shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.


I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.


I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock


Website (RSS + Newsletter)
shelraphen.com/

shel
@shel

The dialectic of housing is

  1. To solve the housing crisis and address climate change we must end single-family zoning and allow for the construction of dense multifamily housing units and walkable neighborhoods

AND

  1. We do not need to just cave to every single real estate developer who wants to displace a community to build tens of identical plastic-clad high-rises of 100% "market-rate" luxury 0–2 bedroom apartments that are completely unaffordable to most people and aren't appropriate to anyone raising a family unless they were very good family planners and had exactly one child in anticipation of this problem.

Americans, despite being obsessed with centrism, seem incapable of imagining the middle ground between single-family zoning and Kowloon Walled City.

The dialectic path is this: Housing should not be a commodity that is left to the free market as thought it's the finest cut emeralds. We need more housing and that housing does need to be dense partially because people all want to be close to the same things because that's how jobs and community work. Partially because we need people to stop driving everywhere.

We keep having these tiny pockets of desirable places to live with not enough housing and it's like an impact crater of gentrification. We should be trying to spread out the desirability of neighborhoods by addressing systemic equity issues. If every neighborhood has trees, good sidewalks, grocery stores, and good transit access to jobs, then we won't be getting these impact craters of people flooding to tiny places like Somerville, uCity, CapHill, etc. they'll just live wherever.

And then we can spread out the housing developments as well so instead of bulldozing all of West Philadelphia to replace it with ugly plastic high-rises, you can put a bunch more mid-rises throughout the entire city.

You can also regulate new developments to mandate affordable housing and also ensure that family-friendly housing is being built as well. Cities need 4-bedroom units! And those 4-bedroom units need to be affordable without 4 incomes!

Also, rent stabilization! Treat housing as a state-protected human right that the private sector is being allowed to participate in and not their gd-given right to exploit for as much profit as possible. Build lots of public housing. Don't just increase supply that is controlled entirely by people who don't want an increased supply to result in decreased demand or rent prices. If the private sector is going to be allowed to participate in the housing market at all then yes they should have to compete with public housing and make their units actually worth living in for the cost of paying more than public housing.

If these developers are building new plastic-clad high-rises, they better be accepting people on section-8 vouchers. And so forth.

There's a lot of myths that we don't need to increase the housing supply because of misunderstood numbers around vacant housing units. Often, housing units are vacant because they're condemned or otherwise not actually appropriate to live in. We learned this the hard way in Philly when the encampment outside the art museum successfully won access to vacant housing from PHA and, after moving in, discovered that there were a multitude of very good reasons why the housing had been vacant. A building is not the same as a safe home.

So yes, we do need to build more housing for there to be enough housing especially because new people are always being born in cities and moving into cities so the population will grow and those people need places to live so the housing stock always does need to be increasing. But how we increase that housing stock does not need to be on the terms of developers who will build openly discriminatory 80-story buildings of only studio apartments listed on Zillow as "Great for students!"


bruno
@bruno

Another reason those 'oh but there are X many vacant units' arguments can be misleading is that for any kind of housing market to function, there have to be vacant units. Doesn't matter if it's a capitalist hellscape or a fully command-and-control state housing system, there has to be slack in the system. There have to be vacant units for people to move into when they need new housing for whatever reason. This is obvious if you think about it, but "there are x vacant houses and only y unhoused people" sidesteps thinking about this.

And I think part of why people forget this so easily is that if you're a renter, a move is on average a traumatic severing event that fucks up your life for a week because your dipshit landlord wants more money or just decided to toy with your life. Whereas, really, people do need to move for all kinds of valid reasons sometimes that are not driven by landlord machinations.


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