Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Jenny Steffel
Jenny Steffel is a doctoral candidate in design and planning at the University of Colorado. She did a study for HUD on the inclusion of affordable housing in New Urbanist developments. Steffel points out that New Urbanist principles state that New Urbanist developments should be configured as both mixed-use as well as mixed-income projects. But a survey she conducted demonstrates that few practitioners of New Urbanism include housing for low-income residents in their developments. They do, however, create housing for moderate-income residents. The Congress for New Urbanism should create a label and certify that a development meets its criteria, she suggests. Otherwise there is a danger that New Urbanism will become just another elitist model of development.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): Do you find that there is a legitimate distinction between "Fair Growth" and "Smart Growth?" Do New Urbanist practitioners of Smart Growth include the provision of affordable housing as part of what makes Smart Growth smart?
Jenny Steffel: I've been to New Urbanism conferences and when equity issues come up they say we are doing Hope VI projects. [Hope VI projects are large replacement affordable housing projects funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development]. But it is not part of the private development they do. I know it is idealistic to think that affordable housing should somehow become an important part of private developer's repertoire. And it turns out it is not. But it is part of New Urbanism. If they call themselves New Urbanists (NU) and try to achieve their stated principles, then the provision of affordable housing is one of them. It is in the charter of New Urbanism that mixed-income housing is supposed to be in there. So it is part of their rhetoric of building community. They state that to have a true community it should include a heterogeneous population, which building mixed-income housing types together can somewhat achieve. The idea is to create a community where you can have younger families and empty-nesters and a range of people. But to really mix incomes takes a little more effort than that on the developer's part.
I'm in a Ph.D. program called design and planning at the University of Colorado. I am also doing my master of architecture degree at the same time. I'm working on my literature review for my comps and dissertation. I got a pre-dissertation grant from HUD to look at affordable housing in New Urbanist developments. Then I decided I needed to be in a Ph.D. program and look at the big picture on low-income housing. It is an inter-disciplinary view and looking at the pros and cons of doing it at all. So my dissertation will be on the bigger picture. I did the HUD study on New Urbanism and affordable housing and then after looking at the data decided to examine the bigger picture.
SDL: Tell me about the study you did for HUD.
JS: The proposal to HUD emphasized public/private partnerships. I called it: "Affordable Housing in New Urbanist Communities: Challenges and Solutions." Essentially, I wanted to know if affordable housing was being included in New Urbanist developments because I couldn't find that information anywhere. Nobody talked about it. Occasionally you would find a description that mentioned some New Urbanist affordable housing but that was it. In an effort to come up with the answer I surveyed a bunch of developers who called themselves New Urbanists. Coming up with a list of New Urbanist projects was a huge challenge that I didn't expect. The lists on the Congress for New Urbanism website, where they have a list of projects, is a purely self-selected list. If you want to call yourself a New Urbanist you can be on their list. There is no criteria, trademark, patentnothing that separates New Urbanists from other architects and developers. You can just call yourself New Urbanist. So I had to come up with my own list.
Also, the New Urban News publishes a list but theirs is only projects that are 15 acres and larger so there are no urban infill projects on it. And certainly a lot of mixed-income projects would be urban infill projects. So it was a challenge coming up with a list. I came up with about 300 projects and of those I was able to locate developers' names and addresses of about 200. So I sent out surveys to 200 of them. The survey asked: did you build any affordable housing, how much, did you do it, and if you didn't do it why not? And if you did what funding programs did you use? Did you use low income housing tax credits or tax increment financing or whatever? I asked if they made any architectural changes to their projects to make units more affordable. I asked if they had changed the amenities or services they had provided in mixed-use new urbanist developments if they made decisions based on their low-income population's needs.
SDL: You mean not including a golf course in a project so that the costs could be kept down to provide housing for low-income residents?
JS: Exactly. Some said we included Head Start or we made sure there was a bus stop, or laundry facilities, or on-site management. So there were some considerations. None said that they specifically excluded anything. I heard back from 85 which was a 38 percent response rate. I sent out about 220 surveys.
SDL: What did they say?
JS: The biggest thing I was looking for was how much affordable housing was being built. And I was surprised at the number. It was higher than I had expected. It came out to something like 55 percent of the places had some affordable units and I used HUD's definition of "moderate income" meaning 120 to 80 percent of the median; low-income and very low income. And I realized after looking at the data that the reason the numbers were high was because of the moderate-income category. There was one project in Florida that was entirely moderate income. It was a low-price housing market around there and it was all median income affordable. So that is why the numbers were high. In reality, out of all of the units, the total number of units in all the responses I got was something like 72,000 units and out of those 4 percent was very-low income; and 6.5 percent was for low-income.
