| 1 |
Profile of a new book that describes “…numerous actors in a complex network of landowners, housebuilders [developers], financial backers, professional bodies and politicians who are engaged in propping up the status quo to ensure that their interests prosper – at the expense of everyone else. The housing crisis is no accident…” |
| 2 |
The Guardian |
| 3 |
The Property Lobby, |
| 4 |
Over the decades, governments of all colours have announced bold new methods to solve the housing crisis, but little has changed. Headlines have continually told us that we are short of 4m homes, that thousands are homeless, that 1.2 million people are on council house waiting lists and that a million private tenants are in deep poverty – not counting the impending impact of the coronavirus pandemic – but no effective action is taken. Instead, funding for social housing has been slashed while subsidies are lavished on the private sector housebuilders, in the hope that affordable housing will be delivered through “planning gain”. |
| 5 |
…It’s a Faustian pact from which the public is doomed never to benefit. As Colenutt puts it, the situation has led to “the ultimate absurdity of public authorities actively pursuing higher values from market-led development in order to find crumbs for social housing development.” |
| 6 |
Meanwhile, the housebuilders get ever richer. Berkeley Group, one of the Top 10 UK builders, built 3,536 homes in 2017, which sounds like a decent contribution to meeting the housing shortage. That is, until you realise that the average price of these homes – proudly described as “pop****r with overseas investors” – was £715,000. Tony Pidgley, the company’s founder and chairman, received a personal payout of £48m in 2018, after a previous payout of £23m in 2015, when profits rose 42%. At the same time, Berkeley has consistently reduced the amount of affordable housing on its developments across London, on the grounds that the local authority targets were “unviable”. Over the past eight years, Berkeley made a profit of more than £3bn. |
| 7 |
…there must be fundamental land reform to bring development land forward for housing at sensible prices so that new housing can be truly affordable and existing prices can stabilise. Colenutt points to the examples of Germany and the Netherlands, where local authorities buy up development land at its existing use value, draw up real masterplans, then offer sites to housebuilders, who build to the plans of the local authority. In this way, housebuilders are simply builders of houses, not land speculators. |
| 8 |
He says it is finally time to tax developers’ land banks and implement “use or lose it” measures, to discourage housebuilders from h****ding plots with planning permission. And, most importantly, the Treasury and the Bank of England must be weaned off their dependence on land and house prices, and rebalance the economy away from property. All of this is eminently possible, if the powerful property lobby can be resisted, and some local authorities are already beginning to take the lead, in spite of central government policy. As the Coin Street Community Builders’ slogan puts it: “There is another way.” |
| 9 |
Or, how Christopher Alexander’s landmark 1965 paper can still guide us in thinking about the coronavirus, and other urban challenges |
| 10 |
private |
| 11 |
they must pa*** through the “choke points” of centralized spaces |
| 12 |
A Pattern Language, |
| 13 |
It must be emphasised, lest the orderly mind shrink in horror from anything that is not clearly articulated and categorised in tree form, that the ideas of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect, and the semilattice, are not less orderly than the rigid tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure. |
| 14 |
exactly |
| 15 |
The long-time colleague of Jane Jacobs writes in the New York Review of Books that “This is a New York story only for now” and “Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring slowly in cities around the country.” |
| 16 |
I weep for my city; it is committing urban suicide. I am a daughter of Gotham, born and bred. My lifelong interest in the vitality of the city included a thirty-year friends***p with famed urbanist Jane Jacobs, with whom I, and a small group of activists, founded the Center for the Living City to build on her legacy… |
| 17 |
This is a New York story only for now. Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring slowly in cities around the country. When it comes to real estate, New York City may lead the way, but others follow in time. |
| 18 |
In 2018, Chase Bank announced that it would tear down the fifty-two-story, black-and-silver-ribbed, early Modernist tower at 270 Park Avenue in order to build a new tower at least seventy stories high. This will be the tallest-ever demolition of a perfectly viable building in New York City. In 2002, Chase began a total renovation of the building to LEED standard, a green building certification that gave it “platinum” status, a rating that acknowledges the value of preserving the embodied energy of an existing building and avoids energy use for demolition, landfill, and new construction. Landmark skysc****ers across the country—from the Empire State Building, Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly Sears), and San Francisco’s Transamerica—have taken this environmentally responsible approach and upgraded their buildings to LEED platinum standard. And in doing so, Chase also benef****ed from the five years of federal environmental tax credits that go with that designation. Then threw it all away. |
| 19 |
