The problem with cities
If you were to think of cities as ladders of social mobility, most are missing the lowest rungs. I dream of a city, where anyone, from a homeless person, to a millionaire, could relocate and begin to move towards greater fulfillment with life. The places that we life have a massive impact on our health, social lives, professional lives and many other things about us. Despite the central role that cities play in our lives, most of us don’t spend much time thinking about the boring policy details of local government. If we implemented good policy at the local level, we could create a city with the lowest rungs added to the ladder. We might dream of a city where there are no poor and everyone has what they need, but the reality is that there is massive inequality, and many people are unhoused. Cities need to deal with this reality.
Bottom rung: people experiencing homelessness.
If you are a person experiencing homelessness, it is likely that you do not have many options. Some of us that live more traditional lives might feel like the solution is simple: homeless people should get jobs and houses. It is not nearly that simple. A person might be experiencing homelessness because they lost a job and missed paying too many months of rent. They might be homeless because they are running from an abusive relationship, or because their parents disowned them for being gay or transgender. Drug addiction could be a factor. A person may be homeless because they do not fit into the world of 40 hour work weeks and suburban picket fences. The fact that there are so many people homeless is a sign that there is not a place for many people in our modern economy. In the perfect city, there needs to be a place for all of these people.
Homeless shelters are often places that are far from ideal for the people that they are trying to serve. There is nowhere to store your possessions, you cannot stay there during the day, there is not enough privacy or stability and shelters are often unsafe. Ideally we could use a housing first model in all cities, with enough units to serve everyone who is in need. It seems that there is a lack of political will to fund this approach. Is it possible to find housing for the homeless in a country with so many empty houses? Yes, but there may not be the political will to do that either. A different approach is one that is proposed by Andrew Heben in tent city urbanism. One of his main insights is that being homeless is often illegal, there is no place to exist legally if you are a homeless person. Heben suggests that we find abandoned and unwanted space in cities, and let homeless people camp there. He proposes that with time, homeless people receive assistance to build more permanent tiny homes, and eventually turn their piece of abandoned land into a long term community.
Our ideal city should provide many services to these people as well. There should be job training, addiction recovery programs, programs for domestic abuse survivors available to all those who want help in those areas. There should be medical care and food available, but it is often overlooked that there is no place for homeless people to exist legally. That should change.
Another low rung: sporadic incomes and people at risk of homelessness
If we were to visit a large city in the US around the year 1900, there would be many families that had recently arrived from europe to live in poverty here in the US. Many families would live in tenement houses where there were several families living on every floor, and rent was cheap in part because the landlords did close to zero maintenance. During the progressive era, there were efforts to improve the lives of these people. Minimum square footage was mandated (often around 450 sq ft per unit) and there were limits on how many unrelated people could live in an apartment. There were laws implemented that landlords had to provide maintenance for their tenants. These laws did improve people’s lives, but perhaps there is room now to allow more people to live together, or allow people to live in smaller apartments. There should still be rules that mandate apartments are clean, safe and warm, but perhaps smaller more crowded apartments could be preferable to experiencing housing instability. In our improved city, there should be a way for a day laborer with inconsistent income to find a place to live that is safe, but maybe less luxurious than a traditional apartment. In Hong Kong, many rooms are subdivided into coffin sized apartments that can cost as little as 100 pounds a month. Perhaps we do not want to go that far, but there should be a place that has fewer amenities so that everyone can afford a place to lay their heads.
A middle rung: affordable apartments
Rent in every major city across the country has been rising for years. Many of us spend so much on rent that the rest of our finances are stretched to the limit. There are several things that we can change so that rent is affordable for all. Alan Durning wrote Unlocking Home and proposed several ways that we can create more housing that is affordable. He says that granny flats, inlaw apartments, basement apartments and loft apartments need to be legalized. All of these forms of housing are illegal in areas zoned for single family housing. This means that if you own a house and want to rent out a loft above your garage to help pay your mortgage, it is often illegal. In our improved city, it is legal to rent out all of these forms of housing. Roommate caps should be lifted too so that individuals can pool their resources to live a more comfortable life.
Our improved city allows dense developments all over the city. There are apartment building and row houses being built to satisfy the demand of all the people that are living there. Large new developments are important to keep a balance between housing supply and demand for housing, but new developments are often very expensive. Granny flats and inlaw apartments do not require as much capital to build as a large developments so they can be rented for much less money. There can still be a role for subsidized housing, but subsidized housing is never able to meet the needs all of the people who could use it.
Lots of other rungs on the ladder: mixed income, mixed use, mixed age developments
Many of the problems that we face in America can be traced to the fact that rich people live with rich people and poor people live with poor people. We should design our improved city so that rich and poor families send their children to the same schools, use the same roads and parks and go to the same libraries, churches and voting centers. Our improved city might have an apartment building with a beautiful penthouse, a tiny studio apartment, family friendly three bedroom apartments and a floor for senior citizens. This would help people from different backgrounds have more of the same opportunities, and have the chance to exchange ideas, friendships and maybe even drinks.
Our city should be designed so that it is easy to walk to work, school, restaurants, coffee shops and anything else that you might want to do in a city. Making cities walkable reduces traffic, pollution and increases opportunities to be active and healthy. There is even good evidence that this approach to designing cities can make us happier.
In summary our improved city should have places where you can live for anywhere between $0 per month all the way to whatever amount of money a millionaire is willing to spend on an apartment. Our communities should be walkable and transit oriented and there should be parks and jobs available to all.
