Managing Rapid Urbanization: Lessons from Mongolia

by David Luberoff
Senior Associate
Director

The capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, provides a useful lens for understanding tensions that arise from rapid urbanization, according to two recent journal articles reporting on research funded in part by the Joint Center's Student Research Support Program.

In the first piece, which appeared in International Planning and Development Review, Raven Anderson (formerly a research fellow in the Social Agency Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design) and Michael Hooper (an associate professor of urban planning at the GSD) explain that because of an economic boom, a series of harsh winters, and the decline of the rural economy, Ulaanbaatar grew dramatically over the last two decades. In response, a diverse array of domestic and international organizations converged on the city to help address the environmental, spatial, and social challenges created by the rapid growth.

Anderson and Hooper, interviewed representatives from 18 of these organizations and learned that while there is agreement about the city's main challenges there is a lack of consensus about how to tackle them. The result, they note, was a "proliferation of plans, in which local organizations' perspectives are often given relatively little attention."

In the second article, which appeared in the Journal of Urbanism, Anderson, Hooper, and Allie Aldarsaikhan Tuvshinbat (also a former researcher at the Social Agency Lab) use interviews with about 120 residents to explore some of the differing perspectives. They found that while there were relatively high levels of support for increases in unit-level density and for apartment living, the majority of interviewees also favored low land-use density.

The tension between the two findings, they note, is "a central theme in the results. The limited appeal of high-density land use likely reflects Mongolian cultural attitudes towards land and open space. These attitudes are generally not reflected in the global 'compact city' models that are promoted by international organizations and which appear to be driving the current city masterplan and other formal planning efforts in the city."

The divergence between residents' views and the organizations' desires, note Anderson and Hooper in the first article, "is likely to further reduce the city's ability to effectively cope with rapid urban growth."

Fiduciary Landlords: Life Insurers and Large-Scale Housing in New York City

by Adam Tanaka

JCHS Meyer Fellow

For a brief window between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, life insurance companies built approximately 50,000 middle-income rental apartments across the United States. Most were racially-segregated, market-rate projects in semi-suburban locations. Others were central city redevelopment projects, built with the powers of eminent domain and offering below-market-rate rentals. Stuyvesant Town, an 8,755-unit apartment complex in New York City developed by Met Life, is perhaps the most famous of these projects (Figure 1) but there were many others, including Lake Meadows in Chicago (developed by New York Life), Hancock Village in Boston (developed by John Hancock Mutual Life), and the Chellis-Austin Homes in Newark (developed by Prudential).

As corporate entities with access to vast institutional funds, insurers achieved considerable economies of scale in construction, financing, and operation, and accepted longer, lower yields than conventional real estate developers. As such, policymakers hoped that life insurers and other fiduciary institutions, such as savings banks, would play a key role in building and operating large-scale, low-cost urban housing and in modernizing the postwar city more generally. By the early 1950s, however, a combination of disappointing financial returns and bruising controversies over discriminatory leasing drove insurers from the housing field.

The 789-unit Hancock Village, which straddles the Boston-Brookline border, was built in 1946 by the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. Source: “Greater Boston Housing Development Charted,” Christian Science Monitor, 01/05/1946.

While the volume of life insurance housing soon paled in the face of the postwar suburban boom — built for much the same demographic and often financed by life insurance dollars — insurers’ brief venture into multifamily development represents a significant and understudied episode in the history of affordable housing. With Stuyvesant Town currently enjoying an unexpected renaissance as both high-class investment and public policy touchstone, the time is ripe for a reevaluation of the substantial, if controversial, legacy of life insurance housing.

In a new Joint Center working paper, I provide an overview of the “rise and fall” of life insurance housing in the postwar period, with a focus on New York City, where the majority of insurance-sponsored apartments were located. The paper is part of my larger dissertation project, which examines the political and economic forces that drove various entities — including life insurance companies, labor unions, public authorities, and for-profit developers — to build some of the world’s largest middle-income housing projects in New York in the mid 20^th century, as well as the factors that abruptly terminated this “large-scale approach” in the mid-1970s.