To achieve the extra height and bulk of the new 270 Park, Chase is taking advantage of the “upzoning” of nearby mid-Manhattan that was applied in 2017 to a seventy-three-block area around Grand Central between 39th and 57th Streets. Upzoning’s relaxation of city planning regulations expands the development potential of new buildings by allowing increased height and density (the number of units or amount of floor area on a given lot), and simplifying the transfer of “air rights” from landmarked buildings to new sites within the district. (Air rights are the so-called unused development rights that would allow a hypothetical taller building on a particular lot, but they can be transferred by sale from one lot to another, depending on the district’s zoning designation.) A portion of any air rights sale does go into a city fund specifically for area subway and pedestrian improvements—but, in this case, that would be for an area already jammed with pedestrians. |
| 20 |
Chase was thus able to buy air rights from the landmarked St. Patrick’s Cathedral, some six blocks away, and construct a taller, bulkier building. Preservationists have identified at least thirty-three buildings worthy of landmark protection from such redevelopment in this Midtown district, but after fierce resistance from real estate interests, only twelve have been so designated. By no logic—design, environmental, planning, zoning, landfill capacity—does demolition of 270 Park make sense, especially when at least some in the architectural community are trying to advance sustainable design… |
| 21 |
Writing almost sixty years ago, Jacobs drew a distinction that warned of the difference between gradual evolution that does not disrupt a city and “cataclysmic” change that threatens a city’s fabric. The alteration we witness today is cataclysmic. Hudson Yards, the new mega-development on Manhattan’s far West Side, is only the most glaring example, but the supertall towers that are spreading like kudzu elsewhere are an increasingly visible disgrace. It is all a reflection of the stranglehold of big real estate interests, with their power to manip****te the zoning code beyond reason. Hudson Yards represents a kind of privately controlled gated community in the sky—definitely a cardinal sin of urbanism—but even more significant, from my perspective, is 270 Park. |
| 22 |
Urbanism is the uneven process that creates cities, over time and organically, through a confluence of democratic, economic, and social forces. This is what Jacobs called an “urban ecology.” This same process can also rebuild and strengthen even troubled cities today, if given a chance, and if big profit-driven real estate interests are not the overriding force in urban development. But authentic urbanism is a process, not a project subject to a design or plan. The result is a balanced mix of buildings and uses resulting in a built environment at human scale. That is precisely what is being lost today in New York City. |
| 23 |
The redevelopment of 270 Park Avenue, which has slipped under the radar of public attention, is an alarming precursor of things to come. It is characteristic of the way the city is committing urbanism suicide, a death by a thousand smaller, self-inflicted cuts. And it reflects how real estate owns and controls a city that is supposed to run on democratic principles. |
| 24 |
First is an underrecognized perversion of the landmarking process. Originally, landmarked buildings were awarded air rights to compensate for their owners being prevented from tearing them down and rebuilding on the same site. Those air rights, though, could be transferred to a building adjacent or opposite. Air rights from landmarks were never meant to float afar. A major consequence of the upzoning, though, is that air rights have now become transferable to increasingly distant lots… |
| 25 |
There appear to be no limits to what the development community gets away with. They’ve taken effective control of both the City Planning Commission and the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA). They have also succeeded in intimidating and taming the Landmarks Preservation Commission, restraining its original mission and turning its system of historic tax credits attached to landmark buildings to new commercial advantage. They are so in control, their machinations are not even hidden… |
| 26 |
Advocates of upzoning argue that it is needed to allow construction of taller buildings to create new affordable housing units. Real estate interests’ upzoning mantra perpetuates a confusion that height creates density. This is a dangerous myth. Along with many American cities after World War II, New York experienced years of demolition and de-densification in the name of “urban renewal.” This misguided movement, often acting in the name of “slum clearance,” used the concept of “towers in the park” to replace old neighborhoods that had grown up organically around a density of mixed uses—residential, businesses, factories, markets. “Urban renewal” demolished existing communities, never replacing as many housing units as had previously existed. |
| 27 |
If we continue to allow the erosion of the human-scale city and long-evolved urbanism on which it depends, then I fear for the future. The first thing needed is a public exhibit of the many empty sites across the boroughs of New York, and a representation of what further, unchecked upzoning will it make possible to build in the future. But without a well-organized, well-financed campaign like the effort to save Grand Central, or a singular leader like Jane Jacobs able to take on the powers that be and a press willing to give these battles full coverage, the perilous undermining of authentic urbanism will continue. |
