The Progressive Case for More Development

 

My job, educational training, and personal predisposition have me examining all angles of issues, probing for what makes sense and what will work. In my travels, I continue to come across something that I wanted to explore a bit today, which is progressive folks feeling ambivalent, against, or outright hostile towards new real estate development.

I will not claim to know all there is to know on this subject, and for a short blog post I will invariably give short shrift to every perspective on the matter. Still, the following seem like reasonably sound statements to make, which together feel like a solid case for progressives to be supportive of more development.

1. I realize it's more than this and more complex than this, but at the core I feel like progressives care deeply about the inequity in our society, one manifestation of that being neighborhood-level things like quality of life, housing unaffordability, and residential segregation.

2. Neighborhoods, particularly in urban settings where you tend to see more turnover, are incredibly dynamic. Things can better or worse fairly quickly, and independent of whether it is better or worse (or even what your definition of "better" and "worse" is), neighborhood change is typical and constant.

3. The automation, suburbanization, and globalization of manufacturing in the 20th century was a major cause of significant depopulation in cities, particularly older industrial ones in the Midwest and Northeast.Where once tens of thousands of people walked to living wage jobs in their neighborhoods, factories shuttered and blight took over. Philly, Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, and Pittsburgh all saw their population levels plummet from 1950 to 2000. From this standpoint, it was a painful transition from an economy dominated by labor-intensive manufacturing to one that is more knowledge- and service-oriented.

4. The result of this painful transition is that cities had plenty of housing but fewer people. And, while housing is a pretty durable thing, by the 2000s much of the housing in these cities that had experienced population decline was functionally obsolete, either because it was run down (due to insufficient funds for upkeep) or unsuitable for modern preferences (e.g. no closets, not enough bathrooms).

Which brings us to the present. Philly has turned things around in that it is now growing its population even as other cities continue to lose. But even in Philly, progress is quite uneven, in that many neighborhoods have continued to decline, while a fearsome consequence of other neighborhoods getting hot is that households have been displaced or fear displacement.

Which brings us to the notion of the progressive case for more development. What is it? Well, for starters, consider the alternative to more development, which is not some magical return to the glory days of the first half of the 20th century when people had easy access to good-paying manufacturing jobs that didn't require a college degree. It is also not simply a freezing of the status quo, because cities and neighborhoods constantly change. So, absent development, you unfortunately often see neighborhoods lacking the resources to upgrade or even upkeep, which invariably leads to a vicious cycle of disinvestment, blight, and depopulation. Absent households having resources, and governments having sufficient tax base to provide resources, houses and blocks and neighborhoods go into decline, with the most vulnerable among us suffering the worse because they have these least amount of buffer to withstand such pains.

Doing nothing seems like a bad thing, no? Which doesn't mean we should just do something. But it does mean that evaluating what the "something" is needs to be in comparison to a really bad outcome. And, in the case of development, the "something" has a lot of good to it:

1. The development itself creates jobs, albeit on a temporary basis. And, those jobs tend to be the kind that progressives care about, i.e. good-paying union construction jobs. Indeed, construction unions tend to be overwhelmingly supportive of real estate development projects. They also suffer the most when the construction project pipeline dries up, either because the economy is in the tank or because public policy is making projects hard to get off the ground.

2. The development usually improves an area, sometimes dramatically so. Flipping an abandoned lot or a derelict home into new housing units is much better for the aesthetic of that block, while larger-scale developments are often even more aesthetically dramatic and/or provide new amenities that people want to have access to like parks and retail and services. Importantly, that access tends to be equitable in nature, since such assets are broadly accessible regardless of income level or personal connections.

3. The development represents a significant upgrade in the taxes being generated at the site, which in turn funds things like public schools and public services. All else equal, anyone who has advocated for more resources for school renovations and homelessness services an gun violence prevention should be predisposed to support rather than block things that generate those resources. Alternatively, keeping a site, block, or neighborhood from being developed means a static or declining tax base from which to draw resources.

The last point I'll make has a lot of layers to it so I want to unpack it further. High-end residential developments are often opposed because they will exacerbate existing affordability concerns. This is a complex topic with many nuances so I will not claim to know or cover all the bases here. But consider why affordability is an issue in a neighborhood. 

1. One is that people don't make enough to afford housing, which is a broader economic challenge that development doesn't directly negatively affect (although, on the margins, it does positively affect it in that it creates economic opportunities that can benefit households). 

2. The other is that housing is becoming more expensive, which by the law of supply and demand is telling you that something is making the area more attractive (demand is increasing), which in turn means that one of two things can happen in response. One is that supply is fixed so price goes up. The other is that supply goes up to meet the new demand, so prices stay stable. One of those things seems better than the other, but all too often people prefer the other. Let me say that again. If we are worried about affordability, the thing that worsens those worries (you can argue that it causes those worries) is not letting new residential development occur. New development doesn't necessarily solve the problem. But blocking it also doesn't solve the problem and in many cases worsens it.

Development is not without its challenges. Ideologically, I am not a full-on YIMBY, which is Yes in My Backyard, the opposite of NIMBY, or Not in My Backyard. Even YIMBYs aren't 100 percent pure YIMBY because they know housing is nuanced. But their predisposition is that, all else equal, more development is better. I agree. You still have to make sure development is done in a manner that creates local jobs, protects the safety of workers, and respects the will of the neighborhood. And, given that new things unleash new dynamics, you still need to think about how to protect those most vulnerable to the negative consequences new development imposes on a local real estate market (e.g. protections for low-income seniors living on fixed income).

So it's not easy. Still, while I didn't look under every rock, I do think that at the core, a strategy that encourages more development, ensures a healthy addition of residential in particular to ensure housing affordability, and is thoughtful about protections, is vastly superior to a strategy that discourages or vilifies new development. I guess that makes me a progressive, because the reason I want all this is that I want to see things happen in a way that protects, lifts up, and provides resources for all and in particular those who are most in need.