In the paper, I argue that when it came to middle-income urban housing, the 1940s represented a moment of unusual convergence between corporate need and municipal interest. While incentives were aligned, thousands of relatively low-cost apartments were built in America’s most expensive housing markets. These apartments proved a panacea for white families who earned too much for public housing but not enough to purchase suburban homes. As soon as civic and corporate needs began to diverge, however, insurance capital moved beyond city limits to suburban jurisdictions offering higher returns with fewer political obstacles. In the context of today’s continued shortage of affordable housing — particularly for middle-income renters in high-cost cities like Boston and New York — the story can be read as both missed opportunity and cautionary tale.

Urbanization and Growth in India

by Sonali Mathur
Research Assistant

“Urbanization as a Growth Strategy for India” was the focus of a panel discussion on Saturday, February 6 at the India Conference at Harvard University, the largest student-run conference focusing on India held in the United States. (The Joint Center was one of the event’s co-sponsors.) As one of the most populous countries in the world, the policy decisions and investment choices that are made in India will have a resonance beyond its borders in terms of environmental impact and quality of life for one of the largest and fastest growing markets in the world. Panelists at the conference, who noted that India’s urban population is expected to grow significantly in coming decades, focused on a variety of topics including the role that urban areas can play in the country’s economy and the many challenges to achieving that goal.

Shirish Sankhe, Director of the Mumbai office of McKinsey & Co. opened by citing the 2010 McKinsey Global Institute report, India’s urban awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth, which estimates that India’s working age population will grow by nearly 270 million people by 2030 (from about 800 million to over 1 billion). The growth will be urban, he said, noting that by 2030 at least 10 of India’s 29 states will be more than 50 percent urbanized.  (Currently, only two relatively small states are urbanized.) Moreover, McKinsey projects a five-fold increase in GDP.

Accommodating this growth will be a major challenge, he conceded, because 25 percent of the urban population of India lives in slums and the country only invests $17 per capita per year in infrastructure, about an eighth of what McKinsey estimated was needed. Illustratively, because the country has underinvested in transportation, the share of people using public transportation is estimated to have dropped in recent years from 50 percent to 30 percent. Moreover, there is a significant lack of public understanding about administrative practices and the role of various organizations involved in city and state governance, which not only makes public participation challenging but complicates the entire planning process.

Photo courtesy of The India Conference

Prathima Manohar, an architect and founder of The Urban Vision, an urbanism “think do-tank;” asserted that another key challenge is that the leaders of India’s cities seem to be fixated on strategies that more developed parts of the world are moving away from, such as auto-centric development and over-consumption of resources. Despite the creative brilliance and skilled human capital in India’s cities, she added, there is a lack of civic and recreational space that would improve residents’ quality of life. However, she also said there are an increasing number of grassroots organizations working to improve urban environments. She also predicts that the success of these smaller enterprises will be paramount to improving livability of the cities.

Brotin Banerjee, CEO of Tata Housing, noted that the lack of affordable housing options is a problem that has plagued Indian cities for decades. Given the scale of the problem, he said it would take efforts from various sectors in order to make a difference. Tata Housing is spearheading this effort from the private sector, by investing in construction that provides homeownership options for the low- and middle-income urban residents. The challenge in doing this, he added, is devising models that are scalable and profitable, particularly when new projects must also provide supportive infrastructure such as water and sewer connections as well as roadways, which are typically the public sector’s responsibility.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, the panelists agreed that given the scale and interdependence of the urban problems in India, the prevalent expectation that the public sector should solve all the urban problems is unreasonable and likely detrimental. Instead, they agreed that there needs to be – and there seems to be – growing coordination between the public and private sector, and there is a significant role for grassroots organizations to play.

In discussions moderated by Bish Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies at MIT, the panelists highlighted a host of approaches and practices that, in their opinion, seem to be working. Shirish Sankhe noted that funding allocation methods based on competitive grounds, like the one being used for development of ‘smart cities,’ seems to be a successful model. These are small to medium size cities competing for federal fund to spur infrastructure development and the selection is based on certain predefined design criteria.

Along similar lines, he noted, there is a movement towards a performance management system of city governance. In this approach, India’s cities are ranked on various criteria which then puts pressure on the elected officials to perform and be more accountable to the public. Highlighting some of the positives surrounding the development of “greenfield” sites, he added that anticipation of transportation needs and how those are likely to evolve over time has become an integral part of planning. In the context of building more affordable housing, Brotin Banerjee noted that some of the policy solutions in recent times have revolved around making construction and green construction more cost effective by providing flexibility around height limitations and FAR regulations. He also added that perhaps the best form of public-private partnership would be talent sharing.

