What we say is a housing affordability crisis in America is actually a misalignment between the system that delivers housing, and the people that buy and rent their products.
Some people in the pronatalist movement would say the best solutions to this misalignment are more people should get married, married people should have more kids, and retirees should live shorter lives.
Thanks, Pete, I think the term “misslignment” is helpfil and reflects a perspective from Legacy Cites adds key insights and nuance YIMBYs from West Coast and NYC often miss (at least in their messaging).
Another way our housing supply is misaligned is that the proportion of it that is very low rent —but habitable—-housing in cities has been deamatically diminishing whole the portion of the population that can only afford low rents is not. We gentrified it in high demand cities and demolished a lot of it in low demand cities where as it aged it became more and more unlivable (along with the neighborhoods around them)but not all that cheap. At the same time we stopped building it due to federal withdrawal from deep subsidy rental production and NIMBY opposition to building it in any viable neighborhoods. Of course, we never built it at any scale in the suburbs.
So as a result, there was a shift in the composition of our housing supply to higher priced units which does not match the still big need for decent low rent housing in cities and suburbs alike. Adding new high priced units after 2000 made this shift all the more dramatic.
I would say that the same core problem of having a locked-in suburban-only housing machine is what’s impacting both the coastal cities AND the Midwest, just in different ways.
On the coasts, the cities were already built up and sprawled by the time the crisis started getting worse, and so the lock-in prevented them from densifying even further.
In cities like STL and Detroit, the entire place is sprawled out, but the cities were already dying and disinvested because of the suburban form being the only legal thing to build, so it’s an uphill battle to rebuild them in any kind of urban form.
Basically, suburbanists made urbanism illegal everywhere. Where it already existed, the bans prevented it from keeping up with its own natural growth. Where it was dying or had never been, the bans kept it from sprouting of its own volition.
Imagine a lawnmower. You can run it over a lawn, and it will chop down every blade of grass that dares poke up — and eventually, you will end up with a densely packed turf like a golf green.
You can also run the mower over a sidewalk, and it’ll chop down every weed that pokes through the cracks. If you do nothing else, eventually you’ll get a funny turf of weeds along every crack, but nothing else.
We’ve been looking at prices as if we were someone naively measuring the density of plants on both the sidewalk and the lawn, and acting like the problem is that anyone who doesn’t want to pay exorbitant golf fees should just go hang out on the sidewalk. But if you’re just someone looking to grow some tomato plants, the obvious answer is to stop running the mower over EVERY surface.
(Yeah, I know the metaphor got a bit tortured there at the end, hope it still makes sense lol)
Some people in the pronatalist movement would say the best solutions to this misalignment are more people should get married, married people should have more kids, and retirees should live shorter lives.
Thanks, Pete, I think the term “misslignment” is helpfil and reflects a perspective from Legacy Cites adds key insights and nuance YIMBYs from West Coast and NYC often miss (at least in their messaging).
Another way our housing supply is misaligned is that the proportion of it that is very low rent —but habitable—-housing in cities has been deamatically diminishing whole the portion of the population that can only afford low rents is not. We gentrified it in high demand cities and demolished a lot of it in low demand cities where as it aged it became more and more unlivable (along with the neighborhoods around them)but not all that cheap. At the same time we stopped building it due to federal withdrawal from deep subsidy rental production and NIMBY opposition to building it in any viable neighborhoods. Of course, we never built it at any scale in the suburbs.
So as a result, there was a shift in the composition of our housing supply to higher priced units which does not match the still big need for decent low rent housing in cities and suburbs alike. Adding new high priced units after 2000 made this shift all the more dramatic.
I would say that the same core problem of having a locked-in suburban-only housing machine is what’s impacting both the coastal cities AND the Midwest, just in different ways.
On the coasts, the cities were already built up and sprawled by the time the crisis started getting worse, and so the lock-in prevented them from densifying even further.
In cities like STL and Detroit, the entire place is sprawled out, but the cities were already dying and disinvested because of the suburban form being the only legal thing to build, so it’s an uphill battle to rebuild them in any kind of urban form.
Basically, suburbanists made urbanism illegal everywhere. Where it already existed, the bans prevented it from keeping up with its own natural growth. Where it was dying or had never been, the bans kept it from sprouting of its own volition.
Imagine a lawnmower. You can run it over a lawn, and it will chop down every blade of grass that dares poke up — and eventually, you will end up with a densely packed turf like a golf green.
You can also run the mower over a sidewalk, and it’ll chop down every weed that pokes through the cracks. If you do nothing else, eventually you’ll get a funny turf of weeds along every crack, but nothing else.
We’ve been looking at prices as if we were someone naively measuring the density of plants on both the sidewalk and the lawn, and acting like the problem is that anyone who doesn’t want to pay exorbitant golf fees should just go hang out on the sidewalk. But if you’re just someone looking to grow some tomato plants, the obvious answer is to stop running the mower over EVERY surface.
(Yeah, I know the metaphor got a bit tortured there at the end, hope it still makes sense lol)