What we can do about housing

 

While the politics of housing remain "wicked," issues of supply and affordability are getting more attention than ever, and there are some signs of progress in places around the country, according to Jenny Schuetz, senior fellow at Brookings Metro and author of Fixer Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems [Brookings Institution Press, 2022]. She spoke to a webinar hosted by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Schuetz summarized the housing policy problem in America: production has not kept pace with population growth, especially since 2008 and especially in high-demand places (cf. Sisson 2021). Where houses are being built, they're often in "the wrong places," the outskirts of metropolitan areas where people face difficulty getting to their jobs, and where they face greater threat from environmental catastrophes like forest fires. Commuting from the outskirts exacerbates traffic congestion and climate change. Everywhere in the United States, whether in Silicon Valley or small-town Iowa, the lowest income renters have little cash left after paying rent, even for housing that is barely structurally-sound. Homeownership is the root of the racial wealth gap, due to accumulated effects of past discrimination, so that even homeowners of color have half or less the household wealth of white homeowners in the same area (cf. Perry 2020).

Housing problems are widely-recognized, but strong systemic disincentives prevent addressing them, she noted. Most people in America rely on homeownership to build wealth, meaning their well-being is fundamentally threatened by new construction that might negatively affect their property values. Cities, too, rely on their property tax bases to fund services, and few if any can risk seeing that base eroded. As a result, zoning codes allow only single family detached housing, sometimes specifying large minimum lot sizes, and motivated neighbors are allowed "veto power over new development." (Older middle-class homeowners are typically more politically engaged than their poorer and younger would-be neighbors.) Historic preservation ordinances are also used to prevent change. 

Schuetz assembled an integrated set of recommendations for governments at all levels to address the issue. Local governments should reform rules for housing production, and allow more diversity of prices and types across the city (cf. Cortright 2017). They may find that they get more for their housing dollar when they acquire and rehabilitate existing buildings than when funding new construction. State governments should facilitate regional revenue and cost sharing among localities in the same metropolitan area, and nudge towns towards removing legal obstacles to housing. The federal government should provide more financial assistance to low-income people to increase their choice of housing, and encourage ways of wealth-building besides homeownership. She noted the 2021 infrastructure bill included more discretionary money for the Department of Housing and Urban Development for competitive housing grants outside of central cities.

In response, Christian Dorsey, vice chair of the Arlington (VA) county board and a member of the D.C. regional council of governments, agreed with the political challenge of local housing policy. He called it the "third rail" of local politics, akin to Social Security at the national level, because of the fear it creates among existing residents ("more for others means less for me"). He urged housing advocates to engage neighbors "with grace," suggesting they will find they are motivated by (1) liking the communities in which they live (which is a good thing, and can be addressed by pointing up how new housing will benefit those communities) and (2) fear they will personally bear the cost of the new infrastructure required. The latter can be addressed by making infrastructure "part of the regular program" of city services rather than adjunct to housing policy.

Schuetz suggested three political arguments for smaller denser housing: (1) businesses can choose from a bigger pool of nearby talent; (2) easier on the climate; and (3) rectifying past racial discrimination. She noted there has been little systematic study of the economic impact of modest upzoning, because there have been as yet only a few recent cases on a citywide base. Dorsey added that Arlington's housing reforms have seen "no corresponding decline in property values," nor in consumer demand, suggesting the negative impact on family wealth is "more of a canard" than established truth.

I'm all for hopeful noises on seemingly intractable issues!

SEE ALSO:

"Housing Policy," 1 July 2021

"Onlining About Redlining: MLK Day 2022," 18 July 2022

Does anybody really know what time it is?

 

Having just endured the semi-annual changing of the clocks, remembering to "spring forward in the spring," I am detecting a disturbance in our collective mood, if we can take any indication from the fact that both our state legislature and the U.S. Congress are working on legislation to abolish this ritual. Iowa's House passed a bill this week to enact year-round daylight savings time. If they can find a way to make this measure hurt transgendered people and/or public school teachers, which seem to be the paramount policy goals of the legislature this year, it's as good as done.

I've gotten used over the years to springing forward and falling back, and it doesn't bother me that much. I also will say that decades of life in the upper Midwest has given me a sense of when the sun rises and sets, and if we mess with that I don't know where I'll be. Here's the thing: my town is at 42 degrees north latitude, which means summer daylight lasts about 15 hours, and winter daylight about half that. Optimizing the distribution of that daylight over the twenty-four hour day is tricky.

Consider this. Most AM radio stations either power down at sunset or go off the air altogether. These times change every month, so tracking them is an easy way to smooth out fluctuations in sunrise and sunset times. If we stayed on daylight savings time all the time, this is how our year would look:

EASTERN IOWA AM RADIO POWER UP AND DOWN TIMES, ASSUMING YEAR ROUND DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME

January	8:45 a.m.	6:00 p.m.	July	5:30 a.m.	8:30 p.m.
February	8:15 a.m.	6:45 p.m.	August	6:15 a.m.	8:15 p.m.
March	7:30 a.m.	7:15 p.m.	September	6:45 a.m.	7:30 p.m.
April	6:30 a.m.	8:00 p.m.	October	7:20 a.m.	6:25 p.m.
May	5:30 a.m.	8:15 p.m.	November	8:00 a.m.	5:40 p.m.
June	5:15 a.m.	8:30 p.m.	December	8:30 a.m.	5:45 p.m.

