Category Archives: New York

NIMBY notes from all over

affordable housing, density, economic growth, fair housing, housing crisis, housing subsidies, housing vouchers, New York, NIMBYism, renters, , , , , , ,

Fresh news of NIMBY opposition to affordable housing comes out of … well, our own backyard.

From North Country Public Radio, we learn that residents in Plattsburgh managed to persuade the planning board to reject a proposed four-building residential complex, alleging familiar sorts of adverse effects that low-income people would have on traffic, safety, property values. plattsbugh Affordable housing is a permitted use in that district, but…

 “It is transient housing,” one resident complained. “ They put people in there who are just out of jail, prison whatever until they can get back on their feet … I don’t want it in my area.”

“This concept of us serving transients is so far from reality,” countered the director of the housing organization that would be referring tenants. “The majority of the people that we serve are disabled. They are the veterans in your community. There are elderly people in your community that we serve…”

She might have also cited reports, like this one, that affordable housing can have an uplifting impact on economic development and property values.

Oh well. The developer is appealing the rejection in court. “The thrust of it was, they did not want ‘these people’ moving into their neighborhood,” the developer’s lawyer said.

Plattsburgh is in good company. Upper Saddle River, a toney community in New Jersey, is being sued for rejecting a multi-family housing complex, and thus, by proxy, new residents who happen to be black or Latino. Another interesting case of NIMBY opposition to multi-family housing recently arose in Arizona, where the “backyard” in question belonged to a mortuary! Apparently the mortuary and the developer resolved their differences, though.

NIMBYism gets some of the credit, or blame, for California’s housing-affordability crisis, and it certainly comes in many forms, as this entertaining catalogue attests. Among our favorites are “mega-mansion NIMBYs.” 

New life for old idea?

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When the housing-unaffordability problem comes up at a public meeting in Burlington, chances are someone will stand up and call for rent control.  rental1Never mind that the city rejected the idea three decades ago and no one has made a serious effort to revive it locally. It’s an idea that never goes away, though, and is getting some fresh currency these days — where else, in California, the housing-unaffordability epicenter.

Rent control’s heyday was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, apparently. Massachusetts did away with it in 1994 via a statewide vote, but it can still be found in many municipalities in New York, New Jersey and Maryland, as well as California, where tenants’ advocates are pushing to get more communities to sign on and have come up with an organizing toolkit. “Rent control moment gains momentum as housing prices soar,” read a recent news headline, but a closer look suggests that much of the impetus is in California. Most states, after all, have laws that prohibit rent control, although in Washington, there’s an effort to lift the ban for Seattle.

Any groundswell in favor of rent control would have to grow out of large numbers of renters, and renters are certainly on the increase nationally. A new Harvard report announces that “that 43 million families and individuals live in rental housing, an increase of nearly 9 million households since 2005 — the largest gain in any 10-year period on record.”

Renters are a distinct minority in Vermont, where the home-ownership rate is above average. In fact, renters outnumber homeowners in just two cities — Burlington and Winooski — so if rent control were plausible anywhere in Vermont, those would be the likely places. City voters would have to approve a charter change, which would require legislative approval. How unlikely is that?

Burlington voters overwhelmingly rejected rent control in a special election in 1981, during Bernie Sanders’ first mayoral term. (Actually, they rejected the creation of a “fair housing commission,” which everyone agreed was a proxy for rent control.) They were influenced by a publicity campaign against the measure mounted by commercial interests.  burlingtonhouseSanders’ critics on the left complained he didn’t try very hard to see the idea through, and in fact he went on to promote affordable housing via a range of other policies.

Barring a major ground shift, rent control will remain one of those recurrent policy ideas with no traction in these parts. Like single-payer health care.

Scaling back, sort of

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A new verb, or gerund, is twittering its way into the contemporary housing lexicon: “co-living.”

It’s often paired with “co-working,” another neologism, and “micro-housing.” These words are being used most commonly to describe the emerging lifestyles of highly driven, hard-striving young entrepreneurs, typically in technical fields — Millennial start-up wannabes, they’re sometimes called in the literature.tiny1 Harnessed to their ambitions, they’re willing to live in tiny spaces with some common amenities (co-live), work in open-space offices where they can freely network and brainstorm with peers (co-work), and abandon the idea of maintaining a conventional “work-life balance.”

These patterns reportedly originated in the Bay Area, as you might expect, but are showing up in New York. This summer, the Times ran a story about Pure House, one of several businesses renting apartments with amenities to such people who are willing to pay $1,600 to $4,000 a month to share rooms with others of their ilk. “The Millennial Commune,” read the headline. (For BuzzFeed’s elaboration on this phenomenon, click here.)tiny2

We’ve never met anybody like that, but we take it on faith that such people really do exist. What we’d like to suggest, though, is that some variant of co-living might have appeal for ordinary people, too – Millennials and oldsters, alike. We’ll explain in a moment, but first, let’s be clear that co-living is not the same as cohousing.

Cohousing, as the Cohousing Association of the United States describes it, is “an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space.” There are many variations of this basic idea of combining private and communal space, and a couple of dozen of these communities have sprung up around Vermont. These are clustered developments, but they’re not necessarily adduced as an answer to the housing-unaffordability problem because of the added costs associated with the shared facilities.

Co-living, by contrast, puts people in tiny apartments (say, 200-300 square feet) with access to some shared space (such as a communal kitchen and lounge). Typically, these are furnished rentals.

An example is Commonspace, 21 micro units being developed on two floors of a five story building in Syracuse, N.Y., above a co-working office space. Each unit will have a bathroom and a kitchenette and will rent from $700 to $900 a month — supposedly slightly less than a one-bedroom apartment goes for in Syracuse, according to a fine profile in The Atlantic. tiny3

Quite apart from the “co-working” annex, micro-units have proliferated in Seattle over the last few years and appear to appeal especially to people who want to live close by where they work.

Now obviously, this sort of place is not for everyone. It means, among other things, giving up the idea that you’ll be paying for living quarters big enough to hold all your seldom-used stuff.

But it might make sense for lots of people — recent college grads working their first jobs, dislocated workers or homeless people getting back on their feet, retirees living on fixed incomes. Not that all these people would necessarily have live together, but assorted communities might suggest themselves.

And beyond rentals, perhaps different ownership models could be devised by land trusts, using judicious public subsidies, all with an eye to affordability.