Healthy Urbanism

In 2008, the housing market in this country was turned upside down. As we begin to start planning for the future of our cities it is important to look closely at what the housing industry has become. In this post, I want to focus specifically on our lack of housing choice. In this country we place great value on having choice. No two people have the exact same vision of the dream home and community. Choice is what fuels a healthy and competitive market and builds strong and cohesive neighborhoods.

However, in today’s housing market there is very little choice in terms of housing types. Many of the reasons behind this lack of choice, date back to the beginning of the Federal Housing Administration. As a part of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan program, design guidelines and standards were formed to ensure a return on investment. The FHA as well as private lending agencies would not give out loans that did not meet a certain formula that included street standards and other designs. As we have gone into the future, into a more globalized world, the concepts or cultural norms specific to each location has begun to fade. There are certain types of housing that investors feel comfortable investing in because they have worked in the past. And because they want to make sure Fannie Mae will be willing to buy the loans in case they need to sell. This inherently discourages diversity in housing choice because new developments tend to follow prescribed formulas. Changes to the norm takes much power and political clout because change must contend against financial institutions willing to lend money, officials putting their job on the line, and politicians risking reelection. Banks today have become multinational and they do not have the resources to plan for investments that are specific to the needs of every location nor every social or racial class/culture. In their minds it makes much more sense to follow the set of established and corroborated norms.

Minority populations throughout the country are growing at increasingly faster rates and their housing preferences are likely to be different than that of white Americans of the recent past. One of the tenets of the planner’s Code of Ethics is to

Expand choice and opportunity for all persons, recognizing a special responsibility to plan for the needs of disadvantaged groups and persons, and must urge the alteration of policies, institutions, and decisions which oppose such needs.

Therefore planners must strive to remove institutional barriers facing disadvantaged groups and persons in their search for the housing of their choice. Rolf Pendall documented very convincing evidence in his article, “Local Land Use Regulation and the Chain of Exclusion” that low-density zoning and building permit caps are associated with the exclusion of Blacks and Hispanics. It is a planner’s obligation to meet the needs of the people in the city. There needs to be more choice in general to meet the needs of our diverse population. Sherry Ahrentzen points out in her article “Choice in Housing” that the housing market offers very few options and is out of date and reliant on archaic myths about American households. Ahrentzen states,

Developers and financial institutions dislike risk. Their goal is not diversity, but the profits to be made from market-rate housing.

Planners should strive for policy that allows flexibility in housing types while encouraging developers to build for other groups besides the white husband and wife with 2.1 kids.

Ahrentzen does a beautiful job summing this issue up,

Through the use of zoning, minimum lot sizes, and building and occupancy codes, our residential landscape reinforces the stratified and value-laden classification of households and ‘protects various politically powerful subcultures.

City officials and planners need to be careful when their policies favor a certain type of culture and definition of a family. One important method to tackle segregation in our cities is to first tackle the problem of limited choice in housing. – adam