More Affordable for the Planet, Too

Last week I heard the term “15-minute city” for the first time.

In the 15-minute city, people can walk or bike to everything they need within 15 minutes: stores, schools, workplaces, parks, and restaurants. Originator Carlos Moreno focused on city neighborhoods (he lives in Paris), but the 15-minute city applies to towns and suburbs too.

I learned about the concept in a webinar called “Housing Policy Is Climate Policy” from Joanna Gubman, environmental director of YIMBY Action and executive director of Urban Environmentalists. Gubman explained that the most effective way for people living in the exurbs to reduce their carbon footprint was to move to inner-ring suburbs or towns and cities. She said people should be able to easily access the things they need (home, food, school, work, fresh air) without using a car.

Which people?

All people.

Housing affordability is powerfully connected to the 15-minute city. Partly this is because the framework aims to transform the whole way we live on this planet. Dan Luscher, the creator of 15minutecity.com, calls it a “North Star” idea, acknowledging that most existing 15-minute communities (like the Noe Valley in San Francisco where he lives) are currently unaffordable for most people. “Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods need to be…accessible financially, not just physically,” he writes.

There is lots of overlap between the actions we need to take to make places where people don’t need cars in order to live there and the actions we need to take to create housing that people don’t need to be millionaires to call home.

The Many Benefits of Density

Toward the beginning of the webinar, Gubman shared a list of changes that would make housing policy more environmentally friendly. But Gubman's list would also have another positive result: her recommendations would also make housing more affordable. They are:

· Permit taller buildings and more homes per building (“upzoning”)—especially in high-opportunity, exclusionary neighborhoods in climate-resilient locations.

· Permit small lots and let people build on their whole lot.

· Don’t mandate off-street car parking for new housing units (because it significantly raises the cost of building them).

· Allow a mix of residential and commercial space in buildings.

· Allow small multifamily housing everywhere (triplexes, quadplexes, and the like are often known as housing’s “missing middle”).

· Increase tenant protections, too.

Image courtesy of YIMBY Action network

If we make neighborhoods a little bit more dense, and we make our communities more compact and walkable, more of us can take advantage of their offerings.

Legalized density can look different in different communities. In a city, or near a transit hub, it might make sense to allow buildings many stories high. In single-family neighborhoods, it might make sense to legalize accessory dwelling units (a.k.a. ADUs, in-law suites, garage apartments, etc.) or to permit some triplexes or quadplexes. “A mix of residential and commercial” might look like a small shop attached to a home (“accessory commercial unit”) or like a row of street-level stores with apartments upstairs.

Any of those ideas—ADUs, multifamily housing, mixed-use housing—probably means adding more smaller homes in among larger, existing ones. In any given location, a smaller home should be less expensive to buy or rent than a larger home, and it’s likely to use less electricity, gas, and water too.

Denser neighborhoods near amenities mean that people may not need a car to get to school or shopping. Because VMT—vehicle miles traveled—is a major contributor to climate change, this is good for the environment. (If you want to explore your personal carbon footprint, UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate Network has a handy calculator.)

And because cars and gas and insurance are expensive, living near jobs (or public transit) can save people a lot of money.

But my very favorite thing about the presentation was the way Gubman talked about density as vibrancy. Some people worry that more homes in their neighborhood will bring too much traffic or noise, or will make room for residents they consider undesirable. (Historically this has often been a coded way to talk about race or class.)

But what Gubman says is: “More neighbors are a delight.”

Swarthmore Is Already a 15-Minute Town

One of the things many of us who live in Swarthmore love about the borough is that it comes pretty close to being a 15-minute town. I live all the way at its southern edge, but I can walk to shops, restaurants, parks, the library, the school my children attended when they were young, and the commuter train, which I took into Philadelphia for the five years I worked in the city.

Of course, one of the reasons housing has gotten so expensive in Swarthmore is that other people would like to live in a town like this too. That’s why it’s so important to think about how to keep Swarthmore accessible to people other than the very affluent, and to make sure a wide range of people can afford to live here.

Another great thing about Swarthmore is that it’s full of passionate environmentalists. We have an active Environmental Advisory Council, and organizations like aFewSteps.org and Friends of Little Crum Creek Park do important work to keep our planet and our town livable. Meanwhile, Swarthmore College is making strides to fulfill its pledge of reaching carbon neutrality by 2035.