| 28 |
A recent article on the work of geographer Samuel Stein argues that our housing dilemma derives from an “unholy fusion” of development and politics — “the real estate state” — which exacerbates, rather than solves, our crises of affordability, equity and sustainability. |
| 29 |
In 2018, Scott Wiener, a California state senator representing San Francisco, introduced a co-auth****d bill that detonated a debate over housing. The aim of Senate Bill 827 was to override local regulations on building height in order to allow denser, high-rise construction near transit hubs. At once radical and simple, its target was nothing more, and nothing less, than zoning—the most common American way to control land use. Zoning determines whether a building is commercial or residential, how big it can get, whether it’s a single-family home or a high-rise tower. |
| 30 |
use |
| 31 |
form |
| 32 |
The Death and Life of Great American Cities |
| 33 |
S.B. 827 elicited heated arguments, along with a few bizarre political coalitions. In supporting the bill, housing advocates found themselves allied with wealthy developers. Meanwhile, in opposing it, anti-gentrification activists found themselves allied with rich homeowners from places like Beverly Hills….despite late-breaking attempts to include anti-displacement measures, the bill failed to make it out of committee, losing 6–4. Of the votes in its favor, only two were from Democrats, Wiener and his co-author—further proof that the housing debate involves some strange bedfellows. |
| 34 |
S.B. 827 nonetheless has spurred a more substantial conversation about zoning reform, of all things, than any urbanist could have predicted. Unfortunately, much of this conversation has taken place online, meaning that it’s resembled people screaming past one another and then shrinking into two opposing crags of congealed vitriol. On one side are the YIMBYs—the acronym stands for “Yes, in my back yard”—who believe that prices are too high because of market distortions that limit the amount of housing people actually want and need. For them, the solution is to increase market-rate housing, which, over time, will result in a reduction in prices and rents. Opponents of YIMBYs—often called “NIMBYs,” meaning “Not in my back yard” (as a term of opprobrium, it of course predates YIMBY)—have a variety of rejoinders to this argument, but they center on the idea that building market-rate housing will never deliver the amount of housing that people need, at prices they can afford. Furthermore, they argue that the immediate effect of introducing such housing is gentrification and displacement. It is at this point that the argument devolves into accusations that the YIMBYs are tools of rich, white real-estate developers, and that the NIMBYs are tools of rich, white homeowners, and the space in between these two positions is quickly converted into a muddy field, where no one dares show a white flag. |
| 35 |
The particular airlessness of this debate is only partly due to its growth in the complexity-free vacuum of the Internet. The more significant constriction is that it is an argument that takes place almost entirely according to the terms of real-estate development. In a recent book, “Capital City,” the geographer Samuel Stein puts this debate into context, and adds to it. He argues that our housing dilemma derives from an unholy fusion of development and politics, which he calls “the real estate state.” Stein, a geographer at the City University of New York, tries to establish how industrial cities, in becoming postindustrial, opened the way for real estate to enter the breach. “Landowners have been determining the shape of cities for centuries, and the idea of housing as a commodity—even as a financial a***et—is not exactly state of the art,” Stein writes. “What is relatively new, however, is the outsized power of real estate interests within the capitalist state.” Deriving his insights from left-wing geographers and urban historians, and also from interviews with activists in New York City, he alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and livelihoods. |
| 36 |
But Stein’s special aim is not just to show how real estate controls everything, which, if you were halfway paying attention during the financial crisis—rooted as it was in the predations of housing markets—you already know. His princ****l point is that the power of the real-estate state flows from the dynamic between development and the profession of city planning. Planners are usually thought of as bureaucrats, though sometimes they take on the aspect of legend: Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who tamed rebellious Paris into wide avenues that couldn’t be barricaded; imperious Robert Moses, who pummelled New York with expressways. Stein’s planners are at once lesser and greater than these. Though they may look like mousy cubicle denizens—determining the right sort of window treatment for a historic house, or calculating the Area Median Income for a smattering of affordable units in a luxury building—they’re more influential than they appear. Planners, he writes, “are tasked with the contradictory goals of inflating real estate values while saf***uarding residents’ best interests.” The position is an inherently uncomfortable one. But planning holds out the promise that the future is, at least in part, knowable. Explicit in Stein’s narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities… |
| 37 |