SDL: So basically almost 90 percent of the affordable units were for "moderate income" clients who were in the lower middle class.
JS: Yes, for the affordable units. Everything else was more expensive. In fact New Urbanist units on average cost about 25 percent more. A study my Tieu and Epply (?) found that prices [for New Urbanist units] were about 25 percent higher for comparable units because there are more amenities.
SDL: And it takes more time to get the permits because of the variances.
JS: Yes, and typically there are more streets. They sacrifice more of their land to pavement [to create a grid].
SDL: To summarize: you found that of the affordable housing built by New Urbanists 10.5 percent were for very-low or low-income tenants.
JS: Yes, and that did include some Hope VI projects. I don't know how many of those were Hope VI. I'm guessing that most of the very-low income units were Hope VI developments. I doubt that any very-low income units were anything else because it requires a very deep subsidy.
SDL: Do you know Patrick Kennedy in Berkeley?
ST: Yes. He responded. McCormack Barron is a developer in Pittsburgh and I think they had some. They may have had Hope VI funding but they were very enthusiastic and sent me tons of literature about themselves and their work and affordable housing. On the positive side I took the survey to mean that there was a pretty significant percentage of moderate income housing. For those developers who think that New Urbanism costs too much and has to be only for upper income people this study shows that you can do New Urbanist developments for moderate income residents.
I visited West Park Village in Florida and it was beautiful and it was all moderate income units with a nice little retail area. I went to the CNU conference in Miami and I went and saw Celebration and Seaside and all those places and some of the smaller ones in between and some Hope VI projects.
SDL: I've heard from developers that there is a huge unmet need for low-income and moderate-income housing but that zoning laws in many areas prohibit their construction. In some counties the zoning prohibits multi-housing units.
JS: Or there are lot size requirements.
SDL: Fiscal zoning has limited the field of what developers can do and yet the economic reality on the ground out there is that there are a whole lot of people who don't have a lot of money and who have a bunch of kids and they can't find a place to live.
JS: Even people who don't have kids sometimes can't afford a place. My sister, who is 20 something and has a decent job and wants to live in DC can't find a place. Forget it. You have to live in the boondocks to find a place you can afford.
SDL: What I hear from developers is that they would love to build housing for these [low- and moderate-income] people because they can sell these units easily. If the city or county would allow them to do this they would build it. Give them the green light to do this and they will make money doing it because they can do it on a large scale. But the problem with doing that is that it would create a new economically segregated housing area rather than mixed-income community.
Tell me why you did this study and how you got interested in this work?
JS: I've always been interested in affordable housing. I majored in Interior Design at Cornell and my first job after my freshman year was with Fairfax County Department of Housing and Community Development. I was doing interior design work on community centers and elderly apartment buildings all of which were affordable housing. It occurred to me that this work required more creativity than projects where you had an unlimited budget. It was a difficult population with a lot of different and it was challenging. I was allowed to modify my major so I could study housing economics as well as design so I ended up doing an independent major where combined both things. I came out having an interest in housing policy as well as design.
After college I worked for a housing Christian Relief Services in Alexandria, Virginia. We did Resolution Trust Corporation projects. When the Savings and Loans went under they were getting rid of the properties they held really cheaply to bail themselves out. As a result, non-profits had the opportunity to buy these properties for very reasonable costs. A 160 unit project in Phoenix was priced at $2 million. I also worked on a project for HUD called the One Dollar Lease Project which allowed non-profits to take over foreclosed HUD properties for a dollar a year on a five year lease. We had to fix them up, pay the taxes and insurance and then we could turn around and rent them out to homeless families.
I also coordinated a project in Fairfax County where I had 15 different non-profits: the county, the Salvation Army, various rehabilitation centers and transitional housing places and they would refer their clients who were ready to move from transitional housing into something more stable. We coordinated all this and found housing for them. In six months of work I think I housed 13 people. I was 22 and it was just me doing it but I had volunteers and church groups going in and fixing up these places and people donating carpets and furniture and paint. It was a cool project.
