Liveblog
Correspondents Duncan Black (Eschaton), Brentin Mock (The American Prospect), Reihan Salam (The Atlantic), Ryan Avent (Grist), Harry Moroz and John Petro (Drum Major Institute) and Diana Lind (Next American City) bring you live updates from the A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Transforming America’s Housing Policy conference.
Conference presented by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
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Am I the Only One Who is a Bit Lost? | Feb 12th at 3:25pm
I’m now sitting in the back with the other bloggers and trying to stay focused during this panel discussion called From Front Yards to Schoolyards: Linking Housing Policy and School Reform. There’s five panelists and I can’t quite link much of what is being said to HOUSING. I was expecting this panel to talk about how many people choose where to live based on the schools that are available… haven’t heard anything about that.
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Community Engagement in Schooling and Housing | Feb 12th at 3:18pm
I’m always encouraged to hear leadership talk about community engagement, in terms of meeting the living needs of people in the neighborhoods who are hosting the schools. Wendy Puriefoy, president of Public Education Network and Warren Simmons, head of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, both gave examples of education initiatives that are addressing multiple obstacles and challenges facing families in poor, urban areas: obstacles like unemployment, ill mental and physical health and financial distress.
As Puriefoy noted, “employment determines where you live and whether or not you’re paid a living wage.” It also determines, of course, whether you rent or own a house, or whether you have a house at all. And it’s nice to know that families regardless of their living situation can have the same kind of say and influence over what schools should provide for their children as do those families with means and 5,000 square foot homes do in their schools.
But increased community engagement is not a novel concept. This has been a priority agenda for many nonprofits and advocacy organizations for decades. What I’d like to see is an office or department in government who attends all of these community dialogues and tracks what is offered from the community and how much their suggestions are actually considered when decisions are made. I’d also like to see a system that sustains these initiatives. Often times major community engagement programs are started, but all it takes is a regime change—new superintendent, new school board majority, “chancellor” from city or state takes over a school district—and then the community clause gets clipped.
New Orleans is going through a major community(s) engagement process while at the same time watching their schools go through one of the largest education experiments in America right now. It’d be really good to have a handle on how much of their input is steering that experiment—especially since so many of New Orleans families are still without homes. It’d also be relieving to know that their voices will remain a key part of education dialogues well into the future.
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Practically impossible | Feb 12th at 3:07pm
Ed Glaeser advocated for a few policy changes, including elimination or reduction of the mortgage interest deduction, that would probably be quite unpopular politically. His fellow panelists noted this flaw, and in response Glaeser said that he was aware that such changes were unlikely to be made, but that economists and other academics had a responsibility, at times, to point out what is best, whether it’s possible or not. And indeed, economists seem to take a perverse pleasure in suggesting policies that haven’t the slightest chance of prevailing in the political realm.
Glaeser also noted that location-based schooling was one of the chief banes of urban places. And one of the chief themes of Amy Ellen Schwartz’s (the lead presenter on the second panel) talk was that location-based schooling tends to generate bad outcome in “bad” neighborhoods (and wide performance gaps at a metropolitan level). But, she quickly noted, she wouldn’t seek to sever the link between neighborhood and school, in part because the idea would be politically toxic.
I don’t note this to disagree with their assessments, but merely to point out that it leaves us in an odd place—trying to duplicate the effects of location-independent schooling without actually getting rid of the neighborhood-based school system. But it is a step forward, I think to at least be acknowledging that while what goes on inside the schools is important, so to is where the school is located, and the kinds of communities that feed into it. Improving education is about methods and teachers, but also about building healthier communities, and healthier cities.
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Suburbanites’ Growing Political Influence | Feb 12th at 3:00pm
A note on Ryan’s point:
“transportation funding in the stimulus plan favors low density areas, because our national political system advantages less populous places over more populous places. This increases the political influence of those places still further, which feeds back into the politics of funding allocations, and on the cycle.”
This is true. Take note that in 1992 presidential elections, 41% of the electorate lived in the suburbs, whereas in our 2008 election that number rose to 49%. At the same time the urban slice of the electorate rose from 24% to 30%. In both cases, Barack Obama commanded the majority of votes. As Ken Silver of fivethirtyeight.com points out:
“With the votes that [Obama] banked in the cities, Obama did not really need to prevail in the suburbs. But he did anyway ... bettering McCain by 2 points there.”
Silver goes on to note how the number of nonwhite voters living in the suburbs is growing—currently 20 percent—and also how eight to nine million people commute from suburbs into cities every day. So, it seems that for whatever reason that people fled outward in the first place, they may be getting more comfortable with the city core, perhaps comfortable enough to start shopping there again as all their big-box outlets continue to close shop.
But if Obama is grabbing the attention of suburbanites’ political interests like the electorate stats suggest, then he’s going to need to start being more direct in his messages about what sacrifice means, and how sprawl is one of the first animals that needs to go to the altar.
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Would States Make Better Land Use Decisions Than Local Governements? | Feb 12th at 2:51pm
In order to increase the density of our communities, Ed Glaeser suggested taking away land use decisions from local governments and instead leaving these decisions up to state governments. The thinking is that NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard, the term given to those that oppose developments and projects that may benefit the city or region as a whole) is a major barrier to increasing the density of neighborhoods.
