June 13, 2021
Los Angeles
Homelessness, the unsheltered, the houseless. The poor and excluded. The people who live on the streets. Encampments, clean and trash strewn, complex and simple. Services like plastic boxes with chemical toilets are here and there. And the people. So many in different states of health, cleanliness, dress. What has happened here? Los Angeles County of about 10 million people, cannot house 60,000 of its inhabitants. And housed people resist the unhoused, resist sheltering them in their neighborhoods. Just like they resist any density, any mixity of race and income, any change to the familiar but dissatisfying status quo. Not in my backyard.
Prices for housing keep escalating, they are stratospheric for most who live on service worker wages, even teacher’s wages, or those of health care workers. But this is not a new problem in the U.S. Louis Mumford in The Culture of Cities published in 1938, already called out the problem of housing affordability in the country. He acknowledged that amenities added to the cost of housing, at the time they included water, privacy, sanitary devices. Today we call out our other amenities, including health and safety regulations, parking requirements, the earthquake code, Title 24 to reduce energy use, as adding to the cost of housing. His proposal to address the issue of the poorly housed, or unhoused, was to raise wage levels. It was transparently clear to him that the reason people were unhoused, or poorly housed was that they could not afford to be housed. We find the same situation today as an unregulated private capitalist system is being counted upon to provide the bulk of the nation’s housing, and continues to fail, dramatically. His other solution was for governments to expropriate land for housing purposes, including for other types of living arrangements like communal living, or cooperatives.
Mumford also pointed out the overallocation of urban land to roads. He called this a highly inefficient use of urban space, causing people to waste time and energy, specifically fuels. It is sobering to realize that Mumford in the 1930s, identified problems with American cities that have only gotten more extreme. His suggestions today seem radical, especially expropriation of private land to create housing. It is seen as unworkable, socialistic, communistic, and all those terms. Yet Singapore offers its residents housing that is state owned. People in Singapore can afford to live there. Singapore is an authoritarian democracy. . . I am not advocating for that, simply that there are real and successful models today, including in Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, that are not authoritarian democracies. Perhaps home ‘ownership’ is not all its cracked up to be, and long term leases make more sense — 25 year leases, for example. After all, the City of Manchester is offering 999 year land leases to investment capital from China and Saudi Arabia. Why not long term, maybe even lifetime, leases to regular folk?
What can we take from Mumford for today’s housing crisis? One that is leading to violence, hate and resentment. That leads to the dehumanization of the other, and a dearth of compassion? I do not think there are any easy answers, but it is time to raise to the forefront discussions about housing provided by the state, and his insightful critique of wasteful urban form. There is really no reason why housing should have become so expensive except speculation. The entrance of equity capital and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) have enormously skewed the market, one which Mumford rightly calls out as problematic already in the 1930s when these tools were non-existent. And we know how much roads now dominate cities, they are made to accommodate transportation rather than having housing and human activities dominate transportation systems.
We must also recognize the role of structural racism in shaping urban form – suburbs – in shoving multiple family buildings into less affluent neighborhoods, and in making access to capital and loans, enormously more difficult for people of color and of modest means. The homeless situation is unambiguously a result of capitalism and the financialization of housing. It does not seem that there is much that can be done to address the unhoused and poorly housed’s needs using the same tools. It is now time to frontally recognize that the market will not house our urban populations, including in Los Angeles. Let us therefore, be willing to try something different, and mostly novel for the U.S.: have the government expropriate land and build housing. While many will point to the generally uninspiring track record of public housing in the past, that housing was aimed squarely at the poor, and maintained the segregated order of land use. That will not create better cities. We need to provide affordable, good housing for all, which would probably encompass about 60% of today’s urban population. Smart designs, using land less wastefully (duplexes, triplexes, some low apartment buildings), narrower streets and ample room for public transportation and walking, might start to reverse the extraordinary surge of homelessness and marginal housing conditions. At the same time, wages also need to rise. Having no money can only be solved by having money. That means much better pay and the end to employers making multiple hundreds of times what the average worker makes.
How to get there? Raising the possibility, or the desirability of this type of future is a first step, as we have so self-censored these ideas are not even discussed. Developing local banks is another step, and strong land use controls is a third. Decrease land inflation through regulation, then purchase the land at its fair value. The market itself does not provide a fair signal of market value since it is gamed. Citizen juries could begin to determine fair value. Now that would be a change!
