The Urban World, 9th Ed.

J. John Palen

Chapter 12: Housing Policies, Sprawl, and Smart Growth

• Introduction• Housing in the 21st Century• Changing Federal Role• Urban Redevelopment Policies• Urban Homesteading• Rent Vouchers: Section 8• HOPE VI Projects• Tax Credits• Designing for Safety• Growth Control• Suburban Sprawl• Smart Growth• Summary

Introduction• A house today is seen basically as a home

rather than an investment• As of 2010 the census reported that two-

thirds of all householders were homeowners and some four-fifths of married couples were homeowners

• Renters now constitute only one-third of all households

Housing in the 21st Century• Mobility– Contrary to what many people think, we are not

moving more. We are becoming more residentially stable

• Housing Costs– Today new workers often are saddled with larger

educational debts, and it’s more difficult to quality for a mortgage

– Housing prices vary considerably from area to area– Baby boomers will change the housing market as

they downsize into retirement housing

• Changing Households– There are somewhat more than 95 million

households in the U.S.– The Census Bureau recognizes two types of

households:• Family (a householder and one or more other persons

related y blood, marriage, or adoption)• Non-family (a householder living alone or with persons not

related)

– Married-couple families have dropped from 87 percent of all family households in 1970 to three-quarters today

– About 1 in 8 adults lives alone, and 6 in 10 of these are women

Changing Federal Role• Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

Programs– During the Depression, the government, through

the Housing Act of 1934, created the Federal Housing Administration to insure home loans

– After WW II, the FHA and the VA for the first time insured mortgages given to working-class and lower-middle-class families who wanted to buy homes

– By 2010 the FHA was backing nearly half of all home-purchase loans

• Subsidizing Segregation– From 1935 to 1950 FHA regulations expressly

forbade issuing loans that would either permit or encourage racial integration

– Restrictive racial covenants were declared illegal by the 1968 Fair Housing Act

– Insurance redlining, a practice in which insurance companies make it more difficult and/or expensive to obtain insurance coverage in minority areas, still persists

• Upper- and Middle-Class Housing Subsidies– Almost all financing for new houses or apartments

involves federal government support in one way or another

– The largest federal tax subsidy is the middle- and upper-class tax break of mortgage interest deduction on federal taxes

– Federal subsidies were designed to help families purchase homes, and they certainly prop up the housing industry

Urban Redevelopment Policies• Critique of Urban Renewal– Three different goals:• Increasing low-cost housing while eliminating slums• Revitalizing the central city• Creating planned cities through community renewal

programs

– Most glaring weakness was the displacement of large numbers of low-income families without adequate provision for their relocation

• Phasing out Public Housing– High-rise public housing projects are now being

phased out– The cap on income eligibility made all upwardly

mobile move on, making successful adult role models virtually nonexistent

– The government provided operating subsidies, but this never covered the needs of operating and maintenance

– In the late 1990s the Clinton administration began tearing down high-rise housing projects and replacing them with mixed-income low-rise units

Urban Homesteading

• Urban homesteading programs turn over abandoned and foreclosed homes to those who agree to stay for a period of years (at least three) and bring the homes up to code standards within two years

• There are some major limitations:– Homesteading involves a limited number of homes– By the time government action is taken, most

abandoned properties are beyond the point of economic rehabilitation

– Title to the property may come cheap, but rehabilitation costs money

– Urban homesteading does not affect multifamily apartments

– Financial institutes have been reluctant to invest in rehabilitating abandoned slum properties

– There is no point in rehabilitation of one home if the remainder of the neighborhood stays the same

Rent Vouchers: Section 8• Public housing programs were replaced in large

part by the Section 8 Program of rent certificates or vouchers

• The landlord enters into a subsidy contract with the government, and the tenant pays no more than 30 percent of his or her income as rent

• As of 2000 more than 1.4 million families nationwide received Section 8 vouchers, but many families couldn’t find units with rental prices low enough to qualify

HOPE VI Projects• In 1992 Congress created the Urban

Revitalization Demonstration Program, or HOPE VI, in order to transform distressed public housing developments

• The goal is to provide stable sustainable communities for those cycling from welfare to work by changing the community makeup

• William Julius Wilson’s research indicates that when neighborhood poverty rates exceed a certain level, social and behavioral collapse follow

Tax Credits

• In order to encourage the private rehabilitation of older central-city areas, in 1981 Congress passed a rehabilitation tax-credit program

• The increasing visibility of downtown housing in rehabilitated buildings is economically viable due largely to the use of tax credits

Designing for Safety• Public housing in particular can be designed to

minimize feelings of deprivation and isolation from the community at large

• Architectural design can increase the security and livability of projects

• An absence of social relationships among residents, fear, and a sense of futility may result in residents not becoming involved

• The best-designed cities and housing cannot solve social and economic problems

Growth Control

• For years it was part of the American creed that bigger is better

• Now that is changing, and rapidly growing communities are seeking ways of limiting growth

• Decisions by the courts seem to indicate that while a town can’t simply ban all growth, it can try to control its future

Suburban Sprawl• Auto-Driven Sprawl– Implicit in outlying areas undergoing sprawl is that

all travel for any purpose must be by auto– Common ills of sprawl are the unholy trio of traffic

congestion, air pollution, and massive destruction of the natural environment

• Amount of Sprawl– One of the unfortunate characteristics of sprawl is

that it occurs not only in metro areas that are growing but also in metro areas that are losing overall population

Figure 12.1America’s 10 Largest Cities: Average Total Days per Year Spent Commuting to Work

• Costs and Consequences– Sprawl occurs when land use increases much faster

than does the growth of population– By 2000 we had built over 4 million miles of roads in

America, most of them in rural areas– The destruction of woodlands, wetlands, and

wildlife habitats has been massive– Sprawl encourages disinvestment in older

communities and increases economic and racial segregation by concentrating poverty in inner-city neighborhoods and older, first-ring suburbs

– Sprawl enriches developers but heavily costs taxpayers by requiring increased taxes to pay for services and municipalities

Smart Growth• The term smart growth covers a variety of

efforts to shape growth so sprawl is limited• Advantages– Higher-density designs can result in positive

advantages, such as greater sense of community, walk-to schools, lower crime, and moderate taxes

• Legislation– The evidence thus far is that statewide smart

growth laws have been a bust