Affordable Housing Institute : US

The other day (while reading William Rosen’s intriguing history, Justinian’s Flea), I came across what I think is the world’s first homeownership subsidy, the panes aedium of Constantine I and his capital Constantinople:

A man and the city he envisioned: Constantine and Constantinople

 

Though only a few hundred of the city’s private residences could be called mansions, a very respectable percentage of the populace lived in single-family homes.  

 

William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea, pages 21-22, quoting A H M Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1964.

 

 

While land grants have always been the means governments rewarded their veteran soldiers (from Roman legionnaires to conquistadors to English expeditionaries to homesteaders on the Great Plains), governments have also used homeownership as the hillside sod of society — a means of investing people in places, and turning individuals into public-spirited citizens.  In the history of affordable housing policy, therefore, we have:

 

The world’s first planned unit development (Pharaonic Luxor workers’ village)

 

Just as Egypt was the cradle of spontaneous communities, so too is it the birthplace of the world’s first planned unit developments: the workers’ village of Deir el Medina at Luxor.

 

The workers’ village, 1,500 years older than Pompeii

 

Civilization comes from cities, and cities arise only in ambitious societies that seek to create new things.  In the act of seeking to send a few to the eternal afterlife, Egypt innovated new skills, new social structures, new towns, all of them inventions of lasting value much more worthy than simply preserving a single pharaoh’s ka.

 

Deir el Medina, Luxor: 3,500 years old

 

The world’s first high-rise flats (New York City co-ops)

The world’s first affordable apartments (English 13th century almshouses), and

The world’s first apartments (Roman insulae).

 

Despite Constantine’s incentives, his capital had a significant homeless problem –

 

Even so, the street was home to a large number of Constantinople’s residents, possibly even a majority, who lacked any sort of permanent lodging …

 

– solved, in the usual fashion, by faith-based institutions:

 

… and depended upon homeless shelters run by the city’s monasteries and churches.

 

Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, built by Justinian

 

Constanine’s fifth-century workforce housing represented an important sector of the economy, its professional administrative class:

 

Constantinople’s fifth century census counted 4,388 single-family dwellings, at a time when Rome had no more than 1,800; give the size of families and household staffs, this probably represented between 5 and 10% of the entire population.

 

The housing was stimulated by a conscious subsidy:

 

What is, by ancient standards, such a high percentage, is largely due to a perpetual grant of a ration of bread – the panes aedium – which was not only given to anyone building a house in the city but passed along to the new owners with the sale of the house … a powerful incentive to both house builders and home buyers.  

 

The founding of Constantinople, divinely inspired?

 

Strikingly, the panes aedium was not just a first-time home buyer incentive, but an ongoing property asset, in much the same way as real estate tax abatements or exemptions are intrinsic property rights in the modern city.  (More on it here from A. H. M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire.)

 

Lots of houses, lots of subsidy

 

Meanwhile, Constantinople also had a basic welfare system:

 

Like Rome, where grain, and later bread, had been given away to citizens since the time of the Republic, Constantinople offered a free bread ration to a substantial number of its citizens, some by hereditary right, as with homeowners and scholars, but many more on the basis of need.  

 

It represented not just altruism but also a healthy imperial self-interest:

 

The policy was driven less by charity than by a well-founded fear of insurrection.  Both Rome and Constantinople were chronically at risk of riots caused by food shortages, usually though not always the result of speculation.  To prevent disturbances, the civic authorities, which controlled retail prices for pork, beef, and wine (though not for fish, a poor choice for hoarding) directed the one hundred public bakeries of Constantinople to provide two pounds of free bread to each of eighty thousand residents daily.”

 

In fact, the existence of municipal infrastructure (in the form of aqueducts) was also quite possibly intrinsic to the very scale of the city, hence to the complexity of government administration, and hence to the vitality of the empire itself. 

 

Landlocked, land-constrained, so housing was expensive

 

From Susanna Elm’s review of Jean Durliat’s From the antique city to the Byzantine city, the problem of subsistences (De la ville antique a la ville Byzantine: le probleme des subsistances): Rome, 1990:

 

Durliat argues that no ancient city larger than a sizable village could have survived without some form of regular, state-financed food supply.  Once the government found itself incapable of sustainiung the immense administrative machinery that allowed for empire-wide grain redistribution, its cities were forced to shrink to a size at which they could supply themselves. 

 

That it was the emperor’s political will alone that governed the vitality and size of his cities has been known.  Durliat’s study demonstrates with great precision the degree to which this will, executed on a municipal level, affected even relatively small cities and their surrounding countryside, and thus the life of the individual to a degree perhaps not previously appreciated.

 

Constantine (right) presents the Virgin the city, and Justinian (left) presents Hagia Sophia

 

This finding is hugely important.   As we have seen, the scaling of cities is governed by mathematical and biological growth functions. 

 

Here we present empirical evidence indicating that the processes relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation are very general, being shared by all cities belonging to the same urban system and sustained across different nations and times. 

 

It looks like all cities scale up and down according to mathematical laws that we can deduce.

 

Can we tessellate the entire globe with cities?

 

Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents that fall into distinct universality classes. 

 

As cities get bigger, people in them get richer, cleverer, and more creative. 

As cities get bigger, they need less infrastructure per person.

As a driver of growth (and viability), economies of scale run out of gas after a while, whereas innovation and creativity have increasing returns, where the bigger is more better than the next bigger.

 

This difference suggests that, as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse.

 

The scale of capital cities — say, the governmental, financial, and academic centers, which in many countries are the same but in some like the US are different (Washington, New York, and Boston) — determines the complexity of management, which in turn controls the effectiveness, reach, and scale of a nation’s political and economic power. 

 

You want an empire?  Build an imperial capital

 

Now we see that, going back 1,500 years, the scaling of cities requires enlightened municipal infrastructure and public subsidy/ incentivizing of homeownership and workforce housing. 

 

Constantinople was for obvious reasons the sole city in the empire to have known the free annona granted to citizens who owned a house, the panes aedium.  Durliat re-emphasizes that both Constantinople and Rome depended entirely on the annona, distributed strictly according to imperial guidelines, and that private commerce played little role in either city’s grain supply.

 

In other words, workforce housing and attendant policy imperatives aren’t merely political sops, they are wise investments for cities and nations that are seeking to compete with other nations.  Harkening back to remarks by Rakesh Mohan that I previously quoted, this has profound implications for twenty-first century cities:

 

Mohan has seen the future, and it is urban

 

With increasing free trade in services, the price of traded products has almost stabilized across the world.  Goods now have very similar prices everywhere; therefore, no city has any advantage over any other in traded goods.  Comparative advantage of nations will increasingly lie in the relative efficiency of their cities.

 

I’m beginning to think that the twenty-first will be the century of cities, where the two preceding centuries were of nations.  Not that nations will be irrelevant — rather, increasingly a nation will be defined by its large cities, and the cities will both collaborate and compete with each other, attracting people and jobs and ideas, competing for talent and networking ideas. 

 

If, as I’ve postulated, we are living in the century of cities, and if cities will compete based on comparative advantage, then workforce housing isn’t a luxury, it’s a competitive necessity, and the cities that crack the problem first will win the century relative to those that do not.

 

He who had the best workforce housing ruled the world

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