Introducing Density to the Suburbs (Carefully)

No Country for High Density

American cities are generally committed to single-family detached homes that keep population density levels thin and home prices high. A list of American cities and their percentage of area zoned for single-family detached residences:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html

• San Jose, California -- 94%
• Arlington, Texas -- 89%
• Sandy Springs, Georgia -- 85%
• Charlotte, North Carolina -- 84%
• Seattle -- 81%
• Portland, Oregon -- 77%
• Los Angeles -- 75%
• Minneapolis -- 70%
• Washington -- 36%
• New York -- 15%

There are glimmers of resistance to the low-density norm.

Rezoning for higher density in Minneapolis

At the local level, Minneapolis, Minnesota has gone against the American grain by ending zoning for single-family residences in order to foster affordable housing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/opinion/sunday/minneapolis-ends-single-family-zoning.html

People should be free to live in a prairie-style house on a quarter-acre lot in the middle of Minneapolis, so long as they can afford the land and taxes. But zoning subsidizes that extravagance by prohibiting better, more concentrated use of the  land. It allows people to own homes they could not afford if the same land could be used for an apartment building. It is a huge entitlement program for the benefit of the most entitled residents.

The loose fabric of single-family neighborhoods drives up the cost of housing by limiting the supply of available units. It contributes to climate change, by necessitating sprawl and long commutes. It constrains the economic potential of cities by limiting growth.

The only thing that will bring down the high cost of housing is the construction of all types of housing, from the high-end of luxury to the low-end of subsidized housing. Mid-range housing in particular will eventually find its way into the hands of those who are underprivileged.

The affordable housing crisis cannot be solved by new construction alone, at least not in the short term. Governments need to provide subsidized housing for people who cannot afford market-rate housing. But advocates for affordable housing should be jumping up and down and screaming for the construction of more high-end apartment buildings to ease demand for existing homes. Those new buildings are filled with people who would otherwise be spending Saturdays touring fixer-uppers in neighborhoods newly named something like SoFa, with rapidly dwindling populations of longtime residents.

Market-rate construction also can help to reduce the need for public housing subsidies in the longer term. Today’s market-rate apartments will gradually become more affordable, just as new cars become used cars. The price of the average rental unit declines by 2.5 percent a year, adjusting for inflation, according to a 2014 study.

Minneapolis was able to pass such legislation because it is a middle-income city with mid-priced housing, and so there was less polarization between wealthy people who fear losing their home value, their quality of life and their sense of safety, on the one hand, and poor people who just can't catch a break, on the other hand. Higher density means lower home prices, but in the case of Minneapolis, the lowering of price would not comprise a catastrophic collapse in home values because home prices in Minneapolis are merely average.

All of this deserves wide emulation by other American cities. But Minneapolis has an important advantage: Its housing prices still are relatively modest, so its population includes a lot of middle-class families. Housing debates in coastal cities pit the wealthy against the poor, and middle ground has been hard to find. 

Minneapolis is not alone in the quest for higher density.

Rezoning for higher density in Oregon

In June, 2019, Oregon deregulated its zoning policy by disallowing much of a longstanding ban on building anything other than single-family homes in residential areas.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/07/oregon-single-family-zoning-reform-yimby-affordable-housing/593137/

On Sunday, Oregon lawmakers gave their final approval to House Bill 2001, which would eliminate single-family zoning around the state. In cities with more than 25,000 residents, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and “cottage clusters” would be allowed on parcels that are currently reserved for single-family houses; in cities of least 10,000, duplexes would be allowed in single-family zones. 

Oregon would then become the first state to ban the century-old practice of reserving land for a single type of residential development, putting it at the head of a nationwide surge in “upzoning.” Pushed by members in the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement and other pro-housing forces, several other urban areas have been similarly seeking zoning reforms to create denser, greener, and more affordable residential units in the face of chronic housing shortages.

Land use policy in Oregon always manifested conflicting ideological trends, contradictions that have been glossed over in the stereotype of Oregon as liberal. On one hand, Oregon's liberals did manage in 1973 to enact strong urban growth boundaries (UGBs) to prevent sprawl that would impact agriculture and recreational activities. On the other hand, Oregonians have long favored zoning measures that would keep urban areas low-rise and family friendly -- a policy usually associated with cultural conservatism.

In any case, banning the ban on non-single family zoning involved other apparent contradictions, with some Democrats adopting libertarian rhetoric, and some Republicans embracing pragmatism.

Representative Tina Kotek, the Democratic speaker of Oregon’s house and the bill’s chief sponsor, introduced HB 2001 in February. “This is about choice,” Kotek said at that time. “This is about allowing for different opportunities in neighborhoods that are currently extremely limited.” Four months later, at the close of a legislative session that included Republican senators staging a walkout over a cap-and-trade bill, HB 2001 passed with a 17-9 vote. “We all have an affordable housing crisis in our areas,” said Representative Jack Zika, a cosponsor of the bill and one of four Republicans who supported it. “This is not a silver bullet, but will address some of the things that all our constituents need.”

On the other side of the fence, there were conflicted responses within conservative circles to the end of single-family zoning.

Kevin Hoar, the spokesperson for the Oregon Republican Party, recently told Oregon Public Radio that he believes the state should make it easier to expand the urban growth boundary, rather than revise zoning codes. “Should the state be deciding what the American dream, or the Oregonian dream is? Or should homebuyers, home sellers and the localities that zone them be deciding that?” Hoar said. And while the libertarian-leaning Reason magazine praised HB 2001 for removing government restrictions on housing development, it also noted that without peeling back UGBs, Oregon’s land-use reforms are still “a decidedly mixed bag” from its political standpoint.

At the national level, rezoning to allow for higher densities is set to become a major flashpoint. Libertarians might respect the idea, but cultural conservatives generally oppose it. Interestingly, a lot of rich white liberals oppose rezoning for higher density, a curious posture that illuminates Oregon's history on zoning. Rich white liberals engage in the 1960s rhetoric of moral outrage over social injustice in order to justify conservative policies that foster gentrification and exclusion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/opinion/our-precious-urban-lives.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/opinion/our-precious-urban-lives.html

Affluent suburbs resist rezoning for higher density

On how some of America's richest towns fight affordable housing:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/05/connecticut-affordable-housing-zoning-westport/590155/

In southwest Connecticut, the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in the country. Invisible walls created by local zoning boards and the state government block affordable housing and, by extension, the people who need it.

It started when a developer known for building large luxury homes envisioned something different back in 2014 for the 2.2 acre property: a mix of single- and multifamily housing that would accommodate up to 12 families. A higher density project is more cost efficient, he said, and would allow him to sell the units for less than the typical Westport home.

But the site was zoned to hold no more than four single-family houses, so he needed approval from a reluctant Westport Planning and Zoning Commission, which denied his plan. Residents erupted in fury each time he made a scaled-back proposal, and it took the developer four years after purchasing the property to win approval to build two duplexes and five single-family homes.
The commission’s discussion was couched in what some would regard as code words and never directly addressed race or income. Chip Stephens, a Republican planning and zoning commissioner, voted against the plan, declaring, “To me, it’s too much density. It’s putting too much in a little area. To me, this is ghettoizing Westport.”