Then I went to graduate school at McGill and I was in a program called "The Architecture of Affordable Homes." I worked with Avi Freeman who built this house in the middle of campus to show that you could build houses affordably. It was the first time I had been in a program with other people who were interested in housing affordability. In college it was just me doing this independent major. Avi did a house they called the "Grow Home" but he didn't get the trademark, There are thousands of them all over Canada now. It is a townhouse that you can add and modify the configuration easily. It has an open second story that you can use as a big master bedroom or you can wall up part of it and use it as a nursery or office or multiple bedrooms. It was reasonable and the one on campus was furnished by IKEA.
I studied exclusionary zoning in the suburbs which was the topic of my masters thesis. Suburban housing is supposed to be single family and owner occupied, and traditional style. So I wanted to know where that came from. I looked up suburban development historically and psychologically and then I looked at the history of zoning. I still find it amazing that even in the U.S. where people are so property oriented that they would allow the government to tell them what they can and can't do with their land. It is incredible. It makes sense but it is amazing to me. They can just make rules and say there are too many African Americans in your neighborhood so you are not going to get funding. And God forbid you want to live in an A Frame. Forget it. And then I looked at examples of exclusionary zoning around the country. I looked at Atlanta, Boston, DC and the different ways that they were excluding people by requiring large lots or limiting multifamily places, or saying you have to have a basement or a garage or manufactured housing, or subtle things like that.
SDL: Some of the regulations require that three walls of the house be made of brick and that the lawns are watered with an underground irrigation system.
JS: Or they require a two acre minimum lot size. The exclusionary zoning contains some amazing stuff.
SDL: Some whole counties prohibit the construction of any multifamily housing. Harvard Law School Professor Gerald Frug is fascinating by this topic. He looks at this from a legal perspective. Traditionally zoning has been a local issue but when you look at it more broadly that right is granted by the state so it comes back to state politics.
JS: And then it is so tied up with the fiscal zoning aspect it makes it so complex that the counties have such competing interests for what they are doing. Multifamily housing is expensive for them. You have all these people who probably have a lot of kids who need schools and all this stuff that doesn't pay for itself. They would rather put in a nice clean light industry and make tons of money or a big box retail development, which is much cheaper for them.
SDL: So if you are in elective office and you want to keep taxes down there is a lot of pressure on you not to practice exclusionary zoning.
JS: Absolutely. And certainly building a huge development of affordable housing is not going to fly with anybody. It is too expensive for the taxpayer. People don't want that in their city. That is what is so cool about New Urbanism. They talk a lot about making changes to zoning ordinances and certainly they have to get zoning changes to get anything built that is New Urbanist. But New Urbanism is popular all across the spectrum: family values, building livable communities, front porches, kids walk to school all the way over to the other side [of the political spectrum] where you have a diverse population there, heterogeneity, income-mixing, opportunity for people who wouldn't have had it otherwise.
SDL: In the New Urbanist charter there is an item which says they believe in building mixed-income communities. Here you have done a survey and found 55 percent are doing some kind of affordable housing but that it is heavily weighted towards moderate income units. What is you assessment about how New Urbanism is doing in achieving its goal of creating mixed-income housing.
JS: I think they are doing poorly but I am not surprised. There is no regulation of what is or is not New Urbanist. There is no one telling these developers what should be there. They can build whatever they want. There are some who are truly committed to New Urbanism and they want to do it to the letter and spirit of the law. They know what it is about and they build nice buildings, they include all the stuff they are supposed to include but they are the exception. For example Stapleton, Colorado, the biggest urban infill project in the U.S. putting in something like 12,000 units of housing is New Urbanist in design. Will Flessig is involved and Forest City is the developer. Flessig has done some cool work by the bus station in downtown Denver with Continuum. I talked to some people involved with the Stapleton project and they said they were very interested in mixed-income but their token inclusion of it is that they left some of the land to be developed by non-profit developers for low-income residents. Granted they do have a huge range of incomes in there but they do not go very low. I think the lowest rent is $700 to $900 a month for a really small place. They do have an apartment building with affordable units for the elderly. But otherwise it is pretty much market rate. From looking at their map if there is any subsidized housing it is very scattered and far between. They do have a bunch of different builders and housing types from townhouses to apartments but over all it is a waste and they are building it in a part of town where they could use some low income housing.
SDL: Do you mean there is land set aside for non-profits to build low-income housing?
JS: That is their intention.
SDL: But it would be separate segregated from the rest of it.