…Developers need planners, but a conflict arises when the former look to the latter for interventions in public space. “They demand that the state build the infrastructure that makes their land usable,” Stein writes of developers. At the same time, they are “fiercely protective of their property rights” and suspicious of planning insofar as it threatens their control over land. Planners, in turn, are agents of the public, but they are beholden to developers, in practice. Democratic societies require at least a display of public input, but often only a display: “planners must proceed with enough openness and transparency to maintain public legitimacy, while ensuring that capital retains ultimate control over the processes’ parameters.” From this comes the charade of public-comment sessions, familiar to most active city dwellers, in which so-called stakeholders are invited to discuss development plans, whose basic outlines they have little chance of influencing. |
| 38 |
Similarly, planners who want to a***ert broad control over the public realm are often dependent on recalcitrant businessmen, who are unlikely to give them the full measure of what they might want to achieve, since planning often involves the creation of public infrastructure that requires business to get out of the way. Much of what does get achieved requires catastrophic, violent interventions in the lives of the very people that planners are trying to help. The land for Central Park, the “green lung” of New York and one of the greatest parks in the world, was secured by expelling Manhattan’s largest African-American settlement. The construction of most public housing required the resettlement of thousands of households, often those of working cla*** African-Americans, in the destructive process known as urban renewal. (Urban renewal, James Baldwin said, in an interview, really “means Negro removal.”) |
| 39 |
…This history sets up Stein’s main story, which is about the contemporary high-priced city of gentrification and displacement. Mercifully, his analysis does not mention hipsters, artisanal stationery stores, or CBD lattes. Instead, he discusses how planners have once again played a central role in scaling up gentrification “from a neighborhood phenomenon of renovation and reinvention to a larger process of displacement, demolition and development.” A miasma of guilt and misunderstanding surrounds discussions of gentrification. The usual story—of upwardly mobile people moving into depressed areas and displacing existing, less well-off residents in the process—is at least partly true. But, as geographers have pointed out for some time, it also requires disinvestment: neighborhoods decline, in part, because of state neglect, and yuppies rush in where planners fear to tread. This is how the familiar story of places such as SoHo, in lower Manhattan, and Park Slope, in Brooklyn, begins. Those neighborhoods were abandoned by the government before they were occupied by new residents. |
| 40 |
Similarly, the past three decades have been characterized by hyper-gentrification, which is a largely legislative phenomenon, the work of planners and policymakers—not simply an ineluctable market signal that is sent when someone opens a vegan doughnut shop. Stein details the number of planning-policy innovations that have made it easier for developers and large nonprofits to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes. In 1971, the establishment of New York’s 421-a tax program gave developers abatements on luxury construction, for anywhere from ten to twenty-five years. (One of the great beneficiaries of 421-a, Stein notes, was Donald Trump, who built Trump Plaza, on the Upper East Side with a thirteen-million-dollar tax break.) In 2016, when the program was set to expire, 421-a cost New York $1.2 billion a year. A recent revision to the law, under Governor Andrew Cuomo, brought the cost to $2.4 billion a year. That’s about six hundred million less than the M.T.A. requested from the state to fix the ailing subway system. These are the sorts of numbers that reveal how the real-estate state declares its priorities. As legislators made developers’ lives easier, planners became the helpless accomplices of urban inequality. |
| 41 |
Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” an indictment of American city planning, appeared in 1961; Robert A. Caro’s “The Power Broker,” an indictment of an American city planner, appeared in 1974. In the years between their publication—and partly owing to their arguments—planning lost whatever was left of its swashbuckling air, and was increasingly seen as a clumsy, illegitimate, even villainous profession, its members casually carving their utopian visions into the fabric of complex, heterogeneous cities. |
| 42 |
When planning lost its revolutionary élan, it also lost its sense of ambition. Many mid-century planners, for all their missteps, tried to engineer a more equal city. As planning lost its power, an impressive variety of inequities crept into policymaking. |
| 43 |
…According to ultra-YIMBY reasoning, the addition of [high-priced] apartments might not be a problem, since housing markets are, like other markets, subject to supply and demand. But, as the author Rick Jacobus recently argued in the magazine Shelterforce, the housing market is segmented, better understood “as a set of interrelated submarkets that can move somewhat independently than as a single market.” For example, rent for student housing may roughly follow the laws of supply and demand, but, in general, its cost isn’t eased by building a lot of housing—what matters is the supply of student housing and the demand from students. By the same token, upzoning that allows for more affordable housing to be built has effects on existing affordable housing. “When planners upzone neighborhoods to allow bigger buildings, rent-stabilized landlords will have every reason to sell their properties to speculative developers, who could then knock down the existing properties and build something bigger and more expensive,” Stein writes. The long-term effect of a housing boom may be a housing bust—but, in the meantime, all sorts of pain may be inflicted on existing residents. |
