Out on the western edge of San Francisco rises an anomaly. Just a block from the Pacific Ocean an unfinished five-story, 56-unit condominium building pokes its head above a sea of single-family homes in the city’s Outer Sunset neighborhood. When completed, The Westerly will be the first multifamily development in the area since 2005.

As San Francisco struggles with a housing crisis that’s pushed rents on new apartments to the highest level in the nation, this neighborhood that encompasses almost a tenth of the city’s land has added just 28 new housing units over the last 14 years. One important reason: 73 percent of the Outer Sunset is zoned for single-family homes. So is 75 percent of the San Francisco Bay Area, 81 percent of Seattle, and 94 percent of San Jose, California.

As in many single-family-dominant neighborhoods around the country, residents combat any attempts to add density. Neighborhood groups complain about increased competition for on-street parking, protest the shadows new buildings will cast on nearby schools and parks, file objections, appeal approvals, and push for environmental impact reports even though a preponderance of research shows that densifying cities slices greenhouse gas emissions.

But now that places like Minneapolis and Oregon have overridden single-family zoning laws to allow more density, cities throughout the United States are starting to confront the history and impacts of the old rules for residential development. In an effort to segregate cities started over a century ago, municipal, state, and federal governments enacted apartheid-like policies that allocated massive swaths of land to single-family homes exclusively for white families and made it very difficult for African Americans to live anywhere but relatively small pockets of land within cities. Addressing the damage caused by those policies over multiple generations will be a long and challenging process for the communities that choose to undertake it.

“We’re at a turning point in U.S. urban history,” says Paavo Monkkonen, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There are very few single-family neighborhoods that have suddenly allowed apartment buildings. We don’t really have a model for that kind of zoning change.”

Increasing density may help ease the housing shortage. But without including measures to reduce segregation, increase equity, and lift up disadvantaged communities it is likely to replicate existing disparities, equity planners point out. What can help, advocates say: building more public and cooperative housing, increasing housing subsidies so those hurt by segregationist policies can afford to live in what are now known as “high opportunity” areas, and investing more heavily in urban amenities like parks and schools.

Critics of affordable housing, especially in expensive cities, often ask why those who can’t afford the high rents should be entitled to live there. But that question ignores the fact that there aren’t many places for those renters to go. Every single state and major metro area has a shortage of available, affordable homes for extremely low-income renters, according to a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. To afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home in the U.S., a full-time worker needs to earn an average hourly wage of almost $23 – more than three times the federal minimum wage.

“Increasingly, leaders recognize equity as one of the major challenges they must address,” writes Lisa K. Bates, a professor of urban planning at Portland State University, in a chapter she authored in Advancing Equity Planning Now, a book showcasing urban planning policies that focus on enhancing the lives of the disadvantaged by equitably distributing resources.

Sequestering land for white homeowners

Fights over preserving the character of suburban neighborhoods dominated by single family houses have their roots in racist zoning policies that sequestered much of the land surrounding cities for white families. This development pattern grew so large that by 2010, a majority of Americans lived in suburbs. Those policies contributed significantly to sprawling, polluted metros and multi-billion dollar wealth disparities. The current housing crisis presents both a high-contrast snapshot of the logical consequence of such policies and an opportunity to rethink how we use, share, and distribute the benefits of our cities. 

“The inflexibility of our zoning with respect to single family neighborhoods is a huge problem,” says Monkkonen. “By living next to each other we’ve created all of these collective benefits, and we’ve made the land arbitrarily valuable because it’s inside the middle of this collective enterprise. Single-family zoning has restricted the benefits of that land to a few people, so it’s a huge part of inequality and social immobility.”

Single-family zoning grew from efforts to find a way around a 1917 Supreme Court ruling that struck down zoning based explicitly on race. Step one was to establish a nominally non-racial zoning category – detached, single-family homes built on large lots to keep prices higher and therefore inaccessible to nearly all African Americans.

Step two was to lure white families into single-family suburbs from urban apartments using propaganda and subsidies. African Americans could then be segregated from these areas with tools like restrictive covenants to keep whites from selling to them and denial of federal subsidies to any developer who tried to open their suburban properties up to African Americans. Legal scholar Ernst Freund noted at the time that “zoning masquerading as an economic measure” was the best way to achieve segregation, recounts Richard Rothstein in “The Color of Law,” his book on the history of U.S. segregationist housing policies.

“People sometimes get upset when we talk about that because they don’t want to feel like they are part of a racist system, but they definitely are part of the legacy of a racist system,” says Monkkonen.

The results of our almost century-long experiment with single-family zoning read like a litany of urban ills. Clogged streets. Ever-lengthening commutes. Pollution so pervasive it inspired a new word – smog. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Segregated neighborhoods. Massive inequality in distribution of wealth. Damaged public health. Racial disparities in access to education and public services ranging from parks to libraries to reliable and affordable transportation options.

But now we might be on the verge of something different. 

On October 9, California passed AB 68, a law that overrides single-family zoning in the state by allowing up to three in-law units on all lots once reserved for single family homes. Earlier this year, Oregon struck down bans on duplexes in all cities with more than 10,000 residents. Last December, Minneapolis led the way by banning single-family zoning citywide. Charlotte, Philadelphia, and other jurisdictions are considering following suit.

Turning garages into housing

California’s first law legalizing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), also known as in-law units, took effect in 2017. The following year, Los Angeles issued permits for 4,171 ADUs — more than 35 times the number permitted two years earlier. 

If every single-family homeowner in Los Angeles converted their garage into an apartment, about 400,000 new homes could be created, researchers noted in a recent CityLab article. San Francisco has about 75,000 parcels reserved for single-family homes, many of which have garages that can be converted. In San Jose, where single-family homes make up two-thirds of housing units but cover 94 percent of the land, more than 120,000 homes have room for ADUs. Mayor Sam Liccardo has already declared his intent to shave almost 20 business days off the approval process and take other measures to make San Jose the state’s most ADU-friendly city.

That’s more than 600,000 potential new homes, in just three of California’s high-demand cities – enough to make a serious dent in the state’s housing crisis, and possibly prompt other municipalities to sit up and take notice.

The demand has inspired new businesses. A number of companies specializing in garage conversions, including a prefab ADU company, offer to handle the full permitting and construction process for homeowners in exchange for a percentage of rents. Homeowners who don’t need to borrow to convert their garages can achieve returns as high as 25 percent, ADU researchers estimate. Of course, not everyone who has the option will add an in-law unit, but with innovations like this making it so much easier for owners to generate additional income from their property, the incentives start to shift.

Mending damage to African American households

Upzoning single family areas may make a dent in the housing crisis. It might even ease some of the traffic and environmental problems that come with low-density sprawl. However, without inclusionary measures of any kind, upzoning could create an even bigger financial windfall for homeowners, who are disproportionately white. And it can’t make up for the economic damage done to African American and other minority communities that have been blocked for decades from home ownership, the biggest wealth building engine for white families.

Of course, exclusionary zoning ordinances were just one part of a panoply of racist policies that prevented huge numbers of African American families from getting ahead financially. As just one example, lenders were barred from approving mortgages in entire neighborhoods populated by minorities from the 1930s until the late 1960s because of federal policies that supported an industry-standard practice known as “redlining” for the maps that color coded such areas red. 

White builders inserted restrictive covenants into deeds to prohibit future white owners from selling those homes to anyone of another race. These restrictions were required by Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and enforced by the courts. The FHA instructed its agents that in order “to assure a homogeneous and harmonious neighborhood,” properties should include deed restrictions to prohibit their occupancy by anyone “except by the race for which they are intended,” Rothstein notes in “The Color of Law.”