JS: That is the sense I got. One of the other places you should see here is Prospect. It is in Longmont and originally plated out by Duane Plater Zeiberg but I think they disowned it. This place is architecturally crazy jumping from Tudor to Second Empire to modernist within three houses in a row. And it is all custom built. There are 50 some architects working in there. And it is all expensive and it is gated and there is one restaurant in there now. They are putting in some solar buildings and small apartments, a little office space, some live/work studios. It is cool but it is not cheap and it is out in the middle of no where.
SDL: What is their commitment to affordable housing?
JS: None that I am aware of.
SDL: And they call themselves New Urbanist?
JS: Yes. They have the planning and street trees and gridded streets all New Urbanist characteristics.
SDL: What is the bus station thing the Fleissig is doing?
JS: It is at the Market Street Station in the hip part of Lower Downtown of Denver (LODO). Jack Kerroac talks about it in On the Road as a not very nice part of town. It is warehouses loft buildings which have turned into fancy $2 million ($400 a sq. ft.) buildings. And it is a traffic urban renaissance with a lot of restaurants and bars and stuff. It has very strict architectural controls to maintain the visual integrity of the place. So his building does a nice job of that. It is a big building but it steps down in scale to meet the neighboring building. It has a bank and some restaurants on the first floor, office space in the middle, and some residential units on the top. It is a nice small scale and fits with the ideals of New Urbanism. It is attached to mass transit across the street. It is architecturally sensitive and it has mixed uses. I believe the apartments in it are expensive penthouses but it has a mix of uses. It has no affordable units. He didn't reply to my survey.
SDL: If you look at mixed income-developments historically that is what we come out of.
JS: I don't know about that. That is the next thing that I will read about. New Urbanists look at small towns as the ideal place to live. But how integrated were small towns? My mom grew up in a small town in Illinois. There is the nice street of big, beautiful affordable houses; and there is the other-side-of-the-tracks area. I am curious and I don't know the answer as to how integrated they were. It is a small footprint so there are people of different incomes living near each other but how integrated were they? I read recently about segregation in Victorian cities. There was a concern during the industrial revolution that the rich were leaving the cities because they were becoming filled with immigrants and soot and noise so they moved to the suburbs. At the time writers were saying that the rich were abandoning their moral responsibility and guidance for the poor. There was concern about revolution and if you leave this group of poor people together they are going to consolidate their interests and class consciousness is going to arise and it will be bad for the wealthy. So there were debate even back then about the role of mixed-income neighborhoods.
Conversely, if incomes are mixed and people live together, will poor people be angry when they see what they don't have? Will they and feel deprived? And will that lead to bad feelings? So even 150 to 200 years ago there was an argument over whether mixed-income housing was socially desirable.
Later, when you look at Ebenezer Howard's Garden City and places like Radburn that Clarence Stein built, all have mixed income as an ideal. Ever since urban planning began it has been an ideal. It was seen as something that had to be forcibly injected into the cities because, for whatever reason, it wasn't being done on it own. It has always been an ideal but then fades away again. New Towns like Reston or any of those places that were designed as utopian styled developments no one would say that Reston is mixed-income any more. But that was part of the design, the ideal, back then. I am interested in following that pattern. Where does it go? Why does it need to be reinjected again and again? Why do planners have to invent it? Why isn't it just done? So you can say that people used to live that way but I don't know how true that is.
SDL: I think it depends when and where. I grew up in Manhattan in the late 1940s and early 1950s and I recall our neighborhood being much more mixed-income than that area is now. The way it worked then was that there were the grand streets with the big houses but then you go one street back and there would be modest tenements where the servants lived; or small entrepreneurs lived over the candy store, grocery store, or laundry. If you go down South there were mansions but not far away would be satellite settlements of poor farmers and servants. So I think we are coming out of an era where the wealthy lived grandly and the poor lived poorly but geographically they lived quite close to each other. As a result they would rub shoulders in the streets and in some of the stores.
JS: Scale is important.
SDL: Then there were zoning changes.
JS: Zoning changes must have had a big impact on that.
SDL: I understand that much of zoning came out of problems associated with industry being located next to residential areas. But that it then became class oriented and it was also a reaction to problems associated with white flight.
JS: There were also aesthetic and environmental issues in it in New York City with skyscrapers blocking out the light for others. Zoning started requiring them to step back buildings from the street to allow light and air to come into the street level. Regal v. Amber was the first Supreme Court case that tested it.
