A Drop in the Housing Crisis Bucket

Housing is one of the biggest struggles facing our communities today, driven by the colliding forces of availability and affordability. In some places, there simply is not enough housing, putting upward pressure on prices. In other communities, the housing that is available is so costly that it remains out of reach for both renters and prospective homebuyers. 

This quandary is the result of housing serving two purposes at the same time. Housing is both shelter and an investment. When its value rises as an investment, the people who depend on it for shelter are the ones who feel the strain. Yet the scale of the housing crisis can make the challenge feel so overwhelming that communities become paralyzed, searching for a solution big enough to solve the entire problem instead of asking what they can do right now to make the next home possible.

When I share this idea, I receive a fair amount of skepticism from those who demand large, sweeping changes to tackle the housing crisis. Here is an example of an email conversation with a group of civic leaders in Frederick, Maryland, not all of whom were convinced that the Strong Towns approach could address their city's problems. The pushback was pessimistic and direct: 

No non-government approach [is] going to ease the housing crunch, since the market is built to work against affordability. Developers, agents, and the city itself all profit when prices rise, and the only party that actually wants a house to be cheap is the buyer, who typically has the least leverage in the transaction. Elected officials and residents may have empathy, but it competes for attention with everything else on their plate. A nearby parcel [has] just sold for a price that guaranteed nothing affordable would ever be built there, and a friend's single tiny house, however well-intentioned, [isn't] going to move the needle on a shortage this size. Incremental housing, sure. But against a crisis this large, it's a drop in the bucket.

I read through this a couple of times and the last line stuck with me: "it's a drop in the bucket."

They are not wrong in what they are saying, but I think starting there creates another problem. When we define the struggle simply as "a lack of affordable housing," we have made the problem so large that most of us have no idea what to do next. The enormity of the problem can become the reason we wait for someone else to act.

Against struggles like these, a single project can look like nothing at all, just a single drop in a very big bucket. 

Start With the Struggle

Somewhere in the community, a family is trying to figure out how to keep an aging parent close by without the cost of a second household. A local developer is trying to build a handful of small homes on an infill lot, and the numbers don't work. A divorced schoolteacher is a few months from losing the house, because a teacher's salary and a mortgage built for two incomes no longer add up.

These are not abstractions. They are the households struggling with rent, the families unable to purchase their first home, older residents unable to find housing they can afford, and the people who work in our communities who increasingly cannot afford to live in them.

These are examples of actual struggles. Struggles that we can respond to through a four-step process:

The process does not begin by asking a community to solve housing affordability. It asks the community to observe where someone is struggling, because what we call the housing crisis is really the accumulated weight of many separate struggles. The family weighing a second household for an aging parent, the local developer whose site economics don't work, the teacher a few months from losing his house, are not experiencing the same problem with different faces. Each is stuck at a different point, and each point calls for a different response.

Monte Started With the People Around Him

Monte Anderson’s idea for the Roommate House grew out of watching people close to him face housing situations that conventional homes did not serve very well.

One was his mother. As she got older, Monte knew he did not want to put her in a nursing home or other institutional setting if there was another way. He wanted her to be able to maintain her independence while living close enough to family for support and companionship.

Another inspiration came from a friend whose adult son struggled with mental health and alcohol problems. She wanted to live close enough to help her son when he needed her, but she also needed her own private space and the ability to live her own life. Living together in the same house was not necessarily the answer. Living close by, while maintaining separate spaces, could be.

Neither Monte’s mother nor his friend ultimately lived in the Roommate House. Their circumstances were the inspiration for it.

The idea became what Monte calls the Roommate House: taking an existing house and adapting it so several people can live close to one another while maintaining their own private living spaces. Over time, the property evolved into five separate living units, including a converted pool house.  

Today, the property continues to serve people going through different seasons of life. Monte’s 20-year-old granddaughter, who was not quite ready to go completely out into the world on her own, lives in one of the units. A friend of hers, also 20, lives independently in another. Other residents have used the property for short- to medium-term housing needs.

That is part of what Monte learned from the project. Housing needs are not static. An aging parent may want independence while remaining close to family. A young adult may need an intermediate step between living at home and being completely on their own. Someone else may simply need a smaller, more affordable place for six months, a year, or a particular season of life.

Monte did not set out to solve the housing crisis. He responded to struggles he saw in the lives of people around him and experimented with a house that already existed.

The Roommate House demonstrated something much larger: sometimes the housing we need is already there. We simply need to allow it to adapt to the way people actually live.  