In response to questions from the audience about the segregation patterns that have or could emerge based on racial and cultural lines, the panelists agreed that Indian cities need to move away from identity based politics in order to avoid increased segregation and to build more inclusive cities.

The New Urban Agenda, HABITAT III, and the Celebration of a Multinational Agreement on Cities

by Jessica Jean-Francois
Harvard Graduate
School of Design

A few weeks ago, I was one of the approximately 50,000 people who came to Quito, Ecuador for the third UN-HABITAT conference (HABITAT III). The conference served as a celebration of the adoption of the New Urban Agenda, a multinational agreement that aims to “help to end poverty and hunger in all its forms and dimensions, reduce inequalities, promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, in order to fully harness their vital contribution to sustainable development, improve human health and well-being, as well as foster resilience and protect the environment.”

Excerpt from New Urban Agenda display

Having signed up for the newsletter over a year in advance, I had grown increasingly excited as I read about the research being done in anticipation of HABITAT III and the many meetings and events held to prepare for it as well. It was clear that this would be an incredible event and that I would have a unique opportunity to observe as key actors in city planning and urban policy came together, to hear about new approaches and practices, while also getting to know a new city.

HUD Secretary Julian Castro speaks 

Once there, I had plenty of activities to choose from. Main events included special sessions on public space, urban resilience and municipal finance. There were also networking and side events hosted by government agencies, nonprofit organizations and research institutions. There were roundtable discussions that brought together mayors, trade union leaders, businessmen and women, farmers and other key stakeholders. There were plenary meetings and many more events covering a wide range of topics, all happening simultaneously every day. On top of that, there was a six-hall exhibition zone with over 150 booths showcasing important ideas and activities related to urbanization.

For many people, all of this was overwhelming. Quito was completely transformed as much of the area surrounding the conference center could only be accessed via security checkpoints. Long lines, limited bathrooms and technical issues sometimes frustrated attendees.

Large lines formed at the event

Now that I’ve returned and debriefed with classmates, friends, and others who attended the gathering, I am left with many questions. What were the intended takeaways? What was the point of such a large expensive conference? Who benefited, who lost? Also, could the conference’s goals have been achieved in a better way? While we celebrate that HABITAT III was open and free to all those who wished to attend, people still had to travel to Quito and pay for accommodations, food, and, if they wanted to highlight their work, for exhibition booths that cost $4,000 or more. Moreover, the selection process for hosting a side or networking event seemed arbitrary. While the New Urban Agenda clearly indicated that issues such as energy and transportation, land tenure, safety and security, disaster risk management and inclusion in spatial planning were concerns, particularly for those living in informal settlements and slums, this was not clearly aligned with the schedule of events on informal settlements, which primarily focused on the UN Participatory Slum Upgrading Program (PSUP) and data collection tools.

Despite these questions and concerns, I still believe the conference was valuable. While in Quito, I primarily attended events addressing informal settlements, which was a focus of MIT’s Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement (SIGUS), the group that I traveled with to the conference. I also attended sessions that focused on Small Island Developing States, tourism, economic development and finance to inform my master’s thesis at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Scheduling conflicts and long lines were at times a barrier to my hopes, but even these offered some interesting surprises. The long lines became an unintended networking opportunity and equalizer where people with different backgrounds and positions were able to meet, share ideas and connect. The exhibition halls were a hotbed of activity as people who sought a place to rest often became consumed in unplanned conversations and experiences.

Jessica at MIT's SIGUS booth

That is how I got to know the Slum Dwellers International (SDI). Although I had previously been in contact with the group, on the last day of the conference, I heard an SDI celebration that featured singing and chanting. The participants were celebrating the launch of Know Your City a website featuring data collected by residents of informal settlements. SDI uses the data collection process to identify needs and encourage community-funded solutions. It also shares the data with policy members of their communities in an attempt to prevent evictions and prevent poor, top-down approaches to planning.

As I learned about this grassroots movement and about cases in Liberia, Zambia and South Africa, I thought about the many challenges that will hinder the effective implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the fact that many of the solutions to these barriers are present (but often hidden) in the communities it is supposed to serve. As we struggle to identify ways to make certain areas livable, it’s often forgotten that many people have already been forced to craft solutions in order to survive while only dreaming of gaining access to the resources needed to innovate on a larger scale. I am hopeful that many of the ideas and innovative approaches that were discussed and disseminated in Quito will help city dwellers take even more control of their own futures.

