Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s part 1]

 

Yesterday I enumerated two of the four observational questions:

 

How do people buy and sell homes?

Where does the financing for homes come from?

 

Those two questions deal with static supply and demand — people changing chairs. 

 

You move out, I move in?

 

Now we have to tackle the changes in supply and demand: why do people want more or different homes, and where do they come from?

 

3.         What shifts do people make in housing consumption and tenure?

 

Ecosystems are complex in that they offer a range of choices.  How many places does the typical person live in during his or her life?  How easy is it to change consumption (how much housing you inhabit) and tenure (whether you rent, own, or something else)?  The more the options, the easier the shifts, the better.

 

Think back to when you first became aware of housing: somewhere that your parents chose.  You were a child, and maybe you had your own bedroom, or maybe not.  From that first awareness of housing consumption, what’s been your consumption cycle? 

 

For many of us, it’s something like the following:

 

A.         A room in one’s parents’ place (home or apartment).  The sanctity of that first space — the first door we can close on the outside world, including those large hairy demanding beings called adult — is so formative to our experience.  (Imagine, if you will, growing up in a space so small you never have that experience.  How does it change your sense of self, and sense of others?)

 

Where we learn respect for property rights?

 

            B.         A dormitory at school.  Not everybody, but many of us, had that first independent-living experience, even if the independence involved living with the other slobs.  (Oh, wait, we were slobs too.)

 

            C.         The roommate thing.  Most of us have had them.  For much of the world, roommates — whether relatives or mere strangers — are an ongoing if not permanent condition.

 

Of course, there are some living tensions …

 

            D.         The sexual roommate.  It may be a short-term thing, it may be a string of overnight friends, it may be a catchall of living together, it may a fiancee, it may be a spouse, but for most of us, there comes a point when the only other person we want to see in the morning bathroom is somebody with whom we are intimately familiar.

 

            E.         Children arrive.  Just as more bedrooms mean more babies, more babies mean more bedrooms.  Beyond the baby problem, there’s the schooling challenge, still one of the biggest drivers of shifting urbanites out beyond the reach of public transportation, to the pleasant suburbs and their fenced grass yards.

 

It’s always sunny in the suburbs

 

            F.         More children, bigger children.  I’ve previously posted about the evolving modern house and the emergence of larger houses with more sophisticated and specialized rooms.  Who uses them?  Those loud aliens known as teenagers.

 

            G.         Empty nesting.   When the next generation is (thankfully?) gone, the suburban house suddenly seems large, drafty, expensive, and distant from the city’s more adult and epicurean pleasures.  The New Urbanist drives to bring people back to the cities are fueled by cities become knowledge-economy hubs, and the playground of actual grownups.   

 

            H.         Aging with dignity, and living helpers.  As our life spans increase, the home becomes a financial asset and an operational burden.  We want to trade larger space with embedded residual value for smaller space and ongoing services.

 

Every one of these lifeline shifts implies a change in housing configuration, consumption, and tenure.  All of those places have to come from somewhere, and all of those life changes are facilitated (or inhibited) by the quantity, variety, and cost of housing.

 

4.         How do societies make more homes?

 

The world’s population is increasing; the world is urbanizing rapidly.  The more urban dwellers, the more we need formal housing. 

 

We could get a lot more housing if we knocked down those stone piles

 

It has to come from somewhere, and it typically comes from the following:

 

            A.         Self-built housing.  While we in America envision the log cabin as a fond remembrance of our past, for much of the global south — especially in rural areas — houses built by people for themselves are very common.

 

Originally there were woods around it …

 

What part of a country’s housing stock is self-built?  Often it’s the biggest element of ecomass in the system.

 

            B.         Incremental housing.  The self-built’s urban equivalent is incremental housing.  The ‘embryo house,’ as my Mexican friend Alberto Mulas calls it, begins as a single room.  At some point, the owner adds another room — often in stages over weeks or months.  Or the house in a yard has two or three one-room shacks built against its various fences. 

 

Incremental housing on the banks of the Nile

 

Incremental housing is critical to successful housing ecosystems.  All of us, here in America, live in the formalized version of incremental housing.  It began life as one box, and over the years it’s had a screen porch added, or a guest bedroom, or a second floor, or a garage.  The right to expand one’s building envelope and rearrange its internal configuration is an essential right of property ownership, one which every homeowner values — and which leads, over time, to improved and improving neighborhoods.

 

            C.         Portable (manufactured) housing.  Humanity has a long history of accommodations that nomads use or assemble to travel where they will.  From the igloo to the Bedouin tent, with detours into the tepee

 

All the comforts of home

 

All mod cons

 

Easy installation

 

The modern European equivalent are the Roma, who I believe are shockingly maltreated and discriminated against (at least in Romania if not other states), and in the British Isles it’s the Travelers, who are both a housing problem and widely derided as a nuisance.

 

In America, we have the mobile home or its loftier cousin, manufactured housing, which is the major tenure configuration for America’s rural poor.

 

            D.         New greenfield subdivisions.  Here is what we in America think of as housing production. 

From Levittown to Reston, we imagine the new community arising from the road graders, with brand-new streets, and moving vans full of goods, and happy families with junior on the big wheel.

 

Just like we drew it up on the plans

 

The processes by which communities make land available or not for new housing largely control whether they have enough affordable supply.  Is it any surprise that in England, where roughly two-thirds of the country is deed-restricted greenfield that cannot be developed, housing prices are high and going higher, or that traffic congestion is bad and getting worse?

 

            E.         Urban infill (’brownfield’).  Whether you label it as sprawl or just call it spatially distributed building, many neighborhoods start out with houses set far from each other.  As cities grow, some land becomes more valuable, and those little lots and irregular parcels gradually get filled in.  By whom and how, and with what formality or degree of financial incentives or penalties?

 

We found a way to wedge it in

 

            F.         Demolition’/ rebuilding with higher density.  Every now and then, some number of properties — particularly informally built low-density — have to go somewhere to die.   Even if people are living in the property, it’s dysfunctional to try to maintain or improve it.  And its disappearance will clear the site for higher-density, and better, housing.

 

I’m sure you have rights, but you seem to be in the way of progress

 

The process of demolish-and-rebuild is may go by noble titles like ‘urban renewal’ but in simple terms, it involves clearing the site of everything that was there before, and building new supply, usually of better construction and much higher density (meaning mid-rises and high-rises).  It’s contentious, whether practiced by a megalomaniac thief like Robert Mugabe or committed urbanists like the long-suffering city of New London, Connecticut.  Either way, the actions are the same. 

 

How a society handles — or doesn’t handle — the need to revitalize neighborhoods speaks volumes about what it values and how it treats its citizens, as well as whether its cities will refresh themselves and flourish, or collapse under the weight of their own overcrowding.

 

The four questions: not answers, but places to start.

 

While Alexander Pope posited that ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ for a housing person, the proper study is of the housing financial ecosystem.  If you can understand what it costs, how it’s paid for, what the choices are, and where it comes from, you’re well on your way to describing the ecosystem, and even if its totality can never be perfectly comprehended, as I’ve often quoted Yogi Berra, “you can observe a lot just by watching.”

 

“I’d like to thank you for making this day necessary.”

 

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