Even today, land use policies are heavily influenced by race. Andrew Whittemore, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, studied zoning decisions in nearby Durham. He found that prior to the mid-1980s, when local lawmakers were mostly white, city leaders were more apt to increase density in African American than white neighborhoods, even when the areas were facing similar problems. Once a critical mass of African American leaders joined the city council, they began reversing these zoning disparities. 

A separate study in Virginia found that complaints about new housing increased when the county became more racially diverse. “It’s just a hop, skip and a jump from ‘I’m worried about my property values’ to ‘I don’t want those people in my neighborhood,’” Whittemore says.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank The Century Foundation, argues that the damage done by zoning policies goes so deep we should rectify it with a national Economic Fair Housing Act. “[S]kyrocketing levels of income segregation in housing [are] compounding racial segregation,” he writes in a 2017 report laying out his case. He proposes banning exclusionary zoning by withholding infrastructure funds or limiting the mortgage interest tax deduction of homeowners in municipalities that refuse to repeal such zoning laws.

The evidence is clear that the nation’s racist housing policies crippled African American families from building wealth for themselves or future generations. Median net worth in 2016 for African American households was $12,920, less than a tenth of the $143,600 held by white households, whose wealth was due in part to much higher homeownership rates, according to Census Department data. In Chicago alone, African American families lost between $3 billion and $4 billion in wealth because of predatory housing contracts that were in most cases their only option up until the 1960s. Taking the $130,680 gap between African American and white wealth and multiplying it by the roughly 17 million African American households in the U.S. offers a glimpse at the staggering amount of wealth those families missed out on over the years: more than $2.2 trillion.

This is the very definition of structural racism. 

Mitigating displacement and gentrification

These days, though, fighting racism is sometimes equated with fighting new housing. In expensive cities like San Francisco, residents often object to new apartment or condo complexes, even in already-dense neighborhoods, on the grounds that adding market-rate housing will bring gentrification – basically, rising rents – and displace longtime residents. In the Bay Area, rising housing costs have prompted many low-income households of color to move to the region’s outer areas, creating new concentrations of segregation and poverty, according to a University of California, Berkeley report.

But planners point out that stasis doesn’t always equal stability.

“The best way to ensure that housing values are going to increase, and that neighborhoods will gentrify is not doing anything at all,” says Whittemore. “In California, though, with density bonus legislation, inclusionary zoning, there are lots of ways to make sure that there are new affordable units provided within new housing.”

Portland, Oregon, where Bates of Portland State calculated that about a third of the region’s African American population has been displaced over the past decade, incorporated equity considerations into its strategic plan in 2012. It brought together city staffers and community groups to hammer out guidelines on how to ensure low-income, minority, and other vulnerable communities wouldn’t be excluded from the benefits of new development. 

Community activists aren’t “out here saying upzoning causes displacement, shut it all down,” she tells Shareable contributor Ben Schneider. “Instead, they’re advocating ‘place specific mitigation’ and equity investments in neighborhoods being upzoned.”

Another way to facilitate equity is ensuring there’s variety in the available housing, notes Emily Talen, a professor of urbanism at the University of Chicago. “You can’t overtly do something like zoning for race, but what you can do is open up zoning so you are ensuring that all the zones you create in a city have a diversity of housing types and price points and unit types that cater to different kinds of families and different kinds of lifestyles,” she says. “It’s very much about opening up from a narrow conception of what housing is about and what kinds of housing units should be allowed and just relaxing those rules.”

Inclusionary zoning ordinances in Portland and other cities are another step toward equity. They require developers to reserve a certain percentage of units – often 10 percent, but in some cases as high as 30 percent – for affordable housing. Community land trusts, demolition taxes, vacancy taxes, rent controls and stronger tenant protections are other tools activists and municipalities are using to address housing inequities.

In Oakland, California, local activists concerned about displacement of African Americans and other communities of color in 2017 founded the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (East Bay PREC), an innovative twist on traditional housing cooperatives that includes the ability to raise capital from outside investors. East Bay PREC’s vision is to create permanently affordable housing controlled by the community. While outside capital gives the organization a powerful lever for expansion, its governance structure prioritizes resident, staff and community owners over investor owners.

“We were trying to figure out a concept that couldn’t be corrupted, that could build wealth from different angles and that could be authentically controlled by community, so we are an investment co-op,” Executive Director Noni Session told The Mercury News last year. “This is a way for people to divest their money from Wells Fargo and invest in their community and get a return at about the same rate one might get from their checking account.”

Adding density equitably

A cooperative housing project built in San Francisco by the Pacific Maritime Association and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the 1960s is an example of another tool: limited equity housing cooperatives, which ensure affordability by limiting the amount of equity members can earn on resale of their units. St. Francis Square, built on three blocks set aside for affordable housing when much of the Fillmore District was razed and the then-predominantly African-American populace was displaced, shows how density can be increased both affordably and equitably.

Susan Solomon, president of the San Francisco teacher’s union, has lived at the three-story complex of 12 buildings both as a child and an adult. She was nine when her parents moved the family into a three-bedroom unit down the street from an elementary school later renamed for Rosa Parks. Down payments for three-bedrooms were $610, and a family of four could only qualify for an apartment if they earned $8,200 or less annually. 

The multi-ethnic complex was designed in part to prevent the erasure of the African-American community that was happening all around them in the Fillmore. The union — led by legendary labor leader Harry Bridges, who fought to integrate African American workers into the ILWU in the 1930s — drew up policies to ensure the 299-unit development would be diversified so that it matched the racial makeup of the city’s population. 

“It was meant to be a true reflection of San Francisco,” Solomon, sporting a dress covered in a bright sharpened-colored-pencils pattern, says at a living-room table in her book-lined apartment on a foggy October day. Her extended family believed so strongly in the co-op’s mission that her grandparents and an aunt and uncle also moved into apartments at the Square, as current and former residents often call it. “They all sold houses to live in this community,” she says. 

The U.S. already has 155,000 limited equity housing cooperatives, a number that could be expanded to increase the number of permanently affordable housing units.   

Combating climate change with upzoning

When her son and daughter were growing up, they would often visit Solomon’s sister’s children in a big hilltop suburban house 20 miles south. “My kids felt sorry for their cousins,” she says with a slight grin, “because they were so isolated.” Solomon’s children, who “learned to Muni very well,” felt liberated, in contrast. They lived in a centrally located neighborhood and didn’t need their parents to drive them around because they could take Muni, San Francisco’s public transit system, to wherever they wanted to go.

The Square’s garden apartments were built with parking spaces for residents, but they likely wouldn’t be if they were constructed now. San Francisco has gradually eliminated the parking requirements many cities impose on multifamily developments as it tries to restrain rising construction costs and push residents to use public transit or other alternatives to private automobiles. 

Why eliminate parking? Suburban-style, car-centric planning imposes high health and environmental costs, which tend to burden most heavily the very populations often excluded from single-family neighborhoods.

Pollution from the traffic on busy roads – which could affect up to 45 percent of urban residents in the U.S. – has cascading health effects that range from asthma attacks and impaired lung function to premature death, according to the American Lung Association. “Traffic-related air pollution is an environmental justice issue because low-income and minority populations are disproportionately concentrated near high traffic volume roadways,” concludes a research paper in Environmental Justice magazine. Zoning ordinances have confined African Americans and other minorities to industrial and high-traffic areas for decades.

Residents of single-family neighborhoods often have little choice but to drive when they leave home because they live in areas that aren’t built for bicycling or near mass transit. That has a huge impact on the climate. Transportation generates 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other sector, including electricity — and most of it comes from cars.

