 |
| by Quinton Mayne Harvard Kennedy School |
This post kicks off a month-long series that our colleagues at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation are doing on affordable housing as a challenge to the health of American
democracy, and in particular local democracy in the United States. The series,
edited by Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor Quinton Mayne, is part of the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy series, a two-year public
dialogue inviting leaders in thought and practice to name our greatest
challenges and explore promising solutions.
Over the past two years, the Ash Center has welcomed leading experts from across the country to debate the structural weaknesses preventing the United States from achieving its democratic potential. Democracy demands an equal right of participation; but as the Challenges to Democracy public dialogue series has shown, the formal design and practical workings of America’s political institutions are preventing the full realization of participatory equality. Some of the key challenges covered in our series to date include the erosion of voting rights and access, the decline of social movements, and the integration of immigrants into political life.
In addition to metrics of
participation related to voice and input, democracy can also be judged by its
outputs. When public officials produce policies responsive to the needs and
demands of citizens, democracy would appear to be in good health. But are
elected politicians enacting laws and designing programs in line with popular
preferences? Answering this question from the point of view of affordability, there
is good reason to question the health of American democracy.
Long before the Great
Recession struck in 2008, affordability posed a major problem for the American
middle-class dream. The rising costs of health care and college education have
made the headlines for many years now. Energy and gasoline prices also cycle in
and out of the news, and in the past half-decade or so the cost of child care has
grown in importance. The devastating effects of the recession on individuals
and families across the nation, coupled with the organized groups and movements
that emerged and strengthened in defense of those affected by the recession,
brought a much-needed urgency to the issue of affordability.
Despite this heightened
attention and the public policies and programs it has produced, democratically
elected officials in city halls, state capitols, and the corridors of power in
Washington, D.C. are struggling to systematically respond to the challenge of
affordability.
Nowhere is the democratic
challenge of affordability more obvious than in the case of housing. According
to a 2014 report
issued by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 35 percent of U.S.
households in 2012 were in housing that they could not afford. In other words,
just over one in every three American households was paying in excess of 30
percent of their income in housing alone. If we break down this statistic and
look just at renters, more than 50 percent are cost-burdened. The picture
becomes even more alarming when we train our gaze on Americans with lower
levels of income. Among households with annual incomes of less than $15,000 –
which roughly equates to working year-round at the federal minimum wage – more
than four out of every fifth household spent 30 percent or more of its income
on housing, and almost 70 percent spent more than half their income on housing.
These are shocking
statistics. They are also politically troubling ones because they suggest that
large numbers of Americans with pressing need are being underserved by the
democratic process. Governments across the U.S. may not be able to eradicate
housing unaffordability, but they certainly have the tools and means to reduce
it greatly below current levels. That they have not been able to do so to date
poses a major democratic challenge, and one that we will be looking at in this
series of seven posts on the Challenges to Democracy blog.
Over the next month we will
be publishing commentaries and thought pieces from authors that we have invited
to examine the issue of housing affordability principally through the lens of
local government. As a complex issue shaped by a variety of social and economic
forces, the problem of affordable housing cannot be addressed by cities alone.
State and federal policy is also fundamentally important. That being said, many
cities have fiscal and legislative resources at their disposal that can be used
to improve the current situation.
Some of these municipal resources
can increase residents’ access to affordable housing through indirect means.
This includes investments in public transit and the regulation of local labor
markets. Other resources are more direct: cities can increase the supply of
affordable housing through financial support and direction provision.
Crucially, cities also enjoy far-reaching land-use and zoning powers that can
profoundly affect Americans’ access to affordable housing. In the blog series we
will be looking at how and why city governments are succeeding and failing in
using their resources and powers to tackle the widespread burden of housing
costs.
The opening blog posts focus
on the problem at hand. In the first post, Adam Tanaka, a doctoral student in urban planning at Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design, interviews officials overseeing a newly created
innovation lab that aims to tackle the problem of housing affordability in the
City of Boston in the coming years. The second post by Margaret Scott, a Master
in Urban Planning candidate at the Graduate
School of Design, considers how housing affordability has been
suburbanized in recent years and the difficulties that this new geography poses
for those hoping for government action.
The next two blogs focus
squarely on the real demands that responding to the challenge of housing
affordability places on politicians and the public sector. Given the magnitude
of the problem, achieving an adequate supply of affordable housing requires
local politicians with bold visions for the future who are able to build and
manage broad coalitions of economic and social actors. The third post, also
from Adam Tanaka, addresses this question of the pressing need for coalition
building and governmental ambition by considering the affordable housing plans recently
announced by Mayor de Blasio of New York City. As in many other advanced
industrial democracies, public housing authorities have long served as
important vehicles for local governments in the U.S. to meet affordable housing
need. In our fourth post, Margaret Scott reflects on whether public housing
could hold the key to unlocking supply to address the current housing
affordability challenge.
The final posts turn to the
role that grassroots activism plays in alleviating the burden of unaffordable
housing. Focused on a non-profit that has operated in Boston for four decades,
our fifth post by Adam Tanaka looks at the power of community organizations not
only to place demands on elected politicians to get more affordable housing but
also to serve as partners with the public sector to plan and deliver affordable
housing. Our final post is by two documentary filmmakers, Andrew Padilla and
King Williams, who were featured speakers in our November 2014 panel
discussion, The Politics of Displacement in the American City. In their post, Padilla and Williams reflect on the role
that they and other filmmakers have played in raising awareness of the problem
of housing affordability and galvanizing support in favor of more effective
government action.
As
the blog series will show, the challenge of generating an adequate stock of
affordable housing in the United States does not appear to be wanting for
policy prescriptions or technical solutions. The problem instead appears
to lie at the feet of elected politicians. That so many Americans are today
burdened by the cost of housing (as well as the cost of child care, health
care, and college education) is attributable to policy choices made by
governments over many years. This is not to downplay the difficulty of tackling
the problem of affordability either in the past or the present. As our blog
posts confirm, the task at hand is a demanding one: elected officials must
attend to a complex and changing constellation of forces and actors, and they
cannot act alone. That being said, the challenge of responding to the clear and
present need for affordability remains fundamentally a democratic one.
Read more posts in the Challenges to Democracy series.
Quinton Mayne is Assistant Professor of Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a member of the Joint Center for Housing Studies Faculty Committee. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of comparative and urban politics.
Read more posts in the Challenges to Democracy series.
Quinton Mayne is Assistant Professor of Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a member of the Joint Center for Housing Studies Faculty Committee. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of comparative and urban politics.
