Such thinking raises obstacles to the revival of American cities. At the very least a distinction must be drawn between areas that require support for affordable housing and those that need quite the opposite. Real estate in some cities, such as San Francisco and Manhattan, has become too uniformly expensive, and they are clearly in need of affordable housing. But cities such as Detroit, Trenton, and Syracuse could use all the gentrification they can get. The last thing that they need is more affordable housing.
Gentrification, on the whole, should be the best of news, for there is nothing more dysfunctional than a monoculture of poverty. As Reuben Greenberg, the Police Chief of Charleston –who happens to be a black American - has said: “Urban problems are caused not by poverty, but by the concentration of poverty.” Gentrification, which is the trend to re-balance the concentration of poverty with the tax base, rub-off work ethic, and political effectiveness of the middle-class, is the very thing indicated for the improvement in the quality of life of all residents. It is the rising tide that lifts all ships.
Implied in the activists’ opposition is that gentrification is artificially induced and that it is controllable. Both of these notions are, with few exceptions, fallacies. Americans have attempted a few induced gentrifications--using the power and resources of government to revitalize decrepit parts of cities. Two famous examples are the harbor area of Baltimore and of the West Side of Manhattan. The catalyst in both cases was a major civic investment. One was the building of Lincoln Center in the early 60’s, and the multitude of entertainment, sports and cultural venues that were supplied to Baltimore Harbor. But in both, as well as in other cities, it was an expensive proposition and the results were slow to take hold. So there haven’t been many induced gentrifications. Examples of spontaneous ones however, are legion.
Spontaneous gentrification takes off without municipal intervention. New York has undergone a continuous sequence--beginning with Greenwich Village and proceeding to SoHo and all the subsequent Hos. Elsewhere, it is today hard to believe that the real estate of Georgetown, Beacon Hill, Charleston, Santa Fe or Nob Hill was ever down; but so it was, before spontaneous gentrification. South Florida, in just twenty years, has witnessed the gentrification of Coconut Grove, Miami Beach, and the scrappy old town of Key West. As it happens, all of these transformations were driven by individuals discovering the excellent urban qualities of each place. The government caught up later to take credit, and to interfere with the natural cycle, for better or worse.
The process of spontaneous gentrification begins surreptitiously, when a first wave of the poor but savvy discover the urban quality of a hitherto decrepit area. These are usually students, artists, perhaps gays, and other self-marginalized social groups. Such folks have been characterized by sociologists as the “risk oblivious.” They demonstrate with their creativity and sweat that old lofts and townhouses are habitable, indeed charming. They transform ratty bad-food joints into ratty good-food joints. The first wave constitutes a social rather than an economic or physical gentrification.
By the time the corner stores are stocking olive oil, the area is noticed by a second wave, which is characterized as the “risk-aware.” These are people with the ability to invest financially in renovation, not just with sweat equity. They expect to secure loans, and therefore must satisfy the building codes and permits that the first wave probably ignored. This includes a group that is pervasive among baby boomers, those who crave the bohemian lifestyle while actually being as securely employed as the conventional old bourgeoisie. This cohort is now an economic, but not necessarily a physical, gentrifying force. They like the place to look rough and edgy, even as it becomes more expensive.
The third wave which follows is “risk adverse.” This group is led by conventional developers who thoroughly smarten up the buildings through conventional real estate operations—physical renovation, improved maintenance, and organized security. Their clientele has been characterized by Manhattanites as “dentists from New Jersey” with all that that implies.
In all cases, induced or spontaneous, once gentrification begins, it is a chain reaction that tends to continue. The difficulty with any attempt to intervene, supposedly on behalf of low-income residents, is that, at its source, urban gentrification is organic. Its motive force is the great urbanism itself: the well-proportioned streets; the good mix of activities in useful building types, a certain architectural quality. And these days the allure is intensified as the promise of the suburb is undermined by traffic congestion and the banality of sprawl. Good urban areas are rare and, in contrast to sprawl, more appealing than ever. This is naturally reflected in their market value.
To control this through policy undermines the intelligence of urbanism when many have a say. What spokesmen for the poor insist on calling gentrification is actually the timeless urban cycle of a free society organically adjusting its habitat. And among the participants in gentrification are the owners who receive better prices for their homes, allowing them to afford other ones that they prefer elsewhere. And for those who remain, there is a general improvement in quality of life. In fact, the only clear losers may be the poverty advocates who have their constituency diluted. The evidence of this is that it is the leaders who complain of gentrification; rarely the residents themselves, who may have much to gain.
