This advocacy group created the first online map to show how an entire state zones for housing. And they want to take the effort nationwide.
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Most Americans have never lived in a time when “the inner city” wasn’t a locus of poverty, physical blight and social disintegration. Yet many of us fail to grasp the extent to which public policy had its thumb on the scale from the start in creating those conditions.
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Strong Towns is prominently featured in a new documentary about suburbanization and mass homeownership in America. Owned, directed by Giorgio Angelini, explores the human consequences of America's suburban experiment.
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Land use and transportation policies like zoning provide the pretense of order through artificial constructs that suppress the natural order. Moreover, they mask the incompetence of modern urban designers.
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Our perception of Americans' housing preferences is distorted by the fact that we really have very few options available to us. Like our cable TV packages, our housing choices are "bundled," and many types of neighborhoods that might combine the things we actually love about urban and suburban environments are scarce, nonexistent, or outright illegal to build.
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Walking away from a neighborhood is seen as a harmless passive act. Moving in is viewed as an act of aggression and displacement.
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The changes in our neighborhoods go far beyond a simple response to what homebuyers and renters wanted. In fact, governments at all levels implemented policies that effectively outlawed the kinds of traditional neighborhoods that Americans had lived in for generations.
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Residents in poor neighborhoods face health issues, unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and no way to get out.
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HUD has, with its mortgage funding, chosen to primarily support the creation of single-family dwellings, which are far more accessible to white middle class people and far less accessible to minorities in poverty. This contradicts Fair Housing laws and the Supreme Court's recent ruling on the subject.
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While the most common image of poverty is a high-rise public housing project, in fact many of America’s poor live in the very type of neighborhood where investment is impeded by current financing regulations.
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I have a lot of conversations with people about the challenge of improving public schools, building affordable housing, and more. But the truth is, we as a society don’t want to solve these problems. So we won’t.
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