Book Review: Disillusioned
Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold was not the book I was expecting when I first picked it up. I was expected a book that tracked my own disillusionment with the suburbs. Instead, what we got were five stories of suburbs in transition from prosperous white neighborhoods to poor neighborhoods of color. This book pus personal stories to the data discussed in The Color of Law.
While reading this book, at first I found it difficult to accept the book for what it is, rather than be disappointed by in not being what I had expected it to be. I had been looking for a book that delves deep into how car dependency hurts us, our families, and our communities. Many books dance around these topics, like Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Palaces for the People, and especially Happy City. However, I have yet to read a book that fully captures my own experiences.
The Losing Battle Against Homelessness in California
Housing and homelessness have been key concerns in California for the past half dozen years. The State has put pressure on cities to increase housing production and has poured money into building permanent supportive housing to house those experiencing homelessness. Unfortunately, this appears to be a losing battle and we must rethink how we are approaching our housing cost and homelessness crisis in the state.
California has been more focused than ever on building Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) to provide both housing and the services people need to get off the streets and stabilize their lives. The vast majority of new funding programs, both at the state and local level, have put the majority of funds into PSH. State programs like RoomKey and HomeKey, and the forthcoming HomeKey+, have diverted most state affordable housing dollars to PSH. Similarly, at the local level, new funding sources like Measure H in LA County and Measure HHH in the City of LA, and new funding organizations like the Orange County Housing Finance Trust, have made additional funding available for PSH.
All of this additional funding has had a measurable impact on the production of homes for lower income households, especially those experiencing homelessness. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of new homes built for lower income households has more than tripled, from just over 5,000 in 2018 to nearly 18,000 in 2023. This is an unmitigated Good Thing ™.
However, over that same time period, the number of Californians living on the street has increased by nearly 50%, from 130 thousand in 2018 to 186 thousand in 2024.
Book Review: When Driving Is Not An Option
Anna Letitia Zivarts can’t drive. She is just one of the huge portion of our population that can’t drive because of their age, disability, or economic status. When Driving Is Not An Option is her account of the difficulties getting around in America when you cannot drive and what we could do about it.
When Driving Is Not An Option is a short book, only about 150 pages. The first half documents the number and reasons for non-drivers in America, and illustrates how difficult it is to get around for them. The second half cover what we can do to improve mobility for non-drivers.
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of people do not drive. In California, where most communities are completely car dependent, there are only 27 million licensed drivers in a population of nearly 40 million. That means more than 30% of Californians can’t legally drive.
Unfortunately, our communities are not designed to enable those non-drivers to get around. Public transit is typically show and unreliable, bike lanes are disconnected and unsafe, and sidewalks are narrow, loud, and unpleasant, if they exist at all. Even for able bodied adults, getting around without a car can be a challenge. For people with disabilities or who are young or old, getting around is impossible.
Gavin Newsom’s Homeless Policy Will Set California Back a Decade
Last month, Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, directed State agencies to clear homeless encampments on State-owned property. Last week, he doubled down on this approach to addressing homelessness by threatening to cut State housing funding to cities and counties that don’t follow the same approach to homelessness. This will provide more than enough justification for cities and counties to turn away from their short-lived path of building permanent supportive housing and return to their failed methods of simply moving homeless encampments from one place to another.
Gov. Newson’s new policy of arresting the homeless and destroying their belongings has been made possible by a recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Grants Pass v Johnson. This decision overturned what had been the law in California and other western states created by Martin v Boise in 2018, which made it so cities and counties could not make it illegal to sleep outside if there were insufficient homes or shelters to accommodate the number of people that were homeless.
The result of the Boise case over the last six years is that California cities and counties have worked hard and expeditiously to open new shelters and bring new permanent supportive housing apartments online. This has been a dramatic change from how cities were addressing homelessness prior to the Boise decision. Before then, cities were either containing homelessness in designated areas like Skid Row in LA, or arresting people who were homeless and clearing out encampments. Neither strategy reduced homelessness.
AI’s Role in Urban Planning
Right now, every tech company is rolling out various AI tools to help brainstorm, write, and illustrate for all manners of industries. ChatGPT is being integrated into Apple products, Microsoft is forcing Co-Pilot on everyone, and Adobe is stealing our images and documents to train its AI. With all of this innovation, surely there must be a role for AI in urban planning, but there is not.
Urban planning and city building in general is fundamentally a community-based activity. Each community has a unique set of goals and desires that cannot be accounted for in a city plan written by machine. Even with the most well crafted prompts, machines will never be able to fully incorporate the nuances of a community as well as a planner who is physically present in the community, even if just visiting.
Removing a Portion of the Housing Trap
In Escaping the Housing Trap, Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges describe half of the housing trap as the American Economy’s reliance on high housing prices. A significant portion of both household wealth and banks’ balance sheets rely upon financial instruments tied to housing. If we build enough homes to meaningfully bring down housing prices, the wealth and balance sheets that rely upon those housing prices will be undermined. If that happens, our entire banking system will become unstable. This is exactly what happened in 2008 when the housing market crashed.
