One Affordable-Housing Solution for Cities: True Home Rule

[M II A II R II K]

One Affordable-Housing Solution for Cities: True Home Rule


Sep 30, 2014

By KRISTON CAPPS

Read More: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/...states/380933/

Chicago generates more GDP than 42 states, according to Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP Architects and director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University. New York City generates billions of dollars in economic activity per square mile. "We should have plenty of money to build affordable housing," he said. "We don’t, because we distribute it."

- The unshakeable misconception that rural taxpayers subsidize their citydwelling counterparts has an enormous bearing on affordable-housing policy. Dense cities that get affordable housing right—namely Singapore—enjoy home rule. Singapore spends a great deal of money subsidizing public housing for more than 80 percent of its residents, an outcome that would be unthinkable in even the most liberal dense U.S. city (and indeed is very far from the case).

- "Subsidize the supply, subsidize the demand: We know how to do all of those. We just don't have the will to do those things," said Living Cities CEO Ben Hecht. "Singapore and Hong Kong are willing to do those things."

- "In Hong Kong, the people who run the subway also run the housing," Chakrabarti said. "It makes so much sense." (Other things about Hong Kong do not make so much sense.) So, I'll bite: How much better off would cities be without states? Or even nations? When I asked a question along those lines (whether state or federal governments provide any value to city governance), I wasn't met with the pushback that I expected. "The history [for New York City] goes back to Al Smith and Robert Moses," Chakrabarti said.

- Late 1970s New York City was bankrupt, while the state was in "pretty good shape" owing to its agrarian economy and government. The critique of urban dependence paid for by a rural Protestant work ethic set in there as it did elsewhere in the U.S. It still persists. It's just no longer true, strictly speaking. --- "This is one where we totally screwed it up," Hecht said, "by allowing the states to be the ones to decide how small you can go. We have thousands of political jurisdictions in a given state, let alone in a region.

- Renters of the world, unite!, right? Maybe not exactly. Their arguments weren't that much pinker than the average respondent to the Atlantic Media/Siemens State of the City Poll. Americans are pretty content with the quality of local government they receive, and they're much more likely to attribute good government services to local government (as opposed to state or federal government), according to the poll results.

- Chakrabarti acknowledged that home rule or city-secession—!!—wouldn't necessarily make for affordable housing that residents in Chicago or L.A. or New York would accept. (Those cities, by the by, are three of the eight U.S. metro areas that stand head-and-shoulder with whole nations among the world's 40 highest producing economies on the planet.) "I don’t think most Americans want to live on the streets of Hong Kong," he said. "They may be wrong and pigheaded about that."

- Every major U.S. city looks a little bit like Singapore in one specific way: They enjoy one-party rule. "Virtually every major mayor in this country is from one party," Chakrabarti said. "Even in the deepest red state, the cities are this bastion of blue voting. --- "It’s not the hinterlands subsidizing the cities," Chakrabarti says, "it's the cities subsidizing the hinterlands."

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[llamaorama]

Cities are like mushrooms. They are the visible reproductive organ of a vast invisible living network that covers huge parts of the planet. To isolate that part is to harm it, so the only reason why it would be done is for selfish reasons by those in charge.

Ugh no. Please display your hukou papers citizen to access all services or return to your informal slum and get beaten by the police!

What creates affordable housing, outside of weird island city states with no build-able land, is a free market and relaxed planning. If the central city is unaffordable, start providing equitable public services on the periphery.Sprawl is merely a product of land use policies and transportation funding or an intrinsic result of wealth.

Singapore is a horrible place. A right wing corporatist dictator co-opted a quasi-leftist movement to take power by promising one generation of citizens in the 1960s and 1970s free goodies like public housing. While turning the city state into a corporate haven where wealth is massively concentrated and meritocracy means winner take all. Immigrants get treated like slaves while the rump population of natives is pacified with handouts while prodded to leave by professional worker visa programs that fill jobs with working age foreigners who will leave when they become dependents.

What these dicks seem to want is a step towards plutocratic city states where wealth is concentrated and the existing voting population and the noblesse oblige of the rich is pacified through services given to a very small minority. While the majority are hidden out of sight, out of mind.

The thing that makes the US amazing is that it is huge and people can come and go and settle in different cities where they can get a good job and find affordable housing and there is less pressure or friction.

- "In Hong Kong, the people who run the subway also run the housing," Chakrabarti said. "It makes so much sense." (Other things about Hong Kong do not make so much sense.) So, I'll bite: How much better off would cities be without states? Or even nations? When I asked a question along those lines (whether state or federal governments provide any value to city governance), I wasn't met with the pushback that I expected. "The history [for New York City] goes back to Al Smith and Robert Moses," Chakrabarti said.

This model does not work in the US or anywhere outside of Hong Kong and the declining legacy railroad suburbs of Japan for that matter.

You must want MegaCorp to own your highways, your apartment, and your balls.