Looking to Washington for ideas? Part 1: Look more closely
Once upon a time, people looked to
Now, at least briefly,
A hive of lawmaking?
Not on Capitol Hill, however; at City Hall, as the policy inversion continues, with local government outpacing and out-piloting national, as revealed in this interesting little Washington Post column by Steven Pearlstein, who uses his premise to make an unusual point:
Mayor Adrian Fenty began making good this week on one of his signature campaign promises, proposing to spend $117 million a year to create or preserve 10,000 units of affordable housing.
$11,700 per home. That’s meaningful but about 5% of the total cost. Whither the rest of the money?
To make it work, Fenty would provide city-owned land at a discount to developers who promise to set aside 30% of the units for households with incomes between $20,000 and $75,000.
Inclusionary zoning, and using city-owned land; both good ideas.
He’d also dedicate 10 cents of the commercial property tax rate for rental discounts and other subsidies.
Though I haven’t written much about it, ring-fencing a portion of the local budget for housing, particularly rental, is a wise idea all too seldom adopted. Other priorities give bigger short-term political bang, and thus tend to usurp dollars that would be better spent on house.
In the past, people have looked on these kinds of initiatives in the same category as food stamps or Medicaid: social programs necessary to assist the working poor, or as anti-gentrification measures to complement other initiatives like “inclusionary zoning,” by which the District requires that 8% of all units in new housing projects be moderately priced.
In the suburbs, the tendency is to downplay the welfare aspect by calling it “workforce housing” for firefighters and teachers who cannot afford to live in the communities they serve. Alexandria and Fairfax County finance their efforts by dedicating a penny of the property tax rate.
These initiatives are fine as far as they go.
Can you hear the editorialist clearing his throat?
But in many ways, they are an exercise in shoveling sand against a rapidly rising tide of real estate values that threatens economic growth in the
Block that metaphor, King Canute!
I tied to stop the ocean, and they put me on this coin
For unless we can figure out some way to increase the supply of housing and begin moderating the cost, Washington is in real danger of pricing itself out of the market for new jobs, forcing companies and even government agencies to channel their growth somewhere else.
The fundamental challenge facing the Washington region’s economy is that we can’t increase the housing stock the way [we] have for the past 60 years, by simply expanding out from the center. The commutes have simply become unacceptable.
Although it is the editorialist’s prerogative to make such an assertion, I have the impression that
Yet those who already live here have shown time and again that they are not willing to tax themselves any further to pay for new roads or better public transit.
Mr. Pearlstein declines to make the further obvious point that it was much less the District’s citizens who funded the Metro; it was the Federal government.
Your tax dollars at work … and we’re glad they are!
Instead, they’ve simply opted not to make things any worse by using the zoning and planning process to limit further housing growth.
The rising house prices we’ve experienced over the past decade are a measure of how much demand has outstripped this constrained supply. And now those near-record prices are seriously beginning to affect the ability of employers to recruit the new people they need to the area.
I’m not just talking about lower-paying jobs; that need has been generally met with immigrant workers willing to drive longer and live in more cramped quarters.
Those immigrants; they’ll drive longer, live more cramped; get paid less. What’s not to like?
Will enact complex housing legislation … for food
But these days, nearly any executive will tell you about the difficulty of recruiting highly paid executives, lawyers, programmers and other professionals.
You just can’t get good professional help these days, can you?
This isn’t a problem for Fairfax or Montgomery counties, or the District — it is a regional problem. Companies draw their workers from a regional labor market, not a local one, while workers look for suitable housing anywhere in the region. What that means is that a shortage of employees or housing anywhere in the region creates a shortage everywhere.
My point is that if most of the really interesting and important problems in the
Which brings me back to Mayor Fenty and his affordable-housing initiative. As laudable as it may be, can such an initiative do much to solve the affordable-housing problem in the District if most of the other jurisdictions in the region are limiting growth of housing of all types, driving up real estate prices throughout the region?
Mayor Fenty, thinking about the affordable housing problem
Mr. Pearlstein’s hit on a curious ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem with affordable housing. Everybody likes having a large supply of workers, but many communities really want them to work in our town but live in somebody else’s town.
And if, by solving its own affordable-housing shortage, the District winds up attracting working families from other jurisdictions — or, even worse, encouraging those jurisdictions to do nothing about low-cost housing — is that good for the District?
I don’t raise these questions to suggest that the District throw up its hands and do nothing, or that the problem best be left to the markets. Quite the opposite. What I am suggesting is that the housing problem — like the transportation problem and the public hospital problem and the problem of workforce training– will only be solved by collaboration among all the governments in the region.
Like Leisure Suit Larry, looking for love in all the wrong places, in his chastisement of NIMBY-ite suburbs and plea for a regional solution, Mr. Pearlstein has overlooked one feature of
And there’s this five-sided building just over the river
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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