SDL: That brings us to the present. Why do we have to keep reinjecting mixed-income requirements into development plans? We have had previous periods where there was more mixed-income on the ground but have gone through a series of zoning changes that have reduced it and it looks like is driving us towards an increasingly economically segregated built environment.
JS: Are you interested in this economically or socially or both.
SDL: I don't want to live in a society that is economically and racially segregated. That strikes me as very close to the apartheid model. I think the lack of opportunities to live in mixed-income communities is unhealthy and at the root of a lot of social problems. I think the concentration of poverty is at the root of many of our social and environmental problems. There should be enough people interested in this to get enough kindred spirits to recognize the importance of this and begin to move it up on the national agenda.
JS: Yes. You can get people from so many different aspects interested in this from an interdisciplinary interests.
SDL: This strikes me as an issue that is under reported. By shining a light on it I hope to help spark a national debate on these kinds of issues. One of the reasons I'm talking with you is that there already is this movement afoot called Smart Growth and it is a little different than New Urbanism but they come together a lot. I'm interested in seeing the Smart Growth movement formally adopt an interest in these equity issues and place affordable housing higher on their agenda.
JS: I agree.
SDL: The Smart Growth movement isn't going to be smart if it doesn't include affordable housing. And it will lose a lot of energy and become an elitist movement that is not relevant to a lot of people and it would start being part of the problem than part of the solution.
JS: Yes, like New Urbanism.
SDL: You were saying that New Urnanism has not done that good a job of integrating low-income housing into their developments. Do you see any signs of movement on this issue?
JS: That is my job. I think it is a wasted opportunity for them not to. In the conferences that I have attended I haven't seen that. It is constantly deferred to look at Hope VI. They say: "New Urbanists are building affordable housing: look at Hope VI." Anyway, Bush has taken it out of the budget. Some aspects of the Hope VI program are good but we haven't begun to see the repercussions of all of it. The displacement issue in Hope VI developments is enormous. You tear down 900 units of low income housing granted it was probably a hell hole to live there and you replace it with 300 units of very low income housing and 300 units of moderate income and 300 units of market rate housing. The result is that you have just lost two thirds of your very low income housing housing of the last resort for the poorest of the poor. And for years they were not even tracking where the displaced people went. Now they have started tracking them and they give them vouchers to go live elsewhere. There is also the fact that a lot of these places were vacant when they tore them down anyways.
SDL: But what I understand you saying is that New Urbanists have failed to look at themselves and recognize that they are not building a lot of low-income housing in their private developments. What are the barriers to doing that?
JS: It is primarily financial. These are for-profit developers that are building affordable housing. I am guessing but I would imagine that if I were a developer who was used to building single family suburban developments and I was trying out a New Urbanist development it requires a whole different type of marketing. Certainly there is a lot of nostalgia in the marketing if you look at all the pictures have people sitting on the front porch waving and the little kid on the bike. But the fact that you might be deliberately including affordable housing, putting in smaller units I don't think they would ever point out in the literature that this was affordable housing. They would talk about the development including "starter homes" or some similar language. I think it would be tougher to market. It is already tough for them to market New Urbanist developments and get their plans approved by the zoning boards. To try to market it as including affordable housing I think people would be a turn off. It is a battle that Hope VI is facing in attracting market rate people to live next to affordable housing when they could live elsewhere. Why would you live there with very low income people in a place that maybe had a bad reputation before? That is a challenge. The infrastructure is there and architecturally it works. Market rate and affordable units can be seamlessly blended together in a development. The New Urbanists are good as architects and planners and they can make it work visually.
SDL: You mean the stepping down.
JS: Yes, townhouses and apartments mixed in with family houses. It seems to me the biggest barrier is financial and then image and advertising.
SDL: Do you know of any examples of mixed-income housing built by developers that works well?
JS: The best source would be for me to look at my surveys and see people who are doing it. What I want to do next is go to those places and look at them and see if they work. I am interested to see if they work socially or architecturally. I haven't followed up yet to say yet if they work.
SDL: I'm going to see Cindy Brown today. Do you know her?
JS: She is working at the Holiday Project.
SDL: What do you think of that?
JS: I don't know much about it. There is a cool architectural firm in town called Wolf Lions. They won a prize from the Congress of New Urbanists for having a good New Urbanist project at 8th Ave and Pearl Street, which is at least mixed use. I don't know how affordable it is.
