4.10.2009

Considering Programmed Housing, Continued

Yesterday, Where featured a post about a proposed development in Albany that would provide affordable urban artist housing while providing valuable cultural services to the existing community by having the residents create and teach free and low-cost art classes, building a community service program into the rental agreement. But artistic development is not the only service that could be programmed into a housing development. In fact, when tax revenue is being used to stimulate the economy and efficiency has become the golden rule, programmed housing stands to give taxpayers a lot of bang for their buck by tackling multiple social problems at the same time.

Foreclosures have become headline news over the past year, and affordable housing has rocketed from being an oft-maligned political quagmire to being an oft-maligned political quagmire in the national spotlight. Public opinion of public and affordable housing is, as Where has argued before, not anywhere near as high as it needs to be at a time when millions of people are in dire need of a place to stay. The central problem here, from a PR perspective, seems to be that Americans assume all residents of public housing are lazy, riding on the government's coattails to avoid working or paying rent. Of course, access to jobs is one of the central reasons for why people actually need affordable housing, particularly in urban areas. Irony is, as the saying goes, a bitch.

To complicate matters further, the Brookings Institution announced the results of a new study on what they have termed "job sprawl" earlier this week. The study confirmed what many already knew: jobs have followed people out to the suburbs. Nearly every city in America has seen its share of the total metro population shrink drastically over the past half century, and now Brookings has hard numbers to illustrate just how drastically this has affected those cities' share of the job market, as well.

According to the study, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk metro area has the highest percentage of residents working within a mile of the city's central business district, at just 36.4%. New York City, with its infamous hyper-concentration of office space, only managed to come in second with just 34.8% of the metro workforce commuting to its CBD each day. That means that, in the best cases, only a third of people are working in downtown areas, which inevitably have the highest concentration of transportation options.

Transportation is the glue that binds these two problems -- a lack of affordable housing and access to increasingly spread-out job opportunities -- together. Affordable housing is only useful to workers if it is available in a location that allows them reasonable commute times to places where jobs are actually available. Many people in the States are finding themselves rather suddenly without a job or a home, much less the funds to drive around the city looking for either, or to drive an hour each way every day to work a part-time job for $8 an hour (if that).

With the need for affordable housing at an all-time high and urbanists hoping for a stimulus-funded urban renaissance, it only makes sense that we should be presenting decision makers at the Federal level with projects, like Albany's Academy Lofts, that can weave solutions to multiple problems together as efficiently and creatively as possible. Programmed housing has the potential to provide job-seekers with affordable housing while simultaneously providing them with an opportunity to continue building work experience, through participation in community programs, while they continue their search for paid gainful employment. Not only that, but since the work done at programmed housing developments would be on-site, transit costs would be accordingly lowered for residents.


The arts are an obvious starting point, but there's no reason why housing developments couldn't be built around legal clinics to provide students fresh out of law school (and saddled with the accordant debt) with a chance to cut their teeth, or around community centers offering technology classes and computer repair services. Programmed housing could be easily tailored to be double assets; by placing such developments in targeted urban neighborhoods where a lack of certain services was identified, these developments would help both the new residents and the existing communities toward economic recovery.

Programmed housing may not be a sure-fire scheme (a potential downside: turnover could make for some very ineffective services), but tying solutions to jobs, housing, and transit challenges together -- particularly in urban areas -- is certainly the most effective way to use stimulus funds. If we're not talking about multiple solutions at once, we're not really talking about a solution at all.


(Photo from Flickr users The Voice of Eye and your_nostalgia, and from Where@FFFFOUND!. The originals can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

1 comment:

Benjamin Hemric said...

Brendain Cain wrote (the numbering is mine -- BH):

According to the study, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk metro area has the highest percentage of residents working within a mile of the city's central business district, at just 36.4%. New York City, [1] with its INFAMOUS [emphasis mine -- BH] hyper-concentration of office space, only managed to come in second with just 34.8% of the metro workforce commuting to its CBD each day. [2] That means that, in the best cases, only a third of people are working in downtown areas, which inevitably have the highest concentration of transportation options.

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Benjamin Hemric writes:

Hi, Brendan! I both agree and disagree with what you've wrote.

Regarding [1]: Did you really mean "infamous" (Merriam-Webster Online: "1: "having a reputation of the worst kind: notoriously evil; 2: causing or bring infamy: disgraceful"]. If so, why?

While some ADVOCATES OF SUBURBAN JOB SPRAWL (e.g., "decentrists") may see the concentration of jobs in NYC's various CBDs (e.g., "Downtown," "Tribeca / SoHo / NoHo / Chelsea" / "Midtown South," "Midtown," etc. -- the various business districts below 59th St.) as "infamous," YOUR calling NYC's concentration of jobs in its CBDs "infamous" seems to go against the larger point that you are appear to be trying to make.

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Regarding [2]: Coming from a Jane Jacobs perspective (which you may, or may not be coming from), I do actually think that there is too much concentration of work in NYC's CBDs, and it seems to me that it is indeed related to transportation as you suggest. But from my perspective it isn't an "infamous" concentration -- rather it is yet another example of the misguided thinking and policies (i.e., that business districts should be "planned" and that urban planners "know" where to "plan" them) of the orthodox urban PLANNING establishment that Jacobs has so often and so roundly criticized.

In particular, I believe that those urban planners who believe so are making a BIG mistake thinking that NYC should somehow have an even bigger percentage of its workforce employed in its various Manhattan, south of 59th Street, CBDs. What about the various URBAN business districts in the outer boroughs (e.g., the Hub, Jamaica, etc.)? (Not having read the study, it isn't clear to me whether Downtown Brooklyn, LIC, etc. are included within the one-mile limit.)

And, while not the concern of NYC officials, what about the various business disticts in the very close in and urban neighboring municipalities of New Jersey (e.g., Newark, etc.)? (Again not having read the study, it's unclear whether Bayonne, Hoboken, etc. are included within the one-mile limit.)

Would it really be good for NYC (and the very close by municipalities of adjacent New Jersey) for the Manhattan CBDs to have an even higher percentage of the area's employment?

And, again, while this isn't the concern of NYC officials, what about the future densification and urbanization of the business districts of older suburbs like Yonkers and Hempstead?

(Let me quickly add that not all orthodox urban planners believe in increasing the percentage of jobs in Manhattan's CBDs -- although from their statements one wonders if this is really the case. Some believe in "planning" for the outer boroughs, etc. While this isn't as bad an idea, it's still often appears to be misguided micro management by "omniscient" urban "planners.")