The rich white people in Connecticut who are blocking low-income housing in their suburb are so often liberals.

Welcome to Connecticut, a state with more separate—and unequal—housing than nearly everywhere else in the country.

This separation is by design.

Westport is only one example of a wealthy Connecticut suburb that has surrounded itself with invisible walls to block affordable housing and, by extension, the people who need it.

In a liberal state that has provided billions in taxpayer money to create more affordable housing, decisions at local zoning boards, the Connecticut Capitol and state agencies have thwarted court rulings and laws intended to remedy housing segregation. As far back as data has been kept, Connecticut’s low-income housing has been concentrated in poor cities and towns, an imbalance that has not budged over the last three decades. Affluent neighborhoods zone against greater density.

Government subsidies aside, another way to bring down housing costs is to build duplexes or apartments on a lot—but that’s not being allowed in many communities, despite state law requiring local zoning commissions to “encourage” such development in order to “promote housing choice and economic diversity in housing.”

Granted, there are good reasons for denying the construction of multi-unit, low-income housing.

Local officials, however, say there are often legitimate reasons to deny multiunit housing because local infrastructure is not in place or there are environmental concerns.

“Unfortunately, we are limited in what we can provide,” said Joyce Stille, who since 1995 has been the administrative officer of Bolton, a small town in central Connecticut that has limited sewer access and where just one duplex has received a permit in 30 years. “Because of our proximity to Vernon and Manchester, we don’t really need any [affordable housing]. They have such a wide range of options. People don’t come to Bolton because Bolton has a higher cost of living.”

There is a sense that allowing low-income families into an affluent area requires much higher public expenditures.

During his State of the Town Address a few months ago, Westport’s Republican first selectman, Jim Marpe, said high-density developments keep him up at night.

“The challenge to our community is not just to the character of neighborhoods, but also to firefighting and police response, potentially to educational capacity, to human services support and to our tradition as a single-family home community,” Marpe told his audience.

Sometimes this is not expressed diplomatically.

“The drug addicts are going to be here, believe me,” William Woermer, of Branford, testified in November 2017 about a proposal to demolish a 50-unit, run-down low-income housing project for seniors and replace it with 67 units for poor families. “Retirees, disabled, old people—I have no objection to renovate the whole place and make it nice for them. But don’t get too much of that riffraff in. There will be a lot of riffraff. Then we go onto, with a project like this, you need security guards in the area.” Woermer did not respond to an interview request.

As mentioned above, one issue is that low-income residents will not be able to afford the cost of living in a wealthy area.

In Greenwich, a public hearing in August 2017 about plans for an apartment complex next to the town’s commuter train station quickly devolved into residents complaining that low-income residents wouldn’t be able to afford to shop locally. “Nobody goes to our restaurants [if you’re] living in affordable housing,” Adam Tooter, a resident who had recently bought a $1.5 million home, said during the August hearing. Tooter did not respond to messages.

Gayle DePoli, another local resident, said: “Those people won’t be able to afford to live in Old Greenwich. They won’t be able to afford to shop in King’s [gourmet grocery store]. They won’t be able to afford to eat in any restaurant but Dunkin’ Donuts and maybe grab a slice at Arcadia Pizza. They won’t even be able to afford getting a scoop of ice cream at Darlene’s.”

Another issue is the greater traffic congestion that will materialize with higher population densities.

During a recent interview, DePoli said she is opposed to the development because the area is already too congested and it is unfair to have poor people living in such high-cost areas.

“It’s not about not in my neighborhood. It’s: enough in my area. It’s overbuilt with condos,” said DePoli, an independent contractor for media companies in Manhattan. “Your heart’s got to bleed a little bit for people that need low-income housing, and then you are going to put them in the middle of something they can’t afford. They can afford the rent, but what else? They aren’t going to the restaurants down there. Everything they can afford [is a car or bus ride] away. It’s pretty sad.”

Aside from the legitimate concerns about the mismatch between affordable housing and an affluent suburb, there might be two related but distinct phenomena at work in the use of zoning to keep out affordable housing.

Humans fear foreigners and the poor

The first is the desire to avoid living near the poor, especially poor minorities. A classic case might be the opposition by a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Queens, NY to the construction of public housing for poor blacks and Puerto Ricans in the early 1970s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/nyregion/jerry-birbach-dead-led-forest-hills-protest.html

Jerry Birbach, a Queens firebrand whose struggle to block a proposed low-income housing project in his Forest Hills neighborhood in 1972 augured a white middle-class backlash to the liberal urban agenda and helped propel Mario M. Cuomo’s political career, died on Monday in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 87.

The planned housing project was a hulking experiment in racial integration that urban planners called scatter-site housing — in this case, three 24-story towers to be occupied mostly by black and Puerto Rican tenants in a largely white, Jewish neighborhood of private homes and garden apartments.

When construction began in 1971, the project galvanized Mr. Birbach and his neighbors and became a national flash point for white resistance in the wake of the civil rights movement and commitments to racial integration.

During months of negotiations, some civic leaders preached racial harmony and sought a middle ground. But the project’s opponents resented having to bear the brunt of decisions dictated, as they saw it, by government liberals cloistered in Manhattan.

Mr. Birbach and his followers insisted that they were not racists; rather, they said, they feared that a sudden influx of hundreds of poor tenants would cause a crime wave in what they saw as a stable, middle-class sanctuary.

The article fails to emphasize that these middle-class Jewish New Yorkers were the quintessential northern urban liberals who supported the Civil Rights movement when it was focused on desegregating the South. When the shoe is on the other foot, integration can lose its appeal. On the other hand, nobody in the world wants to live near poor people -- not even other poor people. And nobody wants to live near a foreign tribe.

Exhibit A. The great champion of the civil rights legislation in the Senate during the 1960s was Senate leader Hubert Humphrey from "liberal" Minnesota. During this period, the number of African Americans in Minnesota could probably have been counted on the fingers of one hand.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/04/the-orator-of-the-dawn

In contrast, the African American population of the southeastern USA was large, often comprising a majority.

http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html

Exhibit B. In Minnesota in the 21st century, far-right anti-immigrant politics has gone mainstream with the influx of African Muslim refugees into the region.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/us/politics/minnesota-refugees-trump.html

St. Cloud, the state’s 10th-largest city, increased in population by 33 percent over the last 30 years, to roughly 70,000 people. The share of nonwhite residents grew to 18 percent from 2 percent, mostly with East African immigrants from Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, and the numbers of Somalis are estimated to grow.

The white majority now sees itself as a persecuted minority.

A 2018 poll from The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported that almost 50 percent of Minnesota Republicans wanted the state to temporarily stop accepting refugees, and during the midterm elections the most prominent members of the state’s Republican ticket all pledged to institute a moratorium on resettlement. A New York Times poll from 2018 showed the Eighth Congressional District — in the state’s northern region — was one of the few areas where 50 percent of people said discrimination against white Americans had become as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.

