Density or Sprawl? How To Solve the Urban Housing Crisis

is this how most of us will live in the future or is this or maybe this the mass migration of humans from the country to the city started with the Industrial Revolution 2007 according to the UN was the tipping point when more of humanity lived in urban than rural areas and the trend continues a projected 2/3 of the global population will live in cities by 2050 in the United States cities have become remarkably expensive because housing prices have outpaced wage growth developers don't build enough move supply to meet rising demand because of a thicket of regulations that artificially drive up building costs but what's not clear is whether the solution to the urban housing crisis is more density in the poor or more sprawl in the periphery or both if we were to remove the artificial restrictions and incentives that shape the landscape of American cities how would our bin' dwellers choose to live there is a huge pent-up demand for density and for urban living that simply is not being able to get met because of the restrictive zoning free market policy analysts Scott buyer who is the founder of the market urbanism report says that urban residents want to live close together in the center city but that local and state governments are standing in the way there's things like environmental review that's often used in a dubious way and doesn't really address actual environmental concerns but is used as a form of obstruction building code laws that are written by the industry and are designed to sort of pad the pockets of certain contractors public review and developers being forced to have a lot of community meetings in order to get the project approved all the different ways that the government controls the pricing and use of land the truly affordable housing would be low density housing built on the urban fringe libertarian urban policy analyst Randal O'Toole who calls himself the anti planner agrees that many city governments over regulate land use but disagrees with buyers assertion that more density is the answer to housing affordability instead O'Toole blames so-called Smart Growth policies meant to increase urban density by discouraging land outside of a city proper from being developed at all a goal furthered by the passage of California State Senator Darrell Steinberg 2008 anti green house emissions law the more we incentivize and promote development that reduces vehicle miles traveled the better chance we will have to meet these very important and aggressive reduction of metric tons of carbon the Regional Council of the Southern California Association of Governments eight years ago Southern California's planners adopted a 23 year regional plan to help realize steinberg's vision experts believe this shift in demographics will lead to less demand for larger Lots and outlying locations and more demand for smaller Lots close to shopping the goal that urban planners have had for many years is not to make housing more affordable but to pack people in to higher density urban areas and that's a goal that I don't think Americans should support we used to build an enormous amount more housing than we do today when we were a smaller state because we did it the old-fashioned way we built enough housing to accommodate our growth California State Senator from San Francisco Scott Weiner represents one of America's least affordable cities a place where the density question is hotly debated and hugely consequential restrictive zoning ensures that housing is perpetually expensive and out of reach for most Californians for years he's been pushing state bill 50 which would make it easier to build mid-rise housing near major transit stops by overriding local zoning rules that only allow the construction of single-family homes the legislature voted down the bill January 2020 for the third time the opposition includes all of the state senators from Los Angeles which in recent years has seen a mild slowing in the rate of rent increases in the wake of newly added housing stock I understand the supply side of housing production is important we've got to do it but then I say what about affordable housing the issue of gentrification comes up resounding ly in my community will developers and speculators buy up the property around me and make my community look feel different who will be my new neighbors Scott Weiner is not going out in saying let's abolish zoning he's effectively just saying let's loosen zoning incrementally so that we can allow potentially double or triple the amount of housing on existing land without really having to add to traffic that much or change the character of areas too much LA City Councilman Paul Koretz disagrees there's so many reasons to oppose SB 50 that it's almost difficult to know where to start Koretz believes a bill like SB 50 would crowd out low and middle-income residents even though it would require a set-aside for subsidized affordable housing in new buildings with more than 10 units they think that you build the million luxury units that that will trickle down and reduce their rents what we've seen is that that will just increase rents under the current circumstance the more luxury housing we build the more tech companies and others will attract with well-paid employees and we're sort of tilting the country into California III I think it has to be a balance I don't think California has a responsibility to house the entire country traffic is intolerable we don't have the infrastructure for it you add a couple million people to LA when we become six million people I don't think it makes it easier I think it makes it harder for us to do everything Koretz is also concerned that more apartment buildings will erode the character of the city which is predominantly occupied by single-family homes we would just ruin the aesthetics of single-family neighborhoods just because that's Scott weiners vision so you'd have a five-story building here and a five-story building there in the middle of a single-family neighborhood it would look like our planners had lost their minds modern Los Angeles was born in 1920s as Americans came to work in the oil fields in emerging film and aerospace industries land was plentiful and cheap and by 1930 94 percent of homes in the city were single-family but for reasons that had nothing to do with single-family zoning rules which hadn't been widely imposed across the city yet you FHA assisted projects have cut net cost about one-fifth be low the cost of private builders in the same cities during the New Deal the federal government started further encouraging low-density development with the creation of the Federal Housing Authority to underwrite mortgages and by the 1960s homeowners groups were successfully agitating for more restrictive zoning rules to protect single-family home neighborhoods as the city grew today more than 75 percent of residential Lots in Los Angeles are zoned for single-family homes or duplexes San Francisco followed a similar trajectory buyer wants Los Angeles and all American cities to eliminate these restrictions if you're actually a working mayor and you're looking for a politically realistic thing to do in your city I think it would be to really question the idea of whether single-family zoning is something that should even exist in the city and then work for ways to ban that zoning but O'Toole says that growing out