We Need More Housing: Both Subsidized And Market Rate

I’ve read and have been seeing this New Republic op-ed making the local A2 politics social media rounds… It presents a perversion of the so-called YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] movement and on that distorted premise crafts a straw man case against zoning reform policy interventions aimed at increasing housing supply.

Brief aside: I think the “-IMBY”monikers are not productive for housing policy discussions for multiple reasons but especially because the “backyard” part of the acronym refers to land that is elsewhere and not actually in anyone’s backyard.

Some other residents against increasing housing density in all residential neighborhoods have recently begun referring to housing supply advocates as supporters of “trickle-down” housing policy, another distortion and straw man.

No one I know locally who’s supportive of opening single family home districts to multifamily housing believes this is the only and one-best way to address the housing crisis.

Local A2 zoning reform advocates [including this writer] are also in favor of investment of public resources into subsidized housing, which by the way is in progress with the 20-year Ann Arbor housing millage. See below for the millage funded projects FY2022-2024.

After mis-characterizing zoning reform advocates, the New Republic op-ed author *begins* his case with this paragraph:

“The housing shortage is real. Households are forming faster than developers are building new homes, and by some estimates the country is short 2.3 million units. For several decades this problem has been squeezing renters in big coastal cities like San Francisco and New York, but in recent years it has mounted into a national crisis, reaching formerly affordable bastions like Spokane, Boise, and Reno. The result is an increasingly brutal market, where the typical American tenant is rent-burdened and homelessness is on the rise.”

So… as a result of a housing supply shortage, renters have been “squeezed” and a “brutal market” [for renters and anyone trying to buy a home] has been formed. ✅

But anyone advocating an increase to the housing supply via upzoning is not addressing the problem and cedes power to “profiteers who rigged the system.” ❌

That is another flaw in the argument. The profiteers didn’t rig the system. It was actually local segregationists and class discriminatory zoning policies that restricted housing supply. The profiteers are a *symptom* of one of the primary sources of our housing crisis and shortage: single-family home exclusionary neighborhoods.

Exclusionary zoning policies/ districts swept into Ann Arbor along with a huge wave of increased population, in the wake of the post WWII baby boom. These zoning districts also proliferated in the wake of the Fair Housing Act [FHA] in 1968 which prohibited racist redlining and deed restrictions everywhere in the US.

By excluding multifamily housing from ~70% of Ann Arbor residential neighborhoods, people with lower incomes [over-represented in the Black/ African-American Community] have been excluded from those neighborhoods for decades. There was some advocacy a few years back to remove lingering racist deed restrictions. These restrictions were largely unenforceable after a 1948 Supreme Court ruling as well as the FHA.

While removal of these discriminatory deed restrictions is laudable, that action alone does nothing to address the generational wealth gap between Black and White families. That said, the folks advocating removal of the deed restrictions also acknowledge that single-family exclusionary zoning was another way of maintaining segregation.

Here is another curious and pretzel logic passage in the New Republic op-ed referred to above:

“Zoning reform is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix it. It’s true that exclusionary zoning rules are rooted in harmful racist policy. Abolishing them is justified. But relying on that approach to induce new housing supply, especially for the lowest-income residents, is a losing proposition.”

So… exclusionary zoning is rooted in racism✅

Advocates of eliminating exclusionary zoning are only focused on this intervention ❌

At the end of the op-ed are some prescriptions to address the housing shortage, the first of which is to repeal the Faircloth Amendment to the Housing Act of 1937. This repeal would remove a restriction on building new public housing. The author goes on to advocate for a New Deal level of public housing reinvestment which this time won’t restrict the majority of benefits to white families as was done in the mid-20th century.

These are great ideas. I fully support them as an advocate for subsidized housing as well as removing zoning restrictions on housing supply… Both and, not either or…

Another note, Gov. Whitmer has recently announced MSHDA [Michigan State Housing Development Authority] investments of $1.4 billion in housing to create or rehabilitate more than 10,000 homes. This is another laudable step. But the benefits of such an investment will be extremely temporary if we do not also build more market rate housing alongside subsidized housing. Non-market solutions alone will not create enough housing to reduce the “brutal market” the New Republic author refers to at the beginning of his op-ed.

The fight for equity in housing access requires more than one single type of intervention. I’ve discussed two here. Can you think of any others?

Feel free to add your ideas in comments below. Then we can move from “Both and” to “All and.”

Thanks for reading

We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there