The Affordable City

From Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Miami, US cities are struggling to address the twin crises of high housing costs and household instability. Debates over the appropriate course of action have been defined by two poles: building more housing or enacting stronger tenant protections. These options are often treated as mutually exclusive, with support for one implying opposition to the other. Shane Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance. He offers readers more than 50 policy recommendations, beginning with a set of principles and general recommendations that should apply to all housing policy. The remaining recommendations are organized by what he calls the Three S’s of Supply, Stability, and Subsidy. Phillips makes a moral and economic case for why each is essential and recommendations for making them work together. There is no single solution to the housing crisis—it will require a comprehensive approach backed by strong, diverse coalitions. The Affordable City is an essential tool for professionals and advocates working to improve affordability and increase community resilience through local action.

This book provides a comparative perspective on housing and planning policies affecting the future of cities, focusing on people- and place-based outcomes using the nexus of planning, design and policy. A rich mosaic of case studies features good practices of city-led strategies for affordable housing provision, as well as individual projects capitalising on partnerships to build mixed-income housing and revitalise neighbourhoods. Twenty chapters provide unique perspectives on diversity of approaches in eight countries and 12 cities in Europe, Canada and the USA. Combining academic rigour with knowledge from critical practice, the book uses robust empirical analysis and evidence-based case study research to illustrate the potential of affordable housing partnerships for mixed-income, socially inclusive neighbourhoods as a model to rebuild cities. Cities and Affordable Housing is an essential interdisciplinary collection on planning and design that will be of great interest to scholars, urban professionals, architects, planners and policy-makers interested in housing, urban planning and city building.

It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up

How are efforts at making cities more inclusive and equitable playing out across nations and societies, with different governance structures and varying political circumstances? How is affordable housing bridging economic gaps across different social and cultural geographies? This collection of fifty essays and case studies engages in these important questions and explores a wide array of strategies and approaches, extracting their overlaps and contrasts. It features interviews with influential administrators and planners such as Somsook Boonyabancha (Thailand), and Jaime Lerner (Brazil). It showcases projects by globally known architects and urbanists such as MVRDV (The Netherlands), and Alejandro Aravena (Chile). And it offers discussions on uplifting the base of the economic pyramid through low-income and slum-upgradation projects in Mali, Venezuela, Bogota, Myanmar, and Pune. This volume is not only an invaluable resource for architects and planners interested in the design of affordable housing, but for anyone interested in the global multiplicity and complexity of urban affordability, liveability and social justice.

Generation Priced Out is a call to action on one of the most talked-about issues of our time: how skyrocketing rents and home values are pricing the working and middle classes out of urban America. Randy Shaw tells the powerful stories of tenants, politicians, homeowner groups, developers, and activists in over a dozen cities impacted by the national housing crisis. From San Francisco to New York, Seattle to Denver, and Los Angeles to Austin, Generation Priced Out challenges progressive cities to reverse rising economic and racial inequality. Shaw exposes how boomer homeowners restrict millennials’ access to housing in big cities, a generational divide that increasingly dominates city politics. Shaw also demonstrates that neighborhood gentrification is not inevitable and presents proven measures for cities to preserve and expand their working- and middle-class populations and achieve more equitable and inclusive outcomes. Generation Priced Out is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of urban America.

Housing is increasingly unattainable in successful global cities, and Toronto is no exception -- in part because of zoning that protects “stable” residential neighborhoods with high property values. House Divided is a citizen’s guide for changing the way housing can work in big cities. Using Toronto as a case study, this anthology unpacks the affordability crisis and offers innovative ideas for creating housing for all ages and demographic groups. With charts, maps, data, and policy prescriptions, House Divided poses tough questions about the issue that will make or break the global city of the future.

Today, there is a tremendous mismatch between the available housing stock in the US and the housing options that people want and need. The post-WWII, auto-centric, single-family-development model no longer meets the needs of residents. Urban areas in the US are experiencing dramatically shifting household and cultural demographics and a growing demand for walkable urban living. Missing Middle Housing, a term coined by Daniel Parolek, describes the walkable, desirable, yet attainable housing that many people across the country are struggling to find. Missing Middle Housing types—such as duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts—can provide options along a spectrum of affordability. In Missing Middle Housing, Parolek, an architect and urban designer, illustrates the power of these housing types to meet today’s diverse housing needs. With the benefit of beautiful full-color graphics, Parolek goes into depth about the benefits and qualities of Missing Middle Housing. The book demonstrates why more developers should be building Missing Middle Housing and defines the barriers cities need to remove to enable it to be built. Case studies of built projects show what is possible, from the Prairie Queen Neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska to the Sonoma Wildfire Cottages, in California. A chapter from urban scholar Arthur C. Nelson uses data analysis to highlight the urgency to deliver Missing Middle Housing. Parolek proves that density is too blunt of an instrument to effectively regulate for twenty-first-century housing needs. Complete industries and systems will have to be rethought to help deliver the broad range of Missing Middle Housing needed to meet the demand, as this book shows. Whether you are a planner, architect, builder, or city leader, Missing Middle Housing will help you think differently about how to address housing needs for today’s communities.

In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.