Bob Carrillo, a former radio host who lives in St. Michael, Minn., and has gained prominence for his anti-immigrant stance, said Mr. Trump had given voice to the concerns of “longtime Minnesotans.” At a coffee shop in St. Cloud, Mr. Carrillo also set a framed picture of his white grandchildren on the center of the table, meant to amplify the emotional impact of his xenophobic thesis: that Muslims pose an existential threat to the safety of his family.
“They’re 2 percent of the population right now, and in 5 to 10 years they’ll be at 5 percent,” Mr. Carrillo said. “At that point, we’re done for.”

The other issue is density. Americans love freedom and hate concentrations of power. This includes not just a hatred of the concentrated economic power of monopolies and the concentrated political power of government, but also the concentrated geographic power of cities.

The American fear of cities

In the same way that Americans demonize monopolies and centralization, Americans also vilify cities as a source of social dysfunction.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-austin-the-air-smells-of-tacos-and-trees--and-city-state-conflict/2017/07/01/682eb420-54f7-11e7-ba90-f5875b7d1876_story.html

Gov. Greg Abbott (R), citing grave worries about “socialistic” behavior in the state’s liberal cities, has called on Texas lawmakers to gather this month for a special session that will consider a host of bills aimed at curtailing local power on issues ranging from taxation to collecting union dues.

Texas presents perhaps the most dramatic example of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between red-state leaders and their blue city centers, which have moved aggressively to expand environmental regulations and social programs often against the grain of their states.

“Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different,” Abbott joked at a recent gathering of Republicans, referring to the county that includes Austin. “And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It’s the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.”

These two discourses, poverty and density, are often fused together.

High density imagined as dysfunctional by Americans

The conflation of high density and poverty in the American imagination is evident in the government's eventual disavowal of high-rise public housing. The case of Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project is exemplary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/magazine/the-towers-came-down-and-with-them-the-promise-of-public-housing.html

Ricks lived at Cabrini-Green for the next 21 years. She worked as a teacher’s aide in the local schools that most of her own (eventual) 13 children attended. She babysat, ran an after-school program and served free lunches out of the field house by her high-rise. She moved her aging mother in with them, and Ricks’s grown children found jobs in construction, home health care, retail and at a new residential complex built atop the old Madison Street “skid row,” an area refashioned into the “West Loop.” Ricks didn’t leave Cabrini after one of her nephews was hit with several bullets through her apartment window — his heart stopped twice before he survived. She stuck it out as the city demolished every other public-housing high-rise in Chicago not reserved for the elderly, including all the towers at Cabrini-Green save hers. After the start of this civic remodeling, in 1999, Mayor Richard M. Daley said that breaking up the severe concentrations of poverty of high-rise public housing would finally imbue long-neglected neighborhoods with vitality; the mostly black residents who lived there in social and economic isolation would be able to reap the rewards of the resurgent city. “I want to rebuild their souls,” Daley declared. But Ricks believed her soul was doing all right on its own. She refused to go, in 2010, even as every neighbor remaining in her building took whatever replacement housing was offered them. She outlasted them all. “I’m the last woman standing,” Ricks liked to declare.

There is a disjunction between the sense of loyalty, camaraderie and hopefulness among those who lived in high-density public housing like Cabrini-Green -- which often constituted an improvement over their previous neighborhoods -- and the presumption by authorities of hopeless social dysfunction.

Nevertheless, the public housing policy born in the New Deal did smack of "socialism", at least in its rhetoric.

The fate of public housing in America — its rise, much of it in the form of towers like Cabrini-Green, and its fall as those towers came down — is the story of urban poverty as an unsteady political priority. In his first year as president, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the federal Housing Division, as part of the Public Works Administration. The P.W.A. built the country’s first 51 public-housing developments, including three in Chicago. By then the shortcomings of the for-profit real estate market were evident in eviction riots, in sprawling homeless encampments and in cities overflowing with mile after mile of cheap, decrepit frame dwellings. In segregated black neighborhoods, where families were excluded from competing for housing on the open market, the conditions were more dire. Without government intervention in some form, private developers and landlords were never going to build or maintain anywhere near enough homes for the urban poor. Like other New Deal assistance programs — relief for farmers, aid to senior citizens through Social Security, food stamps — public housing treated poverty as a widespread social and economic injustice that the country was obligated to right.The subsidy was also intended to help jump-start the economy by rebuilding moribund cities and creating jobs. In 1937, Congress passed more extensive legislation, establishing a federal housing agency; Chicago and other cities formed their own housing authorities to operate the program locally. “I see one-third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished,” Roosevelt announced that year. “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Ideological opposition to public housing has remained consistent in both substance and tone.

Then, as now, the idea of government-run housing was maligned as anticapitalist and socialist; it clashed with a national ethos wrapped up in visions of the frontiersman and the self-made entrepreneur. When the Housing Act of 1937 was being debated, it was opposed by real estate trade groups and property owners’ associations, by builders, suppliers, the U.S. Chambers of Commerce and the departments of the Interior and  the Treasury. Although the subsidy was reserved for only stable families with modest incomes — the “deserving poor” — the ceiling on what qualifying residents could earn was said to discourage hard work, acting as a sap on initiative and pluck.

Nevertheless, the real "socialism" in housing in the USA is for those who are not poor. It consists of massive subsidies for real estate investment. Notably, there are few complaints.

Maybe most telling, the same Depression-era legislation that funded the first public-housing complexes also created the federally insured private home loan. With this revolution in home financing, buyers were able to put down as little as 10 percent of a house’s cost and pay off their mortgages in small increments over an unprecedented 30 years. Even today, the federal government devotes three times as much each year to mortgage-interest deductions and other subsidies to the speculative real estate market — essentially public housing for homeowners — than to the entire annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It was during the 1950s that governments began to create apartment complexes in the city for public housing. This was influenced by the contemporary rage for modernist architecture.

The original public housing was simple in design and low-rise in construction, typically brick row houses or duplexes in diverse neighborhood. That changed in the search for greater efficiencies.

In the 1950s, cities began to build massive complexes of clustered towers encircled by plots of land closed off to through streets. It was a purity of modernist city planning, influenced by the avant-garde “towers in the park” urban reimagining of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. The density and nearly identical stripped-down designs of the high-rises were also believed to cut down on costs while meeting greater demand.

Despite the new scale and isolation of public housing, it was often regarded as paradise for those who moved there. It was a disciplined environment, and resources were dedicated to it.

“It’s almost like I died and went to heaven,” one of the first tenants of a development in Chicago recalled years later. Even though these were low-income communities of thousands of people crammed together on isolated plazas, many families still found a modest home to be somehow divine after the damnation of the cold-water flats they left behind. There, they had been afraid of fires and sickness and eviction. Public housing, by contrast, was new and orderly. All the families went through a screening process. The buildings had teams of janitors on call around the clock. Groundskeepers maintained the gardens and lawns. There was a city agency responsible for answering calls.

