A handsome new library branch in Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan, had its soft opening Thursday. It’s the second library in town during the past year or so to try something clever and innovative: partnering with a 100 percent affordable housing development. New subsidized apartments occupy a 12-floor tower above the library.
These days, NIMBYs are always fighting affordable housing projects. Communities are increasingly desperate for libraries. One obvious solution is the twofer — building housing and a library together — because there’s strength in numbers.
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But that’s only half the Inwood project. In addition to the library and apartment tower, which has its own entrance and name, The Eliza, the development also includes a pre-K, a STEM study center, a teaching kitchen and community spaces.
Upzoning
Regardless of what framework you think makes the most sense, tackling the housing shortage in America is an imperative to tame the cost of living, promote community development, reduce financial stress, and even reduce carbon emissions. The only people who have any problem with making housing more affordable, in fact, are homeowners. And that’s the whole problem.
An ingenious little study from researchers Eren Cifci of Austin Peay State University, Alan Tidwell of the University of Alabama, J. Sherwood Clements of Virginia Tech University, and Andres Jauregui of Fresno State starts from the fairly obvious premise of self-interest: Homeowners want home prices, and therefore their property values, to go up. It’s a simple case of the wealth effect, and people, unsurprisingly, like to be richer. William Fischel, a former economics professor at Dartmouth, coined the term “homevoter” to describe the link between property values and local voting trends. But this paper is the first to track it at the presidential level.
The authors look at voting patterns in 87 percent of all U.S. counties across the past six election cycles, looking for correlations between home prices and vote-switching. Homeowners in counties where home prices rose in the four years before the presidential election were more likely to switch their votes toward the party holding the presidency at that time, whether Republicans or Democrats. Conversely, when housing prices plummeted, homeowner voters switched their votes away from the incumbent party.
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This is a problem for enlightened policy on housing. It’s not about whether zoning deregulation by itself is popular, or rent control. The crux of the matter is this: The population that wants higher home prices is bigger and votes at higher rates than the population that wants lower home prices. In some ways, our dysfunctional housing policies are just that simple. The easiest way to keep prices up, after all, is to mobilize and prevent the construction of new housing nearby. Contrast Tokyo, which has historically permitted nearly twice as many housing units as the entire state of California despite having a third the population and one-two-hundredth the amount of land, so rent therefore remains cheap.
A controversy in planning concerns the degree that upzoning can increase affordability.
I reviewed this issue two years ago in Planetizen columns, The Housing Supply Debate: Evaluating the Evidence, and A Critical Review of 'Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land', and in a Governing Magazine article, The Housing Affordability Recipe. Recent studies support the conclusion that broadly-applied upzoning that allows more compact housing types (townhouses, multiplexes, and multi-family) in multimodal neighborhoods, with complementary policies such as reducing parking minimums, can increase housing supply, drive down prices, and increase overall affordability.
This research has not prevented skeptics from arguing the opposite; that upzoning increases rather than reduces housing prices and reduces affordability. Such skepticism is understandable: housing prices tend to be higher in dense urban areas and a parcel's value tends to increase if it is upzoned. However, upzoning a large urban area has very different effect: it creates a competitive market for land prezoned for higher density housing which minimizes lane value increases, as discussed in UCLA Professor Shane Phillips' report, Building Up the "Zoning Buffer": Using Broad Upzones to Increase Housing Capacity Without Increasing Land Values.