The Upside of a Down Market
With each new day, we get another article bemoaning the end of the housing boom. Last weekend The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald explained why there are plenty of reasons to welcome a kinder, gentler, if slower, real-estate market. Writing about the nation's seeming allergy to affordable housing, Grunwald cites the 200,000 units of affordable rentals that are lost to the stampeding market every year. A slowdown in home prices should also slow the conversion of affordable homes to high-end rates.
It won't change deeper policy problems, however. While much of the affordable housing is evaporating from our cities, many of those who would fill it are headed for the suburbs, where the bulk of new jobs are being created. And most suburbs are not rising to the occasion. As Grunwald points out, zoning regulations in many locales are designed to preserve single-family homes. "Minimum lot requirements, minimum parking requirements, density restrictions and other controls," he writes, "go well beyond the traditional mission of the building code and end up artificially reducing the development of safe, affordable housing." Instead, the new suburban population either crams into unsuitable spaces in numbers breaking both fire codes and zoning laws, or commutes unconscionably long distances to affordable communities.
Grunwald commends Fairfax County, Va., for its "Penny for Housing" tax that takes a cent from each dollar of property taxes to fund affordable housing. The county has also built housing for emergency workers like firefighters and nurses. But these measures are a drop in the bucket. It's time, says Grunwald, for localities to ease zoning regulations so that the market can direct higher-density, cheaper housing to the places that make the most sense for everyone. This can only happen if politicians, says Grunwald, "rediscover housing—not as an urban poverty issue, but as a middle-class quality-of-life issue, like gas prices or health care."
It won't change deeper policy problems, however. While much of the affordable housing is evaporating from our cities, many of those who would fill it are headed for the suburbs, where the bulk of new jobs are being created. And most suburbs are not rising to the occasion. As Grunwald points out, zoning regulations in many locales are designed to preserve single-family homes. "Minimum lot requirements, minimum parking requirements, density restrictions and other controls," he writes, "go well beyond the traditional mission of the building code and end up artificially reducing the development of safe, affordable housing." Instead, the new suburban population either crams into unsuitable spaces in numbers breaking both fire codes and zoning laws, or commutes unconscionably long distances to affordable communities.
Grunwald commends Fairfax County, Va., for its "Penny for Housing" tax that takes a cent from each dollar of property taxes to fund affordable housing. The county has also built housing for emergency workers like firefighters and nurses. But these measures are a drop in the bucket. It's time, says Grunwald, for localities to ease zoning regulations so that the market can direct higher-density, cheaper housing to the places that make the most sense for everyone. This can only happen if politicians, says Grunwald, "rediscover housing—not as an urban poverty issue, but as a middle-class quality-of-life issue, like gas prices or health care."
posted by burb at 5:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home