Over time, however, large public housing was repurposed to promote segregation. Discipline unraveled and resources were starved.

Across the entire country, a majority of public housing remained in low-rises; there were eventually more than 3,000 local authorities, most with fewer than 500 units. But large housing “projects” came to dominate urban landscapes and symbolize for many the unruliness and otherness of the “inner city” in decline. The towers-in-the-park design was only ever partly to blame. In Chicago, as elsewhere, high-rise developments were built intentionally in neighborhoods that were already segregated racially; rather than apportioning the working poor across a number of areas and helping to diversify cities, public housing had the effect of solidifying racial and economic boundaries in superblocks detached from the street grid, in towers of concrete and steel. Yet they were also perennially underfunded and perilously mismanaged. The developments were allowed to deteriorate as maintenance and repairs lagged. And as the broader fortunes of cities declined — diminishing populations and disappearing jobs, spiking poverty and crime and drug use — public housing bore the worst of those effects.

The national attitude by the 1970s was that public housing, identified with tall buildings, needed to be destroyed.

Soon, those same broad trends were used to justify abandoning the basic democratic idea of providing shelter for all. In 1972, when the 33 Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis began to be imploded a mere 18 years after the complex fully opened, the televised image, with its mushrooming cloud of dust and debris, defined the popular notion of the public-housing experiment: It needed to be destroyed.

Two decades later, cities began to gentrify, hastening the end of public housing.

In 1990, Chicago’s population started to tick up for the first time in 40 years; the area surrounding Cabrini-Green added 4,000 white residents during the previous decade, and vacant lots that had sold for $30,000 a few years earlier were being snapped up for five times that amount. As the fortunes of cities changed once again, public housing experienced a new pressure. HUD began to award municipalities tens of millions of dollars in grants to tear down their public-housing high-rises and replace them with much smaller developments that mixed public-housing families with higher-income renters and market-rate owners. Proposals to preserve some of the towers, filling in the cleared land around them with a variety of housing types, were rejected. Many low-rise developments in rejuvenating areas were targeted as well. A majority of the relocated public-housing residents were given Section 8 vouchers to rent from landlords in the private market. Nationwide, 250,000 public-housing units have been demolished since the 1990s. Atlanta, Baltimore, Columbus, Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Tucson — just about every American city got in on the action. But no city knocked down as many as Chicago.

Housing projects were replaced with Section 8 vouchers for rent. However, the underfunding of vouchers fostered the same dysfunctional outcomes as did the underfunding of the housing projects.

Nationally, the number of families using a Section 8 rent subsidy has doubled over the last 25 years, to 2.3 million. In theory, a voucher gives a family the choice to live anywhere. But the rents the federal government pays to Section 8 landlords are generally not enough for a home in a diverse neighborhood with strong schools and low crime; most landlords taking vouchers aren’t in “opportunity” areas but in poor and racially isolated ones not so different from the razed government-run high-rises. In 2003, an independent monitor of the C.H.A.’s first years of relocations offered a bleak assessment: “The result has been that the vertical ghettos from which the families are being moved are being replaced with horizontal ghettos, located in well defined, highly segregated neighborhoods.”

Living in high-rise public housing, people formed communities in order to survive. Now dispersed in the worst sections of the city with Section 8 rental vouchers, the former Chicago Housing Authority residents found themselves suffering from the same old lack of opportunities and resources, but without their old networks of family and friends. Even worse, the other poor people in their new neighborhoods had an unjustified fear of them, and would sometimes attack them.

The families that were dispersed from Chicago’s demolished public housing have been blamed for the city’s recent surge in gun violence, as well as for crime in the suburbs, the greater Midwest and even parts of the South. Several studies have shown that C.H.A. residents did not spread disorder wherever they settled, as if they carried an infectious disease. But these families were moved primarily to areas of Chicago that were already hollowed out of population, schools, occupied homes, jobs and resources. In South Shore, which took on more Section 8 renters than any other neighborhood in the city, 3,700 apartments were caught up in foreclosures, one out of every five rental units. The problems of concentrated poverty and isolation, which the demolitions were supposed to solve, persisted — and relocated families now found themselves in strange territory without their former support networks. People in public housing had, by necessity, bartered services, shopped together, shared food, stepped up when a neighbor lost a loved one.

The saga of public housing in the USA illustrates the challenges of promoting affordable housing in a society that prefers to subsidize luxury housing as a speculative investment. Crucially, most housing in the USA might be understood as "luxury housing".

American homes as luxury housing

American houses just keep getting bigger while American family sizes just keep getting smaller.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-righteous-small-house-challenging-house-size-and-the-irresponsible-american-dream

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average size of a new single-family American residence in 1950 was 983 square feet. Today, it is nearly 2500 square feet. As home sizes ballooned over that time, family size shrank. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 1950, an average American family consisted of 3.8 people; today’s average family contains 2.6 people.

http://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-the-living-space-per-person-has-doubled-over-last-40-years/

For many observers, it is counterintuitive, irrational and self-indulgent that home size continues to expand even as family size shrinks. There may be, however, a method to this madness. As Americans have fewer children, they have more money to spend on their homes. As the home becomes more luxurious, it serves as a much-loved surrogate child. Unlike a child, the home is also perceived as an investment, not merely a drain on resources. That is, in the world we live in today, the home as nest egg promises to take care of the retiree, whereas filial piety is a hundred-to-one shot. Perhaps this is an example of disruptive innovation, in which an inferior product or technology finds a niche, improves over time, and then sweeps aside the longstanding incumbent in the marketplace. Houses are disrupting and replacing children. Extrapolated into the future, this would mean giant houses that never see the likes of a child. It is of concern if people are collectively spending over 2.5 times their household incomes on big houses, because that would constitute a housing bubble. However, it might not be such a drain on financial and natural resources if growing housing sizes lead to fewer children being produced. Counterintuitively, big empty houses could be helping to save the planet.
Moreover, building more luxury housing might be a necessary if imperfect way to produce affordable housing.

"Filtering" (Trickle-down housing)

One debate in housing policy is whether the principle behind "trickle-down" economics -- the theory that what economically benefits business elites benefits society -- applies to housing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

Trickle-down economics, also called trickle-down theory, refers to the economic proposition that taxes on businesses and the wealthy in society should be reduced as a means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term.

More specifically, does building more luxury housing lead to more housing for the greater population?

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/06/housing-supply-debate-affordable-home-prices-rent-yimby/591061/

There’s a fierce argument about housing affordability and supply that’s raging in the urbanist community. The big question: Does building “luxury” (or market rate) housing in wealthy neighborhoods free up more housing for everyone? Advocates in the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement say it does; others are more skeptical.

The market-rate-skeptic’s view: Allowing new market-rate housing citywide will only result in high-end units in already-expensive neighborhoods. At best, developers may win big as the wealthy enjoy new homes. At worst, it could exacerbate segregation in wealthy neighborhoods and displacement in low-income neighborhoods.

