The Plight of the Urban Planner – The New Yorker

In 2018, Scott Wiener, a California state senator representing San Francisco, introduced a co-authored bill that detonated a debate over housing. The aim of Senate Bill 827 was to override local regulations on building height in order to allow denser, high-rise construction near transit hubs. At once radical and simple, its target was nothing more, and nothing less, than zoningthe most common American way to control land use. Zoning determines whether a building is commercial or residential, how big it can get, whether its a single-family home or a high-rise tower. Though zoning is a legislative act, it is sometimes influenced by the efforts of a handful of well-connected people at a neighborhood association, or sometimes by a single, well-connected member of a zoning board. S.B. 827 would have overridden many such rules and made it easier to build. The bill derived its intellectual force from a growing consensus among economists that rising rents and housing prices in Californiaa state in which the median home price is more than twice the national average, and in which more than twenty per cent of residents spend more than half their income on housingare due to a dearth of multifamily housing and to the cumulative effect of zoning rules that stopped that housing from being built.

S.B. 827 elicited heated arguments, along with a few bizarre political coalitions. In supporting the bill, housing advocates found themselves allied with wealthy developers. Meanwhile, in opposing it, anti-gentrification activists found themselves allied with rich homeowners from places like Beverly Hills. A portion of the anti-S.B. 827 crowd simply didnt want to change their neighborhoods characteroften a racialized code wordbut many others came from multiracial working-class neighborhoods, and, for them, the bill was essentially a gift to developers, who would take the opportunity to build market-rate housing and augment ongoing gentrification. In the end, the opposition won outthe San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles City Council both voted against endorsing itand, despite late-breaking attempts to include anti-displacement measures, the bill failed to make it out of committee, losing 64. Of the votes in its favor, only two were from Democrats, Wiener and his co-authorfurther proof that the housing debate involves some strange bedfellows.

S.B. 827 nonetheless has spurred a more substantial conversation about zoning reform, of all things, than any urbanist could have predicted. Unfortunately, much of this conversation has taken place online, meaning that its resembled people screaming past one another and then shrinking into two opposing crags of congealed vitriol. On one side are the YIMBYsthe acronym stands for Yes, in my back yardwho believe that prices are too high because of market distortions that limit the amount of housing people actually want and need. For them, the solution is to increase market-rate housing, which, over time, will result in a reduction in prices and rents. Opponents of YIMBYsoften called NIMBYs, meaning Not in my back yard (as a term of opprobrium, it of course predates YIMBY)have a variety of rejoinders to this argument, but they center on the idea that building market-rate housing will never deliver the amount of housing that people need, at prices they can afford. Furthermore, they argue that the immediate effect of introducing such housing is gentrification and displacement. It is at this point that the argument devolves into accusations that the YIMBYs are tools of rich, white real-estate developers, and that the NIMBYs are tools of rich, white homeowners, and the space in between these two positions is quickly converted into a muddy field, where no one dares show a white flag.

The particular airlessness of this debate is only partly due to its growth in the complexity-free vacuum of the Internet. The more significant constriction is that it is an argument that takes place almost entirely according to the terms of real-estate development. In a recent book, Capital City, the geographer Samuel Stein puts this debate into context, and adds to it. He argues that our housing dilemma derives from an unholy fusion of development and politics, which he calls the real estate state. Stein, a geographer at the City University of New York, tries to establish how industrial cities, in becoming postindustrial, opened the way for real estate to enter the breach. Landowners have been determining the shape of cities for centuries, and the idea of housing as a commodityeven as a financial assetis not exactly state of the art, Stein writes. What is relatively new, however, is the outsized power of real estate interests within the capitalist state. Deriving his insights from left-wing geographers and urban historians, and also from interviews with activists in New York City, he alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and livelihoods.