| 44 |
There are other reasons to be cautious. Historically, attempts to remedy segregation through the real-estate market have often ended up increasing it. In a groundbreaking new book, Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, shows how the post-urban renewal-planning regime came to rely heavily on the real-estate industry. New forms of subsidized loans were, in her phrasing, a form of “predatory inclusion,” trapping black homeowners in substandard housing, while developers continued to reap dividends. Her analysis covers a specific period in time, and a particular kind of housing market, but its conclusion is general and d****ing: the American real-estate market was founded on racism and still depends on it. White NIBYs have kept multifamily buildings out of wealthier neighborhoods, in no small part to keep those neighborhoods racially homogeneous, and it is doubtful that real-estate developers can solve this historic inequity. |
| 45 |
Though Stein supports efforts that would increase housing construction in wealthy areas, he is clear that these policies need to be part of a broader program. In a recent article for Jacobin, he argues that there is a general “overreliance on zoning,” which is, in any case, “a tool ill-equipped to confront the private land and property markets.” The solution, therefore, “is… the decommodification of land and housing.” In other words, having a market for housing is itself the problem. And a return to large-scale planning is the answer. |
| 46 |
…Decades of a housing crisis, accompanied by decades of organizing and activism, have finally led to revaluations of public housing and regional planning. A policy team led by the tenants’-rights activist Tara Raghuveer recently produced a proposal for a “Homes Guarantee”—a marquee plan that proposes the construction of twelve million new, permanently affordable homes as “social housing.” Meanwhile, the law professor Mehrsa Baradaran… has called for a twenty-first-century Homestead Act, under which a public trust would be tasked with purchasing distressed or abandoned homes in historically redlined areas—a form of direct capital investment with the aim of remedying the racial wealth gap. Both are serious proposals that have the potential to s***ft power away from developers and toward the people historically excluded from the housing market. To be achieved, both need the backing of enormous social movements. They could also resurrect large-scale planning, conceived on a freshly democratic basis, as a profession of consequence. The planner, after decades of irrelevance, or worse, might yet be a figure of note—and perhaps, in a time of crisis, one of purpose. |
| 47 |
Maintaining quality of life in spite of pop****tion growth |
| 48 |
“Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations…. Housing is an area where the law of unintended consequences is most powerful. The idea that upzoning will cause housing affordability to trickle down within our metropolis, while also setting up Los Angeles and San Francisco as the new golden land for people in less prosperous regions, is just a lot to promise—and it’s based on a narrative of housing as opportunity that is deeply flawed.” |
| 49 |
“A livable city is a city where people live because they want to, not because they have to… A city that is good for children is good for everybody.” |
| 50 |
In Vienna, one way that happens is with a community grant scheme that bestows hundreds of modest €4,000 grants for small neighborhood-level public-space improvement projects. “Once one of these initiatives gets implemented, it changes the perspective of the whole neighborhood,” Va***ilakou said. “I think this works because this is not top-down. It’s the bottom-up kind of inspiration that can change the city.” |
| 51 |
New research suggests that cities, like brains, are immense networks of connective patterns built up over time. Understanding this evolving structure will help us to formulate better urban policies and practices, in Portland and elsewhere. |
| 52 |
Emergence |
| 53 |
don’t |
| 54 |
“Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations.” |
| 55 |
CityLab (2) |
| 56 |
A new paper by two leading economic geographers suggests this argument is simply too good to be true. t**led “Housing, Urban Growth and Inequalities” and forthcoming in the journal Urban Studies, it’s written by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose of the London School of Economics (LSE) and Michael Storper, who divides his time among the LSE, UCLA, and Sciences Po in Paris. According to Storper and Rodríguez-Pose, the notion that an insufficient supply of housing is a main cause of urban economic problems is based on a number of faulty premises. They say the effect of supply has been blown far out of proportion. |
| 57 |
They agree that housing is part of the problem: “Housing market failures can imperil local economic growth and generate problems such as segregation, long commute times, deteriorating quality of life, homelessness, and barriers to social mobility for certain pop****tions,” they write. But housing policy, and zoning restrictions in particular, are certainly not the be-all and end-all of urban problems. Upzoning expensive cities is no match for the deep divides within—and especially between—cities, and is wholly insufficient to remedy them. |