The pro-market-rate position, championed by YIMBYs, is more optimistic: This view would concede that, though it’s true that new market-rate units will be expensive given the current scarcity of housing, new units will ease up demand for existing housing. Through a process known as filtering, this older housing gradually becomes more affordable to middle- and low-income households. This will ultimately mitigate displacement risk in more vulnerable communities.

At least one research project concluded optimistically that new luxury housing created a chain reaction in which people at all levels moved up one step into better housing.

But when a household moves into a new unit, they initiate a kind of housing musical chairs by vacating their existing unit. A second household then moves into that unit, in turn vacating a third unit. For each new market-rate building, Mast follows this trail of movers back through six moves, tracking where residents are moving from, a process he calls the migration chain. By the sixth link of this chain, Mast finds that approximately half of the movers are moving out of census tracts with below-median incomes. As many as 20 percent of movers are coming from the poorest tracts in the city. 

It is not exactly a one-to-one correspondence, however. That is, creating 100 luxury homes only translates into half or two-thirds of that number of families moving up into newly vacated homes.

These findings suggest that housing markets aren’t nearly as segregated as some might fear, if you work your way down the migration chain far enough. His model suggests that for every 100 luxury units built in wealthier neighborhoods, as many as 48 households in moderate-income neighborhoods are able to move into housing that better suits their needs, vacating an existing unit in the process. Somewhere between 10 and 20 of these households are coming from among the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, vacating units and reducing demand where housing is most likely to be affordable for working families.

Mast’s model still indicates that for every 100 new market-rate units built, approximately 65 equivalent units are created by movers vacating existing units.

The trickle-down theory of filtering -- in which luxury home construction opens up housing at all levels -- is both necessarily true and yet proves insufficient. That is, new luxury housing will create a cascade of newly available homes for all incomes, but not enough to alleviate the entire shortage of housing.

Filtering hints at how it might be possible to build for density in affluent suburbs in order to provide low-income housing. More precisely, it suggests how to circumvent obstruction by affluent suburbanites.

How can greater density be introduced into more affluent areas?

Proposal #1: Introducing high density without low incomes (autonomous houses)

The proposal is that every suburb and city would be zoned or rezoned for density -- but not always for low income. In fact, maintaining substantive home prices would be the new criteria for zoning, replacing density concerns.

Sixty percent of the new high-density housing would be for people at the same income level as current inhabitants. That is, the only requirement for 60% of the new housing is that its price hover somewhere in the current range of the area. The other 40% of new construction would be marketed to the income group that is just below that of the city or suburb in question.

How would this play out in Westport, Connecticut? The average income in Westport is $151,771. This is in the realm of upper-middle class income, which ranges between roughly $100K and $400K. In terms of estimating stable home prices in the area, the Case-Shiller home-price index suggests that although home prices historically fluctuate, they stabilize at 2.5 times the average family income in any given area. The average Westport home price could be estimated at $375,000 ($150K x 2.5). This would be the center of the price range for 60% of the new duplexes, townhouses and condos in Westport.

The other 40% of the dense new housing in Westport would be built for people one notch below Westport's upper-middle class profile -- the middle class. The average American household income is about $60,000, so the average prices of half the new housing would be aimed at $150,000 ($60K x 2.5). The middle-class might not be able to shop at the local Whole Foods in Westport, but they will own cars and not have to catch a series of buses to get to Costco.

The challenge is to build housing for higher density -- that is, to build smaller homes, and homes scrunched next to and stacked on one another -- but at the already established price range of a neighborhood. Building a significantly smaller home that is not significantly less expensive is not a conventional objective of the building industry, of its customers or of public policy. Indeed, building big with cheap materials has been the customary practice (e.g., McMansions).

One way to build a smaller but more advanced home would be to build "zero net energy buildings" and "autonomous houses".

ZNEBs and autonomous buildings

The most flexible and robust building or home would be a hybrid of:
1) a zero net energy building (ZNEB) connected to the grid, and drawing some of the resources (water, electricity) from the grid, but also producing and collecting such resources, and
2) an autonomous building capable of detaching from the grid for extended periods, which generally would have its own established waste disposal system (wastewater, garbage, etc.).

Zero net energy buildings (ZNEB)

So-called 'zero net energy' houses are becoming more of a reality.

With a combination of rooftop solar panels, smart thermostats, advanced water heaters and other high-efficiency features, the homes are all built with a similar goal: to make at least as much energy as they use over a year.
It’s a concept known as zero net energy, and the cluster of homes here represents one of the nation’s largest experiments to see if zero net energy can be put into wider use.

Of course, a ZNEB would initially be more expensive. But in terms of the proposal at hand -- reassuring affluent homeowners that significant home prices will be sustained in their neighborhoods, even while restrictions against high density are relaxed -- a smaller, more expensive home is ideal. Moreover, it's a house that practically has no energy bills.

If homeowners feel any effect, it is in the pocketbook, at least initially. The houses, all with three or four bedrooms, cost more than the $373,990 to $476,990 standard for the subdivision about 20 minutes west of San Bernardino. But because the cost is wrapped into the mortgage, and paid over an extended period of time, it is more easily affordable, and the larger payments are generally offset by the savings on energy bills.

Back in the East, where the Genaus’ previous house had a big foyer, their energy bills could go as high as $500 a month. “I’d rather be cold sometimes than see the bill,” Ms. Genau, 29, said. “It was ridiculous.”

Their energy bill now? About $10.

An autonomous building would go even one step further than a NZEB.

Autonomous buildings

Autonomous buildings take energy efficiency to an extreme.

An autonomous building is a building designed to be operated independently from infrastructural support services such as the electric power grid, gas grid, municipal water systems, sewage treatment systems, storm drains, communication services, and in some cases, public roads.

That being said, the value of autonomous buildings is not just environmental. There would be increased security in terms of civil defense (a neighborhood with autonomous buildings would better survive prolonged blackouts, storms, government paralysis, etc.). Also, in the long term, autonomous buildings lower the cost of living in terms of energy usage.

Advocates of autonomous building describe advantages that include reduced environmental impacts, increased security, and lower costs of ownership. Some cited advantages satisfy tenets of green building, not independence per se (see below). Off-grid buildings often rely very little on civil services and are therefore safer and more comfortable during civil disaster or military attacks. (Off-grid buildings would not lose power or water if public supplies were compromised for some reason.) Most of the research and published articles concerning autonomous building focus on residential homes. British architects Brenda and Robert Vale have said that, as of 2002,

"It is quite possible in all parts of Australia to construct a 'house with no bills', which would be comfortable without heating and cooling, which would make its own electricity, collect its own water and deal with its own waste... These houses can be built now, using off-the-shelf techniques. It is possible to build a "house with no bills" for the same price as a conventional house, but it would be (25%) smaller."

