Build in popular places — and make it easier for all people to flock there
A political project for our moment
Those succeeding today are the ones already-living in or are relocating to opportunity-rich areas. This is at least the conclusion of a slew of studies from urban policy wonks and economists. The claim is so strong. The people who move to high-paying opportunities — where it’s easier to be connected with people who have those high-paying jobs — are more likely to climb the economic ladder themselves, sometimes adding a 20% income boost, and are more likely to see their kids improve in the future. The strength of this claim maybe shouldn’t be surprising. It’s steeped in American traditions.
Americans are a mobile people, willing to uproot ourselves and skip to the next town when the opportunity arises. This is, at least, one story to tell about Americans: we move West (we’re told), we move to opportunities, we have moved — both within and from outside the country — for freedom.
In recent American memory, we allowed people of different class backgrounds (though not racial backgrounds) to more easily relocate to opportunity-rich areas. Some data builds this argument. Between the 1940s and 1960s, about one-fifth of Americans annually changed residences, according to a Brookings report, often for work. But geographic mobility has been sliding since the 1980s, and is decreasing fast. There’s at least one explanation for this phenomenon: Millennials today aren’t moving because prohibitive housing costs and restrictive zoning laws making moving hard, and sometimes impossible. The most desirable places are also the hottest housing markets and, therefore, the most difficult to acquire housing.
Thankfully, it doesn’t take a policy wonk to reverse this trend. Housing, like other market issue, are a matter of supply and demand. The free market need not act alone. The government can ease this transition by subsidizing more — and different kinds — of home-building projects in desirable areas by relaxing single-family only zoning laws. The reason for this is because single-family only zoning laws keep home prices prohibitively high for low-income and new home buyers. But the confluence of many different living arrangements — duplexes and apartments, tiny homes and granny units — in populated and high-paying areas will offer more affordable alternatives and enable people to engage in economic opportunities where they are most abundant.
But easy policy doesn’t always transfer to easy politics. Unfortunately, the politics of making this happen are much more challenging. Americans have always been NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard), particularly in their antagonism to having Black and low-income neighbors. Historically, when nonwhite and poorer individuals move in to a neighborhood, white people simply move out.
Here is our rub. What can be physically done and socially imagined is easy. What will be tolerated by homeowners in desirable areas is a different scenario. As has been reported on, even those in the most liberal places, like Berkeley, California, do not want to make their neighborhoods more accommodating to different types of homes or people. This will be one of many challenges today and, maybe, for generations to come.
Build in desirable parts of southeast Michigan
As many real estate magazines and pundits have declared, the starter home is dead. Land and homes have become more expensive because they have become scarcer. This is basic supply and demand economics. And it isn’t just true in denser and opportunity-rich cities of New York City and San Francisco and Austin, Texas. It’s also true in the (sometimes denser) opportunity-rich areas that exist in and around Detroit. This of course is a problem. But it also allows an opportunity.
Despite its reputation, Detroit has very desirable spaces, both in neighborhoods inside its boundaries and in neighboring cities. Average home prices in cities like Ferndale are $245,000. For Royal Oak, it’s $319,000, and Farmington Hills tops $350,000. And that’s just the suburbs. Detroit has hot, prohibitively expensive markets, too, in places like Indian Village, Midtown, Corktown and Woodbridge where no neighborhood sells homes at average prices below $260,000.
These neighborhoods and cities mostly maintain and encourage detached, single-family homes. But that designation is “inequitable, inefficient, and environmentally unsustainable,” according to an article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. This type of development and planning — expanding on a popular American development strategy from its past — only continues to expand inequality and make it harder for younger — particularly younger Black and brown Michiganders — to climb the economic rung.
A recent Detroit Future City report bears this out.
Only 5% of Detroit residents compared with metro Detroit residents live in middle-class neighborhoods and 62% of city renters are cost-burdened. The report recommends building more affordable housing. There’s nothing wrong with that policy, but that alone won’t do much. A more effective policy would build more affordable housing (and therefor different types of housing) in desirable areas — the places where people want to live and where inevitable cross-class interactions take place, integrating people in a web of connection, expanding perspectives and opening opportunities.
To be sure, more planning and development is happening, both in Detroit and its suburbs of Oakland County. Some of this is even designated for low-income residents. But the most important piece to that puzzle — investigating exclusive zoning laws — is often not up for discussion. Such was the case in Oakland County, where it was scrapped from the original resolution due to its unpopularity.
A new ethic
Where we grow up determines much of our fate. It connects us to resources, educational tools for the future, and, maybe most important, friendships and social connections that ease our ways through doors of opportunity. Americans should allow people to move to places that enable their flourishing. Unfortunately, these doors are being sealed shut. This prohibition — the adding of friction to the lives of others where it need not exist — is an American practice, once embedded in our local, state and federal laws and now simply part of our cultural belief system.
Embracing openness and integration regardless of class and racial backgrounds would be a remarkable achievement. America is and maybe always has been characteristically NIMBY. That is, they have tried to prevent those who they believe don’t resemble them to live nearby. In some sense, that has been integral to the political and economic projects of Americans. And that exclusivity has delivered great benefits to some (wealthy neighborhoods) and delivered bad ones to others (ghettos).
At the local, state, and federal level, government operatives, political representatives, and vocal constituents have blocked African Americans from moving into economically desired suburbs and neighborhoods. This door has only been made slightly ajar with the erection of laws that prevent discrimination against housing. But racism unaddressed directly, as author Eve Ewing suggests in her book “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” has a way of spewing itself into the future, like a sling shot, maintaining enough momentum stored in the past to unleash itself into the present. Color-blindness can’t save us from continued discriminatory and exclusive housing. We can’t just dislike intolerance and exclusivity. We have to be openly and unabashedly tolerant and inclusive.
Opening this would change the way Americans co-exist with one another. It may be the greatest political project of our time.
