Conor Dougherty - Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

IF YOU ASKED a stadium full of people to close their eyes and imagine what the American dream means to them, a large percentage of the crowd would be thinking of a home. Different homes, no doubt. A ranch house in the suburbs, a fortieth-floor condominium in Manhattan, a one-bedroom apartment in a new country where the kids will get a shot that the parents never had. A home is rarely just a roof over our heads. Its a roof in a bright city, or a neighborhood near work and family, close to a freeway or train stop, with parks and a stretch of water, maybe a street full of shops and restaurants. A good school, a field to plow, a welcoming church, a Sunday drum circle. Home is a private space, and yet its the community of work and social life that determines where we want it. Its the dream of being as close as possible to the lives we wish to have.

Around the world and country, that dream is under threat. In the United States, the homeownership rate for young adults is at a multi-decade low, and about a quarter of tenant households spend more than half their income on rent. Homelessness is increasing, eviction displaces about a million households a year, and about four million people spend at least three hours commuting to and from work. One need only look out an airplane window to see that this has nothing to do with a lack of space. Its the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about todays winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing technology and finance centers where good-paying jobs are plentiful and industries of the future are on the rise. California, home of the nations worst housing crisis, has the dubious distinction of having somehow managed to produce some of the highest wages in America as well as the highest state poverty rate once the cost of housing is figured in.

This didnt happen all at once. It has become a popular narrative, at least in a certain kind of high-cost city, to say that the reason housing has become so expensive is that working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified, foreign investors are parking money in U.S. condominiums, houses and apartments are being commodified by hedge funds, and companies like Airbnb are turning rental buildings into hotels. These things are all happening, and theyve been exacerbated by years of federal disinvestment in affordable housing, a tax code that subsidizes wealthy homeowners at the expense of poor renters, and a building industry that hasnt had any meaningful innovation in decades.

But underneath all that is a larger disease, which is a dire shortage of available housing in places where people and companies want to live, along with tectonic changes in how todays technology-centric economy operates. Unlike in the past, when good-paying manufacturing work spread widely across the country and took middle-class wealth beyond cities into small towns, the new economy is more unequal by nature, and its companies tend to cluster around dense metropolitan areas. This has fueled a resurgence in American downtowns and tons of new jobs for people with a wide range of skill levels, but because U.S. cities dont accommodate new people or housing nearly as well or as eagerly as they used to, the growth has caused new residents and speculators to bid up prices of the not-enough housing that already exists.

For the past several decades, America has by and large solved its housing needs by building progressively cheaper neighborhoods progressively farther out. It has forever changed the landscape and upended our governance as well. In effect, we shattered urban regions into a constellation of smallish cities and reactionary single-family house neighborhoods whose influence over local land use decisions give them an astounding amount of control over how much shelter we build, where, and at what cost. These decisions have huge implications beyond housing. Rising housing costs are a main driverarguably the main driverof segregation, income inequality, and racial and generational wealth gaps. You cant talk about educational inequities or the shrinking middle class without talking about how much it costs to live near good schools and high-paying jobs. Transportation accounts for about a third of the nations carbon dioxide emissions, so theres no serious plan for climate change that doesnt begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work.

One way or the other, many of the biggest challenges in America are at some level a housing problem, which is why there is now tremendous pressure on cities to abandon the old pattern of building subdivisions on distant cow pastures and instead to favor taller, denser buildings in places where people already live. The meaning of density varies, from condo towers in the urban core to triplex apartment buildings and backyard cottages in the enclaves of single-family houses beyond. Either way, as cities drive to put more housing in established neighborhoods, the result has been a furious clash over growth, class, preservation, quality of life, and the environment.

The story of modern America is the story of a nation struggling to reconcile the way things are today versus the way we think they used to be. Housing is a central narrative here as well, and like so much of contemporary society that story begins at the end of World War II. In October 1945, a month after the war ended,