Does anyone want to live in a house that is 25% smaller? On the other hand, that might just be an excellent mechanism to get people to downsize.

NZEBs are becoming more possible with the dramatic and on-going fall in the price of renewable energy. Unfortunately, the technological obstacles to distributed waste disposal are not tumbling.

Technically, the potential for an autonomous building to be self-reliant and self-contained depends on its maintenance of a functioning septic system.

What is a septic system?

A septic system is an on-site method of treating and disposing of sanitary wastewater. A typical septic system often consists of the following:

• Buried tank - removes suspended solids from raw wastewater
• Effluent distribution system 
• Soil absorption area – provides for additional effluent treatment and attenuation through the processes of adsorption, dispersion, and biodegradation

Septic systems may also have grease traps or other pre-treatment technologies.  More sophisticated designs can include several small septic tanks that drain to a dry well, or connections to multiple absorption areas used on a rotating basis.

Septic systems are commonly found in rural and suburban areas where people often rely on ground water for their drinking water. Septic systems that are properly sited, designed, constructed, operated, and maintained pose little threat to drinking water sources. However, poorly designed, maintained, or operated septic systems can contaminate ground water or surface water. 

A single septic systems can serve more than one household.

What is a large-capacity septic system?

A septic system is considered a large capacity septic system (LCSS) if it receives solely sanitary waste either from multiple dwellings or from a non-residential establishment and the system has the capacity to serve 20 or more persons per day.
In general, LCSSs may be found serving the following facilities:

• Apartment buildings
• Trailer parks
• Schools and religious institutions
• Office, industrial, and commercial buildings
• Shopping malls
• State parks and campgrounds
• Recreation or vehicle (RV) parks
• Highway rest areas
• Train and bus stations
• Hotels and restaurants
• Casinos

Apartment buildings, for example, can utilize both conventional and alternative septic systems. The conventional systems consist of either basic systems that utilize gravity or the pressure distribution model that distributes wastewater throughout different areas of the drainfield simultaneously. The alternative systems consist of either 1) an aerobic treatment unit uses oxygen to decompose solid waste in the septic tank more efficiently or 2) a mound systems that are suitable for areas where apartment buildings have little or insufficient soil for wastewater treatment.

A sand filter system is similar to a mound system but incorporates a sand filter and pump.The most common aerobic treatment systems use a suspended growth process where oxygen is injected into the septic tank to help bacteria grow and act on wastewater solids. The mound system works in a way similar to a conventional one. However, it incorporates a pump and a small hill above ground level that provides a primary filtering process. This gives the water an extra level of filtering before it reaches groundwater. Sand filter systems integrate an extra sand-filled area that works as a primary filter for wastewater pumped out of the septic tanks before it reaches the drainfield and, subsequently, the groundwater.

To summarize, a septic system is crucial to making a building autonomous. Unfortunately, the discourse on sustainability seems to begin and end with the development and distribution of renewable energy, and does not broach the issues of water and wastewater inputs and outputs. So the potential for advanced systems of onsite wastewater management is crucial.
Autonomous buildings are an intriguing topic in terms of the regulation of building size. The requirement for autonomy would limit building heights because the energy and wastewater systems would not scale cheaply.

Substituting autonomy requirements for height restrictions in zoning

The height restriction laws imposed on buildings are largely based on aesthetic and symbolic reasons, with only a few practical considerations (e.g., airport air space).

Height restriction laws are laws that restrict the maximum height of structures. There are a variety of reasons for these measures. Some restrictions limit the height of new buildings so as not to block views of an older work decreed to be an important landmark by a government. For example, In the Tsarist Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, buildings could not be taller than the Winter Palace. Other restrictions are because of practical concern, such as around airports to prevent any danger to flight safety.

For the most part, there are no practical reasons for height restrictions on buildings. The reasons seem to be primarily emotional and sentimental. Height restriction laws would be relaxed or even waived on the condition that a building be autonomous in its resource production, consumption and disposal. This would not represent the complete elimination of zoning laws, but rather their rationalization. Buildings would still be restricted in their height, not by arbitrary laws but by the added cost of autonomous buildings that would need to produce much of their own energy and process their own outputs.

Suburban congestion and parking policy

To return to the matter of zoning restrictions in the suburbs, the one issue that is most difficult to address is the problem of increased traffic congestion. Higher population densities mean more vehicles on the road, and suburbs are not optimal for mass transit.
However, parking policy can address the problem of congestion.
Parking policy would involve a two-prong strategy:

• banning free street parking
• ending mandated private parking

In this podcast on urban parking policy, the UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup makes a bold statement: NO FREE PARKING!

SHOUP: Everybody likes free parking, including me, probably you. But just because the driver doesn’t pay for it doesn’t mean that the cost goes away. If you don’t pay for parking your car, somebody else has to pay for it. And that somebody is everybody. We pay for free parking in the prices of the goods we buy at places where the parking is free. And we pay for parking as residents when we get free parking with our housing. We pay for it as taxpayers. Increasingly, I think we’re paying for it in terms of the environmental harm that it causes.

This would seem to be a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, where the desires of each individual undermines communal resources.

The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource.

This is also a story of mass gambling addiction. The most powerful form of reinforcement is intermittent, the variable ratio schedule found in the use slot machines and participation in lotteries. In a sense, we are all addicted to the idea of randomly finding that free parking space.

Shoup suggested three solutions to the parking problem.

• finding the lowest parking price that leaves one or two vacant spaces on each block – around 85% parking space occupancy,
• returning meter revenue to the neighborhood that generates it, and
• removing off-street parking requirements when a building’s land-use changes.

In a famous op-ed by Shoup, he argues that much of traffic congestion is caused by drivers looking for parking spaces. He made very detailed observations about traffic patterns caused by free street parking.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In a recent survey conducted by Bruce Schaller in the SoHo district in Manhattan, 28 percent of drivers interviewed while they were stopped at traffic lights said they were searching for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.

When my students and I studied cruising for parking in a 15-block business district in Los Angeles, we found the average cruising time was 3.3 minutes, and the average cruising distance half a mile (about 2.5 times around the block). This may not sound like much, but with 470 parking meters in the district, and a turnover rate for curb parking of 17 cars per space per day, 8,000 cars park at the curb each weekday. Even a small amount of cruising time for each car adds up to a lot of traffic.

Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.

Ultimately, because the cost of street parking is artificially low, drivers are incentivized to cruise around looking for a free space. This creates traffic congestion.

What causes this astonishing waste? As is often the case, the prices are wrong. A national study of downtown parking found that the average price of curb parking is only 20 percent that of parking in a garage, giving drivers a strong incentive to cruise.

Underpriced curb spaces are like rent-controlled apartments: hard to find and, once you do, crazy to give up. This increases the time costs (and therefore the congestion and pollution costs) of cruising.

 Some places are already doing something about this.

To prevent shortages, some cities have begun to adjust their meter rates (using trial and error) to produce about an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking. The prices vary by location and the time of day. Drivers can usually find a vacant curb space near their destination, and the search time is zero. Cities can adjust the price of curb parking in response to demand to keep roughly one out of every eight spaces vacant throughout the day. Right-priced curb parking can eliminate cruising.