I’d like to think we could one day have as many groups and citizens working to solve the affordability crisis as we do taking on the climate crisis.

The good news is that these two major endeavors have so much synergy.

As people focused on the environment and those focused on affordability look for places to work together, we should be able to both get more done and find more community. These days, I’m increasingly aware how much the solace and pleasure of community will give us the strength for the work we need to do.

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“Everyone Can Reap the Benefit”: Delaware County’s Housing Plan

When I first started looking into what other communities were doing to address the housing affordability crisis, my research took me west and north.

California and Minneapolis are well-known for using zoning changes as a tool to provide more reasonably priced housing. Connecticut and Massachusetts are actively working toward that goal as well. My uncle recently sent me this optimistic story from Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. The crowded tourist town is permitting property owners to rebuild some commercial spaces with up to 20 housing units if at least a quarter of them are deeded “affordable.” The proposal sailed through the town meeting.

(There are, unfortunately, cautionary Massachusetts stories too, like this one about wealthy suburban towns willing to forgo state grants rather than build more housing near transit hubs—transit oriented development being central to Republican governor Charlie Baker’s Housing Choice plan.)

What’s Happening Locally?

After learning about what was happening elsewhere, I started reaching out locally to see who is working on affordability closer to home.

I met with two staff members of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), who explained that they are at the very beginning of their work on housing affordability. Learning of Swarthmore’s Task Force on Development and Affordability, they offered their support.

The DVRPC staffers sent me links to articles on “missing middle” housing—like duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes—from the American Planning Association and Zillow; to their own study of how multifamily housing benefits communities; and to a report on how mixed-use development and a diversity of housing types helps make communities resilient.

Then they connected me to staff in the governmental offices of Delaware County.

Rebecca Ross, Principal Planner, worked on Delco’s comprehensive 2020 housing plan. This plan stresses the importance of housing diversity, urging all 49 municipalities to develop different types of housing at different price points.

Noting that local zoning often favors single-family homes, the plan encourages missing middle housing and promotes accessory dwelling units, a.k.a. ADUs, in-law apartments, or granny flats.

The Delco plan explains how increasing housing variety helps more prospective home buyers to enter the housing market. Smaller homes at lower price points enable more people to

build equity, eventually moving “up the ladder” of housing as their needs change. Allowing people to add ADUs to their properties and offer them for rent also provides a potential income source for homeowners, which could help alleviate costs.

Much of the county’s work on housing focuses on income-qualified projects that are eligible for federal, state, and county funding. But Delco is beginning to pay more attention to “attainable housing”—that is, market-rate housing for first-time home buyers, younger families, and middle-income earners.

Ross said she saw Swarthmore’s task force as a useful response to “a growing, ongoing need for our communities to look more holistically” at housing overall.

“No one community should be bearing the brunt of high housing prices,” she said. “And no one community should bear the brunt of disinvestment.”

If municipalities across the county work together, Ross said, “Everyone can reap the benefit.”

What Else Is Happening in Delco?

Ross and her colleague Sarah Carley pointed me to other local communities that are tackling the affordability problem. Mostly these places have different situations and populations than Swarthmore (more land, more people, less wealth). Phoenixville’s new Council on Affordable Housing is working on public-private partnerships for new development and is developing a grant program to help low-income buyers afford homes. Upper Chichester is experimenting with land banks. Media, which has experienced its own explosion in housing costs—has a new group addressing affordability.

On the one hand, I had hoped to see more efforts to alleviate the housing crisis.

On the other hand, it’s exciting—and a little sobering—that what we do here in Swarthmore can serve as a model for our neighbors.

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“Rethinking Federal Housing Policy,” or, What One Swarthmore Resident’s National Perspective Suggests About What We Can Do in Our Small Town

If you’re working to make your small town’s housing more affordable, and that town turns out to be home to a well-known housing economist with a book about the affordability crisis, you probably ought to read that book. 

A couple of months ago, I learned that Joseph Gyourko, a professor of real estate, finance and business economics, and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, lives right here in Swarthmore. Or rather, I knew a guy named Joe Gyourko lived in Swarthmore; our daughters had been friends back in elementary school. What I learned was that this neighbor was a well-known housing economist.

One surprise about Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable, which Gyourko wrote with Edward Glaeser, was how readable it was to a non-economist like me: lucid and direct.

As the title suggests, the book is largely about what the authors think the federal government should do to address the affordability problem. But a lot of what they say has implications for what can be done on a smaller scale—a borough scale—too.