A committee of the nonprofit Transportation Research Board investigated how more compact development patterns could affect carbon emissions. It found that driving could be slashed by as much as 25 percent by doubling residential density in metropolitan areas if we also implemented other measures like improving transit and job access. That could cut carbon emissions by as much as 8 percent by 2030 and 11 percent by 2050, according to the most aggressive scenarios.

Envisioning a new, more equitable land use system

Although local land-use regulations remain one of the most significant barriers to more compact development, the housing crisis is starting to take a hammer to these policies. In the last few years, new zoning laws in Minneapolis, Oregon and elsewhere have opened a pathway to change. But it will take more than building a bunch of in-law units in single-family neighborhoods, says Monkkonen of UCLA: “We can do better than that.” 

In a housing policy brief analyzing California’s affordability problems, he proposes four steps that can be taken to reduce resistance to new housing and increased density. First, the state can use carrots, such as infrastructure investment, and sticks, like legal action, to ensure cities build enough housing to meet their legally required targets. 

Second, local leaders need to make the planning process, which is structurally biased toward wealthy homeowners, more inclusive so that other voices get heard when new developments are considered. Third, local planners ought to be aggressively sharing relevant information such as the capacity of sewer and water lines, and nonpartisan analysis to help inform public debates around planning and new development.

Fourth, state lawmakers should shift some aspects of land use decisions up to the regional or state level, where competing neighborhood or city interests can be considered in a more holistic way. “There is evidence that when higher levels of government control land use decisions, rules are less exclusionary and reduce socioeconomic segregation,” he says. 

“Opposition to new housing and increasing densities in urban neighborhoods of California is one of the state’s major policy challenges in the 21st Century, because of the negative social, economic, and environmental [consequences] of a lack of housing supply near productive employment centers,” Monkkonen writes. Urban areas around the country are grappling with similar issues.

Should politicians, activists, and urban residents take his prescriptions to heart, the cities that result would certainly be denser, but it’s unlikely San Francisco would end up looking like Hong Kong. Maybe just less like Phoenix — and with a lot more residents benefiting from all the wealth it generates.

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This post is part of our Fall 2019 editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

Or take a look at the other articles in the series:

• Zoned apart: How the US failed to share land but should start today
• Timeline of 100 years of racist housing policy that created a separate and unequal America
• How pro-density advocates in Minneapolis took on single-family zoning — and won
• Bringing equity to the forefront of urban planning
• How some cities are looking to in-law units to ease the housing crunch and build more diverse neighborhoods
• Can zoning reform undo “50 years of bad policy?”
• Segregation By Design author expects political battle between fair housing opponents and proponents
• How to ease the US housing crisis? Import strategic policy from abroad
• Author Richard Rothstein calls for new civil rights movement to address housing scarcity and injustice
• 8 must read books on US land use and housing policy

The post Cities at turning point: Will upzoning ease housing inequalities or build on zoning’s racist legacy? appeared first on Shareable.

After spending half a dozen years researching the topic, Rothstein began in 2015 to turn that work into his best-selling book, the Color of Law, thanks to the insistence of Ta-Nehisi Coates that he publish something written for a popular audience. In the work, Rothstein lays out in meticulous detail the government’s powerful, pervasive role in creating and enforcing residential segregation throughout the United States over the course of the last century. 

“Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulations but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States,” Rothstein writes. “We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies.”

Now that he’s diagnosed the problem, Rothstein is focused on solutions, calling for a new civil rights movement, meeting with leaders around the country, and developing a new book examining what such a movement might look like. One step on the road to writing that book came to light on Aug. 14, with his publication of a New York Times article revealing how developers, lenders, and government agencies all collaborated in the segregation of one San Francisco Bay Area community and theorizing about what remedies families in the area might pursue. In one neighborhood, white families who bought homes that black homebuyers were excluded from in the 1940s have seen their home values rise from $100,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars to $1.5 million, while Black potential buyers were excluded from that wealth-building opportunity. 

“Residential segregation underlies almost all the racial inequality we have,” Rothstein told Shareable. “Blacks live in less healthy neighborhoods, they have more pollution, stress, shorter life expectancies, greater incidence of cardiovascular disease, and police abuse and of course the wealth gap.” 

His prescription for those pursuing remedies involves substantial research as well as a healthy dose of door-knocking to build community support. “Government policy is the last step, not the first step,” he said, “if we’re serious about making it uncomfortable to maintain present patterns of segregation.” 

Shareable caught up with Rothstein after his article was published to learn what he was thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement and how its push for police accountability might intersect with his work. An edited version of our conversation is below. 

Q: At Shareable’s housing summit last November, you gave a keynote address that called for a new civil rights movement to seek redress for the decades of federal policies that shut African American families out of housing and other wealth-building opportunities. Since the murder of George Floyd by police in May, we’ve seen a dramatic upsurge in racial justice activism and a public reckoning with systemic racism in the U.S. Does this look like the movement you imagined? What else is needed in your opinion?

A: Oh no, not at all, it’s not what I envisioned. Certainly, as I said in the article, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations lay a foundation, a context, where it makes a civil rights movement that addresses residential segregation more likely. But it itself is not addressing issues of residential segregation. 

It’s only addressing issues of police reform and vague calls for reparations. But what’s necessary is a disciplined and focused understanding of residential segregation and what needs to be done about it, and the example I give in that article is just one example. 

I’m not suggesting that’s the model for all civil rights activity in the area of segregation, but that’s an example of the kind of thing that once a disciplined group began to look into its own community and what’s possible, that could be done. It took me – and I’m a skilled researcher – it took me over a month to develop the information for that article, the history of how that community was created and so forth. So this is not something you can do just by sign waving.

Q: When you say a disciplined approach, you’re talking about deep and skilled research; it sounds like, into what happened in the past. Say more.

A: Well, the research is one step. It’s a first step only. Then it also has to be disciplined in how you take action based on the research. In this particular case — the article I wrote, based on San Mateo — that’s not actually the best example, because the difference between $100,000 and $1.5 million is in practical terms too big to bridge with a fund set up by organizations like that. But there are many places in the country, not necessarily in California, in the Bay Area, but there are many places in the country where the exact same thing I describe in that article results in a difference of $100,000 to say $400,000. That’s bridgeable. So it depends on the community. And there are many other issues.

A civil rights movement, it seems to me, needs to include four elements. First is the thing that most people think of when they think of housing segregation, and that is improving conditions in low-income segregated neighborhoods. Second is preventing massive displacement from gentrification. Third is opening up white communities to diverse residents, and fourth is preserving diversity where it exists, so that it’s not just transitional as a low-income community gentrifies and then turns into a high-income community.

I guess two and four are somewhat related, but they’re not exactly the same thing. 

Q: How much of this is something that can be addressed by government policy?

A: It all can be addressed by government policy. But in the meantime people need to take local action. Before the voting rights act was passed, John Lewis was registering voters in a locality, a local town in Alabama. Trying to register voters, getting them killed for trying to register. I’m not suggesting that people are going to get killed for engaging in this kind of activity of around residential segregation, but what I’m saying is that government policy is the last step, not the first step – if we’re serious about making it uncomfortable to maintain present patterns of segregation. 

Q: I want to move to a slightly different locale. This question is based on a friend of mine who just won election for mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. If you were in his shoes and especially knowing the history of that state, where I’m from, and you’re looking to do the right thing by the African American population in that city, what do you think your best options would be.

I don’t know enough about Natchez to know. This is what I keep on emphasizing to you. The tactics are going to vary depending on local conditions. 

I’ve traveled around country before the pandemic. I gave hundreds of lectures in different parts of the country. Every place I went, people tried to tell me their community was worse than anyplace else. More segregated, had more racist history than anyplace else. And they were always right. Every one of them was right, but in different ways. The opportunities to address this has to be unique to these circumstances. Is there a substantial middle class black population that was kept out of middle-class white areas? Is there a possibility of creating affordable housing there? 