Finley Street Started With a Project That Didn't Work

The Finley Street Cottages in Atlanta began with a different struggle. Local developer Kronberg Urbanists + Architects wanted to invest in new housing in a city that needed far more housing than it had. The standard approach, one or two houses per lot, wouldn't add up to much against that need. The development needed to yield more units, or the project wouldn't pencil.

One of the barriers to this housing was parking. Off-street parking requirements would have consumed land that could otherwise hold homes, and on lots this size, that tradeoff was decisive. Atlanta had also limited how many accessory dwelling units a property like this could hold. When the city reduced the parking requirement and allowed more accessory units, Kronberg could rethink the site.

The firm did not begin by asking Atlanta to solve housing affordability. It tried to build enough homes on two small lots to make the project work. In trying, it ran into a regulatory barrier standing between the site and that goal. That struggle revealed something the city could change, and the city changed it.

The result was 16 units on two lots that once held two single-family houses, achieving 23 units per acre, a mix of historic houses, duplexes, accessory units, and guest houses grouped around a shared courtyard. One project exposed a barrier that, once removed, made similar small-scale development possible elsewhere in the city.

Noah Started With His Mortgage

Noah Tang is a high school teacher in Bloomington, Illinois. After a divorce, at 26, he found himself alone in a house he could no longer afford on his salary. Losing it would have put him back into a housing market where finding another home on a teacher's salary would have been difficult.

But Noah had something valuable: two empty rooms. He noticed that most landlords in town leased on one-year terms or built their calendar around the school year, leaving young professionals and interns who didn't know how long they'd stay with nowhere to go. This observation inspired him to write a Craigslist ad for the rooms.

Over the past four years, Noah has housed eight people this way. What began as a response to his own financial struggle changed how he thought about his role in the housing market. He didn't need to wait for someone else to build affordable housing. With the resources he already had, two rooms and a house he was determined to keep, he could provide additional affordable housing.

What Happens When We Have a Thousand Drops in the Bucket?

This brings us back to the criticism that started the conversation. A roommate house is a drop in the bucket. A few cottages in Atlanta are additional drops in the bucket. A teacher renting spare bedrooms is unquestionably a few more drops in the bucket. These are many drops in the bucket that is being filled by many hands. 

The mistake is assuming that an action has little value unless it is large enough to solve the entire problem. When we apply that standard, the scale of the housing crisis becomes an argument for doing nothing until someone arrives with a response large enough to match it. That is not how complex places evolve.

The value of a drop isn't how much it fills the bucket. It's what it teaches us about where the next drop should go. Sometimes the next action will be another small project. Sometimes it will be helping the next person navigate the process. Sometimes the lesson will reveal a regulatory barrier that local governments can remove for everyone. That is how small actions can lead to larger reforms.

The people who can create the next generation of incremental housing are often already living in our communities. They are homeowners, tradespeople, small landlords, architects, neighborhood entrepreneurs, and people like Noah who may not even think of themselves as developers. They don't need to solve the housing crisis. They need to be able to take the first step. Accessory dwelling units, duplexes, small multifamily buildings, cottage courts, and adaptive reuse are legal in more places today than they were a decade ago, but making something legal does not guarantee that anyone will actually build it.

Imagine a community where hundreds of people are allowed and encouraged to try. Some projects will fail. Some will encounter financing problems. Others will reveal confusing regulations or unnecessary requirements. Some will work only under unusual circumstances. But others will succeed, and a successful project shows what worked while a failed one shows what got in the way. The community can then ask what barriers it can remove and what it can make easier for the next person.

Scale does not have to mean finding one organization capable of building a thousand homes. It can also mean creating the conditions where a thousand people are each capable of building one.

What Is Your Drop?

In that original email conversation, I posed a much smaller question than "How do we solve affordable housing?" I asked: what is one barrier to affordable housing in Frederick?

Once we identify that one thing, the next question becomes what we could do to respond to it. Maybe the answer looks like Monte's: adapting a house already standing. Maybe it looks like Finley Street's: removing a regulation standing between a project and the units it needs to work. Maybe it looks like Noah's: renting out space that's sitting empty. Maybe it's something none of them tried. We won't know until we start observing where people are actually struggling.

Find one person trying to create or hold onto housing. Ask where they are struggling and why, not how we should solve the housing crisis. Then ask what the next smallest thing is that we can do right now to address that struggle.

Try it. Observe what happens. Learn from it. Then take the next step. It will be a drop in the bucket. That's how the bucket fills.