Washington, D.C., a city whose limited and expensive housing stock is made even more limited and expensive by a municipal height limit, is considering tightening those limits even further by restricting the ability to build additional rental units in areas zoned for single-family row houses. Critics think this clamping-down is exactly the opposite of what D.C. should be doing to address its affordable housing crisis. Constrain the ability of landowners and developers to chase the rental market and you will end up with an endless rise in rents for the rentals which do exist; release these constraints and you will open a flood of supply that will naturally push down prices.
Meanwhile, in Boston, developers are breaking ground on what will become the city’s third-tallest skyscraper. The new building features “11-foot ceilings, a fireplace in every condominium, the best kitchens, the best everything,” which, according to the developer, will secure its place at the “the top of the market.” Its 61 stories will hold 180 luxury units atop a Four Seasons Hotel; meanwhile, the 29 affordable units mandated by the city as part of the project will be built offsite, at a yet-to-be-determined location. Capital financing for the project comes from investors in 26 countries, and 30 percent of the new building’s units are forecast to be purchased by foreign buyers.
Perhaps those 180 sky-high condominiums will take the pressure off of Boston’s 180 next-most-expensive dwellings, and so on down the market until rents ease up on the city’s 180 lowest-price apartments. Supply and demand is not a fairy tale cooked up by sinister economists. Yet I would like very much to see a planner at the Boston Redevelopment Agency try to convince a hard-pressed tenant in Roxbury exactly how the new building’s 50th-floor owners-only restaurant represents a victory for Boston’s working classes.
Entangled as it is in the patterns of urban geography, the location of jobs, the search by private capital for fat investment returns, and several layers of state regulation, the housing market is a complicated market indeed—which means that simply releasing private developers from the manacles of municipal regulation can hardly be expected to predictably and reliably produce affordable housing options. Expensive cities absolutely need to grow their housing stock. But they could do so in ways that do not simply make them the desperate suitors for speculators’ fickle attentions. In the early twentieth century, housing copartnerships were seen by many reformers as one solution to the rent problem. By financing new development themselves, working-class people, cooperating with municipal authorities, can build neighborhoods for habitability rather than profit.
Ultimately, though, Washington and Boston (and New York and San Francisco) cannot hope to solve these problems on their own. If more and more people keep flooding into fewer and fewer economically vibrant cities, they will reach their breaking points no matter how furiously they churn out new housing units. The problem these cities face cannot be detached from the inverse problems which places like Flint and Springfield and Bakersfield face. We need coordinated national planning in order to ensure that America does not fall into a winner-take-all geography of exclusive high-rises and burnt-out suburban tracts. If cities think that they can solve their housing problems simply by inviting developers to do as they please, may very likely remain unaffordable—and become uninhabitable as well.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2015/01/19/791/