation costs. (See also the interactive maps at the Center for Neighborhood Technology website, including total driving costs by location, housing + transportation affordability index, and access to jobs by transit.) 

Apartments in the former Monroe School rent for $695 a month,
but the Walk Score is 34

Residential concentrations of poverty are problematic for children, who do less well in life than those raised in more socioeconomically mixed areas (Chetty, Hendren and Katz 2016). They are problematic for adults, who have less access to economic opportunity as well as lower life expectancy (Ludwig 2014). Distance from affordable housing to jobs creates the transportation nightmares particularly for the poor and near-poor that Steven Higashide (2019: 92) calls "mobility redlining." 

Simpkins talked about "building communities that have been left behind" as an essential part of remedying the racial wealth gap (Urban Institute 2021, at about 1:01:50). Most areas of concentrated poverty have not gentrified since the 1970s, but in fact have gotten worse off (Cortright et al. 2014). Can cities provide incentives to locate jobs that pay well near low-income areas, and discourage large corporate campuses in remote locations? Or to encourage developers to build affordable housing near areas of economic growth? 

Options for cities include zoning reform that allows a greater variety of housing in a given area (Cortright 2017); Inglewood, California is planning zoning changes to allow more housing and commercial space near Metro rail stops (Sharp 2021). (See this post from 2017 for more on these issues.)

This four-plex is four blocks from my house.

So is this two-plex. If they were even closer, would I be less wealthy?

Cities can reform zoning codes to allow the production of small fourplex apartment buildings ("missing middle" housing) in residential neighborhoods (Holeywell 2016, McGlinchy 2017). Access to capital can provide "ladders" for those with very low income, as well as attracting middle class people to disinvested neighborhoods (Simpkins, in Urban Institute 2021). The national government can revisit the mortgage interest income tax deduction (Quednau 2017), as its value for most filers was eliminated by the 2017 tax act. 

Local transit connections can be improved almost everywhere, and certainly could be in my city. Dharna Noor (2021) points out "investing in public transit isn't just a good idea for the climate and commute times. It's also a good way to ensure everyone has access to opportunity, including the opportunity to relax. Imagine if access to parks and lakes weren't limited to those who can afford to buy, maintain, and park their cars. That could go far in improving access for exploited, poor communities who are disproportionately harmed by highway pollution." 

But is a ridership model compatible with where Cedar Rapids is currently building affordable housing (Pioneer Avenue, Johnson Avenue, Blairs Ferry Road, e.g.)? I would think not.

3. Stability and Gentrification

As land values rise, and incomes do not, evictions have soared: Desmond cited a figure of seven evictions per minute nationally in 2016 (Bipartisan Policy Council 2021). Annually there are more than a million more evictions than there had been foreclosures at the height of the housing crisis, with many associated bad effects on individual lives. Black [and Latinx] renters have about twice as high a rate of evictions as white renters. Evicted renters bounce from place to place because (quoting Desmond) they "are already living at the bottom of the market, in places they can't afford."

Stagnant incomes are one cause of housing instability; another is gentrification. Gentrification occurs where some circumstance has changed raising the potential value of housing far above its actual price (known as a "rent gap"). Recently middle-class demand for urban living has risen as amenities have improved, crime has decreased, and frankly fashions have changed. Gentrification can be good for places, and the people that live in them; at best it improves economic opportunity, public services and facilities, and the tax base. At worst it raises costs for those who stay, and drives others to less connected and less-well-off places (Florida 2015b; see this post from 2016 for a more detailed review of the debate). (For an argument that a focus on gentrification misidentifies the cause of problems with affordability and stability, see McMillan 2021.)

As rents go up, or property taxes rise on homes, some residents are forced to move to more affordable areas. Shane Phillips recounts one California experience: "A $5 billion stadium was proposed in Inglewood and rents and home values skyrocketed nearly overnight; even if the city had allowed for infinite development to meet the growing demand, thousands of households would be displaced before relief ever arrived. These changes were entirely outside the control of local residents, and yet they were the ones to suffer the consequences" (2020: 13). 