We Need More Housing

When they published their book in 2008, Gyourko and Glaeser already observed that in a “growing number of metropolitan areas, housing prices have soared, making housing unaffordable even for middle-income Americans.”

The main reason? “Stringent land-use regulations make it too costly to change the quantity of housing very much.”

In other words, while zoning serves an important function, overly restrictive zoning laws were making it nearly impossible to build more housing, which was driving prices up. 

This is still the case—and it’s very relevant to the housing situation in Swarthmore.

Two Affordability Crises

One still applicable tenet of Gyourko and Glaeser’s book is that America is suffering from two separate affordability crises with different causes and different solutions. 

One crisis is that many people are so poor that they struggle to afford any housing, even inexpensive housing. 

Another is that, in many parts of the country, housing has become unaffordable to even middle-income people. 

Unless you understand which crisis you are talking about, the writers explain, you’re not going to be able to implement a solution.

I found this extremely clarifying.

In my reading and thinking about affordability over the last year, I’ve often found myself stuck in a thicket of confused ideas about what “affordability” is. I wrote about this a few weeks back in a post called “What Is Affordability Anyway?”

Gyourko and Glaeser helped me see how the word “affordable” is such a flexible, protean term that it can be more obfuscating than useful.

Their book spends most of its time discussing the lack of housing affordable for middle-income earners. The principal solution, the authors argue, is to loosen local zoning restrictions in unaffordable markets to encourage the creation of more housing units. 

Gyourko and Glaeser argue for limiting the federal mortgage-interest deduction and sending the resulting tax dollars back to municipalities that build housing. This is a national and therefore efficient approach, but not one I imagine seeing implemented any time soon.

So What Can We Do Locally?

Loosening land-use restrictions in Swarthmore alone would likely not drive down the price of existing homes. That would probably require changes across the Philadelphia metropolitan area. But it could open the door for the creation of housing units at lower price points.

Other communities have done just that by, for example, permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to offset the cost of homeownership while providing affordable rentals. They have rewritten their zoning laws so large houses can be divided into several condominiums. They have designated areas for townhomes like Swarthmore’s Village Green near the Princeton Avenue underpass. 

Changes like these could make our town more accessible to middle-income earners like teachers, small merchants, data-science consultants, writers, and college professors who were able to afford to buy homes in Swarthmore twenty years ago but mostly can’t anymore.

As for the poor who struggle to afford even inexpensive housing, Swarthmore has long been mostly out of their reach. A 1972 proposal by local religious leaders that the borough allow twenty units of subsidized housing went down to defeat. The words of one of the proposal’s advocates at a borough council meeting, quoted in the January 23, 1973, issue of The Swarthmorean, show that our forebearers half a century ago had some of the same concerns many of us do today: “[The proposal] bears on Swarthmore’s ability to remain an open, socially mixed community in which material achievements aren’t the only measure of human worth.”

An article in the Delaware County Daily Times described an exchange, not mentioned in The Swarthmorean’s account of the meeting, in which a citizen named William Allen Raiman said the proposal “would little by little make one big Scrapple Hundred out of Swarthmore.” Scrapple Hundred is a derogatory term for the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore. 

I’m guessing no one in Swarthmore today would speak that way in a public meeting. But I worry that opposition to making housing more affordable is driven in part by stereotypes and prejudices about the kind of people who would live in it.

I’d like to think we could find ways to make Swarthmore more accessible to low-income workers, especially those employed in our community as restaurant servers or custodians at Swarthmore College or home health aides. 

Two Takeaways

One optimistic nugget I unearthed from Gyourko and Glaeser’s book is the idea that—since the lack of affordability for middle-income earners is largely the result of overly restrictive zoning policies—changes in government policies can supply solutions.

Here’s a more ambiguous nugget. The book notes that in some big cities, mayors fight for the creation of housing units so city workers can afford to live near their jobs. But, the writers continue, “In leafy suburbs…there is no group to oppose existing homeowners’ natural desire to restrict construction.” 

As I read this, I found myself wondering how, in our own leafy suburb, such a group might be created. 

I chair Swarthmore’s Development and Affordability Task Force, which is charged with making recommendations to our borough council next year. But beyond that, a critical mass of residents who see the benefits both to themselves and to others in creating more affordable housing in Swarthmore will be crucial to bringing about change.

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