Photo source:Unsplash/Maximillian Conacher
This story originally appeared on StrongTowns.org on January 3, 2024.
We often use the term “housing crisis” at Strong Towns to describe a dysfunctional system that serves a narrow sliver of the population and housing industry, at the expense of many others.
In their new book, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, Strong Towns Founder Charles Marohn and co-author Daniel Herriges examine the past and present of North America’s housing development, and point toward several potential solutions. In the course of their research, they uncovered some startling statistics that help tell the story of why we’re facing these challenges, and how we can correct course to address them.
22 Lots/80,000 People
In 2015, city planners in Somerville, Massachusetts, undertook a study to find out which of the city’s existing residential properties conformed to Somerville’s own zoning code. The number of fully zoning-compliant lots in the city of 80,000 people was a surprise to everyone: there were only 22. The city of Somerville, it turned out, had declared itself illegal. There was no single reason for this but a combination of requirements working in tandem. These included rules about building height, lot size, density, and the positioning of buildings on a lot. Nearly every property was in violation of one or more.
This story, of how 20th-century zoning rules inexorably expanded and subsequently stifled historical development trends, has played out in countless communities across North America.
3 Floors/3 Units
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of migrants flooded into the cities of New England, looking for work in the region’s mills and factories. The housing solution that arose to serve such burgeoning urban populations was the triple-decker: a three-story, wood-framed house consisting of three stacked apartments, each typically with a small balcony.
The triple-decker was a “small-d” democratic housing solution, in that it was inexpensive and uncomplicated to build. Most were not built by professional real estate developers but by a combination of skilled tradespeople, mill and factory owners, and immigrants. These homes quickly became the preferred option of immigrants to New England because they were an affordable first rung on the ladder to homeownership.
Triple-deckers, however, almost immediately provoked the ire of the New England establishment, and campaigns began to restrict their spread. In 1912, a Massachusetts state law allowed cities to ban any “wooden tenement” in which “cooking shall be done above the second floor.” By 1920, dozens of municipalities had banned the construction of new triple-deckers.
This backlash was a harbinger of exclusionary zoning rules that popped up across North America. Reforming zoning, and reestablishing a system in which small builders can contribute to housing inventory, is an important step in re-balancing the housing supply.
25 Feet/60 Feet
Kansas City, Missouri, developer J.C. Nichols was a visionary. His ideas on growth and development shaped post-war suburbanization across North America. Nichols also got into very specific details for what prosperity looked like on the ground. He called 25-foot residential lots “old-fashioned” and said new lots should be at spacious widths of “60 feet or more.” He called for “two feet of off-street parking space for each foot of floor space” in shopping areas. He said cities needed to zone ample amounts of land for future expansion.
After World War II, housing as an investment became the key to social stability, economic growth, and wealth creation. It was the critical component of building a middle class. Housing as an investment was now the economic engine by which America would come to dominate the world. According to Nichols, Americans had long endured the chaotic “fleeting and shifting uses of property” in urban areas. He urged his colleagues to build homes and neighborhoods that instead would endure.
Nichols’ words reflect the dominant mindset of the post-war era. It was a combination of disdain for the accepted wisdom of the past, along with a boundless, naïve optimism for what could be accomplished by empowering men of vision and action.
Seen through the lens of history, many of these changes had a deleterious effect on American cities. Wider lots were less likely to be used for humble houses. Requirements for off-street parking severely hampered future development, both commercial and residential. And the emphasis on top-down planning and neighborhoods built to completion undermined traditional development patterns. All are now contributing factors to the housing crisis.
$241,350/$524,020
Between 2000 and 2005, the median home price in Southern California grew by 117% from $241,350 to $524,020, an increase of more than $280,000, or $56,000 per year.
In 2005, the median household income in Southern California was $53,600. In other words, the median homeowner made more from home appreciation than the median family earned in income. And, with the ability to do a cash-out refinance or simply take out a home equity loan, much of that appreciation could be accessed to increase family spending, even to pay the mortgage. American homeowners had come full circle, from humble beginnings pursuing housing as basic shelter to participants—some reluctant, some eager—in the bubble mania of housing as speculative financial instrument.
This commodification of the housing market was a primary factor in the 2008 recession, and a reflection of how ordinary citizens get squeezed when the housing industry and policy makers focus on factors other than providing shelter for a broad swath of the population that needs it.
620 Days
The median housing-related project in San Francisco in 2022 took 620 days to receive its permits. Building a duplex in Sunnyvale could require $196,000 in fees to support city parks. A rezoning petition in Huntington Beach will cost you $113,000.
Underbuilding, delay, red tape. This combination of factors, on top of a nationwide surge in home prices, has led to truly eye-popping housing costs in California. California has experienced a vast exodus of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers who cannot bear the state’s cost of living.
In the years that followed the financial crisis of 2008, all the conditions were in place for the emergence of a renters’ backlash over housing costs. Mortgage lending rules got tighter, and along with a surge in foreclosures, the U.S. homeownership rate fell from a pre-recession peak of 69% to a low of 63% in 2016. This coincided with historically low rates of housing construction. The intense upward pressure on cost of living was felt earliest in America’s most expensive cities: coastal hubs of high-tech and other white-collar employment such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, and Washington, DC.
Housing affordability had long been a crisis for the poor, but now the pain was being felt by a large segment of the middle class. And this group had excess time and energy to spend on activism. A young, impatient, frustrated group of largely middle-class renters looked at the housing status quo and decided it was time to flip the table.
This brings us to the present day, in which the energy of the YIMBY movement, a growing awareness among elected officials about the systems that stifle housing availability, and advocates like you across North America are working to make things better.
Pre-order your copy of ‘Escaping the Housing Trap’ to learn more about the history and contours of the crisis and the Strong Towns concepts we hope will address it.
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