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    Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities
    Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities
    Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities
    Ebook101 pages1 hour

    Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities

    By Alan Durning

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    About this ebook

    Award-winning author and leading green thinker Alan Durning takes a hard look at the pinch of expensive urban housing and sees what many others have missed. Hidden in city regulations is a set of simple but powerful barriers to housing for all. These rules criminalize history’s answers to affordable dwellings: the rooming house, the roommate, the in-law apartment, and the backyard cottage. In effect, cities have banned what used to be the bottom end of the private housing market. They’ve made urban quarters expensive and scarce. In Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities, Durning details how to revive inexpensive housing in walkable neighborhoods—at no cost to the public—by striking a few lines from municipal law books.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJul 12, 2013
    ISBN9780989474016
    Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities

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      Book preview

      Unlocking Home - Alan Durning

      Author

      Closed Doors

      A few years ago, I attended a block meeting up the street from my house in Seattle. The evening buzzed along congenially, as a woman updated us on a new local sustainability initiative. I nodded in agreement as neighbors lauded recent progress in expanding the farmers market, installing rain gardens, developing renewable energy projects, and planning better transit service. I listened quietly, happy to hear their enthusiasm.

      Then something happened that reminded me how far we still have to go. Asked what the goal of the initiative was, the presenter replied, half jesting, To stop the end of the world.

      The questioner persisted, End of the world from what?

      A loud voice behind me interjected, Condos! I assumed he was joking, but the group did not.

      The growth of midrise condo buildings is a key part of making my neighborhood, which is called Ballard, a complete, compact, vibrant, low-carbon community. Fitting more people into our neighborhood is more important by far to sustainability than anything we’d previously discussed. The dense concentration of residences, offices, and shops allows extreme levels of energy efficiency, frees people from cars for many trips, and—in conjunction with renewable sources of energy—pushes greenhouse-gas emissions down toward sustainable levels. Such communities, if built right, would allow us to live entirely on the quantities of energy that we can harvest from clean, renewable sources and, therefore, avoid a future of catastrophic Frankenstorms, heat waves, and massive human—and natural—dislocation.

      But the room erupted in revulsion, as if condo builders were mining tar sands from local parks, rather than building walkable, low-emissions housing for our future neighbors. No other topic that evening generated the vociferous intensity that condos did. My green-minded compatriots regaled each other with declarations and oaths about how much they hated the condo buildings rising near the neighborhood shopping street, half a mile from our sedate block.

      This anti-density attitude remains, sad to say, the political reality in most single-family zones, and it yields a sort of collective pathology: Cities pledge themselves to green leadership, then vigorously and earnestly set about doing the wrong things. Cities sworn to aggressive climate-action plans and bound by comprehensive plans that elevate sustainability to the stature of municipal grail—even, in Vancouver, BC’s case, committing to become the greenest city in the world—nevertheless expend most of their public effort trying to induce lower-impact changes: recycling, school-based solar cells, expensive new rail transit projects, and local food. At the same time, though, they treat as sacrosanct the thicket of laws and regulations in land use, or zoning, codes that ban from many close-in neighborhoods the tall buildings that would bring about sweeping reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions per capita.

      It is tragic. It is also sadly human. In time, the diverse benefits of compact cities will become apparent to enough people, and North American cities will evolve toward more European forms, with less residential land held in low-density districts than at present. Indeed, this evolution has been underway for some time in the Northwest, if only in neighborhoods not legally reserved for single-family houses.

      In the meantime, a few other doors to more-compact, affordable housing are more easily opened. This book focuses on unlocking them: on advancing toward complete, compact communities by enacting less controversial reforms than wholesale upzoning—changes in land-use rules to allow bigger buildings in low-rise zones. I take my neighbors’ feelings seriously. Their minds and the neighborhood’s doors are closed to condos and other tall buildings, so I detail three keys to unlocking homes for all that my neighbors might accept:

      Key 1: Legalizing rooming houses

      Key 2: Decriminalizing roommates

      Key 3: Welcoming in-law apartments and backyard cottages

      Each of these strategies has the potential to win political acceptance soon in cities far and wide. Each costs cities basically nothing to implement. Each requires no public spending, just that the city clerk use the delete key on various lines of municipal code. Each would step up residential concentration organically, without big changes in architectural character. Each would also create new income-generating opportunities for property owners, especially in popular, sought-after urban neighborhoods. Each would alleviate the outward pressure of sprawl on forest and farmland. Each would bring some of the benefits of density for local prosperity, vibrancy, and sustainability, in addition to more customers to support local businesses, more eyes on the street for safety, more riders for transit, and shrunken carbon footprints.

      Above all else, each of these strategies could unlock homes for people who need them. They could generate thousands and thousands of units of inexpensive housing dispersed across entire metropolitan areas—in the form of new and converted boardinghouses, empty bedrooms rented out for the first time, and basement apartments and newfangled garden huts tucked among the detached houses that make up the overwhelming majority of Northwest residences. In fact, these strategies might generate far more units of inexpensive housing than public subsidies currently supply, though the housing likely would not serve the poorest and neediest.

      This book focuses on the Northwest, or Cascadia—the region encompassing British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington—as a case study for all of North America. The patterns found in this region are likely to extend across most of the continent, and the keys to unlocking housing here will likely work elsewhere as well. This region is a hotbed of environmental conservation, smart-growth urbanism, and innovative housing programs. It serves as a natural laboratory for innovation, and lessons learned here apply widely. If the Northwest leads, others will follow.

      The three keys—legalizing rooming houses, decriminalizing roommates, and welcoming in-law apartments and backyard cottages—are not without political challenges, of course. If they were, this book would be unnecessary. The challenges are surmountable, but they are real.

      At root, the problem is the too-powerful classist impulse for better-off people to exclude renters, people of pinched means, recent immigrants, students, and others who cannot afford to buy single-family homes. This impulse manifests itself in complicated and even subconscious ways. Sometimes it is even expressed as a form of concern for vulnerable people. This theme will recur throughout the book. For now, an analogy will suffice.

      Poor and working-class people tend to wear inexpensive shoes. They buy their kicks at places like Payless or Goodwill, not Nordstrom. Payless and Goodwill shoes are known

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