But Steins special aim is not just to show how real estate controls everything, which, if you were halfway paying attention during the financial crisisrooted as it was in the predations of housing marketsyou already know. His principal point is that the power of the real-estate state flows from the dynamic between development and the profession of city planning. Planners are usually thought of as bureaucrats, though sometimes they take on the aspect of legend: Baron Georges-Eugne Haussmann, who tamed rebellious Paris into wide avenues that couldnt be barricaded; imperious Robert Moses, who pummelled New York with expressways. Steins planners are at once lesser and greater than these. Though they may look like mousy cubicle denizensdetermining the right sort of window treatment for a historic house, or calculating the Area Median Income for a smattering of affordable units in a luxury buildingtheyre more influential than they appear. Planners, he writes, are tasked with the contradictory goals of inflating real estate values while safeguarding residents best interests. The position is an inherently uncomfortable one. But planning holds out the promise that the future is, at least in part, knowable. Explicit in Steins narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities.

Like many professions with a broad, metaphorically resonant name, planning has a history that can be dated back centuries. In the Americas, planners domesticated forests, dammed rivers, laid out grids. But city planning as we know it today arose in the late nineteenth century, as a response to the growing chaos of industrial life. At first, the profession was meant to ameliorate conditions of congestion, sanitation, and shoddy construction, especially where they intersected with the lives of workers and the urban poor. Benjamin Marsh, the first secretary of the New York City Committee on Congestion of Population (CCP), was one of the twentieth centurys most energetic thinkers on planning. He decried tenements and sweatshops, pushed for government control of factory-owned land, and advocated for a progressive tax on land values to help fund the social needs of workers. Marshs proposals, like those of many planners, were essentially based on the hope that the rich could be shamed into supporting the poor. This was a gambit that, in time, left planners frustrated and power imbalances intact.

Marsh and figures like him embody what Stein, following the historian Robert Foglesong, describes as a twinned set of contradictions in planning. Developers need planners, but a conflict arises when the former look to the latter for interventions in public space. They demand that the state build the infrastructure that makes their land usable, Stein writes of developers. At the same time, they are fiercely protective of their property rights and suspicious of planning insofar as it threatens their control over land. Planners, in turn, are agents of the public, but they are beholden to developers, in practice. Democratic societies require at least a display of public input, but often only a display: planners must proceed with enough openness and transparency to maintain public legitimacy, while ensuring that capital retains ultimate control over the processes parameters. From this comes the charade of public-comment sessions, familiar to most active city dwellers, in which so-called stakeholders are invited to discuss development plans, whose basic outlines they have little chance of influencing.

Similarly, planners who want to assert broad control over the public realm are often dependent on recalcitrant businessmen, who are unlikely to give them the full measure of what they might want to achieve, since planning often involves the creation of public infrastructure that requires business to get out of the way. Much of what does get achieved requires catastrophic, violent interventions in the lives of the very people that planners are trying to help. The land for Central Park, the green lung of New York and one of the greatest parks in the world, was secured by expelling Manhattans largest African-American settlement. The construction of most public housing required the resettlement of thousands of households, often those of working class African-Americans, in the destructive process known as urban renewal. (Urban renewal, James Baldwin said, in an interview, really means Negro removal.)

Urban renewal accompanied broader convulsions in American cities, during which much industry fledto barely unionized Southern states and abroad, for cheaper wagesor was deliberately pushed out. Stein follows Robert Fitchs underrated, impassioned book The Assassination of New York in detailing how many planners dreamed of replacing the citys industrial areas with office towers, and, in the sixties and seventies, through large-scale changes in zoning, succeeded, transforming the city from blue-collar to white-collar. At the same time, the practice of redlining, in which the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency, marked diverse neighborhoods as being unworthy of credit, and hardened urban segregation and poverty. In the eighties, the United States began to cut public assistance to cities, leaving more and more power in the hands of private developers.

This history sets up Steins main story, which is about the contemporary high-priced city of gentrification and displacement. Mercifully, his analysis does not mention hipsters, artisanal stationery stores, or CBD lattes. Instead, he discusses how planners have once again played a central role in scaling up gentrification from a neighborhood phenomenon of renovation and reinvention to a larger process of displacement, demolition and development. A miasma of guilt and misunderstanding surrounds discussions of gentrification. The usual storyof upwardly mobile people moving into depressed areas and displacing existing, less well-off residents in the processis at least partly true. But, as geographers have pointed out for some time, it also requires disinvestment: neighborhoods decline, in part, because of state neglect, and yuppies rush in where planners fear to tread. This is how the familiar story of places such as SoHo, in lower Manhattan, and Park Slope, in Brooklyn, begins. Those neighborhoods were abandoned by the government before they were occupied by new residents.