instead of up is the cheaper faster more realistic path to housing affordability because both construction and land acquisition costs are more expensive in the urban core in a urban area that doesn't have growth restrictions you can buy a new house for as little as $100 a square foot mid-rise housing typically costs $500 a square foot and high-rise housing cost six to eight hundred dollars a square foot so how does that housing become affordable it becomes affordable by building tiny units and we call that affordable housing and that's what's happening in cities like Seattle Portland San Francisco and Los Angeles today despite its reputation for sprawl California is actually home to seven of the ten densest urbanized areas in the country O'Toole says the effort to fight urban sprawl his only driven up the housing costs and points out that there's still lots of room for growth on the periphery of major California cities citing a state-sponsored report that identified more than two hundred thousand acres of privately owned land in both Los Angeles County and the Bay Area that could be developed without threatening sensitive ecosystems or farmland I think that we should loosen the urban growth boundaries I'm very much of a pro market person but if we had an open market I do not think more sprawl would be the outcome fire argues that Millennials in particular want to live in dense neighborhoods he says that cities like San Francisco would build taller buildings in a freer market citing higher land values as evidence of the pent up demand fire also points out that homeowners typically don't pay the full cost required to get roads electrical lines and other city infrastructure out to the suburbs and so I kind of view the suburbs as an outcome of social engineering and government planning to a degree and I look at urban density as the more organic market-based outcome but O'Toole says that even with those costs built in most Americans even Millennials will prefer living in more spacious less dense settings he points to census data showing that more 25 to 30 year olds are moving from cities to suburbs than the other way around and a recent Gallup poll finding only 17 percent of young people saying they want to live in a big city urban planners have spread these myths in order to justify their goal of increasing urban densities but that's not the way Americans have wanted to live for the last hundred years and there's no sign that American tastes have changed O'Toole atributes the lion ization of cities - the influence of the urban theorists Jane Jacobs the object is to nurture locales where people on foot will naturally encounter one another Jacobs landmark 1961 book the death and life of great American cities blamed the federal government for destroying city life by financing the destruction of dense neighborhoods the truly dynamic American cities are those that are coming to grips with the problem of outmoded structures increasingly we are seeing large-scale demolition as the first step in building modern cities the federal bulldozer replaced urban communities with modernists towers in the park that were missing what Jacobs called the ballet of urban street life the federal government also encouraged suburbanization with federally subsidized mortgages and the construction of the interstate highway system O'Toole agrees with Jacobs critique of federal housing policy but says that her idealization of cities led even many free-market Urbanists to mistake her particular tastes for the opinions of most Americans they believe that if we let the free market work we will end up with people living in higher densities and they've never said let's get rid of the urban growth boundaries let's let the whole free market work no they only say let's get rid of single-family zoning that's not a free market so in a freer market would we see more density or more sprawl the city of Houston Texas provides clues both byron O'Toole point to Houston as an American city that gets it more or less right it's one of America's fastest growing cities yet housing prices remain low compared to America's large coastal cities what makes Houston unique it's the only large US city with no zoning whatsoever and just as importantly two O'Toole no urban growth boundaries the result a fairly dense downtown with several towering skyscrapers but with an enormous footprint that quickly becomes far less dense as you move out towards the periphery if Houston tells us anything it's that if you liberalize the market and allow people to move into your area and access affordable housing you're gonna get a whole variety of housing types you'll get everything but O'Toole points out that Houston's single-family homeowners can form so-called protective covenants to restrict the development of single-family homes into apartment buildings he sees this as mostly a voluntary market phenomenon that reflects the preferences of homeowners even though these covenants are government sanctioned with 75% approval by homeowners property rights are sometimes described as a bundle of sticks each stick represents a different part of your property rights one possible stick in your bundle is a stick that says I promise not to develop my home to higher densities provided none of my neighbors develop their homes to higher densities either and it turns out this is a very valuable stick O'Toole says that if cities were to abandon zoning they would best serve their residents by allowing the formation of similar covenants most single-family neighborhoods would stay single-family if somebody has located in a neighborhood and bought a home in a hotter bionaire eeeh do they have a right to deed restrict that area to prevent other people from moving in I would say no cities are open labor markets people need to be able to locate and live there everyone should have the right to buy the sort of housing that they can afford and that is comfortable for them and I don't think that simply moving there before the other people did give somebody the right to then draw off the gate the density question can only be answered if the government stops interfering with the housing market allowing consumer preferences to shape the urban landscape and that's something O'Toole and buyer would both like to see the government control of land use and zoning has caused housing to be unaffordable and I think that market urbanism is a way to reverse those trends it's important to distinguish between affordable housing which is housing we provide at a subsidy versus housing affordability they say let's mandate the developers give usually fifteen to twenty percent of all new homes they build at the low cost prices that's going to make the other eighty to eighty-five percent of the homes they build more expensive so many of the prescriptions they are offering actually will make housing even less affordable [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 90,651

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv, housing crisis, affordable housing, gentrification, urban density, suburban sprawl, FHA, urban planners, smart growth, new urbanism, Jane Jacobs, urbanization, cities, market urbanism, Scott Beyer, Randal O'Toole, land use, zoning, single family housing, Scott Wiener, SB 50, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, millennials, suburbs

Id: BOCvMJPPbC4

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020