Housing and Suburbia

Team housing has often left the suburbs out of its imagination. That’s never been more dangerous.

Like a lot of housers, I’m watching what is happening in Washington and around the world with horror. HUD is being eviscerated. So is the FHA. Everyone I know in housing is afraid, especially the unhoused and the organizations that support them, and tenants, and people who rely on all kinds of programs, or those that provide technical assistance, or those that embrace DEI (which is everyone). Builders are losing confidence, as tariffs add to an already spiraling list of things that make housing expensive and hard to build and finance. Mass deportations are inhumane, and also bad housing policy. We live in an age of increasing disasters yet they cut disaster funding at HUD and FEMA.

This is to say nothing about those whose health and lives are at risk because of what is happening, whether they live in this country or not. Or the fact that the rent is still too damn high and rising. Bruce Katz has penned an interesting piece on the radically restructuring of the housing system currently underway, I will do my best to focus on many of these issues in coming posts, and in Season 3 of Housing After Dark, which is coming out soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to flag something lurking behind the current tsunami, one more deeply connected to the electoral map - the continued divide between cities, suburbs, and rural areas. I’m not talking about the likely forthcoming proposal to rename HUD - I’d love to see a housing department that speaks to all Americans, regardless of where they live. I’m talking about decisions which further the city-suburb-rural divide.

One of the quietest and scariest things that the administration has done is to connect transportation funding to birth and marriage rates. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed staff at the DOT to give preference to communities with higher birth and marriage rates when awarding grants. This means more funding for highways and roads and sprawl, and setting us down a path that becomes harder to turn around from the further we go.

The instinct from many of us will be to defend cities, defend urbanism, try to save transport and affordable housing funding and so many other things worth saving. This of course we must do.

But the way to save cities is not to try and continue the endless fight against suburbia. We can’t try to make this about density v. ‘sprawl’. We can’t defend urbanism while making it seem like it’s something that happens in “cities” and not everywhere humans live.

I live in a “city” that will be as impacted by whatever is coming as any in this country. But I recognize some hard truths about where America lives. America is suburban. So is the city I live in for the most part, and most parts of most cities. Suburbia is what we’ve built, and whether you like it or not, whether it’s climate friendly or not, whether it’s what you want or not. We cannot win this fight to save urban places unless we start to make housing policy in all of the communities we’ve already built, even if we should never have built them this way in the first place.

All the ways we divide ourselves based on what kind of place we live in.

While most of the news coverage is focused on red states v. blue states, what’s happening in America is as much about even older divides between types of places. Since the days of Jefferson, America has argued over where to live and what the best kind of living should be. Our original fight was about urban versus rural, and this fight morphed into urban versus suburban in the 20th century. We fight about density, about sprawl, about where we should be building and what we should be building, and we’ve been having some version of this fight for generations.

Everyone has their opinions about what type of community is the best, what gives you freedom, where equity happens, what is green, what is good, and what is a shithole. Some of these opinions are based on facts, some on feelings, but feelings are facts, especially right now.

What I have learned in almost 20 years of studying how people talk about places is two things. One, since we’re never really educated about how anything gets made, most of the grand statements about cities or suburbs or small towns are just nonsense. They are rehashed stereotypes, or broad platitudes, and this is sadly true regardless of people’s politics. Most folks just don’t spend enough time in other people’s types of communities to really understand them, or don’t study them enough to understand how different types of places are inextricably connected. They don’t see the region, they don’t see the economic connections and commuting patterns and all the ways very different places depend on each other. They just see how they live or want to live, and cast aspersions. Sadly, this is true whether you’re an ardent small town ruralist or a young urbanist dreaming of a different America or one of the hundreds of millions of Americans living in some sort of suburbia.

Second, and most important, is that this endless, constant battle over where the American Dream should be, over what kind of house it should be and what kind of place, is utterly un-winnable. The only outcome of this fight is like the outcome of most wars - loss. One of the major reasons why we can’t have nice things in America - like a stable housing and transportation system with solid fiscal underpinnings in communities of different sizes - is that we fight this endless fight over what a good community looks like. And this fight has never been more dangerous. In the hands of the ultimate divider-in-chief, we will all suffer.