Alexander Garvin's book about downtown areas discusses the displacement of people along the way to prosperity: "Increasing demand led to increasing rents and the inevitable gentrification. The rental tenants, who had pioneered loft living and could not afford to remain in the area, were replaced by occupants who demanded and received better fixtures and services for their higher rents. But condominium occupants either remained in a much-improved neighborhood or profited from selling their residences at the appreciated value" (2019: 37). Increasing housing supply might mitigate gentrification "if the citywide housing supply is increasing faster than population growth" (2019: 159), but resurgent value of districts like Cincinnati's Over the Rhine seems to depend to a frustrating extent on getting rid of the "undesirable people" (2019: 134). Either way, as places gentrify, their former residents are going somewhere, and where they go should not be a matter of indifference to policy makers.

Rising values create incentives for property owners like MidCity Financial Corporation in Maryland to convert low-income housing developments into mixed-income mixed-use (Milloy 2021). At the Harvard report rollout, Gary Anthony of the National League of Cities argued that construction of one- and two-bedroom apartments is not an answer for families who have been priced out of their single-family homes, and advocated for "race-specific anti-displacement policy."

Cities could improve access to transportation and other amenities more broadly, to reduce the value premium on accessible places (Florida 2015a). Washington, D.C. is redeveloping a closed hospital in the Congress Heights neighborhood with affordable housing as well as an entertainment facility anticipated to create jobs (Steuteville 2021). Other options include inclusionary zoning requiring developers to include below-market-rate housing (S. Williams et al. 2016, Kaplan 2014); improving housing choices by loosening zoning restrictions in order to provide more options like living above your shop (Marohn 2015); limiting increases on property taxes (T. Williams 2014); and mitigating culture clashes by facilitating communication between the recently-arrived and long-term residents (Saunders 2016).

Conclusion

Shane Phillips argues for balancing the many interests involved in housing policy: 

We must design pro-housing policies that target development where it will benefit the most people (such as where housing costs are highest or job concentration is greatest) and that discourage it where it may do the most harm (such as on sites where dense concentrations of renters already live, especially in lower-income communities and communities of color). 

We must design pro-tenant policies that protect renters living in affordable homes while ensuring that development remains a profitable venture on sites where tenants aren’t threatened and it can do the most good. 

We must increase spending on rental assistance and affordable housing construction, and complementary zoning reforms and renter protections must be in place to make sure those funds are spent effectively (2020:42-43).

But he makes an exception to all that balancing by prioritizing affordability, even though, for many current owners, increased supply threatens the value of their property. It is an inescapable fact that home equity represents the major if not the only source of retirement savings. "Owning a home is integral to financial security for most families in the United States, and rising home values continue to give the government cover for skimping on retirement programs such as Social Security and pensions," but "ever-growing property values are completely incompatible with long-term housing affordability" (2020: 61). So, at the fundamental level, focus on broad affordability and the many social and quality-of-life benefits that would bring, and figure out some other way for people to accrue wealth.

In the 19th century, Jacob Riis depicted squalid housing conditions in New York City.
An exhibit of his photographs is now at the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library
in Cedar Rapids.

SEE ALSO

Bipartisan Policy Council, "Eviction Prevention Now and After COVID-19" [webinar], 23 June 2021 #harvardhousingreport

Alexander Garvin, The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island, 2019)

Annie Gowen, "She Wanted to Stay. Her Landlord Wanted Her Out," Washington Post, 28 June 2021

Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (Island, 2019)

Norman Van Eeden Petersman, "Could You Move in Next Door?" Strong Towns, 23 June 2021

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (And Keeping It There) (Island, 2020)

Prevention Institute, "Healthy Development Without Displacement: Realizing the Vision of Healthy Communities for All," July 2017

Urban Institute, "Stable Housing is a Critical First Step Toward Racial Equity" [webinar], 29 June 2021 #liveaturban