This is not a question of whether affordable housing should be available. To that, the answer is a clear affirmative. Society has its poor but it is necessary to make the distinction between the provision of affordable housing and its retention. These effects, while related, can be separated for discussion. It is a paradox that the retention of affordable housing may be more difficult to achieve than its provision which is well in hand through subsidy of the private sector, or entirely supplied by government as an extension of public works. The market also provides affordable housing in the form of older, out-of-date, building stock. The urban decay that supplies it is no less integral to the organic urban cycle as gentrification. Cities with such housing stock typically are portals for immigrants. These "Chinatowns" or "Little Havanas" are economic incubators. They represent affordable housing in its ideal form: the "old neighborhood" that is fondly recalled by the foes of gentrification. These inner city neighborhoods however, are not permanent as they were usually built originally for the middle-class and it is their quality that eventually attracts subsequent gentrification. They are, in fact, only recovering their intrinsic value; they are reverting to their origins, not just being “taken away” from the poor.
Can anything be done to keep the existing housing stock from becoming expensive? This is very difficult to accomplish. In fact, it’s not easy even to agree to make affordability a political objective. Because spontaneous gentrification is not to be confused with the clearly horrific practice of neighborhoods being razed for redevelopment, as happened in the H.U.D. era of the sixties and seventies. People sell their property willingly in the open market and those who sell do so at higher value than they had been able to achieve before gentrification began. If one were to remove the owners’ right to market value, they would react violently. To artificially restrain resale value in order to keep housing affordable is unfair to the poor. Why should others who own buildings profit handsomely for their perspicacity, while the poor are prevented from doing so? Life is unfair enough for low-income people without their well-intentioned overseers denying them their just profits.
The people know this. In one neighborhood of small houses that was supposedly fighting gentrification, we were asked to avert a sharp rise in housing price. We dutifully proposed limiting building size, based on lot size. In planning terminology, this technique is called controlling the floor-area ratio. The measure we recommended would have prevented the existing houses from becoming large enough to accommodate yup expectations: additional family rooms, mega bathrooms and superclosets would not have been possible. When the depressing effect of this technique became clear, the public posturing disappeared soon enough; the participants in the planning process would have none of it. These may have been poor people but they were, after all, Americans. When the proposal was rejected by acclamation, only those unaffected, the activists from outside the neighborhood, were surprised by the outcome.
We then proposed more subtle techniques that could be used to maintain some of the existing residents in place: To allow the creation, legally, of one or two ancillary units behind the existing small houses that could be available for rental. We wrote new codes that would allow small-scale services, such as the care of a few elderly persons, child-care, laundry out of a house, for example. These strategies involve supporting the sort of income generating businesses that already occur throughout poor neighborhoods, illegally. They are the mutual support system that was dismantled with the H.U.D. demolitions of the 60s and 70s and subsequently eliminated by the application of suburban-style codes inappropriately to the traditional city.
But the question remains: Can anything be done to prevent gentrification? Yes, there is one proven, if craven, technique that’s effective in holding down prices. It is to give people bad design. As gentrification is essentially the value of real estate seeking its proper level, most places that gentrify are good enough for the gentry. Places that resist gentrification are those where the housing is of poor design, or the quality of the urban space mediocre. So the most certain technique for permanently preventing gentrification is to provide dismal architectural and urban design. This is not facetious. The Federal Government inadvertently tested this effect in the process of providing affordable housing at two distinct periods. One was during the First World War when the U.S. Housing Corporation built fifty-five projects in cities where the expanded defense industry required it. This housing, while inexpensive, consisted of traditional houses and rowhouses skillfully designed by first-rate architects. Today, most of it is still in good shape, much of it having gentrified over the years. This is in stark contrast to the second model, the housing that the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (H.U.D.) produced in the 1960s. This time it was designed along the then-fashionable socialist models that our modernist architects so admired in Europe. Most of it soon decayed and persists in remaining so, despite multiple renovations over the years. (For the record, it has fared just as badly in Europe. It was clearly not the fault of H.U.D. but of the architects who advised them.)