As the market crashed, and homeowners were unable to refinance their adjustable rate mortgages after their teaser rates ended, banks started foreclosing on large numbers of homes. As this happened, the mortgage backed securities that used these mortgages became worthless. The Big Short includes a great description of how this worked by Margot Robbie, but the entire movie is worth watching to better understand the 2008 crash and resulting financial fallout.
Book Review: Escaping the Housing Trap
Before starting Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis by Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges, I was very skeptical of what it would say. While I’ve found a lot of value in Chuck’s writing in the past, I know his background is not in housing and so I doubted his insights into the housing crisis. What I found was the most well rounded analysis of the cause of the housing crisis and some interesting suggestions for solutions to the crisis.
The housing trap that we find ourselves in is simply stated in the introduction of the book, “We need housing prices to fall; we also cannot afford for them to fall. Thus, we are trapped.” Chuck and Daniel do a wonderful job explaining how the US economy became dependent on high housing prices. There is so much wealth tied to the mortgage and mortgaged derivative markets that if home prices went down in an meaningful way, our economy would collapse. While this might sound like hyperbole, the 2008 crash shows the very real threat a housing crash would have on the backing industry.
Of course, this is not a new problem, it’s one that’s been building since the Great Depression. Escaping the Housing Trap walks through the programs put in place in the 1930s and then changed and expanded throughout the second half of the 20th Century to get us to the housing market we have today. It is this analysis and history of the financial structures that make housing possible, not just of the changes to zoning and building codes, that sets this book apart.
Prevent Homelessness to End Homelessness
Earlier this month, the results of the 2024 Point-in-Time Count were released for Orange County. The Point-in-Time Count, or PIT Count, is a survey of people that are homeless conducted over one night in January across the United States. The PIT Count is the most reliable way we have to know how many people in our community are living on the street or in shelters. In Orange County, the number of homeless residents ballooned to never before seen heights in 2024.
Over the past five years, the County of Orange and many cities in Orange County have had a specific focus on building shelters and permanent supportive housing to provide the necessary homes for people living on the streets. United Way of Orange County has taken a slightly different approach, where they’ve worked to place homeless households in existing homes and apartments using Housing Choice Vouchers through their United to End Homelessness program. All of these efforts are commendable and have been fairly effective on moving people from the streets into housing. There have been over 1,000 permanent supportive housing apartments built since 2019 or that are currently under construction in Orange County, and United to End Homelessness has placed hundreds more homeless individuals and families into housing. And yet, the number of homeless residents keeps growing.
Looking Back on the Builder’s Remedy
A couple of days ago in the California Planning & Development Report, Bill Fulton asked if the window on the Builder’s Remedy is closing. He makes the case that the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) is settling many of its disputes with cities like Beverley Hills and that many cities are now getting into Housing Element compliance. What an ever increasing number of cities in compliance with State housing law, the opportunity for Builder’s Remedy projects is diminishing. However, the numbers don’t quite bear that out, and it ignores the biggest affect the Builder’s Remedy had on this Housing Element cycle.
In the SCAG Region, which has been the biggest focus for Builder’s Remedy projects, there are still 56 of the 197 jurisdictions out of compliance. Of those 56, 14 have draft housing elements in review by HCD. Bill assumes that those 14 will largely be approved, but my recent experience with HCD is that they are still holding cities to the same standards that they always have. While some of those 14 housing elements will be approved on their merits, HCD will continue to have comments on many others. Given all that, there are still roughly a quarter of all jurisdictions in the SCAG Region subject to Builder’s Remedy projects.
Despite so many cities in the SCAG Region being out of housing element compliance for years at this point, there have been relatively few Builder’s Remedy projects. According to data from YIMBY Law, there have been 48 Builder’s Remedy projects in the SCAG Region. However, more than a third of those are in Santa Monica alone. The Builder’s Remedy never became a way for developers to produce large number of new homes. For many pro-housing advocates, this has been a real disappointment and great failure of the Housing Accountability Act in general and the Builder’s Remedy in particular.
Book Review: City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequity, and the Future of America’s Highways
When I wrote about the book Crossings at the end of January, I said, “the book could have been greatly expanded to talk about how the growth of road networks in our cities over the past century have transformed our cities and society.” City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequity, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimble is the follow on to Crossings that I was looking for. City Limits focuses on highway development and opposition in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. While all three of these cities are obviously in Texas, their stories are diverse enough that they can be instructive for cities outside of the Lone Star State as well.
Much of the first part of the book talks about the social ills of ever-expanding highways. This feels like old information for folks who have been interested in cities for a while, but for people just being introduced to the freeway fight this is useful background and history. This first part of the book also introduces us to many of the personal stories that will carry us throughout the book as various aspects of highway widening and the first against them are explored.
These personal stories are really the focus of the book. Sharing the lived experiences of the people in the path of highway widening is the heart of this book. These stories illustrate the real human impact of highway widening projects. In fact, these stories are such a focus that we often miss the wider perspective and data that can be useful in opposing wider freeways elsewhere.