Q: Right now, it seems obvious that we can’t look to the federal government to actually try and address these issues, so given that, we have to look at states and localities. Is there anything more general that you can say that you think would be useful for folks working on those levels?

A: I don’t agree with what you say that “right now.” I think if we had a Democratic administration it would be just as difficult. The Democratic party, a good part of its base is NIMBYs. I’m serious. In fact, the swing voters the Democratic party is trying to appeal to is suburban women. So what’s needed is a mass movement first that’s going to make the federal government move, and that wouldn’t exist in a Democratic administration either. 

Q: You say a mass movement and it sounds like you’re referring to something other than BLM.

A: Well, no, I’m talking about groups that are focused on issues of housing segregation, neighborhood segregation. Can Black Lives Matter movements, demonstrations evolve into that? Yes, they may. The article I wrote appeals to a Black Lives Matter group of demonstrators to think beyond police reform. If I’m hopeful at all that such a mass movement can emerge, it’s because of the Black Lives Matter movement, which involved an unprecedented number of whites. 

Q: Segregation issues are connected to the wealth gap. Is that something that you would talk about separately? I wonder if there are other ideas on how to rectify that huge disparity?

A: Yes. There’s been too much emphasis in the discussion about homeownership as a route to wealth creation. Homeownership is a route to wealth creation only if you’re smart enough or if the government is smart enough on your behalf to give you access to homes in neighborhoods that are about to appreciate faster than homes in other neighborhoods. 

Most African Americans who own homes haven’t gained wealth from them the same way that whites have gained wealth, because their neighborhoods haven’t appreciated in value the same way. So the idea that simply putting people into homes is going to close the wealth gap is very misleading. There are good reasons to put people in homes, but it’s not the only way to create wealth. One way to create wealth is to narrow income inequality so people can save. 

Q: What are some of the ways you suggest for doing that? 

A: A progressive tax system, a much, much higher minimum wage, a labor movement that is permitted to organize in a way that it’s not now permitted under federal law. 

Q: How do you connect the dots between the housing and land use policy that you talked about in your book and the policing and criminal justice system that the BLM movement has been focused on? Your article is obviously one piece of that. What are some other ways?

A: Segregation creates the conditions for much greater police abuse, mass incarceration than would otherwise exist. 

When you concentrate the most disadvantaged young men in single neighborhoods without access to jobs, without access to transportation to get to those jobs, without a variety of other opportunities, schools that are not dealing with social and economic disadvantages overwhelmingly — when you concentrate young men like that in single neighborhoods — the police become an occupying force. Much like they were in colonial India or colonial, the Congo or any other place.

Isabel Wilkerson uses the term caste. I think that’s appropriate. If young African-American men weren’t concentrated in those neighborhoods where they engage in confrontations with the police, where the police abuse goes mostly unnoticed except if somebody happens to have a cell phone. If African-Americans weren’t concentrated in those neighborhoods, there would be less abuse. I’m not saying there would be none, but it would not be as extreme as it is. 

Q: So by that argument, fighting segregation is a pathway to fighting police abuse, is what it sounds like you’re saying?

A: What I’m saying is that residential segregation underlies almost all the racial inequality we have. It’s not just police abuse, it’s the achievement gap in schools, it’s health disparities between blacks and whites. Blacks live in less healthy neighborhoods, they have more pollution, stress, shorter life expectancies, greater incidence of cardiovascular disease, and police abuse and of course the wealth gap, which I’ve written about. The wealth gap itself drives much of our ongoing inequality. Yeah, I think residential segregation underlies all – not exclusively — but it’s a major contributor to all the forms of racial inequality we have.

Q: In your book, you talk about police tolerance and promotion of cross burnings, arson, all these other things as systematic and nationwide, and done in the service of housing segregation, yet people still tend to view housing segregation as something that results from personal choice rather than government policy. What are some ways that we can help people better understand this history? 

A: Write books about it. [Laughs]

Q: And write articles? 

A: Articles, yes, go around the country giving talks about it. All I can do is my part of it. That’s my mission: to try and help people understand it, and I think I’ve been more successful in doing it than I ever expected. One of the things I talk about in the book is how the textbooks that are used in high schools everywhere misstate this history. So if the next generation doesn’t learn this any better than previous ones have, they’re going to be a in as poor a position to remedy it as the previous ones.

Q: Are you working on a history book?

A: No. I’m not. I’m working on a book about what we do about it, about how to create a new civil rights movement. The article that you saw is the first piece that I’ve published out of that research. 

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New bike lanes and a network of “slow streets” popped up in cities including Oakland, New York, and Minneapolis, creating space for pedestrians to easily social distance and get around on foot. However, Thomas says the move came without genuine community engagement, and residents and urban planners of color had questions about safety in these public spaces — especially amid protests against over-policing and brutality within Black communities. 

Thomas, a former transportation planner, likened the decision and the implementation process to many of the discriminatory practices that came from redlining, established in 1937 following another national emergency — the Great Depression. 

“As with redlining, Black people and many communities of color have been convinced that they don’t belong in the process and have to accept what they are offered,” said Thomas, founder of Los Angeles-based nonprofit Thrivance Group. 

For practitioners, community activists, educators, and planners, Thrivance offers educational tools and resources and runs panel discussions to promote sustainable changes in planning processes.

Deemed a far right-leaning practice, redlining impeded homeownership and the building of wealth by restricting where Black families could live. Generations were shut out of the housing market and forced to rent in communities redlined as “risky” prospects for investors, which led to underinvestment in the housing stock, utilities, local economies, and services. Redlined districts were chosen as sites for new freeways, highways, and industrial facilities. These policies combined to disenfranchise and impoverish Black communities and to reinforce segregation. Redlining also has its roots in disinvestment and displacement within communities and has connections to gentrification. 

Thomas had one caveat about slow streets: she said they had long been part of a dream progressive agenda among transportation planners to transform urban areas into safe havens for bikers and pedestrians. Closing streets to cars mostly supports those privileged enough to stay at home during these unprecedented times, without consideration of Black, Indigenous, and LatinX people traveling these same streets to get to essential jobs, often in the gig economy. Merge that approach with the legacy of redlining, communities of color continue to be marginalized.

Hugely popular with white urbanites, the slow streets are likely to stay, without a true public process. “This is what I call purplelining,” Thomas said. “And it suggests that anti-blackness and racism are so embedded in planning practices that you really can’t tell who’s doing the harm.” 

This is what I call purplelining and it suggests that anti-blackness and racism are so embedded in planning practices that you really can’t tell who’s doing the harm.

Thomas joins a host of planners, architectural designers, and community activists who are shining a light on race and anti-blackness in city planning. Black, Indigenous, and LatinX communities have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic fallout, which has been compounded by nationwide protests against police brutality. 

On June 18-19 2020, Thomas led a live digital 23-hour “teach-in,” titled The Un-Urbanist Assembly, confronting the legacy of anti-blackness in the built environment. More than 8,000 people joined the event to celebrate urban planners of color who’ve been at the forefront of pressing for change, to examine the legacy of racism in city planning, and to discuss toxic urbanism and why planners are culture-bearers. 

“I went into this thinking this is my version of protest, and I will use my voice and body to denounce what we know as urbanism,” Thomas said. “When we’re talking about defunding and abolishing systems, let’s talk about what that means for urban planning.”

Thomas told the group that the purplelining in her hometown Oakland — one of the first cities to institute slow streets — matched a redlined map of the city from 1937. “I instantly knew this was a new wave of gentrification,” she said. “I hated to see this happen in my home.”    

