Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis

Housing is an investment. Investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people experience distress. This is the housing trap. It’s time to escape. In Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis , renowned urbanists Charles (Chuck) Marohn and Daniel Herriges introduce a first-of-its-kind discussion of the tension between housing as a financial product and housing as shelter. This is the key insight that’s been missing from the Housing Crisis Conversation; and the insight that can help cities fight back against the crisis from the bottom-up. This book offers a serious, yet accessible, history of housing policy in the United States and explains how it led us to this point in time: where we face a market that is rigged against people who, only a few decades ago, could have been homeowners or stable, long-term rentals. Only local change, on a neighborhood or city-wide scale, can begin to restore balance to the housing market. Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-read resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America—and that means everyone. Readers will find: Discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment Explorations of housing as shelter, including discussions of zoning policy and NIMBYism A comprehensive overview of the Strong Towns approach to solving the American housing crisis Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Introduction I: Housing as Investment 1 Is Housing Shelter or an Investment? Who Benefits from High Housing Prices? Understanding the Housing Market Can Housing Prices Go Down? 2 Building the Trap Understanding the Traditional Development Pattern The Progressive Movement's Housing Reforms Housing Becomes a Financial Product Stabilized and Ready to Grow 3 Setting the Trap Mechanical Permanence as an Antidote to Organic Messiness The First Generation of America's Suburban Experiment The Second-Generation Implications of Permanence The Trap Starts to Close The Savings and Loan Bubble Note 4 Trapped The Subprime Crisis The Road to Recovery? What Comes Next? II: Housing as Shelter 5 Zoning Lockdown The Illegal City of Somerville The Roots of American Zoning The Birth and Death of the Triple-Decker The “Lodger Evil” Residential Hotels / SROs Zoning as a Tool of Economic Exclusion Zoning and the FHA Locking Down the Core Cities Downzoned and Pushed Out Build and No-Build Zones The Missing Middle Did Zoning Cause the Housing Shortage? Can We Escape from Zoning Lockdown? 6 Not in My Backyard Who Are the NIMBYs? How the Suburban Experiment Created the NIMBY Incentives in the Driving City The Outsized Power of No Homevoters versus the Growth Machine (Spoiler: They Both Win) The New Battle over “Local Control” Reclaiming the Banner of Community Empowerment 7 Yes! In My Backyard The Start of a Movement One Neat Trick Does “Build Build Build” Offer an Escape from the Housing Crisis? Big YIMBY Question #1: (How) Does Supply Matter? Housing as Six Degrees of Separation The Importance of Vacancy Rates Try YIMBYTM Today! (*Your Local Experience May Vary) Big YIMBY Question #2: How Do We Get a Housing Revolution? Successes That Scale 8 Affordable with a Capital “A” How Los Angeles “Lost” 111,000 Affordable Housing Units The “Affordable” System in the US Public Housing Housing Vouchers Inclusionary Zoning The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Removing Housing from the Speculative Market Social Housing: Public Housing 2.0? A Parallel Option, Not a Panacea III: Housing in a Strong Town 9 A System That Produces a Solution A Paradigm Shift toward Complexity The Principles of a New Approach to Housing Maintaining a Sense of Urgency 10 Releasing the Swarm Building an Incremental Development Culture: The South Bend Experiment “Find Your Farm” Growing an Intentionally Inclusive Developer Community Cities Built by Many Hands The Incremental Developer's Business Model Incremental Development as “Gentlefication” It Takes a “Swarm” How Cities Can Support the Growth of Incremental Development Not “Does It Scale?” but “Does It Replicate?” 11 Financing a Housing Revolution Buffer from the Distorting Boom Repurposing Empty Bedrooms Financing Backyard Cottages Getting Capital off the Sidelines Financing Small Developers Transforming Entire Neighborhoods Aligning Local Tax Policy 12 Building a Strong Town References Index