Similarly, the past three decades have been characterized by hyper-gentrification, which is a largely legislative phenomenon, the work of planners and policymakersnot simply an ineluctable market signal that is sent when someone opens a vegan doughnut shop. Stein details the number of planning-policy innovations that have made it easier for developers and large nonprofits to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes. In 1971, the establishment of New Yorks 421-a tax program gave developers abatements on luxury construction, for anywhere from ten to twenty-five years. (One of the great beneficiaries of 421-a, Stein notes, was Donald Trump, who built Trump Plaza, on the Upper East Side with a thirteen-million-dollar tax break.) In 2016, when the program was set to expire, 421-a cost New York $1.2 billion a year. A recent revision to the law, under Governor Andrew Cuomo, brought the cost to $2.4 billion a year. Thats about six hundred million less than the M.T.A. requested from the state to fix the ailing subway system. These are the sorts of numbers that reveal how the real-estate state declares its priorities. As legislators made developers lives easier, planners became the helpless accomplices of urban inequality.

Jane Jacobss The Death and Life of Great American Cities, an indictment of American city planning, appeared in 1961; Robert A. Caros The Power Broker, an indictment of an American city planner, appeared in 1974. In the years between their publicationand partly owing to their argumentsplanning lost whatever was left of its swashbuckling air, and was increasingly seen as a clumsy, illegitimate, even villainous profession, its members casually carving their utopian visions into the fabric of complex, heterogeneous cities.

When planning lost its revolutionary lan, it also lost its sense of ambition. Many mid-century planners, for all their missteps, tried to engineer a more equal city. As planning lost its power, an impressive variety of inequities crept into policymaking. Zoning emerged as the most important tool of increasingly powerful neighborhood groups that sought to limit racial integration, protect the character of existing neighborhoods, and encourage the early stages of gentrification. As the think-tank scholar Richard Rothstein outlined in The Color of Law, from 2017, zoning has always been exclusionary, especially in keeping black families out of certain neighborhoods. In 1910, Baltimore tried to institute zoning on explicitly racial lines, before the Supreme Court struck down the practice. But zoning on implicitly racial lines has persisted because of Americans preference for single-family housing over apartment buildingsmultifamily housing was associated with poorer renters of color. New Yorks 1961 zoning law, for example, protected a number of mostly single-family-housing districts in Queens, the Bronx, and South Brooklynthe archetypal urban villages depicted in shows like All in the Family and films like Saturday Night Feverand helped prevent renters of color from joining their mostly white residents.

Contemporary planners, stripped even further of power, have proposed only meager remedies for such inequality. One attempt has been inclusionary zoning, which allows developers to exceed zoning restrictions and receive subsidies if they commit to making a portion of their apartments affordable for a certain period of time. In response to New York Citys luxury-development boom, Mayor Bill de Blasio made inclusionary zoning mandatory. Even so, the mandate has a number of fatal loopholes, which allow developers to skirt the requirements, and the income threshold still excludes most black and Latinx New Yorkers. Another problem with de Blasios plan may be its premise. For it to succeed, the plan needs to marshal a multitude of rich people into places that are already experiencing gentrification, as Stein writesexactly the sort of effect that activists feared with regard to S.B. 827. Though it would potentially satisfy only three per cent of the need for affordable housing units in New York, it could add a hundred thousand market-rate apartments to the citys neighborhoods.

According to ultra-YIMBY reasoning, the addition of these apartments might not be a problem, since housing markets are, like other markets, subject to supply and demand. But, as the author Rick Jacobus recently argued in the magazine Shelterforce, the housing market is segmented, better understood as as a set of interrelated submarkets that can move somewhat independently than as a single market. For example, rent for student housing may roughly follow the laws of supply and demand, but, in general, its cost isnt eased by building a lot of housingwhat matters is the supply of student housing and the demand from students. By the same token, upzoning that allows for more affordable housing to be built has effects on existing affordable housing. When planners upzone neighborhoods to allow bigger buildings, rent-stabilized landlords will have every reason to sell their properties to speculative developers, who could then knock down the existing properties and build something bigger and more expensive, Stein writes. The long-term effect of a housing boom may be a housing bustbut, in the meantime, all sorts of pain may be inflicted on existing residents.

