Shane Phillips - The Affordable City

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2020 Shane Phillips

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Keywords: affordable city, affordable housing, homelessness, housing affordability, housing finance, housing policy, housing stability, housing subsidy, housing supply, not in my backyard (NIMBY), real estate development, rent control, tenant protections, yes in my backyard (YIMBY)

Quite a few friends (and my editor) have asked me, Who did you write this book for? My first intuition has been to reply that its for anyone who cares about housing affordability, which conveniently describes the majority of coastal US residents and quite a few in the Mountain West, South, and Midwest as well. I look forward to the book sales bonanza.

But, truthfully, thats not right. This book is really for people who prioritize affordability and community over their own agenda, ideological purity, or personal ownership of victories and losses. Its for people who dont want only to identify problems and bad actors but who are also set on enacting solutions, even when those solutions may be incomplete or incremental or may require compromise. Admittedly, and unfortunately, thats a somewhat smaller readership.

And yet, I think, its bigger than most people realize.

Most of us suffering from the high cost of housing dont care about factions, ideologies, or whose side wins the political fight of the day; we care about results. We want very simple things: homes that dont break the bank; the ability to live, stay, and thrive in the communities of our choosing; and strong, enforceable protections from abuse and exploitation.

To date, the housing policy debate in high- and rising-cost cities has been defined by its poles: if you support the development of more homes, then you mustnt care about tenants; if you care about tenants, then you mustnt support new development. But these are false choices. Cities grow; thus they need more homes. Communities change faster than some people can manage; thus they need protection.

The central argument of this book, supported by dozens of specific policies to help make it an actionable resource, is that more homes and stronger tenant protections are both indispensable. Furthermore, both of these effortswith public funding to augment themare mutually reinforcing. Each is more effective with the other. Supply, Stability, and Subsidythe themes of this bookare all integral to realizing the promise of affordable and accessible cities.

The diversity of ideas in this book reflects my own scattershot background. I never finished high school, but I was the first person in my extended family to go to college, first at the University of Washington, where I majored in biochemistry, and later at the University of Southern California (USC), for masters degrees in urban planning and public administration. Before getting my bachelors degree I worked at a grocery store, several restaurants, a city public works department, UPS, and Comcast, as a cable technician. (Please, no Cable Guy jokes.) During college I worked in a chemistry lab and a genetics lab, and after college I did tuberculosis research. I grew up in the suburbs but was then living in Seattle, and it was around this time that I began to develop an interest in cities and write about them in my blog, Better Institutions (http://www.better-institutions.com).

I moved from Seattle to Los Angeles to enroll in graduate school, and while there I worked in a city council office and later as a consultant on transportation, development, and sustainability projects. After graduating I worked on a Downtown Los Angeles transportation project, continuing to write and to grow increasingly interested in housing. As slow as progress could be, it seemed that LA and other cities were moving in the right direction on transportation. When it came to housing, it seemed to me that things were only getting worse, and I was motivated to focus my efforts there. I took a job as director of public policy for a Downtown LA advocacy organization, and there I had the opportunity to work on housing policy in what was arguably the only pro-housing neighborhood in a city of five hundred square miles.

Today I work on housing full time and then some, serving as the housing initiative project manager for the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (whew), writing about how to strengthen rent control one week and how to build more market-rate homes the next. After seven years in LA, I believe Ive made every housing advocate angry at me at least once. Ive taught public policy at USC, I advocate with organizations such as Abundant Housing LA and Streets For All, and I assist with local efforts including LAs citywide housing element task force. The work genuinely never gets old.

My views on housing policy werent always so all-inclusive, and maybe thats true of you as well. In my case, I came to housing advocacy with a focus on supply, armed with endless statistics about the decades of underbuilding that plagued US cities and its consequences for scarcity, vacancies, and rents and home prices. I didnt believe that housing production could solve our affordability and homelessness crises by itself, but I didnt have much to offer beyond it. I bought into the argument that rent control was anathema to housing supply, and I had little to say about public funding and other government-led interventions.