Resisting purplelining and bringing about healing would “require a degree of reckoning with the past, a plan to heal the existing trauma that stems from the past, and must be careful to resist the tendency to be motivated by and responsive to white comfort,” she said. 

That would entail moving away from planning processes that focus solely on what white urbanites want. Cities needed to support and invest more in the economies within communities of color including the street vendors who’ve served as a means for essential items, she said. There should be more focus on long-term planning that redistributes wealth throughout communities and divests from law enforcement and other entities that perpetuate systemic racism. Most of all, the voices of Black, Indigenous, and LatinX communities should be valued and lead the discussions on future planning. 

Comfortability and convenience are not sustainable ways for urban planning and design. We should be imagining a world that divorces from our current understanding of what we mean when we say space.

“Comfortability and convenience are not sustainable ways for urban planning and design,” Thomas said.  “We should be imagining a world that divorces from our current understanding of what we mean when we say space.”

The post Whose streets? Black communities sidelined as slow streets reboot redlining for gig workers appeared first on Shareable.

The interview, originally published as a Q&A on Shareable last year, explores Oakland’s affordable housing crisis, how EBPREC is working to address the situation as part of a broader Just Transition movement, and what people can do to get involved and invest in this transformational work. 

For the past two years, The Response podcast series has explored the remarkable communities that come together in the aftermath of disasters (and how they are building increased resilience before disasters and other disruptions occur). 

While much of the show has focused on the response to acute events that are often framed as “natural disasters” (tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, etc.), we feel like ongoing structural inequalities that pervade capitalist economic systems can be just as catastrophic. Furthermore, it is often these existing social and political factors that exacerbate the negative effects of disasters and other disruptions when they occur.

The conversation with Noni Session is part of Shareable’s special series exploring the history of land use and housing policy and solutions to the housing crisis (with a focus on increasing equity).

The entire series has been wrapped up into an eBook with the title “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It”. You can download a free copy right now here.

The post The Response: A Permanent Real Estate Cooperative to combat the affordable housing crisis appeared first on Shareable.

Since then, Chicago has sold 1,250 out of approximately 11,500 total vacant lots, transforming these desolate spaces overrun with trash, nuisance animals, and illegal dumping, into gardens, housing and public parks.

Very few municipal government programs have generated such excitement. As one resident exclaimed, “[Large Lots] allows us to tell our own story… This is about history making… and it’s time for us to take ownership of our community.”

Given the successes of this program, other cities are excited about adopting it. Officials from Rochester, Kansas City and New Orleans have all spoken to the City of Chicago, according to Peter Strazzabosco, the Deputy Commissioner for Chicago.

Not everyone is a fan of the Large Lots program, however

While there are multiple benefits to the Large Lots Program, it is not without its detractors. Luerlis Gutierrez initially celebrated the program, excited that her community would be able to take ownership of the vibrant “Fulton Garden” community garden which had been created over a decade before in an abandoned lot near her home.

But today the garden has been destroyed, half of if it fenced off and cluttered with weeds and trash. The Large Lots Program sold half of her garden to a local property owner (who also owns three properties that have remained empty) who barred Guetierrez from tending to the garden, citing liability concerns.

Violating the spirit of the program

Fulton Garden isn’t an isolated incident; another community garden at 311 North Sacramento Boulevard was also sold off and is now sitting untended and overgrown. Angela Taylor, head of the Garfield Park Garden Network says, “It’s just like if somebody comes in and takes your child away.”

The program requires purchasers to own property in the area where the lots are located — however, they are not required to live near them. In the case of community gardens, such purchases can rip apart community revitalization efforts.

Recently, local Chicago aldermen have requested a list of all community gardens to add to a “do not sell” list for the city. However, residents like Gutierrez believe this effort is insufficient and argues that these lots should be for residents who are “sitting in the community, working with the community, engaging the community.”

In other words, she believes the program should favor those who will steward the property for the community. Whether the purchaser owns property locally should be a secondary concern.

Boston has found a way around concerns like Gutierrez’s

Dudley Street was once one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan area, with numerous vacant and tax-defaulted lots, much like the lots in Chicago.

With the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s (DSNI), instead of selling these lots to local property owners, residents worked with city and state officials to transfer ownership of 15 acres to a Community Land Trust (CLT), in which 1,300 parcels of land were placed. Now, those lots boast 225 new affordable homes, a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse, urban farm, playground, gardens, and other amenities one would only expect in more privileged, resource-rich neighborhoods.

In Chicago, an alderman representing Gutierrez supported transferring Fulton Garden to a local CLT called Neighborspace. However, since there was no formal process in place to do so, “wires were crossed” and the lot was sold.

The Co-City Protocol

CLTs, like the one set up in the Dudley Street neighborhood, exemplify an alternative stewardship-based approach to urban revitalization pioneered by LabGov and its Co-City framework.

The Co-City protocol, designed by Professor Sheila Foster at Georgetown University (one of the co-authors of this article) and her LabGov colleague Christian Iaione, fosters alternative forms of land stewardship. In this model, residents use available urban land and infrastructure to generate resources such as housing, and commercial and artistic spaces, while keeping them affordable for future generations. 

Back to Chicago

In order to take advantage of a program like the Boston model, Chicago city administrators would need to find or cultivate a land trust to steward the plot. If there are insufficient land trusts, the city could learn from New York City’s exciting efforts to incubate more of them.

Demand for these cheap lots — with new conditions —  should be a secondary concern. Each sales round is already massively oversubscribed. Having validated the program, the City of Chicago can now afford to be more choosy.

As we saw in Boston’s DSNI, when more residents benefit from their use of land, cities unleash the creativity to build more. Cross-cutting relationships are built, communities thrive, and sustainable economies develop. Such strategic, long-term thinking means leaders earn the trust of their stakeholders.

The City of Chicago has a unique, legacy-building opportunity to build on its Large Lots Program by integrating land trusts. The city is poised to empower its most valuable resource — its people —  to build autonomy and “tell their own stories.”

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This article is a follow up to our editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

The post Are Community Land Trusts the answer to Chicago’s Large Lots Program issues? appeared first on Shareable.

The state and various municipalities have been attempting to address the crisis for some time now, but often their proposed market-based solutions — such as simply building more housing — don’t address the underlying causes of displacement. However, there are many advocates and organizations hard at work to not only address the immediate needs of those at risk, but to do so in a way that empowers residents and addresses the root causes that stem from structural racism and capitalist ideology.

One of these organizations, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EBPREC), facilitates black, indigenous, people of color, and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward properties. We spoke with Noni Session, the organization’s executive director, about what they’re doing to achieve systemic solutions to the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis. 

Robert Raymond: Can you start by sketching a picture of what’s happening in Oakland right now in terms of the affordable housing crisis, and what communities are being disproportionately impacted?

Noni Session: I often say that this thing we call the ‘housing crisis,” isn’t actually a housing crisis — it’s a distribution crisis. We have over 10,000 empty units and over 20,000 empty luxury units in the Bay Area right now, and yet people are still under more than 50 percent rent burden, and there are still 9,000 people lying on the sidewalk. It’s not a housing crisis we’re experiencing: it’s philosophical; it’s economic; and it’s political. It’s about our priorities. We have to recognize that.

What’s happening in Oakland is that thousands of legacy Oaklanders have been displaced in the last decade — that’s a huge segment of the population — and this displacement is highly racialized. The most underserved communities that are suffering are black, indigenous, people of color, differently-abled, [and] trans people. So all of our underserved populations and working-class populations are the most vulnerable in the transition we’re seeing not just here in Oakland but in urban areas nationwide.