There are other reasons to be cautious. Historically, attempts to remedy segregation through the real-estate market have often ended up increasing it. In a groundbreaking new book, Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, shows how the post-urban renewal-planning regime came to rely heavily on the real-estate industry. New forms of subsidized loans were, in her phrasing, a form of predatory inclusion, trapping black homeowners in substandard housing, while developers continued to reap dividends. Her analysis covers a specific period in time, and a particular kind of housing market, but its conclusion is general and damning: the American real-estate market was founded on racism and still depends on it. White NIMBYs have kept multifamily buildings out of wealthier neighborhoods, in no small part to keep those neighborhoods racially homogeneous, and it is doubtful that real-estate developers can solve this historic inequity.

Though Stein supports efforts that would increase housing construction in wealthy areas, he is clear that these policies need to be part of a broader program. In a recent article for Jacobin, he argues that there is a general overreliance on zoning, which is, in any case, a tool ill-equipped to confront the private land and property markets. The solution, therefore, is a popular movement for anticapitalist urban planning and the decommodification of land and housing. In other words, having a market for housing is itself the problem. And a return to large-scale planning is the answer.

Stein is one of a number of voices, some of them newly ensconced in state legislatures, pursuing what he calls classic methods. One of these methods is rent control. For decades, rent control has served as a case study in what not to do in housing in the U.S., though it remains a normal feature of housing markets in Austria and other countries. But, in the past few years, it has made something of a comeback; Oregon and California both recently passed statewide caps on rent increases.

In classical economics, caps on rent increases were believed to limit the incentives to build new housing. If that were true, one policy solution would be to exempt new construction from controls for a certain period of time. A more significant solution would be for the state to intervene where the market failsthat is, to build public housing. Public housing is another curse word in the American context, though less for the economics of itthere is no more obvious solution to the rise in prices than to take some units permanently off the marketthan for its sorry denouement in the countrys history. The United States committed to a sweeping expansion in spending for public housing with the landmark Housing Act of 1949, and then proceeded to build fewer units than were promised, and dedicated little to maintenance following building. Many condemned American housing projects for their forbidding scale and design flaws and, even more so, for the racial segregation they createdby the mid-nineties, forty-eight per cent of public-housing residents were black, as opposed to nineteen per cent in the private-rental market. And, since the nineteen-seventies, several measuresincluding President Richard Nixons moratorium on public housing, the rise of Section 8 vouchers, and the HOPE VI program, under which housing towers were demolished and replacedhave steadily eroded Americans support for public housing. The result is a country in which millions of eligible people have lost access to subsidized housing, and in which the existing public-housing complexes are suffering from severe infrastructural neglect.

Decades of a housing crisis, accompanied by decades of organizing and activism, have finally led to revaluations of public housing and regional planning. A policy team led by the tenants-rights activist Tara Raghuveer recently produced a proposal for a Homes Guaranteea marquee plan that proposes the construction of twelve million new, permanently affordable homes as social housing. Meanwhile, the law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, who has advised Senator Elizabeth Warren, has called for a twenty-first-century Homestead Act, under which a public trust would be tasked with purchasing distressed or abandoned homes in historically redlined areasa form of direct capital investment with the aim of remedying the racial wealth gap. Both are serious proposals that have the potential to shift power away from developers and toward the people historically excluded from the housing market. To be achieved, both need the backing of enormous social movements. They could also resurrect large-scale planning, conceived on a freshly democratic basis, as a profession of consequence. The planner, after decades of irrelevance, or worse, might yet be a figure of noteand perhaps, in a time of crisis, one of purpose.

A previous version of this post misidentified the author of the Shelterforce article.

More here:
The Plight of the Urban Planner - The New Yorker