Affordable Housing and Healthy Communities
The goal of affordable housing: healthy properties in healthy communities.
Government sponsors affordable housing programs in pursuit of a mixture of goals:
- Poverty alleviation. Provide charitable relief to those deserving[1] of it.
- Self-help.Create the opportunity for the industrious to improve themselves[2].
- Urban regeneration. By definition, slums are wretched housing. Creating new affordable housing has long been a tool in slum clearance and urban regeneration.
Affordable housing is an integral link in forming healthy communities. When the community is healthy but housing is unaffordable, the neighborhood becomes exclusionary. When the housing is viable but the community is unhealthy, the housing will sink into the quicksand around it, or become a prison against the outside environment.
Because housing is a component in any healthy community, affordable housing plays a major role in urban regeneration — but they are not one and the same. Affordable housing is a component in urban regeneration but by itself it is not only sufficient but prone to failure.
The five dimensions of a healthy community
A healthy community is a successful ecology that succeeds in meeting people's needs across five distinct dimensions, presented simply as follows:
Dimension |
What people do |
Why it matters |
| Housing | Live | Good housing incubates good families; bad incubates bad families. |
| Jobs | Earn | A community must have money coming into it. |
| Schools | Raise kids | The greatest investment people make is in their children. |
| Safety | Play | Without safety, there are huddled enclaves, prisons without walls. |
| Retail | Spend | A community must have people using money within it. |
The healthy-body metaphor for healthy communities.
Suppose you are weak, malnourished, and possibly ill. You want to become strong, well-fed, and healthy. You can exercise, you can change your diet, you can see a doctor, you can change you daily routine, or you can do these things in combination.
But if you do these things in isolation, you can make yourself worse. Sudden exercise leads to injury. Exercise without diet leads to heart attacks. A changed routine without curing disease makes you sicker. Eating without exercise leads to fat.
In short, you cannot do good things in isolation, nor can you do them willy-nilly, without a plan. You need:
- A diagnosis of your condition.
- A prescription of coordinated remedies.
- A balanced plan to get better.
- Willpower to carry on with the plan.
Once you're healthy, you have to maintain a healthy regimen or you can slip back.
In terms of urban regeneration, healthy communities work like healthy bodies:
- Exercise one part in isolation does not sustain health. Investing in housing without public safety, or retail without job creation, works no longer than the subsidy flows.
- Eating too much leads to fat. Dollops of subsidy raise prices and reward intermediaries but by themselves do not strengthen neighborhoods.
- Disease destroys muscle. Blighted areas, dusfunctional subgroups, a crime-ridden environment, all drive out the very people whose presence can anchor and build a neighborhood.
Governments, impatient or immediate solutions, sometimes try violent interventions that focus on only one dimension of the community. This hurts at the time(hard to enact, community opposition or skepticism),works only for a while (the problem returns), and leaves lingering scars (the community and stakeholder remember failed attempts and become disenchanted with affordable housing and urban regeneration.
To build healthy communities, you must combine:
- Diet- new resources
- Exercise- new approaches
- Medicine- schools and parks and public safety
- Willpower- community buy-in and sustained stakeholder commitment.
Not a bad mantra for trying to revitalize urban areas.
Implications for public policy initiatives
- Just as a table is wobbly if even one leg is short, communities are unstable if even one of their dimensions is unhealthy
- Improving a community requires attacking its weakest dimension.
- Because the dimensions are interlinked, any community development initiatives- even if targeted on a particular dimension- will work only if the other dimensions are also being improved. (The improvement can be spontaneous, fortuitous, or directed, but it must be taking place.)
- The best urban revitalization projects thus tackle whole neighborhoods, combining place-based improvements (such as housing, retail, and schools) with people-based improvements (such as jobs, social services, and safety).
- Government programs cannot be silos of assistance, acting without regard to and with no connectibility to other programs. Silos of resources become bunkers or enclaves that niether improve nor are improved by their neighbors.(The ultimate depressing endstate of this approach is the isolated high-rise public housing project, unconnected to a decaying urban neighborhood around it, and eventually both being undermined by and contributing to the neighorhood's collapse.)
Implications for affordable housing initiatives
- Affordable housing is the hardest form of real estate to make viable in the long run, because it maintains a dual mission: (1) be financially healthy, and (2) provide affordability to low income residents. These two goals are diametrically opposite- almost every decision involves trading one off against another.
- To be viable at both missions, affordable housing requires the injection of government financial resources to fill the gap between what the market requires for quality, and what poor people can afford. It is a mistake to start an affordable housing initiative with too little government resource- all the financial wizardry imaginable may disguise but will not prevent its inevitable, and expensive, failure.
- Among community development initiatives, affordable housing (especially large-building multifamily) is unique in that it can be a locus for social services. Large buildings have common spaced and usually have a population with common attributes (e.g. elderly).The services can be brought into the building, to the people, rather than making the people travel to the services.
- Affordable housing cannot carry other missions in disguise. Because the housing, once created, exists poor people, government has a tendency to give it unfounded mandates for social change, either directly (by requiring social services) or indirectly (via preferential admissions that in effect define the constituency). Confusing the affordable housing mission further by making it carry water for other initiatives usually fails. Far better to have specialist social service providers who are in effects subcontractors or outsourced enterprises that are domiciled in the affordable housing.
[1] The charitable housing approach has long had strong overtones of moral judgment, seeking always to distinguish relieving the suffering of the truly needy from providing a featherbed to those who are merely slacking off. In effect, the donors, whether individuals or government, have always sought to look into the beneficiaries' hearts and find them worthy before bestowing charity.
[2] The self-help motive can be justified either as 'equal opportunity' or out of a belief that people who become self-sufficient will become taxpayers rather than resource consumers.