These folks have been displaced due to a number of factors. Rising rents is a major one — or what we refer to as ‘rent blight.’ Another major factor is the untaxed finance industry and the privileging of market actors and profiteers. This is exacerbated by wildly speculative land prices that come off of the arc of the last bubble burst where small communities — working class black people, and people of color — lost billions of dollars in assets due to artificial land inflation and predatory lending.

You’re seeing this in cities worldwide. And in Oakland, with the history of activism and pushback on these unchecked processes, this has become one of the prime places to really try to make a difference and make some incursions against the growing displacement rate.

What have you and your team been doing to help mitigate and reverse some of the trends in displacement that you just outlined?

We take a multi-pronged approach, recognizing that our work situates itself inside of the Just Transition movement, where we’re looking to move toward a new way of doing economics, a new way of doing community, and a new way of doing community representation. 

But I would even correct myself and say that it’s not a new way. It’s the way that communities always supported themselves before this religion that we call capitalism. Collective economic action was always the intuitive go-to…. [But], we now give so much power to the so-called “invisible hand of the market” [and] simultaneously efface the fact that there are people with agendas and intentions that drive the market. That it is not a natural mechanism, but very much a human cultural, technical and power-based mechanism.

Practically speaking, we provide resources that help community members to own and collectively govern assets by putting together low cost, non-extractive capital stocks for their small-site development projects, and at the same time build an equity account for our resident owners so that there is wealth building, ownership and control built into the structure of our projects.

We also do a lot of outreach and organizing across sectors. So we talk to philanthropic investors, mission-aligned lenders and CDFIs [Community Development Financial Institutions] about the ways that a differing approach to co-op lending, and lending to small community-based projects, can provide a non-extractive return on investment while re-assembling communities that have been dismantled by the very financial tools we’re still using. We’re really trying upset a comfort with conventional approaches to financial tools as they’ve been handed to us, and recognize that there are ways to re-tune our lending expectations, our definition of risk, and how we prepare communities and projects to receive non-extractive funding.

We also go and spend a lot of time with folks who are inside of our sector. We call our sector community investment, but people tend to think of us as a housing organization. We spend time with affordable housing developers, community land trust members and other non-profits who are looking to create community control and stability.

We’re really trying to activate them around a concept of anti-competition, because that competitive thrust for seeking out funding, for using funding, for how we design our projects, for how we build community relationships, has really created a silo between our work. These silos weaken us and keep us focused on donor needs instead of community needs. They keep us competing for the small dollars. Instead, we believe that these large philanthropic organizations should channel their money into really impactful and widespread projects — not just piecemeal. [We advocate collaborating on funding] applications where folks are competing for the same money that could potentially go further if they were working together.

And you also do quite a bit of outreach and organizing to the underrepresented communities themselves?

Yes, so last year we did book clubs in East Oakland, Richmond and West Oakland. We share a very  powerful work called Collective Courage by Jessica Gordon Nembard, which really is meant to demonstrate to our communities that collective economic action is a historically and culturally consistent way of stabilizing communities. We want to demonstrate to our communities that this is our way through this crisis.

What are some of the projects that you have going on right now?

We have our flagship project at 789 61st Street in North Oakland. That [was] our first community-based acquisition. It really gave us a proof of concept that we could put together a low-cost capital stack and create ownership for folks who wouldn’t necessarily have the capital or the credit to buy a property on their own. In the acquisition, we really got to see how you build out the inputs for sustainable change and housing in underserved areas and communities. We’re excited about that because we’re going to be adopting a lot of the lessons we learned into our open-source learning materials for our non-profit arm, Collective Action and Land Liberation Institute. It’s given us the attention and the capacity to expand our staff and really start to build out a robust vision of what our work in Oakland and the East Bay could do.

We have two other properties that we’ll be developing in 2020. The second one is in Berkeley, and the really groundbreaking thing about this property is that [it] was donated by an elderly dancer who really believes in Just Transition. She feels like part of the problem with the system of holding commodities is that commodity hoarders are the challenge. So instead of hoarding another housing resource, she has chosen to donate it to [EBPREC]. And it’s a $1.3 million asset. Not only will we be using it to support cooperative and regenerative art inside of ownership model of the house in Berkeley, we’re also using that property to demonstrate a new legal tool that we’re building with our partners, Sustainable Economies Law Center called The Land Justice Easement. It’s analogous to the agricultural easement where, attached to the title deeds to the land, is a restriction where any owner to whom the land is passed cannot ever charge extractive rent or sell it for an exploitative, speculative price.

The third project is really interesting because it’s becoming the springboard for all of the projects that we have for our plan for 2020. We have an empty plot in West Oakland that a community member saw was going up for sale to a commercial developer, and he did not want to see another townhouse in his neighborhood. He had some excess capital, and he used the part of that capital to buy this plot for EBPREC. We’re going to be co-developing it, building environmentally sound housing, and organizing community members around an environmentally regenerative vision. 

It’s a vision of land and housing acquisitions that root an anchor culture and that provides a place from which people can be activated, because a critical part of our work is movement building. But when you don’t have a place from which to build a movement, it never has a strong foundation. So we’re really happy about our projects this year, offering us the opportunity to create a foundation for more acquisitions, for more community-based visions, and more cooperative ownership.

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This article is a follow up to our editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

The post How the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is using collective economic action to combat the Bay Area’s housing crisis appeared first on Shareable.

Mark Asturias, Executive Director of Irvine Community Land Trust, commented on the bill, “California community land trusts will soon be able to take community development efforts to the next level. With the funds freed up by SB 196, we will be able to create even better communities, with more units that serve even more families looking to participate in the American Dream of homeownership.”

CLTs are a proven model for creating affordable housing because they not only make housing affordable for one generation of buyers, but permanently for all future buyers of the same home. That’s because CLTs place restrictions on the resale price of homes, which limit equity appreciation, and preserve units of housing created specifically for people of low and moderate income. In this sense, CLTs grow the initial subsidy created rather than losing it in one generation like in the case of low-income mortgage assistance, where the buyer simply pays back the same amount with interest at the time of sale.

The fact is that in rapidly appreciating real estate markets like the San Francisco Bay area, or around other job-rich urban centers, the amount of money invested in the form of subsidies in 2008-2009 to make homes more affordable, requires two to three times the amount today. This is a point made by Francis McIlveen of Northern California Land Trust who has demonstrated in a study of 40 of their properties that using the community land trust model not only allowed subsidies to be retained, but to grow in value by 1,150 percent!

Francis McIlveen of Northern California Land Trust says, “We are very lucky to have such a dedicated group of folks throughout the state committed to the CLT model, whose advocacy made these two pieces of legislation possible. It has also been a deeply meaningful step to have CLTs receive the same help that other non-profit affordable housing developers have enjoyed ([namely] property taxation & exemptions), because this shows that more and more people in government, and in our communities, are coming to understand the fundamental need for our society to stop treating land as a commodity, and to see it for what it is: the very foundation for our right and ability to live and work in a particular place. If we want to continue to live in community, we must prioritize community uses of the land, hence the Community Land Trust model.”

Through tax exemptions, SB 196 will make CLT housing more financially feasible. SB 196 does this by making the time between acquisition of properties and their sale exempt from taxation as well as applying important tax exemptions on the assessment of CLT property taxes thereafter.

Currently, and despite a 2016 bill providing tax exemptions, the California Board of Equalization and individual tax assessors have continued to assess taxes based on the market value of the property or some other valuation, instead of on the value of both land and housing with affordability restrictions taken into account. As a result, it can be very costly if not prohibitive for CLTs if they are forced to pay taxes during the time the property is being developed. Furthermore, tax assessments based on full market value can make projects financially infeasible for CLTs and unaffordable for those of low and moderate income. Such taxes create extra monthly costs, which must be incurred by the CLT or tenant-owner/renter.

