Today’s housing market combines the worst of two worlds: a lack of supply for those with the means and desire to buy, and unaffordability for those of lower income. A June report for the National Association of Realtors found that the growth in U.S. housing stock over the past decade was less than half what it was between 1968 and 2000, “exacerbating a growing affordability crisis in many parts of the country.”
While there are many reasons, including such fundamental problems as the lumber supply, a key, long-term cause of housing shortage and its social implications (including the capacity for those of low income to accumulate wealth through property ownership) lies in our housing policy history. We once had a reliable formula for housing a wide range of income groups but have turned our backs on it.
Like the Roman recipe for durable cement that was lost in the Middle Ages, our formula for affordable housing was once widely applied. It took the form of hundreds of thousands of row homes in Philadelphia and Baltimore, framed three-family structures in New England, the “two-flats” of Chicago’s South Side, California’s bungalows, and even the post-war “little boxes” of Levittown. Hiding in plain sight, their secret was small homes on small lots.
Such homes formed what pioneer Boston sociologists Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy called a “zone of emergence:” a path through which immigrants rose to the middle class. Even affluent suburbs had a poor side of town as the richest communities were dotted with small dwellings for the workers in large mansions.
The post-WWII rise of large-lot single-family zoning, unfortunately, marked the death knell for neighborhoods that had their own healthy social fabric and brought social classes together through housing and local government. This change, described by Yale Law School housing expert Robert C. Ellickson as a “zoning straitjacket,” made it impossible to build small multi-family homes or replace single-family houses with them. And increasingly, the cost of these single-family homes went up as they required larger lots because of zoning regulations.
To loosen that straitjacket, we need to understand the legacies of America’s housing policy history. Too often, healthy, working-class neighborhoods with a variety of owner-occupied housing were labeled slums and destroyed by the urban renewal programs of the 1940s and 1950s. African American neighborhoods were particularly targeted. Neighborhoods with black-owned stores, civil groups, and owner-occupied homes such as Detroit’s Black Bottom, St. Louis’s DeSoto-Carr, and Chicago’s Bronzeville, were declared crumbling eyesores.
Worse still, reforms eliminated private ownership and replaced it with public housing. This was the culmination of a housing reform movement that was started more than a century ago by urban reformer Jacob Riis, who had concentrated only on the seamiest side of New York’s Lower East Side, along with University of Chicago sociologist Edith Elmer Wood, who argued that the private housing market would inevitably fail two-thirds of households, and Catherine Bauer, whose 1936 classic, Modern Housing, introduced the early Soviet Union’s government-owned block towers as an ideal. (Bauer, by the way, later became a key New Deal housing official.)
Urban renewal was not only directly harmful, but it also sent a message to local planning boards across the country: Tightly packed neighborhoods with small multi-family homes were too dense, unhealthy, a “menace,” as Immigration Restriction League cofounder Prescott Hall described Boston’s 15,000 “three-deckers.”
Local planning boards across the country got the message: Good neighborhoods should be single-family neighborhoods.
It’s a lesson we need to unlearn. We need not only to loosen zoning restrictions to permit different types of housing but also accept the fact that a lower-income side of town, where the houses are less costly because they’re closer together, is OK. California has made a notable start in addressing what’s being called the “missing middle” through a new state law authorizing two-family home construction. This is the needed path (without the deep subsidies) to the “starter homes” President Joe Biden wants to see built.
The politics will not be easy. Minneapolis has ended single-family zoning citywide — but sparked a backlash by citing it as the needed corrective for historic racism. Winning arguments for zoning reform at the local level will have to appeal to the collective good. Small homes on smaller lots can provide starter homes for young adults who grew up in towns where they can’t afford to live and for teachers, police, and firefighters zoned out of the communities they serve. These new versions of a poor side of town will bring ancillary benefits: providing ownership chances for minority households and new immigrants. In contrast to subsidized housing, they allow for wealth accumulation.
Singer Johnny Rivers once crooned, “Together we can make it, baby, from the poor side of town.” Let’s hope so — but it’s harder when there’s not even a poor side from which to start.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It (Encounter Books).
