Excerpt: Two Punks’ Guide to Community Planning 

This is an excerpt from a larger piece that originally appeared in issue 139 of Razorcake magazine. You can purchase copies of the issue or subscribe to the magazine on the Razorcake website. The magazine also features a series of short guides on topics as diverse as the Ramones, gardening, Thomas Pynchon novels, jazz saxophonist Aubrey “Brew” Moore, crime novels…and community planning. 

NAHRO’s interview with Kamala Parks and Jason Wittenberg is available in the Summer 2024 edition of the Journal of Housing and Community Development. The opinions expressed in this piece and in their interview are their own, and may not reflect NAHRO’s policy positions. 

Development, Housing, and Community Opposition (Or, Are Developers Evil?)

The cost of housing is one of the most challenging issues of our time. The price of housing depends on a web of complex factors. Some factors are beyond the control of planners and local governments. Extreme income inequality really messes up housing markets, as some people have a tremendous amount of money to spend on housing while others can afford very little.  

Here’s a statement that many of you might think is crazy: we need real estate developers! We say this because we need places to live, work, buy things like groceries, and attend punk shows! The places where those things happen aren’t going to be provided only by non-profit organizations or government agencies. All realistic or foreseeable future scenarios are going to result in the private market continuing to develop the overwhelming majority of places where we live, work, and play. For decades, federal housing policy has shifted away from government construction of public housing—which was always a small percentage of the overall housing market to start with—to subsidies for development of affordable housing and rental assistance for tenants. The federal government drastically reduced its role in housing in the 1980s during the Reagan administration. 

Developers don’t have the best reputations, and some of them have certainly earned their bad reputations by exploiting loopholes and exerting political influence to increase profit margins. While thoughtful and ethical developers exist, it’s nearly impossible to create regulations that weed out ones based on their moral compass. Successful zoning, as discussed earlier, enables a wide range of developers to fulfill our community’s needs for housing, employment, culture, and education, while minimizing negative impacts on existing inhabitants (particularly disadvantaged communities) and the environment. Certain regulations and strong public opposition to new development often make it extremely difficult to build housing. There’s growing agreement that those challenges are making housing more scarce and less affordable in many places. The difficult task for your community and its planners is to strike the right balance. Your city’s regulations shouldn’t be so strict and unreasonable that they prevent anything whatsoever from happening. Yet they should be strict enough—and focused on the “right things”—so that new buildings in the community don’t conflict with the community’s goals and needs. 

Economists suggest we’ve fallen into a really big housing shortage—with perhaps millions of fewer housing units than we should have across the country—since the housing market crashed in late 2007, early 2008. Developers haven’t built enough to keep up and it’s affecting the price of housing. California has perhaps the largest housing shortage in the country. Housing experts in Minnesota suggest that housing production is happening at a fraction of the pace that will be necessary.  

A zoning code should allow a variety of housing types in a variety of places. However, no city should be a blank slate for real estate developers to do as they wish. Simply letting developers build an unlimited amount of housing isn’t going to solve the affordability problems that exist in many places. But it’s also true there’s no likely way out of an affordable housing crisis without building a lot of new housing in places where there’s a strong demand to live. This might sound weird, but building housing that’s extremely expensive is helpful to the overall housing market. In fact, allowing a lot of housing in the wealthier parts of your city can actually reduce development pressure and displacement in areas of the city where rents are typically more affordable. It’s also worth noting that a single luxury residential tower generates a lot of revenue that helps pay for government services that we all rely on. If we’re going to tax the wealthy, we should allow housing that wealthy people will live in so it can be taxed!  

There seems to be substantial evidence that “filtering” in a housing market is critical and that housing abundance is what allows that to happen. Here’s how that works: As new—and typically expensive—housing is constructed, wealthier people occupy those new buildings, moving out of older housing that will depreciate, or rise in value more slowly. In areas where there isn’t enough housing, that older housing doesn’t “filter down,” because wealthy people will pay a lot of money for older and possibly substandard housing if alternatives don’t exist. Is this trickle-down economics? While we understand the comparison, we’d suggest that having your local government use their regulatory authority to allow housing (and prevent scarcity) is fundamentally different than cutting income taxes on the wealthy to find out how much of that money ends up in the pockets of working-class people.  

Our country is having a difficult time coming up with the tools to ensure housing is available for those at 30% of a region’s median income, especially, or even 60% or 80% of a region’s median income. There are tools, but the need is tremendous, partly because wages haven’t kept up. It’s critical for government to play a role in ensuring that there is access to quality affordable housing.   