Housing Solutions for Suburbia

One of the most fundamental values that I think progressives need to hold onto is the willingness to self-reflect and admit we’re wrong. It’s not something we in housing or elsewhere do easily. I also understand why folks don’t want to. The other side doesn’t do this, and it seems to be a good way to win.

As I mentioned earlier, I imagine that many of my friends and allies and readers will react to this blatant attempt to build America like it’s 1960 again - anti-city, pro-suburbs, who cares about the environment or racial justice - by defending many of the things built to turn that paradigm around. While there is much to defend, we must also admit that team housing and team equity and team green haven’t had enough solutions in suburbia itself. It’s especially bleak when we look at places that I’ve written about, the Antiochs and Brentwoods and Fairfields and Vacavilles, or their cousins in other parts of California - the Inland Empire and the 209 and the Sacramento Valley and Fresno and Bako.

We still don’t value inland California enough, and many statewide leaders fail to offer solutions to their very real challenges. We don’t have clear solutions to the mounting fiscal challenges of a place like Solano County’s Suisun City, which just opens the door to “solutions” like California Forever. Most of the ideas I still hear about racial justice and housing focus on urban places where BIPOC communities were once concentrated, not the vast new suburban lands where so many have gone in pursuit of the American Dream.

In the Road to Resegregation, I talked at length about how we continuously fail to see places like Antioch as a real place where real solutions need to exist, not as a mistake or an afterthought. The BIPOC majority in California isn’t living in big cities - it’s out in the sprawling beige suburbs, places where too many people in housing policy and politics don’t seem to have ever visited. We still too often imagine housing policy based on a Color of Law America, not based on the actual America we’ve built since then. We too often imagine housing policy based on what some wished we should have built - I also love Europe! - and not what we actually built.

This is not only shortsighted, and fundamentally anti-equity, it’s also politically dangerous. What will happen in these places - places where many BIPOC households have gone after being priced out or pushed our of older cities - when new formulas from Washington benefit them at the expense of these same cities? What happens to a California Forever type project if they are offered some sort of carrot by the current regime? Never mind the environmental damage, the terrible traffic, and other problems that these decisions will generate. Folks will take the deal. If the current regime can make itself into the defender of suburbia, it can win, even in California.

This is one of the many reasons why some in this state are worried about just how purple or even red we may one day become, a shift led by people of color no matter how racist the regime they are supporting has become. If folks are worried about their homes and hometowns, they will support the people who are at least offering them a solution - as opposed to folks offering them solutions in places they long ago left behind, or solutions that simply don’t speak to them and their communities or daily reality.

It’s time for team pro-housing, team equity, and team green to put down their discomfort or hatred of the California we have built and work on solutions that work in most of the state. This can and should include:

• A much deeper commitment to homeownership, which I’ve written about in part because of its salience in most of California. We need to advance things like multifamily homeownership, which can work at the smaller densities of suburbia. Things like CLTs are actually often quite rural or suburban in form, and can be part of this solution. We also need general reform and support for Condo Homeowners Associations.

• Renewed attention to fiscal issues. There is a deal to be had at the state level that makes real movement in how local government and services are paid for. This is essential for housing, and must include compromises that unlock redevelopment 2.0 styles infrastructure finance, and interjurisdictional collaborations on shared services.

• Speaking of finance, megaprojects are a common denominator, and we can build on this (literally and figuratively). Almost every jurisdiction has at least one old office parks or industrial site or decaying shopping center that used to generate tax base and needs a new life. Many of these are actually on transport corridors. These are just as much suburban issues as urban ones, and they can be a unifying force.

• We need to continue progress on advancement of ADUs and small densification like SB684, one area where our solutions work in smaller densities. One twist can be the geographic focus, working to make sure they are being supported in already diverse suburban and exurban environments. They can be focused on wealth building, intergenerational housing and stability and other more positive framings.

The need to find housing solutions for all California was true when I first wrote about this in the Cities of Carquinez in 2012, when a certain someone was a TV personality and Obama was President. It’s even more true now. Unless and until we have real solutions for housing and fiscal stability and transportation that work in Antioch, we risk losing even more than we already have.

Alex