You'll notice the sun rises awfully late in the morning in the winter months, though we'd get an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day. I was in high school (in Illinois) during the 1970s energy crisis, when the nation went on daylight savings time in January 1974. It didn't get light until second period, which was strange. My history teacher, Mr. Lindvall, a great teacher whom I completely failed to appreciate, was essentially teaching a night class, for which he deserves even more credit. 

Illinois is to our east, while most of Nebraska, to our west, is also on Central Time. That would mean some late mornings in, say, North Platte in mid-winter.

Back to Iowa: If we go on standard time year-round, this is how our year would look:

EASTERN IOWA AM RADIO POWER UP AND DOWN TIMES, ASSUMING YEAR ROUND STANDARD TIME

January	7:45 a.m.	5:00 p.m.	July	4:30 a.m.	7:30 p.m.
February	7:15 a.m.	5:45 p.m.	August	5:15 a.m.	7:15 p.m.
March	6:30 a.m.	6:15 p.m.	September	5:45 a.m.	6:30 p.m.
April	5:30 a.m.	7:00 p.m.	October	6:20 a.m.	5:25 p.m.
May	4:30 a.m.	7:15 p.m.	November	7:00 a.m.	4:40 p.m.
June	4:15 a.m.	7:30 p.m.	December	7:30 a.m.	4:45 p.m.

Where now we have twilight past 9 in the summer, under this scheme we'd lose it at 8. We could start fireworks shows earlier, but maybe other kinds of outdoor activity would suffer? 

But this blog is here to ask: Which arrangement would be best for the community? Maybe having the daylight last longer throughout the year would encourage more outdoor activity in the winter, while the later sunrises would make coffeehouses cozier. It would be interesting to study the effect of either change on worker productivity. I'm definitely a morning person, but would that change if the sun rose later?

It's really hard to think of a public purpose to moving summer daylight from the evening to the 4:00 hour of the morning. The city and homes and businesses would all be using electric lights when awake, and sleeping when the sun is out. So I'll just leave it at that.

Letter from Washington (X): Finding a quiet place

 

Heurich House Museum grounds

With a spring-like Saturday afternoon off in Washington, D.C., Jane and I grasped our trusty guidebook [cited below] and walked in the neighborhood of Dupont Circle on the city's northwest side. The circle itself I find chaotic, formed as it is by the confluence of five major thoroughfares, and there are busy commercial strips in every direction. Real estate must be pricey even by Washington standards, judging from the dominance of new commercial offices and franchise chains. (Compare with the somewhat more modest Adams Morgan neighborhood to the north, which has more indigenous offerings, including a coffeehouse called Tryst recommended to me this weekend and which I must some day check out.)

But walking around quickly reveals more to Dupont Circle than CVS and Subway. There are embassies, including those of Chile, Indonesia, Mozambique, and Peru. The think tanks American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution are near the circle on Massachusetts Avenue, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the National Trust for Historic Preservation between them. 

Across the circle on 20th Street is the 1898 building where the Church of Scientology was founded.

This 1909 mansion on New Hampshire Avenue is now the headquarters of the Order of the Eastern Star, of which my Grandma Pochert was a proud and active member.

The Cairo--I'm from Illinois, so I pronounce it KAY-ro, but you be you--was built on Q Street in 1894 as the tallest building in Washington, which did not thrill its neighbors, leading to the adoption of the city's strict building height ordinance.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals boast some striking yard art.

The Dupont Circle area also has the Tabard Inn on N Street, built in 1922 and long a favorite of my Creighton University colleague Graham Ramsden...

...and gourmet toast. Whatever that is.

There are also lots of churches, some quite architecturally striking.

The Church of the Holy City (1894)

Foundry United Methodist Church (1904)

Perhaps my most surprising find was the 1894 house of Christian Heurich (1842-1945), who owned D.C.'s largest brewery. The house is now a museum, which is open part of the year for limited hours. It promises to be "honestly exploring what it takes to achieve the American Dream," which sets an intriguingly high bar. The castle garden was open, and quite a few people were lounging about on the picnic benches and Adirondack chairs. The carriage house houses the 1921 Biergarten, serving a variety of beer and wine, and has restrooms, which I was unfortunately not able to experience.

Anyone who blogs about our common life has surely been vaccinated against the coronavirus, but unfortunately had neglected to bring the little card along. (This is the only time on my trip when I would have needed it, too.) 

So I had to hurry along to more permissive facilities, but not before noting what an oasis the castle garden is. On an irresistible spring day, there was a steady trickle of people into the garden for a bit of peace and quiet in company, away from the traffic and busy-ness of Dupont Circle's commercial areas.

Of course, there's plenty of peace and quiet to be had in large-lot suburban subdivisions. That's pretty much what they sell, along with space and privacy. But, as it has been repeatedly argued in this space and elsewhere, those subdivisions are neither financially nor environmentally sustainable, and they oppose the very existence of a common life. We need cities if we are going to survive, and yet... we need peace and quiet, too. Places like the Heurich House's castle garden are pearls beyond price.

SOURCE: Frommer's 24 Great Walks in Washington, D.C. (Wiley, 2009), ch. 16

Christian Heurich would have been part of this Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC). "It was, however, the last cyberspace left in Dupont," quips Matt' Johnson, AICP on Twitter.