Jessica Jean-Francois, a second-year Master in Urban Planning student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, was a Joint Center student research assistant in 2015-2016. Her trip was funded in part by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) and the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

From the Archives: When New York’s Legendary “Power Broker” Spoke at the Joint Center

by David Luberoff
Senor Associate Director

Fifty years ago today, Robert Moses, the legendary “power broker” who reshaped New York City in the mid 20th century, gave a lunchtime talk at the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. Thanks to Adam Tanaka, a 2015 Joint Center Meyer Doctoral Fellow who was doing research for his thesis on the construction of large-scale, middle-income housing in New York City, the Joint Center recently received a copy of his speech.

Given today’s debates about housing, transportation, and other issues related to urban development and urban policy more generally, it’s instructive to look back at Moses’ remarks, which were given at the predecessor of today’s Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Moses, whose language was florid and at times supercilious, asserted that most major municipal problems could be solved “by genuine courage as distinguished from braggadocio, empty millennial problems, buck passing to Washington and yielding to every obstructionist group, every Johnny-Come-Lately planning expert, every editorial pundit, and every racial, religious and sectional minority. Water supply, sewage and waste disposal, roads, parking, schools, hospitals and health, all are the same category of works requiring an honest, factual, fearless approach and attack by officials with at least a thirst for martyrdom and an instinct for the jugular.”

Robert Moses

The remarks and the harsh judgments are particularly striking because Moses – whose importance is sometimes compared to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s impact on 19th century Paris – was a singularly important figure in New York specifically and American cities generally. Working from a series of appointed state and city positions (many of which he held at the same time), Moses oversaw the construction of 13 bridges (starting with the Triborough Bridge, now known as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), 416 miles of highways (including the Long Island and Cross-Bronx Expressways), 658 playgrounds and parks (including Jones Beach State Park), key cultural and non-profit institutions (including Lincoln Center and the United Nations), and 150,000 mainly high-rise housing units for the city’s low- and moderate-income residents (including Trump Village, a 3,800 unit complex in Coney Island built by Donald Trump’s father). These changes not only transformed New York, they also provided a template for redevelopment and highway projects throughout the country.

Image by Hassan Tahir (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

However, such changes came at a huge human cost. In The Power Broker, a critical and seminal biography of Moses that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, Robert Caro estimated that taken together, Moses’ road, bridge, housing, and urban renewal projects displaced about 250,000 people, most of them poor and many of them blacks and Puerto Ricans. Moreover, Moses strongly supported policies that did not allow blacks to move into many of the new housing projects, such as Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan – a private moderate-income housing development built on land cleared by a city entity that Moses oversaw.

By the time that Moses spoke at the Joint Center, his power had begun to wane largely because of increasingly intense disputes about his aggressive approaches to urban development and growing feuds with key elected officials, particularly then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His opponents, who included Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of American Cities, had stymied his efforts to radically transform lower Manhattan via the construction of an elevated expressway from the Hudson River to the East River and to use urban renewal powers to clear parts of Greenwich Village for high-rise middle-income housing developments. As a result, by the time he gave his Joint Center talk in 1966, Moses, who once simultaneously held 12 separate city and state positions, had only one official post, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, a self-financed public entity that he had chaired since he had led the effort to create it in the 1930s. When Moses spoke at the Joint Center, the authority owned and operated nine bridges and tunnels, including the Verrazano-Narrows, Throgs Neck, and Bronx-Whitestone bridges as well as the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels.

In his remarks, Moses – who was fond of the French aphorism (sometimes mistakenly attributed to Joseph Stalin) that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” – made it clear that his recent defeats had not changed his views. He began by hailing the approach to urban problems taken by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who headed the Joint Center from 1966 to 1969 and who went on to several prominent posts, including serving as one of New York’s U.S. Senators from 1976 until 2000. “I like Mr. Moynihan’s approach to our municipal problems,” Moses said, “because it is honest and forthright at a time when solutions are mainly the province of demagogues screaming for perfection, smooth politicians with new catchwords and slogans appealing to every racial, religious, sectional and economic faction and minority, image makers, fanatics, self-appointed wowsers, reformers with direct links to Higher Regions, far-out critics with long claws and venomous serpent’s tongues, ponderous editors, computer analysts, and just plain nuts.”