It is hard to say when it is working. People who funded it want to say: sure, look at it: it's great. But my interest is if it works socially. People say it works but what does that mean? Does that mean people are living there together and are not beating each other up? Or is it in someway helpful to either of the groups that live there? There is a whole discussion about social capital and whether this help low-income people by putting them together with people who work and people with job contacts? Is there any social advantage to it or is it just better than the alternative of segregated, concentrated poverty.
SDL: Did you look at Moving to Opportunity program?
JS: That is what I'm reading about now and the philosophy behind it. Some people say that there is a culture of poverty and once people have been on welfare, are surrounded by people who are chronically poor, and by high crime rates that it doesn't matter where they live. You could hand them a job on a silver platter and they wouldn't show up. Moving to Opportunity takes the other stance and that is that it is all structural. They are stuck in a bad environment and if you move them to a good environment it will all be better. And I don't know the answer. There are pros and cons to it. Definitely, the guy who knows it is Javier de Souza Briggs at Harvard. He has written a lot about it in Housing Policy Debate.
SDL: There were a number of positive results documented in the Move to Opportunity program.
JS: Yes. Kids stay in school longer.
SDL: Mothers were getting work and their children were less involvement in crime. There were some pretty substantial improvements.
JS: Absolutely.
SDL: On the downside, some of the people who moved out of poor neighborhoods to middle class communities felt isolated, which is not surprising. If you move people out of projects where they have networks of family and friends and stick them in a white lower middle class suburb they are going to look different than other people.
JS: And feel like they stick out like a sore thumb.
SDL: One of the issues that comes up when planners are deliberately creating mixed-income developments is that when you put low-income residents next to higher-income people you may have the poorer people feel bad about not owning what their neighbors have. My first thought about that is that if I were poor I would prefer to live in a place that was not a high crime area and had better schools and that maybe had a grocery store I could walk to. Yes, I might be annoyed by seeing people who had things I didn't but my circumstances would be improved. My opportunities would be expanded and that would be worth the trade off. Besides, I think poor people see the way the rich live on television. Has any research been done about it?
JS: I haven't read about it yet. I'm interested partly because the New Urbanism makes you interested in it if you are being critical of their language about community is so prevalent. I think it hurts them, frankly. The way they use the word community is so loose. Someone said that if there is a term that always means something good but always means something different you should be skeptical. You never hear community used in a bad sense but you hear Collin Powell refer to the "international community." For them to argue that somehow communities are stronger when they are mixed is something I question although I would like it to be true. And I think it probably is true for some people.
But over all you need a certain amount of homogeneity: not necessarily racially or ethnically but something you have in common. Maybe it is enough that you live in the same neighborhood. Do people actually bond and form a community when there is a lot of heterogeneity? What has to be held in common? Herbert Gans writing about Levittown said that in his experience race didn't matter, ethnicity didn't matter, religion didn't matter but class and income and age mattered. He was trying to defend Levittown when people were saying it was a bad, white suburb where people had 1.5 kids and became the Organization Man. And he said there was a lot of diversity ethnically and religiouslymore so than in an Italian neighborhood. And it works: people are fine with it. But everybody makes about the same amount of money and lives in about the same kind of house. And that is enough. I wonder what ingredients have to be there for people to bond together. And I if the built environment has any role to play. A large part of New Urbanism is designing places so that people have a public space in which to interact. This involves making sidewalks friendlier, building porches so you can wave to each other, and building places where people can meet their neighbors informally in the local coffee shop or whatever. But if there is a person who is not at all like you but you both like to watch your football team in the same bar is that enough? Will that create the bonds that form community even among people who are different?
SDL: My personal experience is that I generally socialize with people of my own class but that when I have an opportunity to socialize with people of a different class either above or below mine I find it energizing particularly when we are involved in doing something together.
Angela Blackwell-Glover at PolicyLink gives a talk about a group of people from a single income and how they are deprived because their children are growing up in an unrealistic environment. Then she flips it and suddenly you realize she is talking about not a low-income group but a high income group. So kids in an affluent white suburb are deprived because they are cut off from people who are different from them. But I would say that at least they have the ability to choose to be deprived in this way while others are involuntarily deprived.
There are some opportunities to build affordable housing around mass transit where you don't necessarily have mixed-income right in the same area but you will get more mixed income on the street because there will be wealthier houses in the residential areas back behind the main avenue where the mass transit runs. Building affordable housing near mass transit will put these people in a neighborhood where there are also affluent people. Blackwell-Glover says that is where we should be putting the energy. These neighborhoods are vibrant and they work and people like them. So it is better to concentrate on building affordable homes in these areas rather than trying to shoehorn affordable housing into wealthy neighborhoods where the developments meet a lot of opposition and where land is expensive. Do you have a sense of when the introduction of affordable housing into an area goes over the line and becomes a problem rather than a solution?