SB 196 will now remove these costly barriers thus easing the creation of permanently affordable housing throughout California.

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This post is a follow up to our editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

The post New California legislation passes to benefit Community Land Trusts appeared first on Shareable.

Along the way, Gorenflo collected a list of books that helped him piece together the timeline or just put U.S. land use and housing policy in a larger socio-economic context. We’re sharing this list in case you want to go further down this rabbit hole than our series (which is included in the list in ebook form). We came to believe that ambitions for sharing in cities can only go so far if past inequities aren’t confronted and taken into account when developing solutions. 

As is usual for our book roundups, these books are either new, new to us, or one of ours. If you have suggestions for books to include, let us know at info@shareable.net. Below are summaries excerpted from each book’s website:

How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It- Shareable

Our very latest ebook is hot off the presses, so to speak. This free ebook is a compilation of all of the articles in our series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.” We explore the history of land use and housing policy in the United States, solutions to the housing crisis with a focus on how to increase equity, and conversations we’ve hosted about it. Download our free ebook here. 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America– Richard Rothstein

In The Color of Law (published by Liveright in May 2017), Richard Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America—the incessant kind that continues to dog our major cities and has contributed to so much recent social strife—is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

Segregation by design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities- Jessica Trounstine

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early twentieth century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation – first within cities and more recently between them. Documenting changing patterns of segregation and their political mechanisms, Trounstine argues that city governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor.

Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation – Sonia A. Hirt

In Zoned in the USA, Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences. Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly American profile. A distinct spatial culture of individualism, founded on an ideal of separate, single-family residences apart from the dirt and turmoil of industrial and agricultural production, has driven much of municipal regulation, defined land-use, and, ultimately, shaped American life.

Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities- Carl H. Nightingale

When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow—two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us in this magisterial history, segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide. Starting with segregation’s ancient roots, and what the archaeological evidence reveals about humanity’s long-standing use of urban divisions to reinforce political and economic inequality, Nightingale then moves to the world of European colonialism. It was there, he shows, segregation based on color—and eventually on race—took hold; the British East India Company, for example, split Calcutta into “White Town” and “Black Town.” As we follow Nightingale’s story around the globe, we see that division replicated from Hong Kong to Nairobi, Baltimore to San Francisco, and more.

Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life- Dolores Hayden

Americans still build millions of dream houses in neighborhoods that sustain Victorian stereotypes of the home as “woman’s place” and the city as “man’s world.” Urban historian and architect Dolores Hayden tallies the personal and social costs of an American “architecture of gender” for the two-earner family, the single-parent family, and single people. Many societies have struggled with the architectural and urban consequences of women’s paid employment: Hayden traces three models of home in historical perspective—the haven strategy in the United States, the industrial strategy in the former USSR, and the neighborhood strategy in European social democracies—to document alternative ways to reconstruct neighborhoods.

One hundred years of zoning and the future of cities- edited by Amnon Lehavi

This book reconsiders the fundamental principles of zoning and city planning over the course of the past one-hundred years, and the lessons that can be learned for the future of cities. Bringing together the contributions of leading scholars, representing diverse methodologies and academic disciplines, this book studies core questions about the functionality of cities and the goals that should be promoted via zoning and planning. It considers the increasing pace of urbanization and growth of mega cities in both developed and developing countries; changing concepts on the role of mixed-use and density zoning; new policies on inclusionary zoning as a way to facilitate urban justice and social mobility; and the effects of current macrophenomena, such as mass immigration and globalization, on the changing landscape of cities.

Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York city- edited by Tom Angotti and Sylvia Morse 

Gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color are major issues in New York City and the city’s zoning policies are a major cause. Race matters but the city ignores it when shaping land use and housing policies. The city promises “affordable housing” that is not truly affordable. Zoned Out! shows how this has played in Williamsburg, Harlem and Chinatown, neighborhoods facing massive displacement of people of color. It looks at ways the city can address inequalities, promote authentic community-based planning and develop housing in the public domain.

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This post is part of our Fall 2019 editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

Or take a look at the other articles in the series:

• Zoned apart: How the US failed to share land but should start today
• Timeline of 100 years of racist housing policy that created a separate and unequal America
• How pro-density advocates in Minneapolis took on single-family zoning — and won
• Bringing equity to the forefront of urban planning
• How some cities are looking to in-law units to ease the housing crunch and build more diverse neighborhoods
• Can zoning reform undo “50 years of bad policy?”
• Segregation By Design author expects political battle between fair housing opponents and proponents
• How to ease the US housing crisis? Import strategic policy from abroad
• Cities at turning point: Will upzoning ease housing inequalities or build on zoning’s racist legacy?
• Author Richard Rothstein calls for new civil rights movement to address housing scarcity and injustice

The post 8 must read books on US land use and housing policy appeared first on Shareable.

Speaking to the full house, Rothstein called for change. “We have an apartheid society,” he said, and that while we may not want to admit it, we need race-specific policies in the United States to reverse the damage done to African Americans and other minorities by government policies. Rothstein argued that every metropolitan area in the U.S. is racially segregated due to racist housing policies enacted by multiple levels of government. One result of this segregation is that, “schools are more segregated now than any other time in the last 50 years,” Rothstein said. 

Rothstein’s call to action was for a new civil rights movement in the U.S. to reverse the damage done to minorities and enact policies that make high quality housing available to all. “We need a new civil rights movement that’s as vigorous as the one in the 1960s,” he said. “Policies don’t enact themselves.” 

Following the keynote, Rothstein joined a panel discussion moderated by Noni Session, Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, with Chris Iglesias, Executive Director of Unity Council, and Sarah Jo Szambelan, Research Director at SPUR and leader of their place types research.

Session asked panelists about whether the solutions being enacted — for instance, upzoning single family suburbs to allow more density — can ease the housing crisis and create more justice. Rothstein discussed the need for public housing: “In expensive areas like San Francisco, the private sector is incapable of building housing for low-income communities,” he said pointing out the fact that it isn’t financially feasible. “This is why we need public housing.”

Notably Session asked the panelists about how we can move forward in a society where housing, which many argue should be a right, is actually treated as a commodity. Initially stumped, panelists discussed the need to change how we view housing, echoing Rothstein’s call fundamental change that might come from a revived civil rights movement.

Session called on Iglesias to share his experience developing affordable housing in East Oakland’s Fruitvale district, the largest Latino community in the Bay Area. He shared how city council members initially discouraged him from developing below market units, the difficulty in financing such projects, and how the money big local tech companies have pledged to address the housing crisis hasn’t found its way to the grassroots yet.  

Szambelan shared her work for SPUR on place types, detailing how 75 percent of the urban land in the Bay Area is zoned single family and how these areas are disproportionately white, especially outer ring suburbs. 

The event was part of Shareable’s fall editorial series on U.S. zoning and housing solutions prompted by a nationwide trend to upzone single family areas started in Minneapolis late last year. Neal Gorenflo, Executive Director of Shareable, opened the event by calling this moment a potential turning point for more justice in U.S. housing policy, but only if parallel inclusionary measures are enacted alongside upzoning.

You can watch the entire program in the video below:

• ##

  This post is part of our Fall 2019 editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

  Or take a look at the other articles in the series:

  • Zoned apart: How the US failed to share land but should start today
  • Timeline of 100 years of racist housing policy that created a separate and unequal America
  • How pro-density advocates in Minneapolis took on single-family zoning — and won
  • Bringing equity to the forefront of urban planning
  • How some cities are looking to in-law units to ease the housing crunch and build more diverse neighborhoods
  • Can zoning reform undo “50 years of bad policy?”
  • Segregation By Design author expects political battle between fair housing opponents and proponents
  • How to ease the US housing crisis? Import strategic policy from abroad
  • 8 must read books on US land use and housing policy

The post Author Richard Rothstein calls for new civil rights movement to address housing scarcity and injustice appeared first on Shareable.