I’m just not very certain that statehouses will make the proper land use decisions. State governments tend to have a more suburban or rural framework than municipal governments.
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Selling It | Feb 12th at 2:42pm
The people on the panel all basically agreed that we need to implement/change policies so that more people live in denser areas. To many people that is a very undesirable outcome. They don’t want to live in dense areas. They don’t want to increase the supply of residences contained in multifamily structures. They don’t want lot sizes to be smaller. They don’t want driving to be more expensive. These all sound like very bad things to them. So how do you convince people these are good policies when the outcomes actually sound very bad to them?
I know that there are benefits to these policies as well. I know that density can reduce automobile dependency which can save people a lot of money. I know that minimum lot size requirements increase the cost of housing and reduce the amount of affordable housing. I know that our transportation funding formulas/rules are absurd for a variety of reasons. But selling these policies, especially “crazy” ones like scrapping or seriously reducing the mortgage interest deduction, requires making other people understand this as well.
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Pay For What You Get | Feb 12th at 1:55pm
As Duncan mentions, moderator Enrique Penalosa has pointed out, twice now, that Americans may really like low-density suburbs. And indeed, many of them do. Others like Manhattan-style density, while many others prefer something somewhere in between, from central city living in smaller cities, to walkable inner suburbs, to small town life. And that’s fine. The point of government policy changes to address the shortcomings of transportation, housing, and environmental rules are not to favor one taste instead of another, but to try and improve regulations such that people aren’t excessively subsidized for unhealthy behavior.
There are social costs to carbon emissions, as Ed Glaeser notes, and to things like congestion, which most people aren’t required to pay. When we decide to drive to work, we emit carbon that will negatively impact the entire world, yet we pay nothing for the privilege of doing so. So in pricing carbon or addressing mortgage subsidies, we’re seeking to remove policies that lead to an excess of suburban development or carbon-intensive development which, by its nature, places people in suburban settings who don’t want to be there, but who can’t afford the limited greener options available.
Another point is that current policies may reflect the public’s priorities. We may, in other words, favor carbon-intensive growth because a majority of people like such growth. But as Glaeser also mentions, transportation funding in the stimulus plan favors low density areas, because our national political system advantages less populous places over more populous places. This sets up a nasty cycle. Politics pushes more money toward low-density oriented infrastructure, like highways, than population distributions would imply is justified. This funding bias leads to population growth in places receiving more than their share of federal money. This increases the political influence of those places still further, which feeds back into the politics of funding allocations, and on the cycle goes. At some point, it’s necessary to say that what we’re doing isn’t working. And hopefully we are arriving at that point, at least at the level of national politics.
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The End of the Sprawl Era? | Feb 12th at 1:35pm
Shelley Poticha, president and CEO of Reconnecting America made an interesting comment. Maybe we’re at the end of the sprawl era? Foreclosures seem to be happening largely outside the urban core, while the center is holding. Anyone out there know if there’s data out there that supports this idea?
The end of the sprawl era is a nice thought—not sure if that’s really going to happen unless gas prices go back up again.
She later made a better point: get Obama to rewrite the allocation of transportation funding. Right now, cities are essentially penalized to creating density around transportation, for creating parks that make urban life more livable, and for discouraging highways.
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Policy | Feb 12th at 1:14pm
In this room I imagine that many people understand what many people in the country don’t, that the common forms of development we’ve seen over the past several decades are largely consequences of our tax, zoning, and transportation policies. But it’s important to remember that to some degree at least, those policies, and the neighborhoods they create, exist because they’re popular! It isn’t that I think all such policies are perfect expressions of the popular will, and I recognize that peoples’ choices are constrained by income and available options, but to a great degree the suburban ideal has become ingrained in a lot of people. It’s important to acknowledge that many people like the result, Fortunately the moderator, Enrique Penalosa, just made this point as I was typing this. People live in suburbia because they like it, and they therefore might like the policies which make it possible.
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Let the Big Get Bigger | Feb 12th at 1:05pm
One of the great points Ed Glaeser makes today, and makes generally in his academic work, is that local governments do not tend to take into account the effect of local policies on the larger world. He notes an interesting asymmetry—when new buildings are proposed, an environmental impact statement is typically required to assess the environmental cost of erecting those buildings. This, of course, is because the construction of a new building can have some negative effects on its immediate environs. But communities never commission environmental impact studies to pinpoint the effect of not building a building, primarily because those effects are largely felt by others. As Glaeser notes, when California communities restrict new growth, that growth doesn’t go away—it just goes to Las Vegas or Phoenix, where carbon emission levels per person are much higher.
The implication is that state governments and the federal government should exercise influence over policies that affect new housing construction, which currently fall mainly under the purview of local officials. And one way to achieve that is to begin to think of housing as one of a handful of inter-related issues, which includes climate change, energy consumption, and housing affordability. Federal officials have important levers available on these issues—transportation funding is one Mr Glaeser mentions, as is the federal mortgage interest deduction—and it needs to use them to address broader crises.