JS: I don't because it depends on what works for whom and who you ask. That is one of the challenges of designing research for this because self selection is a big factor. People chose to live there because there is a mix of income and mix of uses and mix of types of people. And because of that it is hard to judge the positives and the negatives because they are going in with a positive assumptionat least the market rate people who can afford to live wherever they want and are choosing to live in this kind of place. They are fine with it and want their kids to be exposed to a diverse population.
When I started thinking about New Urbanism I read a book that was published in the 1950s that was a study done by a couple of British sociologists looking at slum clearance Wilmit and Young and it was a participant observation study so they lived there in this slum area and learned how the people lived. And it was a bad area with the buildings falling down and no hot water. It was dangerous for kids but the people had a very tight network and they had the local pub and it was very tight. Then the government came in and knocked down the buildings, cleared them out, and moved them out to housing estates. They studied what happened to the people afterwards. What they found was that they became very materialistic. They didn't know their neighbors. All they knew that one of them got a new baby carriage or a car. And it changed them. It made me think about New Urbanism and why it was aimed at wealthy people in the suburbs and not working class people who value being able to stop by a neighbors place to borrow a cup of sugar and watch each others kids.
SDL: Do you think there is a "tipping point" where a mixed-income project suddenly has too many low-income people and it ceases to work?
JS: Work for whom? Maybe we need more low-income housing to make it work for the low-income people who live there. Maybe that will be beyond the comfort point for the market-rate people who live there. They might have different ideas about when it works or doesn't work. Is the point to keep it at a comfortable level for the people who can choose to live anywhere they want is that the threshold? Or do the negative behaviors that might be associated with low-income people people vandalizing stuff or whatever if that reaches a certain point is that too much? It is a complex question.
SDL: The answer I find among developers is that the tipping point is anything beyond 15 percent low-income people. Ten or 15 percent can be absorbed without scaring off the market- rate folks, developers say. But what it means to the low-income people who are being absorbed, as you point out, is a different story. What a fascinating area to study.
JS: I find it fascinating and it combines all of the stuff I am interested in.
SDL: Do you live in a mixed-income are?
JS: I live in a place that was built as a working class area in the 1910s and 1920s. My house is a cute little bungalow that is 90 years old and falling down. I rent it. It is in one of the most expensive parts of Denver. They are taking down the little houses and putting up monsters. It is gentrifying unbelievably. So we are the low-income people in our neighborhood.
SDL: Do you get into gentrification and what to do about it and how to maintain low income housing?
JS: I haven't much. It is an interesting issue. Hope VI brings it up by making these areas better, nicer places to live. But what is the cost?
One of the questions I asked in my survey was if the developer had any affordable housing, did they have any mechanisms in place to keep it affordable. The majority of developers who had affordable housing in their developments said, yes. The primary way it worked was through deed restriction required by low-income tax credits. Low-income tax credit financing was used by a lot of these developers and there is a deed restriction of thirty years that typically requires those units to stay affordable. They were pretty creative. Some limited the appreciation. There was one in which the county had the first right of refusal to buy back a place if the low-income people who lived there were selling it. The county could buy it to keep the price down.
SDL: Did they limit the equity and the profit they could make on it?
JS: People that mentioned that particular scheme didn't. There were some that did limit the equity. Habitat for Humanity does. They limit the amount of money you can make on the place.
SDL: john powell at the Institute on Race and Poverty said that if you look at where most wealth came from it exploded after WWII and people bought homes with cheap mortgages and those homes appreciated in value (at least those that weren't in redlined areas). A lot of the reason that African Americans are poor is that their property values did not go up because they were not able to get mortgages to fix up their homes and improve their area and invest in their children's education or start a small business, powell says.
JS: They missed the wave.
SDL: That informs my thinking about whether you should limit equity in housing for low-income people.
JS: I think limiting equity is a goofy idea.
SDL: You do?
JS: Yes, because this is a person's biggest investment. It is the biggest investment people make across the country.
SDL: What have you written so far?
JS: Not much. I presented this study at a conference. I presented it at the American Collegate School of Planning in Baltimore last year
SDL: How do you feel New Urbanists are doing in producing affordable and mixed-income developments; and what could they do to improve their record?
