Two Simple Rules For Healthy Neighborhood Change
The way we grow our cities today produces a few winners and many losers. Here's how to get back to places that serve all of us.
In our cities and metropolitan regions today, instability is often the only constant. The housing market veers from boom to bust and back like a car careening on ice. Millions of Americans find that their ability to afford rent is precarious at best. Concentrated poverty and its mirror image, concentrated affluence, are at historic highs. And our neighborhoods are caught between a destructive pair of outcomes: either experience stagnation and slow decay, or a cascade of redevelopment that leaves a place scoured of its former identity. A trickle of investment or a fire hose blast: nothing in between.
Taming this destructive dynamic is a central challenge if we are to sow the seeds of healthy, productive growth for America's cities. Strong Towns has a simple, two-part rule we think needs to be part of the conversation:
1. No neighborhood can be exempt from change.
2. No neighborhood should experience sudden, radical change.
Our zoning codes and development policies should be guided by these principles. And both pieces are essential and complement each other. Here’s why.
The Harm Caused by Build and No-Build Zones
Urban gentrification and large-scale redevelopment get a lot of press. In reality, though, only a small fraction of neighborhoods are experiencing the kind of gold-rush condition in which whole blocks are razed and transformed, and gleaming new "luxury" buildings replace dilapidated homes.
Build vs. no-build zones in greater Los Angeles. Via BuildZoom. Click to view larger.
A much larger majority of places are seeing virtually no growth or physical transformation. These "no-build zones" have expanded to cover most of residential America. They include, on the one hand, affluent enclaves where everything from zoning codes to parking standards and HOA rules are designed to shore up exclusivity and keep out those who can't pay the cost of entry. But they also include growing swaths of concentrated poverty and decline: places that could benefit from reinvestment but where only a downward spiral of decay and abandonment appears to be on the menu.
As a example of this stark dichotomy, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio—an area of 1.2 million people that includes the city of Cleveland—75% of new homes built from 2014 to 2018 were built in just 5% of neighborhoods.
The housing market in high-cost cities.
What happens when we rule most neighborhoods off limits to even the kind of gradual changes that would have been common in another era, such as the addition of a granny flat or corner store, or conversion of a home to a duplex? We end up funneling a whole region's worth of demand for new buildings to the handful of neighborhoods where that demand is permitted to be met.
If you've ever slightly cracked the lid on a boiling pot of water and watched the steam rush out, then you can understand what this funnel effect does to land prices and housing markets. It should be no surprise that what we do see built is often a) huge and b) expensive. This in turn fuels the perception that “developers only want to build luxury housing.”
Jane Jacobs warned of this dynamic 60 years ago in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs describes cataclysmic money, investment capital that floods into and reshapes neighborhoods according to the whims of outside forces:
Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing drastic changes. As an obverse of this behavior, cataclysmic money sends relatively few trickles into localities not treated to cataclysm.
Putting it figuratively, insofar as their effects on most city streets and districts are concerned, these kinds of money behave not like irrigation systems, bringing life-giving streams to feed steady, continual growth. Instead, they behave like manifestations of malevolent climates beyond the control of man—affording either searing droughts or torrential, eroding floods.
This is, of course, no constructive way to nurture cities.
It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
Consider the boiling pot analogy again. If you lift the lid straight off the whole pot, on the other hand, the steam does not escape with the same intensity, but rather gently rises and dissipates.
Before the 20th century, nearly every city ever built was a co-creation of its own residents. A neighborhood, as it grew, would be shaped by many hands. What started as a row of pop-up shacks might, over a generation, become a Main Street of brick and stone structures occupied by local merchants who lived in apartments above their shops. Another generation later, 5-story hotels and apartments might have risen. People often adapted buildings freely: putting on an addition or a second story, carving out an in-law unit or subdividing into a duplex. A healthy neighborhood would be constantly evolving and regenerating itself.
Cincinnati in 1841. Via Wikimedia Commons.
This process does not have to be slow. It can produce dazzlingly rapid evolution—Cincinnati, for example, grew 20-fold between 1820 and 1870, blossoming from a wilderness outpost on the Ohio River to a modern metropolis that many called the "Paris of America." But this process is always incremental in the sense that it is the product of many small decisions, not a few large ones.
Our cities used to have thriving ecosystems of incremental developers, though not all of them would have used that term—being a "developer" didn't mean what it means today. The person building next door to you was more likely to be your neighbor, and far less likely to be a corporation headquartered far away. And this meant that they had an interest in cultivating a successful place for the long haul, not merely extracting a short-term profit.
The steady stream of gradual money from this sort of development results in neighborhoods that are not static, but ever-churning places that can sustain virtuous cycles of growth and reinvestment. They are built in response to the immediate needs of their residents. They build wealth for their inhabitants, even those who start with next to nothing. And they are places where complex, rich communities can take deep root, even as they grow and flex to let more people in.
Legalize Small
If we don't want cataclysmic change in our cities, then we need to tolerate gradual change. Everywhere.
As Charles Marohn writes in Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity:
It is critical that every neighborhood ... be allowed, by right, to evolve to the next level of development intensity ... without any special permitting, approval of neighbours, or added conditions.
If you own a house and want to make it a duplex, for example, you should be able to walk into City Hall and walk out with a permit to do so.
We need to retool our regulatory processes and financing systems to legalize small. Right now, convoluted zoning and development rules, long and uncertain approval processes, and financing mechanisms that favor predictability and standardization have left an oligopoly of deep-pocketed developers as nearly the only ones who can afford to be in the game. This precludes many citizens from playing a meaningful role in co-creating the places they will live. And it is at the root of America's overlapping housing and affordability crises.
(Cover photo: Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. Via Flickr.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.