Moses went on to endorse his support for what had become a common, but inaccurate reading of “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the controversial report Moynihan had prepared in 1965 while working in the Johnson Administration. Moses began by restating – and expanding – the report’s best-known assertion. “If I understand him,” Moses said, “Mr. Moynihan says, and quite rightly I believe, that family, church, and other ancient responsibilities and disciplines must be restored if we hope to meet the problem of negro, Puerto Rican, and other slums and ghettos.”

However, like many conservatives who embraced Moynihan’s assessment of the state of black families, Moses did not repeat Moynihan’s assertion that the problems were largely caused by “three centuries of unimaginable mistreatment” of blacks by whites. Nor did Moses support Moynihan’s proposals to address those problems via large-scale government programs focused on strengthening black families. Instead, Moses asserted that responsibilities to family, church and other institutions had to “come first, ahead of improved housing, schools, recreation, the Four Freedoms, integration and even human rights.” He added, “But our political and opinion-making leaders don’t go for such simple and sane reasoning because it represents restraint and, like charity, begins at home.”

Moses, who was forced out of the TBTA in 1968 when the agency became part of the newly formed Metropolitan Transportation Authority which used some of the TBTA’s revenues to subsidize the region’s subways and commuter rail lines, concluded with a somber assessment of the then-current urban policy landscape. “Almost no one in high office wants to be told that a motorized civilization is bound to glut the roads and that the best we can do will not meet the problem short of approaching much more drastic regulation which will require sacrifice,” he said. Then he returned to some familiar critiques of others’ ideas, asserting, “Careless experts say we shall meet the demands by preferring rails to rubber, substituting regionalism for states, master planning, super duper departments run by administrative giants of an elite corps of experts who are also seagreen incorruptibles, trained to be public tycoons, more business in government, the repeal of Parkinson’s Law, rebuilding everything without hurting or discommoding anybody, and combining immediate, uncompromising slum clearance with revolutionary social objectives.”

Moses, who died in 1981, concluded by noting, “Here endeth the lesson, if I have any to offer, and the beginning of the interrogation which will enable you to get even with me.” While we haven’t yet found a transcript of that discussion we’re sure that, like Moses’ remarks, they not only would be an informative historic artifact but also would highlight many of the urban issues that we are wrestling with today.

Read the speech transcript.

Improving Housing and Neighborhoods in Mexico: Lessons from a New Harvard GSD Report

by David Luberoff
Senior Associate Director

What kinds of planning and design interventions can help improve housing and urban development practice in Mexico? Can housing be a key tool in efforts to redevelop and expand the country’s metropolitan areas in efficient and equitable ways?

In Revitalizing Places: Improving Housing and Neighborhoods from Block to Metropolis, a report released earlier this year, a team headed by Ann Forsyth, a Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), tries to answer these questions. The report, which was part of the larger GSD project "Rethinking Social Housing in Mexico" does so by drawing on international and Mexican experience to identify policies, programs, planning approaches, and tools to help implement an ambitious housing and urban development policy announced by the Mexican government in 2012.

Vivienda Social en Cancun, one of the research case studies

In the report, Forsyth and three research associates who worked on the project – Charles Brennan, Nélida Escobedo Ruiz, and Margaret Scott – identify four key strategies that can help create more sustainable and inclusive communities.

First, they note that those who wish to densify existing metropolitan areas can use a range of policies and programs aimed at increasing development in the urban area as a whole (including the core cities and suburban regions). These include simplifying the infill development process, promoting public acceptance of infill, and promoting accessory apartments. Together these types of strategies promote densification on various levels and also address physical, regulatory, and organizational issues.

Second, they recognize that, in most of the world, accommodating all growth in existing urban areas is difficult, and that better approaches to developing greenfield sites are necessary. Key strategies for doing so include “creating additions to urban areas that are rich in infrastructure and services and using innovative designs to comprehensively develop neighborhoods and new towns.”

City square in Oaxaca, Mexico

Third, they emphasize that strategies to retrofit some areas should respond to concerns about existing developments. They note that “upgrading areas where services and infrastructure are lacking and dealing with abandoned housing are both vitally important.” They further assert that adding mixed-use, multi-functional neighborhood and town centers to developments and providing better job opportunities can better connect people to services and reduce the sense of isolation often found in new developments.

