Tag Archives: affordable housing

The Failure of Preservation

Posted on by
Reply

by Michael Lewyn

In an excellent blog post, Reuben Duarte explained that many big-city zoning disputes involve a conflict of visions: a “preservation camp” favors preserving neighborhood character at all costs, while an “affordability camp” favors construction of new housing in order to make the city more affordable.

Duarte write that the preservation camp’s interests “hover around preventing evictions of tenants in long-held residences, but also includes the topics of traffic (“this neighborhood can’t support more development, because, traffic!”), parking (replace “traffic” with “parking”), and neighborhood character (“building is too tall or too dense!” “Views!”).”

It seems to me that to the extent government uses preservation as a reason to exclude new housing, arguments based on “neighborhood character” fail on their own terms: either because limiting housing supply itself changes neighborhood character, or because it forces less exclusionary places to change their character.

Zoning restrictions designed to limit traffic create the second problem. For example, suppose a city freezes a neighborhood’s housing supply in order to limit traffic and parking. Other things being equal, fewer households mean fewer cars. So at first glance, this policy has no losers. But if a city or region is adding households, those new households have to go somewhere. And if they don’t go to your neighborhood, they go to another neighborhood, adding cars (and thus traffic/parking problems) to that neighborhood. Continue reading →

Not Racist- But Similar to Racism

Posted on by
Reply

by Michael Lewyn

Is zoning racist? After a committee designed to study Seattle’s zoning codes suggested some significant reforms to the city’s code, Mayor Ed Murray said: “In Seattle, we’re also dealing with a pretty horrific history of zoning based on race, and there’s residue of that still in place.” Even if this remark is factually true, it doesn’t mean that today’s zoning is racist: low-density zoning exists in black neighborhoods as well as white ones, and opposition to changing such zoning crosses color lines.

But it seems to me that even though zoning is not consistently or intentionally racist, zoning is similar to racist housing discrimination (or “RHD” for short) in a few ways. Both involve a politically influential dominant class (in one case, whites generally; in the other case, homeowners of all colors) who have the votes to impose their will on the political process. In both situations, the dominators use their political power to exclude someone else from its neighborhood; racists usually seek to exclude blacks, while pro-zoning homeowners usually seek to exclude new residents regardless of color (to the extent that zoning is designed to exclude housing smaller or more compact than the status quo, such as smaller houses or multifamily dwellings).*

Both RHD and low-density zoning do, on balance, exclude blacks more than whites—though of course RHD does so much more consistently. One purpose of zoning is to raise housing prices (or, as courts and homeowners euphemistically say, “values”). And higher housing prices mean higher rents, which means that everyone has to pay more for less. If you don’t have any money, you are obviously going to suffer more from that policy than someone who has plenty of money, since the difference between having a small apartment and sleeping on the street is a bit more significant than the difference between having a 8000-square-foot mansion and a 12,000-square-foot mansion. And since blacks tend to have less money than whites, on balance blacks are going to suffer a little more than whites from these policies, just as they are going to suffer more from any tax imposed without ability to pay (for example, an increase in bus fares).** Continue reading →

Airbnb and Affordable Housing, Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

by Michael Lewyn

A few months ago, I blogged about the impact of Airbnb on rents for traditional month-to-month or year-to-year tenancies. I suggested that this impact was pretty minimal, reasoning as follows: even in a large city such as Los Angeles, Airbnb units are less than 1 percent of all rental units. So even if every single Airbnb unit would (in the absence of Airbnb) otherwise be part of the traditional rental market, Airbnb is unlikely to increase rents in that market.

The comments (and a recent San Francisco Chronicle story) raised an interesting response to my theory: what matters isn’t the percentage of all rental units, but the percentage of all rental vacancies or all new housing units. In the words of the Chronicle story: “where a typical year sees just 2,000 new units added, a few hundred units off the market makes a significant dent.”

But as I thought about the argument, I was less and less persuaded by it. Here’s why: first, the number of vacancies is limited to new housing units. San Francisco has just over 236,000 rental housing units. The units other than the new units are not owned by their current owners or occupants forever: rather, they shift around from occupied to unoccupied as tenants move, and as owner-occupants become landlords or vice versa. So the number of units vacant at any given point in time is a bit higher than the 2000 figure, and the number of units that become vacant at some point over the next year or two will be higher still. Continue reading →

Airbnb and affordable housing

Posted on by
1

by Michael Lewyn

Over the past few years, the growth of Airbnb.com has made it much easier for people to rent out rooms in their houses and apartments. Before Airbnb, a traveler who wanted an alternative to hotels (which tend to be (a) quite expensive or (b) located in desolate-looking suburban arterials), would most easily be able to find a room through a temporary listing on Craigslist. However, these travelers had no way of knowing anything about their hosts, and would-be hosts had no way of knowing anything about their renters. By contrast, Airbnb, by providing a forum for hosts to review guests and vice versa, does allow some screening to take place.*

However, Airbnb has become politically controversial in high-priced, regulation-obsessed cities like Los Angeles and New York. Hotels and hotel unions quite understandably see Airbnb as competition in the short-term lodging industry, and wish to regulate it intensively (if not to destroy it). One common anti-Airbnb argument** is that Airbnb, by making short-term lodging more affordable, actually reduces the supply of traditional apartments—that is, apartments leased for a month or more at a time. The argument runs as follows: units that are on Airbnb for a few days at a time would, in the absence of Airbnb, be rented out as traditional apartments. Thus, Airbnb reduces the housing supply and raises rents.

This argument rests on an essentially unprovable claim: that Airbnb units would otherwise be rented out as traditional apartments. More importantly, the argument proves too much. If Airbnb hosts reduce the supply of apartments by not using their houses and spare rooms as traditional apartments, why isn’t this equally true of hotels who are not using their rooms as apartments, or homeowners who are not renting out every spare room? And if homeowners and hotels are reducing the rental housing supply, why shoudn’t they be forced to rent out their units as traditional apartments? Continue reading →