A home is one of the most important necessities in life. However, not everyone has a shelter where they can live due to affordability. Housing is not simply a local issue; it is an issue in many different cities. It is impossible for this problem to be resolved completely as many factors in society play a role, but we can strive for better and more housing opportunities for those in need.
The effort in striving for housing equality involves more than real estate agents, property owners, and tenants. As depicted in the “Affordable Housing’s Forever Solution” article from Next City, community land trust is a favorable method for revitalizing neighborhoods and increasing affordable housing or renting units. To my surprise, most community land trusts are not like companies or organizations that do things for some selfish benefits in return. They truthfully want to save neighborhoods by ensuring homes to families at a price below market value, especially in areas where gentrification is occurring. Community land trusts require money, resources, and people in order to succeed and properly function. In addition, they also need to purchase land at low-costs in order to rebuild it based on the needs of the neighborhood residents. I agree that neighborhoods should not simply have residential areas and housing. In fact, a successful community has a mixture of commercial and open space as well. Having access to basic amenities and beautiful green space is part of a healthy life.
A similar method that involves the power of neighborhood residents to change and help decide on plans to meet the communities’ needs is discussed in the article “How East Harlem Wrote Its Own Development Plan” from Next City. Just like how the issue of housing can not be settled completely, there is not one successful plan that settles the housing issue. In New York City, ULURP is a process where applications that affect land use are publicly reviewed by the Department of City Planning, City Planning Commission, borough president, and City Council. The process involves the input and planning decisions from the community. Through the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan, I realized that the best way for strive for a more equitability in housing, even if it meant only increasing affordable housing by a small amount, is to meet halfway with those who constantly want to gentrify neighborhoods. As a result, there is a need to upzone, or make buildings taller, in order for there to be more low-income housing units.
Matthew Gordon Lasner makes an interesting claim in “Affordable Housing in New York City: Then and Now.” He believes that by incorporating four main strategies into a city, the housing problem can be solved. These four aspects are regulating housing conditions, enforcing rent laws, eliminating profit ownership, and having government subsidies. I am not sure what exactly can decrease the percentage of income people spend on housing or provide everyone with a home, but I believe that the housing issue can not be solved by any one of the aspects presented in any of the articles on its own. By working together, maybe one day everyone will have a place they can call “home.”
Additional Sources:
Lasner M (2015) Affordable Housing in New York City: Then and Now. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College.
Hi Jessica,
I agree that housing can’t be made affordable for everyone by applying a suggestion from any one article by itself, as the problem at the root lies with our city’s focus on capitalism. In this case, as long as people are aiming to make a profit in the real estate sector, there will always be people who cannot keep up with rising prices and gentrification will continue to push people with lower incomes out, despite the policies created to make housing more accessible. One such effort, for example, is mandatory inclusionary housing because the real estate market isn’t swayed by the fact that housing is inaccessible to many – its primary focus is on making a profit and only those who can afford to keep up will be able to have homes.
I also agree that community land trusts are more favorable than governmental policies that are blanketed over various neighborhoods because the community itself is involved with decision-making, as every neighborhood is unique (a policy that supports any one demographic won’t necessarily support all demographics). Implementing policies without ever having seen the areas that will be affected is completely different from making decisions for the neighborhood that a person lives in and knows.
Hey Jessica,
I enjoyed your post and agreed with all of the points that you made. You discussed the four strategies that Matthew G. Lasner proposes can solve the housing crisis. It does seem that a multi-pronged approach would be the most effective, although it seems unlikely that we can ever fully solve the problem.
Yesterday, Wired magazine came out with an article entitled “NYC’s New Tech to Track Every Homeless Person in the City” (link below). The article describes the new software, StreetSmart, as a “customer relationship management system for the homeless”. This description already had me on edge; having worked with CRMs in the past, they are essentially platforms that can track and evaluate thousands of data points about a business’s customers. In business, I see that as perfectly acceptable – it allows companies to run efficiently and optimize performance, and consumers opt in to tracking. Tracking data points on homeless people is a whole different story. The homeless are not given a chance to “opt in” to StreetSmart. They have effectively opted in by neglecting to lead the sort of lives that society simultaneously expects of them while denying their right to have.
The article says that “every day in New York, some 400 outreach workers walk the streets checking in on homeless people” and collecting information about them. Even if these workers are being paid the bare minimum yearly wage of $22,880 (they are likely paid significantly better), 400 workers doing an average of 80 hours a week would be paid $9,000,000+ a year. That’s aside from the costs of developing the software, which the article does not specify.
Depending on the implementation of StreetSmart, it could have some potentially positive effects or be a total failure. That said, the money could certainly go quite a long way towards a land trust or several other methods that have been proven effective at providing the homeless with shelter. The article uses the phrase “get them off the streets” several times, and I think that’s telling. Getting the homeless off the streets is the goal of the politician whose incentive is not to actually help anyone, but bolster their public image and perhaps get reelected. That is the type of thinking that leads to likely ineffective and expensive software tracking homeless people like assets, rather than proactive efforts to provide them with food and a roof over their heads. In order to truly solve the homeless crisis, the people making the decisions need to have their incentives aligned with the homeless and the motivation to make truly positive and effective changes to our society.
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/new-york-citys-businesslike-tech-fighting-homelessness/
Depending on the implementation of StreetSmart, it could have some potentially positive effects or be a total failure. That said, the money could certainly go quite a long way towards a land trust or several other methods that have been proven effective at providing the homeless with shelter. The article uses the phrase “get them off the streets” several times, and I think that’s telling. Getting the homeless off the streets is the goal of the politician whose incentive is not to actually help anyone, but bolster their public image and perhaps get reelected. That is the type of thinking that leads to likely ineffective and expensive software tracking homeless people like assets, rather than proactive efforts to provide them with food and a roof over their heads. In order to truly solve the homeless crisis, the people making the decisions need to have their incentives aligned with the homeless and the motivation to make truly positive and effective changes to our society.