Finally, they observe that a lack of data coordination is a significant barrier to making positive changes in metropolitan areas. The authors note that Building Better Cities, a companion report also produced by the Rethinking Social Housing project, analyzes existing policy and political challenges to coordinate and promote densification strategies in key Mexican metropolitan regions. These challenges, they note, include data coordination, which is needed to develop and share success indicators that not only provide feedback on the process and interim achievements but also help key actors "recalibrate and improve actions."

Taken as a whole, the authors conclude that these policies and programs are not only useful for Mexico but are more broadly applicable in middle and higher income countries trying to meet housing demand while minimizing the negative effects of urban sprawl.

Housing development in Aguascalientes, one of the research case studies

The report was produced as part of a larger project "Rethinking Social Housing in Mexico" headed by Forsyth and Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and Chair of GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design. The report and the larger project were funded by INFONAVIT (Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores), a major Mexican government-sponsored funder of mortgages for private sector workers that was interested in how its polices could help create a more stable housing market and better towns and cities.

INFONAVIT’s efforts in Oaxaca, which was the one of the areas studied in depth as part of the Rethinking Social Housing project, will be the subject of a panel discussion on “Staying a Step Ahead: Institutional Flexibility in the Rehabilitation Of Social Housing In Oaxaca, Mexico,” that will be held in Gund Hall at the GSD at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, November 9.

Developing a “New Urban Agenda” in Paraguay

by David Luberoff
Senior Associate Director

Since urban growth has come relatively late to Paraguay, the South American country has had the opportunity learn from the successes and failures of others, noted Maria Soledad Núñez, Paraguay’s Minister of Housing and Habitat in a Brown Bag talk hosted by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on September 12.

The youngest person ever appointed a Cabinet-level minister in Paraguay, Núñez, who was appointed in 2014, when she was 31 years old, recalled that accepting the post represented a major change for her, as she had spent almost a decade working at NGOs that advocated on behalf of those living in slums in her country and other parts of Latin America. Although she worried about whether she would be given the authority to move forward with the ambitious policies she had been advocating, she ultimately decided that the opportunity was too promising to pass up.  

At her talk, which was co-sponsored by the Harvard Urban Planning Organization, Núñez recalled how, when she became minister, she pressed for a dramatic increase in the production of social housing for low-income families. At the time, the Ministry had been building less than 2,000 units a year and most observers didn’t think it had the capacity to even double that amount. Now, however, the Ministry is building more than 10,000 housing units a year. Núñez is also trying to build on that success by focusing not only on building new housing but also ensuring that the new units are part of larger plans to implement the country’s New Urban Agenda, which seeks to create viable and vibrant communities.

As part of those efforts, Núñez added, the Ministry is working with the local government of Asuncion, the capital and Paraguay’s largest city, to relocate low-income residents living in areas regularly subject to flooding from the Rio Paraguay to better housing and to transform some of those areas into badly needed open space for the city’s residents. She also is leading the country’s National Committee of Habitat, which comprises more than 50 public and private institutions that are working together to carry out the country’s urban plans.

Download Minister Núñez’s presentation
(Source: SENAVITAT, National Secretariat of Housing and Habitat of Paraguay)

Can Demolitions and Property Rehabilitations Alter Nearby Crime Patterns?

by Jon Spader

Senior Research
Associate

The potential for vacant and abandoned structures to attract crime has long concerned local policymakers. Newly vacant structures may attract crime, to the extent that they contain appliances, copper pipes, or other targets for burglary and theft. Additionally, abandoned structures offer suitable locations for criminal activity away from the public eye, such as public order offenses like vandalism or drug use. The presence of such crimes can reduce public safety for other neighborhood residents and require public dollars to police.

The foreclosure crisis sparked increased anxiety about these issues in many communities where concentrated foreclosures left properties vacant. Indeed, a large and growing body of research indicates that foreclosures caused increased crime during this period, largely as a result of the vacancies that occurred during the foreclosure process. In addition to the possibilities mentioned above, researchers hypothesized that foreclosures might increase crime through several additional channels: falling property values might reduce the local resources available for crime prevention; turnover of neighborhood residents might reduce the extent of monitoring in public spaces; and, reduced maintenance might alter offenders’ perceptions about whether the unit is occupied.

