My new book, The Affordable City, is out September 15th. It’s a how-to guide for affordable housing policies and programs, and it makes the case that truly affordable, just, and accessible cities require us to prioritize Supply, Stability, and Subsidy policies. None by itself will ever be enough. Click here to order it from Island Press. You can also purchase it from Amazon and other online booksellers.
To celebrate the release of my book and encourage folks to pick it up from their favorite online bookseller, I’m excerpting several passages from different sections. If you missed the story of the book’s genesis and the excerpt from the intro, I suggest you read that first. You can find it here.
In this post I’m sharing an excerpt from the section on Stability policies, which opens with a discussion of why tenant protections and housing preservation strategies are necessary for affordable, accessible cities.
Here it is:
Strong tenant and rental housing protections are essential for cities to remain accessible to a wide range of families and individuals. Demand for a city or a specific neighborhood can change abruptly, much faster than even the most permissive development rules could ever respond to, and tenants get caught in the middle as rents rise but new homes remain years away from completion. Supply helps moderate prices at the city and regional levels, but only tenant protections will provide adequate security at the neighborhood and household levels. A reasonable median rent is not the sole measure of an affordable city; the experience of individual households—their stability, their fair treatment, and the safe, healthy upkeep of their homes—is at least as important.
Historically, renters in the United States were treated with benign neglect at best and outright contempt at worst. Renting could be an unpleasant experience, subject to the whims of a landlord or property manager, but most (white) renters could eventually look forward to the independence and security of homeownership. Being a renter was just a phase of life that you had to endure. But homeownership is now out of reach for a large and growing share of our population, and many will be renting for the rest of their lives, whether they like it or not. It is no longer just a rite of passage. For many people it will be the only form of housing they ever know, and they deserve the same dignity and protections enjoyed by homeowners.
If the argument in favor of supply is economic, the argument for stability is moral. Landlords manage what is a fundamental human need—shelter—and thus shouldn’t have the unconstrained ability to set prices and living conditions wherever they like. Housing is too important to leave purely to the whims of the market or to individual landlords. And when a community improves, it should be the people who live there who reap most of the benefits, not only the people who own property—many of whom might not even live nearby. There’s an important public purpose served in ensuring household and community stability, and that implies a role for government to rein in the excesses of an unregulated rental market.
In cities where the rent gap between affordable housing and market-rate housing is greatest, building more homes is simply not an adequate solution for a large share of families. That goes double for places where new, denser housing will require the demolition of existing homes. As the previous section noted, supply is essential but rarely, by itself, sufficient. When the demands of economic efficiency and basic human dignity are in tension, there shouldn’t be any question that human dignity wins out.
The Stability section goes on to cover major themes and debates about the role of tenant protections and rental housing preservation strategies, and how stability policies interact with supply and subsidies. I then review roughly a dozen policies that can help promote stability at the household and community level, devoting 2-4 pages to each. These include common strategies such as rent stabilization and displacement protections and mitigations, and less-discussed approaches including permanent covenants on affordable units, rental registries, and public/non-profit housing acquisition.
If you’d like to read more, buy my book! I also encourage you to check out excerpts from the Supply and Subsidy sections of my book. You can find those here: Supply. Subsidy.