The question of how to address rising demand for quality, affordable housing is, of course, not a uniquely American problem. But, elsewhere in the world, governments have found solutions rooted in very different philosophies on how societies should build, finance, distribute and maintain housing. A few have even succeeded in avoiding the social and racial segregation plaguing many American cities through policies intended to build diverse, cohesive communities.

In Austria, policymakers have relied on an approach that embraces, at its core, the belief that society should provide every citizen with decent and affordable housing. With the help of heavy federal spending, the government has developed an expansive housing stock and some 60 percent of Vienna’s citizens — including much of its middle class — now live in subsidized homes.

The neat buildings often boast leafy common spaces meant to encourage interaction among neighbors, while swimming pools, saunas and childcare facilities are also common sights. In Austria, city governments regulate rents and households spend on average about 21 percent of their income on housing. By contrast, the average American family spends 37 percent on housing every month, with the figure approaching a staggering 60 percent in places like New York City.

Vienna’s housing model also involves strategic measures meant to cultivate social cohesion. Through land use planning, the city ensures that communities are home to a mix of residents from varying social and demographic groups. “They (the state) do it because they want balance in the community — that’s part of their aim,” says William Menking, a professor at the Pratt Institute and co-author of a book about the city’s housing model.

In Singapore, government policies that envisioned housing for all citizens have helped millions buy their own homes with the state’s help. With the aim of creating a “homeowner society,” Singapore built more than a million apartment units, while turning the national pension scheme into a fund that Singaporeans could draw on to buy these homes.

In just half a century since independence, the scheme has allowed the city-state to solve a spiraling homelessness crisis by placing high-quality publicly developed housing at the center of its agenda. Now, 81 percent of Singapore’s residents live in government-built high-rise apartment blocks and the vast majority own their homes. By contrast, in 1960, almost 70 percent of Singapore’s population was made up of squatters and slum dwellers. Strategic land-use planning and ethnic quotas regulating the resale of government units are used to ensure communities remain diverse and inclusive.

Finland, meanwhile, has become the only country in Europe to see a decline in homelessness thanks to a national program that provides subsidized homes to vulnerable people without requiring them to first get sober or meet other housing-readiness requirements. At the heart of the program is the Housing First philosophy that many social and health problems faced by homeless populations can be resolved by providing immediate and unconditional access to housing. As a result, the number of homeless people has fallen from a peak of 18,000 in the late 1980s to 5,482 at the end of 2018.

How local land-use policy shaped U.S. housing markets

In the U.S., housing policy has evolved in a different direction. While the federal government has exercised influence over housing funding and policy for nearly a century, the focus has mostly been on facilitating homeownership of single-family dwellings and financing low-income housing for society’s most vulnerable citizens. Notably, unlike in Finland or Austria, local governments in the U.S. control a key factor in  housing — land use. Instead of expanding access to housing, American cities have exercised that control to implement policies that perpetuate segregation, deep inequalities, and sprawl. Even though many of these challenges are created or exacerbated by governments, municipalities typically look to private developers to address the resulting market imbalances.

Housing policy in most U.S. cities is rooted in the belief that the solution to chronic housing shortages, skyrocketing rents, deep inequality and dilapidated social housing lies primarily with the private market. A number of cities, including New York, have used incentives in the form of tax breaks and waivers on density restrictions to nudge developers to build more housing and reserve some of it for low-income residents.

The rationale behind this is that increasing the overall housing stock through private development will ease some of the pressure on availability and affordability, leading to a natural correction in the housing market. Meanwhile, by encouraging mixed-income developments through inclusionary zoning, American cities are hoping to avoid creating more of the urban ghettos often associated with the public housing projects of the past.

Yet this strategy has had only mixed success so far. In New York City, demand still far outstrips the supply of affordable housing being built by private developers. De Blasio’s flagship initiative — announced in 2014 and later expanded — aims to build 300,000 affordable housing units by 2026. As of June 2019, developers had started on 43,930 new units. But the odds of securing an affordable unit through the city’s lottery system are slim: More than 4.6 million applications were submitted for just 7,857 units allocated in 2018.

Much of the housing developed under this model is also geared toward middle-income residents and does little to help the poorest segments of the population: A Brooklyn development made headlines last year with requirements that applicants vying for its affordable units earn between $67,000 and $150,000.

What can the U.S. learn from cities abroad?

Complex local land use policies in the U.S. also mean that the private market often winds up building housing that favors high-income, white families. Residential zoning codes often set a minimum size for dwellings and the lots they sit on, restrict how many families can live in one home, cap the number of stories that can be built, or require parking spaces for every unit. All of these requirements ultimately push up the price of developing housing, which developers pass on to tenants or buyers. 

Most cities also reserve vast swaths of urban land for single-family homes and restrict multifamily housing to areas near industrial zones or otherwise undesirable tracts of land, further limiting development possibilities. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, 75 percent of all residential land is zoned single family. This is not unusual in America. All of these factors make housing unnecessarily scarce and expensive in the U.S.

“We’ve run into a planning system where building anything becomes fantastically complicated and expensive,” says Alain Bertaud, a senior research scholar at NYU’s Marron Institute and author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. “And so you end up building only expensive things.”

But, while successful models used elsewhere may provide a helpful roadmap for U.S. cities, their success is linked to a complex mix of factors that makes them potentially difficult to replicate. For one, many of these cities are far smaller — and growing at a much slower rate — than their U.S. counterparts, making it easier for governments to address housing demand. Helsinki grew at just 0.7 percent in 2018 and Vienna marked growth of 1.1 percent. By contrast, New York City’s population expanded by 2.7 percent in the same year.

Government land ownership has also played a significant role. Following independence, Singapore enacted a law that gave government agencies powers to acquire vast amounts of private land at below-market rates, displacing millions of people and allowing the state to kick-start its public housing scheme.

Vienna also owns a large chunk of the land its building on, much of it taken over from the aristocracy when democracy was achieved. However, Menking notes that cities like Vienna have made a strategic decision to hang onto public land instead of selling it off as many U.S. cities have done. “They made a choice to build housing there,” he says. “We’ve made a different choice here.”

In Finland, meanwhile, a much more ethnically homogenous population has also meant that building inclusive communities and avoiding segregation has been far less challenging for the government.

But what American cities can learn from other models is that there must first be a shift away from viewing housing as solely the responsibility of the private market, says Rodrigo Faria Gonçalves Iacovini, a researcher at Brazil’s Polis Institute and part of the Global Platform for the Right to the City.

“We need to start framing the idea of housing not as a commodity,” he says, “but as a right.”

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This post is part of our Fall 2019 editorial series on land use and housing policy challenges and solutions. Download our latest FREE ebook based on this series: “How Racism Shaped the Housing Crisis & What We Can Do About It.”

Or take a look at the other articles in the series:

• Zoned apart: How the US failed to share land but should start today
• Timeline of 100 years of racist housing policy that created a separate and unequal America
• How pro-density advocates in Minneapolis took on single-family zoning — and won
• Bringing equity to the forefront of urban planning
• How some cities are looking to in-law units to ease the housing crunch and build more diverse neighborhoods
• Can zoning reform undo “50 years of bad policy?”
• Segregation By Design author expects political battle between fair housing opponents and proponents
• Cities at turning point: Will upzoning ease housing inequalities or build on zoning’s racist legacy?
• Author Richard Rothstein calls for new civil rights movement to address housing scarcity and injustice
• 8 must read books on US land use and housing policy

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