A side-by-side comparison of this phenomenon is provided by the pair of housing projects called Seaview in Bridgeport Connecticut. One, today, is a delightful little village about 80 years old and in perfect condition. The other, barrack-like, is less than 30 years old and, despite being less than a decade away from its last renovation, is again trashed. Experimental, modernist design is indeed a proven technique for keeping housing in the hands of the poor. Fortunately, the new highly successful H.U.D. program, called Hope VI, provides only traditional housing, the very opposite of the experimental 1960 “projects” that socially self-destructed and are now being demolished by HUD itself.
There is an additional difficulty. The provision of affordable housing today is vehemently opposed by the middle-class. Is this simple prejudice? Is it fear or crime? In fact, there is a statistical basis for the relationship between crime and poverty, so it is difficult to deny that those who fear affordable housing are just categorically prejudiced. In fact, it is a necessary first step to acknowledge that the manner in which affordable housing is provided causes problems. If it is done, as has usually been the case, in very large groupings, then the opposition is not wrong in their fears. Affordable housing to be socially sustainable must be provided in small increments. Ten percent is a good rule--imagine only two townhouses amongst twenty others and you can deduce that this is imperceptible – particularly if the buildings are indistinguishable in architectural syntax from middle class housing.
There are currently such policies to promote the intermixing of subsidized with market-rate housing. In Montgomery County, Maryland, builders of new subdivisions are given strong incentives to sprinkle affordable units among middle-class ones. Such housing is maintained in small ratios, and it looks like the market-rate housing nearby. This program seems to work very well indeed; we have designed one such project, called Wyndcrest, in Sandy Spring, Maryland and can attest to its success.
And one may ask: if there is such a strong need, why is affordable housing not provided by a market-driven economy? One answer is that our housing industry is not operating in a free market. It is trammeled by building and planning bureaucracies that prevent its smooth operation. In the past, people could build for themselves. A self-help system used to provide housing through sweat equity; and so it was that this continent was colonized. But there are now a myriad of regulations that, in the pursuit of eliminating bad housing, inadvertently has eliminated the supply of affordable housing. Today, only licensed professionals can design, permit, and build housing. The resulting beurocratic friction makes housing for the poor available only with artificial supports. Thus the possibility of housing oneself has been taken away from the individual to become the responsibility of government or alimonisary organizations. It is another instance government solving a problem that it created.
We should note that certain “code-free” zones do exist, whenever the government looks aside while regular people make underutilized places habitable for themselves. That is how the “risk-oblivious” broke into the housing market in SoHo in the 60's. This method can be replicated in many older American cities where the upper stories of commercial buildings are typically underused or abandoned. They are empty because to renovate them, the building codes require a thorough upgrading to current code standards. Much would-be affordable housing is illegal because it lacks a few inches of stair width, or fails to conform to some other ideal. A more sensible application of building codes would allow that, if a building satisfies the code valid at the time that the building was originally constructed, then it is not forced to meet the new code requirements when renovated. This simple rule change would allow the renovation of old housing stock at reasonable prices, by eliminating unnecessary and expensive "upgrading to code". New Jersey has one such law and it has contributed to spectacular comebacks of Jersey City and Hoboken.
So what is the fuss over gentrification about? Perhaps it is that community leaders cannot bear the self-reliance of the incoming middle-class, nor can they accept the dilution of their political base. But theirs is a swan song. Middle-class Americans are choosing to live in many inner-city neighborhoods because they have urbane attributes that are not available in conventional suburbia. And as it becomes increasingly obvious to the American middle-class that it is badly served by the suburban habitat, they are discovering the older, more functional and pleasant urban model.
The only permanent solution to overgentrification is to assure that new development in greenfields are authentic urban places so that the older ones don’t become overvalued through scarcity. A national housing policy should include the creation of traditional neighborhoods instead of sprawl, it should eschew a narrow focus on affordability and it should avoid limiting the ability of people of modest means to build for themselves, it certainly should not prevent them to profit from the natural appreciation of their neighborhoods.
Author ID: Andres Duany is a partner in the Town Planning firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. He was co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and co-author of the recently published Suburban Nation. The ideas presented in this paper do not necessarily represent the ideals of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Unpublished paper, Nov. 2000, http://www.cherrywood.org/docs/UBC/Duany.htm