 Finding the right price for parking can be tricky.

The balance between the varying demand for parking and the fixed supply of curb spaces is the Goldilocks Principle of parking prices: the price is too high if too many spaces are vacant, and too low if no spaces are vacant. But when only a few spaces are vacant, the price is just right, and everyone will see that curb parking is both well used and readily available.

But finding the right price has financial benefits for the city.

Beyond the transportation and environmental benefits, performance-based prices for curb parking can yield ample revenue. If the city uses a share of this money for added public services on the metered streets, residents and local merchants will be more willing to support charging the right price for curb parking. These funds can be used to clean and maintain sidewalks, plant trees, improve lighting, remove graffiti, bury utility wires and provide other public improvements. Returning the meter revenue generated by a district to the district can persuade residents, merchants and property owners to support right-priced curb parking.

Shoup argues that each street should typically have one or two parking spaces available, and that parking prices should be adjusted for the locale and the time of day to achieve that.

The typical street has about ten spaces. Hence, an 85% occupancy rate is Shoup's norm.

Redwood City, Calif., for example, sets its downtown meter rates to achieve an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking (the rates vary by location and time of day, depending on demand). Because the city returns the revenue to pay for added public services in the metered district, the downtown area will receive an estimated $1 million a year for increased police protection and cleaner sidewalks.

(Shoup's classic paper, "The High Cost of Free Parking", explains his research.)
But ending free street parking is just one strategy in Shoup's program.

The other strategy is ending the requirement that homes and businesses have their own private parking.

Because cities with fewer cars will need fewer parking spaces, city planners can abandon their most expensive zoning regulation: off-street parking requirements. Requiring all new buildings to provide ample off-street parking spreads the city over a larger area, reduces density and makes cars the default way to travel. Parking requirements also undermine public transit and make life harder for people who are too poor to own a car.

These parking requirements have a cascade of unintended negative consequences.

I argue in “The High Cost of Free Parking” that minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, exclude poor people, degrade urban design, reduce walkability and damage the economy. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements have these effects and more. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking.

Policies like mandatory off-street parking tend to benefit the affluent.

City planners cannot do much to counter the inequality of wealth in the United States, but they can help to reform parking requirements that place heavy burdens on minorities and the poor. Removing minimum parking requirements may be the cheapest and simplest way to achieve a more just society, and will produce a cascade of benefits for cities, the economy and the environment. Best of all, cities don’t need to wait until cars disappear before they remove their unwise parking requirements. They can remove their parking requirements now.

Another example of inequality is a plethora of large, expensive, under-occupied homes strewn along the American landscape, even while homes grow ever more unaffordable.

Along these lines, another proposal would address the increasing size of American homes and the decreasing number of inhabitants, as well as the issue of elderly residents alone in houses.

Proposal #2: Fees on underused homes & public apartments for seniors in their suburbs

Perhaps the most pointed insight in the article on the Cabrini-Green housing project is how the majority of housing subsidies in the USA are not for the poor and needy, but exist in the form of government support for mortgages and real estate investment. Regardless of the drawbacks of this policy -- feeding increasing home sizes and inflating housing bubbles -- this could suggest a way to increase affordable housing. Importantly, it would not involve taxes.

Just as there are taxes imposed on vacant homes that drive up the cost of housing, there would be fees imposed on homes based on the estimated ratio of floorspace to occupant in a particular neighborhood. The revenue from these fees would be distributed evenly throughout the general population on a per capita basis to compensate for the high cost of homes. Every American would receive, say, $1,000 a year from these fees for underused residential floorspace.

Within this distribution of revenue, there would be a special program for seniors. This would help to encourage seniors to downsize and move out of their long-time suburban homes. Rent vouchers for seniors would be inversely proportional to the amount of floor space of their new home. For example, an elderly couple in a 1,500 square foot apartment would receive, say, $1,000 a month, but if they downsized to a 750 square foot place they would receive, say, $2,000 a month.

Moreover, in the suburbs, high-rise residential towers for seniors would be erected next to shopping centers. Or, at least, there would be some effort to create a walkable urban core in the suburbs for seniors who would not be driving anywhere. The idea is to create high-density public housing for senior citizens in their current suburbs. These would be subsidized retirement homes for all income groups within the senior population, not just for disadvantaged seniors. If seniors were to sell or to rent their houses, they they would be eligible for subsidized housing in apartment buildings dedicated to seniors in the locality in which they have long lived. Suburbs might be more inclined to allow zoning for more density in the form of housing for seniors, as opposed to housing for the poor. This might be especially true if those seniors are locals.

https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-renting-suburbs.html

Not everyone wants to live in a single-family home. Households are getting smaller, with single-member households growing fastest of all. At the same time, not everyone can afford to live in a center city, where costs have risen sharply over the past decade. Add these factors together and the result is lots of new apartments going up in suburbs. “People don’t have to choose the center city or the suburbs with the idea that they’re homogenous or contrasting,” says June Williamson, an architecture professor at The City College of New York. “There are parts of each all around.”

Not everyone is happy about this trend. In suburban Minneapolis -- and in suburbs of Chicago, Salt Lake City, San Jose, Calif., and other cities -- longtime residents have waged one form of protest or another against new developments. They complain that their towns don’t have the capacity to handle so much growth at once, whether their worry is traffic or increased demand on schools. “A lot of these units are one or two bedrooms, max,” says Rolf Pendall, head of the department of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois. “Even so, there’s concern about kids entering the local elementary school or, even if they’re above median income, concern that the new residents of a home of any kind are going to put more demand on the local budget.”

Aside from potential resistance, this proposal might face at least a couple of obstacles. One paradox is that as seniors age, financially, they have greater reasons to downsize and move into an apartment, but psychologically, they become increasingly reluctant to do just that. Hopefully, if apartment buildings can be built in every suburb for seniors, they may find this option less objectionable than a more drastic move (e.g., to Florida). For this reason, seniors should be encouraged to move out of their houses as early as possible, perhaps starting at the age of 65, the official age of retirement.

Another potential obstacle to subsidized housing for seniors in suburbs is the invalidation of the old chestnut that people live in the suburbs in order to raise a family. The cliche is not so true anymore. People increasingly live in the suburbs childless. They might want to live alone permanently in houses.

This might have always been a long-term trend. In the 1950s, home sizes in the suburbs were less than half the size they are today, and families were larger. Perhaps the trend was always for bigger houses with fewer family members. Richard Florida explains the new, child-lite American suburb:

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/06/suburbs-definition-census-data-way-of-life/591343/

The suburbs don’t revolve around children.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that only one-fifth of suburban households are married couples with children. This is a sharp contrast to the 1950s image of suburbs filled with nuclear families and young kids. The average suburban neighborhood now, according to the researchers, is “composed primarily of married households without kids and single-person households.”