JS: Frankly, I think that if they are going to call themselves New Urbanists then they need to include affordable housing. The term gets bastardized in a lot of ways but to me that is the worst way. A lot of developers put up the front porches and call it New Urbanist. This is a pretty forceful group, they are growing a lot, and they are selling out their developments with lottery systems. It is a missed opportunity to not build this. So, yes, I think they have a responsibility to include affordable housing in these projects because it is part of what New Urbanism is suppose to be.
SDL: Should there be a mechanism requiring that they do that if they are to call themselves New Urbanists?
JS: They don't even have a mechanism to do anything if anyone calls themselves a New Urbanist.
SDL: But should they?
JS: I think so. The Congress for New Urbanism could put a stamp of approval on peojects and developers could use it in their advertising. And they should. Certainly New Urbanism is becoming part of the new lingo. People know what it is or Traditional Development or whatever the phrasing is. When people go out looking for new homes they want to see that and it is trickling down into what people expect. The Congress of New Urbanists is missing out on an opportunity to put a seal of approval on it. They could say: this is what New Urbanism is, This and if you don't have mixed-use, mixed-income, pedestrian-orientation, access to transit etc, then you shouldn't be able to call yourself New Urbanist.
If they don't do this the term New Urbanist will be so watered down that it won't mean anything. They are already making the zoning changes that have to be made and it is a long tough process. What needs to be done to make it include affordable housing? Think of all of the adjustments and loopholes that these developers are asking for. Think of all the concessions they are asking cities to make: bend your rules because we want to build this or that. It seems as if the city has a lot of leverage to say to them: Ok build it that way but we want 15 percent affordable housing as part of the deal. There is leverage that is not being used by the local governments. Most places need to build good quality affordable housing in their district or county and if they are making all these zoning concession to developers, they have leverage to get affordable housing built.
SDL: Bruce Katz at the Brookings Institute says that there are two versions of Smart Growth. Smart Growth and Smart Growth Lite -- the version without the affordable housing.
JS: I agree that affordable housing needs to be a part of Smart Growth. If they don't include it after awhile it will be elitist and all of a sudden smart growth will mean keeping low-income people out instead of doing things in a smarter way for everyone. One of the things I heard about Boulder ten years ago was that they put in growth boundaries and right away the land prices went way up. It became an expensive place to live. And in Oregon they are constantly battling prices going up because of restrictive growth. Affordable housing has to be considered when these decisions are made.
SDL: Do you have a solution to that?
JS: No, I don't. I don't know enough about Smart Growth and the techniques that are used. I know about Urban Growth Boundary. But again it seems as if there is a huge amount of municipal intervention in passing these new rules and municipalities have the leverage to require affordable housing.
SDL: If you do create a Urban Growth Boundary you could couple it with changes in zoning that allow higher densities.
JS: That seems like it should be part of smart growth anyways.
SDL: And you can make it easier to do infill development. You can encourage development along mass transit lines. And you can also eventually structure it so that there can be a bulge in the boundary when enough pressure builds up. And at a certain point planners could say: let's start a new mixed-income community here with enough density that it makes sense in order to not have growth spread out into the countryside. And you can also build satellite cities. So I think there are enough mechanisms available to keep the cost of housing from going through the roof.
JS: Certainly the design principles of building along transit corridors make it ideal for affordable housing because these are people who need mass transit. They need it and will use it.
SDL: A lot of people would say that all of this sounds nice until you try to put a project into a neighborhood and the Not In My Backyard voices become so loud that politicians react against it. People seem particularly concerned that their property values will go down if poor people move in.
JS: I wrestled with that in my master thesis on exclusionary zoning. Property values don't create themselves. There is an appraiser. Someone decides that affordable housing nearby is bad. It isn't just bad: someone decides that it is bad. There is a culture that needs to change. There are better examples of New Urbanist, high-density, mixed-use developments. It is not going to be bad to live near the corner store; it will be a good thing. Property values will go up and people will value this. I don't think there is any reason that if affordable housing is done well that it needs to hurt anybody's property values. I don't know enough about how the appraisal system works but somewhere there is a sheet that says that if there is a housing project within 300 yards it is bad and you lose points. Property values come from something.
SDL: Have you heard of these two experiments one in Illinois and one in Ohio where the municipality guaranteed that they would make up the difference if people's housing property values went down? These communities decided they wanted a mixed-income and mixed-race community and they decided the way to do it was to guarantee property values.