| 58 |
“Housing is an area where the law of unintended consequences is most powerful,” Storper recently told Planning Report. “The idea that upzoning will cause housing affordability to trickle down within our metropolis, while also setting up Los Angeles and San Francisco as the new golden land for people in less prosperous regions, is just a lot to promise—and it’s based on a narrative of housing as opportunity that is deeply flawed.” And as Rodríguez-Pose told me via email: “Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations.” |
| 59 |
Rodríguez-Pose and Storper question several pieces of evidence that stand at the heart of this market-urbanist view, a perspective they dub “housing as opportunity.” Whereas some urban economists suggest a close relations***p between housing supply and prices (with places that add supply having lower prices), Rodríguez-Pose and Storper find the relations***p to be weak. |
| 60 |
Likewise, some market urbanists point to an a***ociation between city pop****tion size and/or density and economic growth. But Rodríguez-Pose and Storper argue that this too falls away under close scrutiny—the link between city pop****tion in 2000 and subsequent economic growth from 2000 to 2016 is weak to “non-existent,” on their analysis. |
| 61 |
For Storper and Rodríguez-Pose, the rising spatial inequality between cities and metro areas stems from different kinds of economies that distinguish different kinds of cities, not from differences in housing costs. Or as they put it, “the basic motors of all these features of the economy are the current geography of employment, wages and skills.” |
| 62 |
The economies and talent bases of cities have diverged over time. Expensive cities have much larger clusters of leading-edge tech and knowledge industries and of highly educated, skilled talent. It’s this, rather than differences in housing prices, that is behind growing spatial inequality. |
| 63 |
“The affordability crisis within major urban areas is real,” they write, “but it is due less to over-regulation of housing markets than to the underlying wage and income inequalities, and a sharp increase in the value of central locations within metro areas, as employment and amenities concentrate in these places.” |
| 64 |
A key factor here is the growing divide between highly-paid techies and knowledge workers and much lower-paid people who work in routine service jobs. These service workers end up getting the short end of the stick, spending much more of their income on housing in expensive cities. “Under these circ***stances moving to big cities provides no immediate benefits for workers without college education,” Rodríguez-Pose and Storper write. |
| 65 |
Upzoning does little to change this fundamental imbalance. Because land in superstar cities and tech hubs is so expensive to begin with, upzoning tends to create even more expensive c*****inium towers. “While building more affordable housing in core agglomerations would accommodate more people,” the authors note, “the collapse of the urban wage premium for less-educated workers means that the extra housing would mostly attract additional skilled workers.” |
| 66 |
Solving the economic and geographic divisions of America and other advanced countries is a task that goes far beyond local housing policy. |
| 67 |
Opportunities for improved wages in core areas have stagnated, and the “ladder has shrunk.” Therefore, the decline in interregional migration can be attributed to many factors, including the new geography of skills and wages. But housing restrictions in prosperous areas wouldn’t top the list. And upzoning ends up fueling, not relieving, economic and spatial inequality. As Rodríguez-Pose told me: “Income inequality is greater within our cities than across our regions. Upzoning will only exacerbate this.” |
| 68 |
“Planning deregulation and housing costs are neither going to solve the problem of areas lagging behind, nor are they likely to have an impact on the economic development of dynamic cities,” Rodríguez-Pose and Storper write. Worse, they caution, “an excessive focus on these issues at the expense of serious and sustainable development strategies, can fuel economic, social and political distress and anger in declining and lagging areas that can threaten the very foundations on which economic activity, both in less developed and more prosperous areas, has been erected in recent decades.” |
| 69 |
and |
| 70 |
…a fascinating case study of a remarkable transformation from a sprawling bedroom suburb of Indianapolis into a thriving, livable community. We’ll share concrete examples of what has worked in this and other suburbs, where such a high percentage of the pop****tion now lives – either by choice, or too often because they have been unwillingly displaced from gentrifying city cores. We’ll examine tools and strategies that are effective in building a new generation of walkable, equitable, livable cities – AND suburbs – for all. |
| 71 |
Genius of the European Square |
| 72 |
The Forgotten Child |
| 73 |
Livable Cities Observed |
| 74 |
Livable Cities, People and Places |
| 75 |
The Wisdom of Cities |
| 76 |
Making Cities Livable |
| 77 |
Planning, Urban Land, The Mayor, Western City, Environment & Behavior |
| 78 |
An editorial |
| 79 |
The Oregonian |
Livableportland.org
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