The share of married-with-kids households is considerably higher in the suburbs than in urban areas. However, the percentage of households with kids under 18 is remarkably similar in both kinds of places—roughly 22 percent. Nearly one-quarter (22 to 24 percent) of suburbanites live alone, compared to one-third of urbanites.

It has been observed repeatedly that the traditional cycle in the USA of seniors in the suburbs selling their homes and young couples purchasing those houses to raise their children has been slowed, if not broken. Young adults in the city wait longer to marry and have children, or they don't have children, or they they don't move to the suburbs but to smaller, more affordable cities; and seniors are not selling their homes, either, because they feel home prices are not high enough to justify a sale or because all their memories and affections are wrapped up in the house and its vast collection of items and in their local network of friends and family. Offering seniors subsidized apartments might help to revive this cycle by lowering the cost of suburban housing.

But that might not work for two reasons.

First, Americans in the suburbs -- and not just seniors -- may never want to sell their house because emotionally that is all they have. (This is distinct from the observation above that over time, seniors increasing abhor the disruption of moving.) Subsidies may not work to get lonely old singles and couples out of their five-bedroom houses because the house is their best friend and family. Related to this is the observation that as the American family lost its cohesion and centrality in American life, it was replaced by the house as the focus of affection, and the family became an ornament of the house. (For the younger generation, the family may be the ornament of the Instagram account.) By the 2000s, the house had become the meaning of life for Americans.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5525283

Second, the urban mentality might have spread to the suburbs, and that might include the desire to have smaller families. It had often been asserted that Manhattan has always been a cultural "postcard from the future". Because the average household size in Manhattan is 2.0 persons, it was assumed that the USA was headed toward childlessness and city life. That might be happening -- albeit without the urbanization that city-loving liberals envisioned as the future. In fact, city-loving liberals themselves generally live in the suburbs and drive everywhere, and they fight the possibility of real urban development.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/los-angeles-public-transportation-tax-measure-m-metro/580609/

Conversely, the conservative urban planner Joel Kotkin triumphantly asserts that the suburbs are the future, pointing out that suburbs continue to grow. Now that suburbs provide the amenities that at one time only the city could provide, Kotkin claims, the final victory of the suburbs over the city is complete. Yet the cultural ubanization of the suburbs might in some respects represent the conquest of the suburbs by the spirit of the city. More specifically, the urban ethos that now pervades the suburbs might include the embrace of small family sizes.

Ultimately, giant houses in the suburbs are irrational in terms of serving as a home for only one or two individuals. Getting seniors into suburban apartments would involve a three-part strategy:

• Fees would be levied on homes in terms of the ratio of floor space to number of occupants.
• Revenues from the fees would subsidize rent for the suburban apartments of seniors, inversely proportional to the floor space of the apartments.
• Suburbs would (somehow) be compelled to build apartments for local seniors.

In sum, just as there is a vacant home tax for unoccupied real estate, someday a "semi-vacant" home fee may arise, in which a penalty would be levied in terms of the ratio of home size to number of occupants. As a fee to compensate the public for the rising cost of housing, the revenues that it generated would be channeled to subsidize the suburban apartment housing of seniors who have sold or rented out their houses. Moreover, the smaller the apartment that seniors would move into, the bigger the rental voucher that they would receive. Moreover, suburbs would be encouraged to build apartment buildings for their local seniors in walkable areas.

To some extent, the policies described above -- zoning for higher density by promoting autonomous buildings and NZEBs (and thereby abolishing the need for height restrictions), eliminating both free street parking and the requirement for private parking, imposing fees on vacant and underutilized homes and redistributing the revenues equally to the entire population -- all promote a certain autonomy and localized distribution of resource production and consumption. In becoming more autonomous, those locales may display the traits of "self-organizing systems".

Self-organizing systems

Self-organizing systems consist of lower-level component parts that interact to produce  system-wide order. Simple rules or limited input at the local level produce the complex behavior of the whole system.

Self-organization is a process where some form of overall order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between smaller component parts of an initially disordered system. 

A self-organized system involves collectively directed movement coordinated among constituent parts which is triggered by limited stimuli generated in the local environment. A classic example would be a school of fish.

As a collective body, the fish move with dazzling dexterity and coordination, with each fish reacting to the movement of the group as well as to events outside the group. The individual fish may lack advanced complexity, yet there is a resulting over-all sophistication to the group's behavior, with the school moving with a stunning agility and fluidity in the face of danger.

The process of self-organization can be spontaneous, and it is not necessarily controlled by any auxiliary agent outside of the system. It is often triggered by random fluctuations that are amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized or distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive and, even, self-repair substantial damage or perturbations. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in a variety of physical, chemical, biological, robotic, social, and cognitive systems. Examples of its realization can be found in crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, and neural networks.

The article notes how economists like Paul Krugman and Friedrich Hayek utilized the idea of self-organization, but there is no mention of self-organization in relation to urban planning.

If buildings were both ZNEB and autonomous -- producing much of their own energy and processing much of their own outputs, and also supplying other buildings with energy and water -- then these buildings, as the fundamental components of the urban fabric, could introduce the question of self-organization into the field of urban planning. That is, to some degree urban "planning" would be turned on its head when generation and disposal is distributed. Moreover, the height restrictions on buildings would become redundant because building size would be restricted by the need to save and produce energy. That is, the cost of constructing an autonomous-NZEB building would place a rational limit on what gets built. The urban fabric would evolve organically in response to the capacity to make a building autonomous in relation to the value of real estate (which is, of course, higher in the urban core than in the suburbs).

Reformed parking policy would likewise promote self-organization at the local level. In reality, there is no such thing as "free street parking", it is all subsidized by the state. This is a top-down, hierarchical arrangement that ignores actual local conditions. In contrast, metered parking would involve the locality adjusting to the local situation. The locality would optimize parking fees by fixing the price of parking so that there were at least one or at most two open parking spots on a ten-car street at any given moment. (Parking meters are now computerized and accept credit cards, so this price point that aims at an 85% rate of street occupancy does not need to be checked and verified by a worker, it would be done automatically and adjust parking fees to variable demand throughout the day.) Likewise, mandatory off-street private parking would not need to be imposed by the state because there would be ample metered parking on the street.

To some degree, a reformation of housing subsidies would encourage self-organization in housing markets. Similar to a vacant home tax, there would be a fee on underutilized space based on the ratio of the average floorspace in a given neighborhood to the average number of occupants estimated to live in those neighborhoods. Revenues from these fees would be distributed throughout the population equally to every individual in order to compensate for the plethora of overly large houses that contribute to the unaffordability of homes. Moreover, a special program in line with this would exist for senior citizens. For those over the age of 65, subsidies to recipients would be inversely proportional to the size of the abode that they live in. Compared to the current system of government subsidies for housing (for example, the government-backed 30-year mortgage), this kind of policy would resemble a self-organized system insofar as it involved local-level feedback systems rather than a one-size-fits-all policy imposed by the federal government.