These potential vectors for increased crime raise important questions about what options are available to policymakers who seek to prevent vacant properties from becoming sources of blight to their surrounding communities. A recent Joint Center for Housing Studies working paper examines one possible strategy, measuring the extent to which demolitions and property rehabilitations effectively reduced the incidence of crime on or near foreclosed and vacant properties. Specifically, this paper measures the impacts of demolitions and property rehabilitations funded by the Neighborhood Stabilization Program between 2009 and 2013 in Cleveland, Chicago, and Denver. For more information about the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, additional analyses are available here, here, and here.

These three maps below show the location of demolitions and property rehabilitations in Cleveland, Chicago, and Denver. The number, type, and location of NSP activities are displayed, overlaying this information with shading that illustrates the underlying rates of crime in the neighborhoods surrounding the property demolitions and rehabilitations. The working paper measures the average impact of demolitions and property rehabilitations on the incidence of crime that occurs on the property or within 250 feet in any direction. This distance increment reflects the impact of these investments on the property itself or in the areas immediately adjacent to the property (relative to the trend observed in other areas of the neighborhood).

In addition, the map for Denver shows a small number of financing activities which provided down payment assistance to low-income homebuyers to purchase homes that had recently experienced foreclosure. Unfortunately, the number of such properties is too small to allow similar analysis of whether the reoccupancy of these properties affected the incidence of crime or near the financing properties.

 

The results suggest that the demolitions conducted by the NSP grantee in Cleveland reduced the incidence of burglary and theft within 250 feet of the demolished properties. The measured impacts of demolitions were present during the period of the demolition and persisted for one year following the demolition, before dissipating. In total, these estimates imply a reduction of just over 1 reported property crime for every 2 demolitions completed.

The findings do not show similar impacts for the observed set of property rehabilitations in Cleveland, Chicago, and Denver, nor for the observed set of demolitions in Chicago. Because the sample sizes are much smaller for these activities, we are unable to determine whether these activities had no impact on crime, or whether this outcome is due to limitations of the study’s data and methods. For example, the set of property rehabilitations conducted in each city, as well as the set of demolitions in Chicago, each included a heterogeneous set of property  and neighborhood types, which may limit the estimates of the ‘average effect’ of these investments.

Nonetheless, the findings carry useful implications about the potential for demolitions to alter nearby crime patterns. The direct implication is that a strategy of concentrated demolitions may be effective in altering neighborhood crime patterns under certain conditions. The map of Cleveland above illustrates the extent to which Cleveland clustered its demolition activity, targeting its demolitions primarily to neighborhoods with high levels of vacancy and abandonment. The reductions in crime surrounding these demolitions add to the potential benefits that policymakers should consider in weighing the use of demolition to remove vacant and abandoned properties. The caveat is that the size of the impacts is relatively modest. Policymakers will need to weigh the overall benefits of demolishing vacant and abandoned structures against the costs—which averaged $13,970 per demolition for the NSP program.

Some caution is also needed in applying the findings to other neighborhoods and cities. As the above discussion suggests, the estimates reflect Cleveland’s use of concentrated demolitions in neighborhoods with high levels of vacancy and abandonment and moderate levels of crime. Their demolition strategy might therefore be readily applied to nearby Midwestern cities facing similar challenges, but could be less exportable to neighborhoods with different levels of crime, different built environments, or that are located in different regions of the United States.

VIDEO: An Interactive Conversation about the Role of Designers in Promoting Racial Justice in our Communities

by Jennifer Molinsky
Senior Research Associate

Earlier this month, the Joint Center for Housing Studies, together with the Loeb Fellowship and African American Student Union at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), hosted InFORMing Justice, an interactive conversation about designers’ roles in promoting racial justice in our communities. The event evolved in the wake of national discussions about the deaths of black men in Ferguson, Staten Island, South Carolina, and elsewhere, as a way for GSD students and the broader community to discuss how design and designers can promote community empowerment and ultimately justice (and its requisite parts, including equal access to safe, healthy neighborhoods and economic opportunities). 

In the opening panel, moderated by Professor Michael Hays, architects Kimberly Dowdell, Theresa Hwang, Liz Ogbu, and artist Seitu Jones touched on the intensely personal nature of their professional work in disadvantaged, racially segregated communities. They urged architects, designers, and planners to reflect on their own biases and assumptions as they work to build what Jones called “the beloved community;” the importance of active, intentional listening in engaging with community residents; the critical role of the design process in bringing about change; and the value of working collaboratively across disciplines. 

Following the panel, participants broke into small groups to brainstorm ideas about how design professionals can address racial injustice in the university curriculum and in practice. 