Here’s one example of how competition for scarce housing works: Morty Dorkus has gotten job offers from startups located in two different cities. Silly Startup is located in Cyber City, which has built one new home for every one and a half jobs created, so Morty knows that he can easily find an apartment in a new building near his job. Butthead Startup is in Krypton City, which has only issued permits for one new home for every ten jobs created, so he could only afford a dumpy apartment if he wants to live close to his job. Krypton City isn’t only cooler than Cyber City, but it has more startups than Cyber City, plus the pay at Butthead Startup is higher, so he takes their offer. Due to the scarcity of housing options, the dumpy apartment he rents previously housed a public school teacher. But the landlord raised the rent thirty percent, so the public school teacher moved farther from their job into a crappier apartment in a struggling neighborhood. That crappier apartment was previously occupied by an undocumented immigrant family, but the management company threatened to report them to the authorities if they didn’t move out, circumventing Krypton City’s renter protection ordinances. And so on. Had Krypton City authorized more housing construction, the highly paid Morty might’ve found housing that wouldn’t have started this chain reaction of displacement.  

A second way luxury residential towers benefit the general population of a city is they provide a tremendous amount of property tax revenue that’s used for the public services that are especially critical to working class people. In Minneapolis, the city’s recent apartment construction boom has allowed the mayor and city council to invest a large amount of money in the city’s affordable housing trust fund without most people in the city feeling a large and burdensome increase on their property tax bill. Approximately five percent of the city’s property tax revenue comes from apartment buildings constructed in the last five years. The rest of the apartments in the city—those built more than five years ago—contribute an additional fourteen percent toward all of the property taxes collected in the city. Cities fall into a death spiral if they can’t collect enough tax revenue to pay for many of their community’s basic services.   

Not every development deserves public support and the support of planners and local decision-makers. Some development proposals, including some high-density urban redevelopment proposals, are bad and should be opposed. However, public opposition to urban redevelopment and increased density can work against the things that we all care about, including housing affordability and environmental protection. Angry crowds fill public hearings in the name of preventing change. In some states, environmental rules are weaponized by the public in ways that can actually contribute to harming the environment. In some instances, development opponents claim that their concern is the project isn’t one hundred percent affordable. Cynically, some of these opponents probably know the project won’t be viable and won’t proceed if all of the units are required to be affordable and income-restricted. Maybe their motives aren’t as virtuous as they claim.  

We’re not calling for skyscrapers everywhere. In fact, we ought to be conscientious and respectful of much of the existing urban fabric and historic, walkable development patterns in our cities, which typically developed around streetcar networks. We should also thoughtfully reuse many of the buildings that already exist. Jane Jacobs, author of the influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities, felt that the most successful cities include a mix of newer and older buildings. While we’re advocating for evolution and change in our cities, we also believe there are places worth preserving in every older city. Historic preservation is another planning topic we don’t have space to cover here.   

We also suggest that your city’s zoning rules and development review process should remove political influence as much as possible. A city’s zoning regulations should be clear, predictable to all stakeholders, and should allow housing construction (and other development) that doesn’t depend on support from a particular community’s representative on the city council. Systems that rely on political processes in the development process—systems that are far too common throughout our country in both “red” and “blue” communities and states—provide a framework that invites corruption, favors the most politically connected developers, and ultimately doesn’t consistently serve the broader public interest.   

If you still think that all new for-profit development is evil, maybe ask yourself this: when the building where you live was constructed, was that evil? It was probably built by a developer and someone probably made money in the process. But it’s providing you a place to live, even if the rent (or mortgage payment) is too damn high.  

To be clear, the private housing market, on its own, isn’t going to provide new, quality housing in the most disinvested areas. And new construction that’s not subsidized in some way is generally not going to be affordable to lower-income people because of the cost of “land, labor, and lumber.” Buying property, paying skilled tradespeople to construct a new building, and obtaining the materials needed to build a new building are all things that make new construction expensive. Federal, state, and local governments have critical roles to play related to housing. In addition to ensuring that developers have the ability to construct new housing, the public sector must utilize a variety of tools to ensure that housing is available and attainable to those who find that the cost of quality housing is out of reach in their community. Those tools include, for example: public housing, tax credits for developing affordable housing, affordable housing trust funds that subsidize affordable units, rent subsidies/vouchers, and inclusionary zoning that requires that developers provide affordable, income-restricted housing units in larger market-rate developments. Some of these tools have tradeoffs and pitfalls. The best housing policies are probably those that facilitate mixed-income communities, allowing working class people the opportunity to enjoy the same urban amenities that are available to the wealthiest residents. 

Kamala Parks (she/her) is a Principal Station Area Planner with the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District. She’s also a musician, and a co-founder and former board member of 924 Gilman. Contact her via her LinkedIn profile. 

Jason Wittenberg (he/him) is a Planning Manager with the City of Minneapolis, where he has worked in the Department of Community Planning and Economic Development since 1998, and teaches Urban Studies courses at the University of Minnesota. Contact him on X at @WittenbergJason.  

Eric Baskauskas is an artist and graphic designer who lives in Chicago and has been designing for Razorcake since 2014. Contact him on Instagram at @wallofyouth or at www.wallofyouth.com