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Blog Post#6 (Class 12) – Cheng Dong
March 5, 2015 | Leave a Comment
Class 12: Zoning – Getting The Poor to Better Places
Since the start of humanity, the issue of where you live has always bear a great significance in determining one’s fate. After all, where you live determines the resources available to you in your vicinity, from public transportation, employment opportunities, to quality public education, these factors all come to help shape our path in life. Thus, one way to combat the ever growing income inequality is to remove zoning laws and allow the poor to be able to move into areas where these resources exist. On the other hand, the construction of affordable housing benefits the cities as well by attracting talents who lack the fortune to move there to work. Of course, it is hard to say that the poor living near the rich will receive similar treatments, but that unfairness in living conditions is a tradeoff by the poor for the benefits of their place of residence. As uncomfortable as it may sound, I found myself agreeing with Ed Glaeser of Daily News. The poor chose to live where they do, and equality in residence is less important to them compared to the opportunities provided to them by the location of their residence.
Like Daniel Hertz of The Washington Post claim in his article, reduction of zoning can be an effective method to treat income inequality. One very important source of income inequality is difference in quality of education received, a problem stretching back into a child’s days in elementary school and even kindergarten. The prominence of zoning policy is a important factor contributing to difference in education qualities. Zoning keeps the rich and the poor separate, and therefore prevents school districts from having a combination of rich and poor students. This leads to difference in funding, ability to attract high quality staff, and ultimately better education for the rich and lesser education for the poor. This, as discussed in previous readings, prevents the poor, who are also poorly educated, from obtaining a good job in today’s world of technological advancements. Imagine now, if zoning policies are removed and the poor are more able to move into affluent communities, the poor children will be able to get access to better education from the very start of their time as students. Ultimately, these children will be more able than their parents to gain well paid positions, and thus closing the income gap.
Asides from the major factor of education, the removal of zoning policies will also provide other significant opportunities to the poor, whom are likely willing to sacrifice things for those opportunities. There is always a reason behind one’s decision to move to a certain place, and the opportunities available in that location is a great factor. Like Glaeser claims “The poor make reasonable location decisions.” When the poor moved into affordable housings in Manhattan in search of the employment opportunities and easily accessible public transportation, they are well aware of the inequality they could be facing as they are mixed in the same complex with wealthy condominiums. I do not disagree with CNN writer Emily Jane Fox’s stance in the need to bettering the living conditions of the poor in affordable housing. Yet, I don’t think Fox is just in blaming all of this on the developers, as the poor made their own decision to enduring such inequality as a tradeoff for the benefits of living in Manhattan. For me at least, this is a common sign of the poor today, willingness to endure certain inequalities in hope for opportunities to improve their situations in the future. In their minds, equity of living conditions is much less important than the advantages provided by the location of their residence, and that is perhaps one of the reasons that this segregation of the poor and the rich was ever approved in the first place.
While the low income individuals enjoy the benefits of cities’ affordable housings, the cities stand to benefits from their actions to implement the program as well. As we have discussed, one of the poor’s predicaments is the lack of good employment opportunities in their area of residence. On the other hand, some cities lack workforces because they don’t have affordable housing for them. Thus, the construction of affordable housings can benefits cities by drawing in needed workforces. The workforces attracted to these cities are not necessarily all low skill labor forces; James Pethokoukis of American Enterprise Institute makes a good point that there are people with great professional skills fallen into the lower income bracket because there isn’t decent opportunities at their place of residence and they don’t have to money to move to places where there are decent opportunities. With the proper opportunities and the initiation of affordable housing policies, cities can draw in a large wave of low income skilled professionals, leading to growth in certain industries. While the process is complicated, it is a great way to move low income professionals out of cities where they earned low wages and into new residences where they can get a better paying job. In the end, there will be decreasing income gap in both cities, more workers will get suitable jobs, and the cities benefit from gaining competent workforces, a win for everyone.
The removal of zoning that keeps the poor and the rich separate is only the first half of the battle, as we still have to figure out how to get them together. The removal of zoning only allows low income housing be built in previously banned areas, but how do we convince developers to build low income housing in those areas? Should there be a policy like the one in Manhattan that requires certain amount of affordable housing be built when building a luxury condominium? Should subsidies be provided to developers to encourage building affordable housing? The idea is that without incentives, just removing the restrictions on affordable housings won’t cause them to magically appear. There must be other actions to ensure that the developers are willing to turn away from building more profitable houses for the wealthy and build low cost housing for the low income groups. In general, how are we to bring about the increase of affordable housing after removing restrictions on it?
Where you live is a determining factor in the resources and opportunities that will become available to you. To the poor, that is not a good news as they can’t afford to move to other places if their places of residence does not offer them the chance to better their livelihood. By removing the zoning policies that restrict building of affordable housing in affluent communities, the poor will be able to gain access to more resources as they can now afford to move to these communities. Yet, the removal of zoning is only the first step, as the incentive to build low income housing trail behind that of wealthy residences. There must be policies put in place to convince developers to build affordable housings in these areas, thus completing the effort to assist the poor moving into areas of better opportunities, gain more resource to move up the social ladder, and resulting in a smaller income gap.