If you missed the event, you can now watch the webcast, view our Storify of tweets & images from the evening, or read more about design for equity, including contributions from panelists Liz Ogbu and Theresa Hwang.

Watch our Gateway Cities Summit on YouTube

If you missed our recent event at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Opening the Gates of Opportunity: Realizing the Potential of Gateway Cities in Massachusetts, you can now watch the full event on YouTube.

Gateway Cities are midsize urban centers in Massachusetts facing stubborn social and economic challenges, but with many assets that have unrealized potential. Our half-day event brought together community leaders, public officials, policymakers, faculty and students (agenda) to exchange ideas and information about workable solutions for these cities and local economies. Through these discussions, we captured innovative, cross-sector, collaborative ideas and models that we hope will feed into the work that is being done by students and faculty in urban planning.

We want to thank all of the speakers, panelists, students, and sponsors who made our event such a success.

The video is available in three sections:

Part 1:  Welcome & Keynote
Part 2:  Goals, Challenges, and Who Are We Trying to Help?
Part 3:  How Do We Get it Done? Tough Choices, Which Places, and Why?

Download the Agenda from the event

Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Urban Development

by Eric Belsky
Managing Director

Tackling urban poverty and attending to its spatial manifestations is vitally important. The speed with which many regions of the world are urbanizing, the haphazard spatial development of urban areas, and the deplorable living conditions of more than 800 million slum dwellers make the need to address urban poverty more urgent than ever. Climate change is only intensifying the necessity to act, as the urban poor tend to occupy land susceptible to physical risk, such as steep slopes, flood plains, or low-lying coastal areas made more vulnerable with extreme weather and climate variability. At the same time, however, government and business leaders are awakening to the potential to advance social and economic development by engaging the urban poor as consumers, producers, asset-builders, and entrepreneurs.

The Joint Center’s recent report, Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Urban Development: Correcting Planning Failures and Connecting Communities to Capital, highlights the challenges of tackling urban poverty as well as promising strategies to do so. Obstacles to addressing slums and realizing the potential of slum residents include weak, non-participatory, and uncoordinated urban planning. National governments often establish regional authorities or public-private partnerships to plan major investments in urban infrastructure that fail to consider broader regional land use planning goals, community input, or the needs of poor communities. Local land use regulations and plans, to the extent that they exist at all, are not widely followed. Plans for slums seldom situate them in the context of broader plans for the urban region. And the non-governmental organizations that do much of the work to improve slums rarely coordinate their efforts. In addition, community-based organizations often are weak and not incorporated into the government’s urban planning process.  Finally, these governments, authorities, and partnerships generally fail to formulate specific strategies to improve or redevelop slums in ways that leave the poor better off.

Yet many examples of better planning practices exist around the world: efforts to develop national strategies for urban development and poverty alleviation, metropolitan regional planning and governance, anticipatory planning for urban growth and climate change, spatial planning and coordination of land uses and investments, participatory planning and community engagement, asset building for the poor, and institutional transparency and accountability through initiatives such as participatory municipal budgeting.

Drawing on these positive examples, several strategies emerge to improve urban planning and investment in order to spur inclusive and sustainable urban development. Most important, spatial planning must be fully integrated with investments in infrastructure, and the development of regional plans must involve participation by all stakeholders. A variety of practices can support inclusive, integrated planning such as funding for multi-stakeholder planning at the regional level and investment in community-based organizations and their intermediary supports. Government capacity can be built through national urban development commissions—spurred by intergovernmental, international bodies—charged with developing plans for inclusive and sustainable urban development. Technical assistance and capacity building can help national, regional, state, or local governments form and manage public-private partnerships, optimizing the use of scarce public resources while also introducing stronger and more rational spatial and participatory planning techniques into the process. A host of other tools described in the report can support more coordinated planning and investment as well as innovation in employment and small business, housing, and infrastructure programs in slums.

Taken together, these actions would greatly improve planning for inclusive and sustainable urban development and create an international movement to focus on these issues. With a growing list of examples of best practices to address urban poverty in effective ways (many summarized in the report), the Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations still before us, and a chorus of globally-branded businesses (including McKinsey and JP Morgan Chase) calling for better urban planning and poverty amelioration strategies, there is a chance that these issues will gain the international attention they deserve and lead to concrete actions.

Read the new Joint Center report: Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Urban Development: Correcting Planning Failures and Connecting Communities to Capital