Hope and Housing

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/opinion/nyregionopinions/LI_Housing.html

New Yrok Times
N.Y./Region Opinions
Long Island

Hope and Housing
Published: September 17, 2006

Housing is one of those emotional terms in the New York metropolitan region, like terrorism and global warming, that bring out a weird sort of anxious fatalism in people. Everyone knows that affordable housing is scarcer than ever, that entire counties like Nassau have become practically off limits to young people and the working class, and that the only way to deal with the problem is through passive acceptance or abject surrender — turning half of one’s gross income over to the mortgage, or moving to the Dakotas.

But not everyone is giving up. A report in July by two nonprofit groups, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and the Regional Plan Association, offers a big-picture dissection of the housing crisis that can leave a reader feeling not overwhelmed, but hopeful. While acknowledging that the housing squeeze poses a serious threat to the region’s economy and quality of life, and that things have been getting worse, “Balanced Housing for a Smart Region” (available at chpcny.org or rpa.org) is bursting with strategies for attacking the problem on multiple fronts.
There has been no shortage, of course, of housing prescriptions that are optimistic, ambitious and ineffectual. Every politician has a few. But this report is singular for its depth and completeness, and for the strategies it suggests.

The report is also notable for the sound principles that inform it (and could inform policy makers as well), among them the following:

Sprawl is not an option. The region will need to create housing for an estimated three million to four million people in the next 25 years, but this time there will be no Robert Moses to lead the multitudes into the promised land, because there is no such place.

It is true that parts of eastern Long Island, the far reaches of New Jersey, the upper Hudson Valley and near reaches of Pennsylvania still have room left for traditional single-family homes on suburban-style lots. But this region’s commutes are already the longest in the country, and there is a limit to how far people can drive and how much bulldozing of open space they will tolerate. On Long Island in particular there is intense pressure to preserve what is left of its forests and farmland, and the age of buildout is nearly at hand.

The good news is that the region is rich in poor cities, from Yonkers to Newark to Bridgeport, as well as empty industrial sites, desolate shopping malls and — in Long Island’s case — many dilapidated downtowns in places like Hempstead and Wyandanch that are ripe for redevelopment. The answer on this bedroom island, as elsewhere, is to repopulate fading downtowns, to build apartments over stores and, where possible, to create accessory apartments in existing homes.

Some of this is actually being done now, but illegally; the trick is to encourage the phenomenon and regulate it.
‘High-density’ is not a dirty word. And neither is ‘‘affordable housing.’’ Communities throughout the region have long fiercely opposed more apartment buildings and other forms of multifamily housing and subsidized housing for people with low and moderate incomes. Some of the resistance comes from plain old white-flight racism, but some stems from the not-unreasonable belief that newcomers with children burden the schools and end up costing a community more than they pay in taxes.

The report concedes that in some cases that is true, but not in all cases. It also argues that there are remedies. Not every household has children; the elderly people, divorced singles and young couples who make up a significant part of the housing market can generate large tax surpluses in a community. A smart mix of new housing, in other words, can help, not hurt, a community’s fiscal bottom line.

Old perceptions die out slowly, but there also seems to be a growing realization in the suburbs that “those people” who would take garden apartments near single-family split-ranches are not just refugees from the inner city, but the children of suburbanites — including teachers, police officers, firefighters and the other members of the middle and working classes who are vital to the life of any community.

It is telling, in this regard, that the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity is building low-cost housing in East End communities like East Hampton, which is only too aware that even a rich village cannot function if only the rich can live there.

Smart is better than dumb. Properly understood and executed, the philosophy of “smart growth” involves walkable communities, ready access to mass transit and architecture that is dense and compact but attractively built. If the region is ever going to break its addiction to low-density sprawl and traffic congestion, communities arranged on smart-growth principles will lead the way. Their appealing design is usually a plus, helping to build public acceptance of new multifamily construction, which often looks better than the aging suburban homes around it.

New York is not Phoenix. And thank goodness for that. This region is distinctive in the United States for having every conceivable mix of housing types, from “Brady Bunch” ranches to SoHo lofts to creaky riverfront Victorians. The cultural richness and diversity of the urban and suburban mix give lots of options to planners and builders, and suggest a variety of ways to solve the housing shortage.

Big government is not the problem. Little government is. Hundreds of local municipalities control decisions about land use, and their individual acts of resistance to housing solutions have left the whole region in a pickle. But states can help, first by developing broad strategies for planning and managing growth. The report holds up New Jersey’s plan as a model for the nation, while noting that Connecticut’s is purely advisory, and that New York has none at all.

On their own, the county executives on Long Island have tried to reinvigorate a wise but toothless advisory body, now called the Long Island Regional Planning Board. While no one expects it to overturn the powerful tradition of home rule, the board could serve as a forum for big ideas and a place to marshal arguments against the status quo.

More radically and profoundly, states can help by breaking the link between school financing and property taxes — a huge barrier to the creation of multifamily and affordable housing. The state of Michigan has done so, replacing property taxes with a grab bag of revenues from other sources and eliminating one local rationale for opposing affordable housing.

State and county governments can also give tax breaks to companies that build housing for their employees, as the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, has urged; provide money to nonprofit groups to buy and preserve housing; and create state housing trust funds that can be used to create mixed-income housing.

We’re all in this together. The report stresses that the region’s far-flung suburbs are all extremities of one social and economic organism. Solutions in one area will help communities in another. The region is large, sprawling and full of competing interests and rivalries, but affordable housing is the quandary that unites us all.