Housing Stability and Housing Mobility are Both Essential. Can They Work Together?
Building a housing system that keeps you housed and helps you move.
Whenever I would go visit my parents during the darkest days of the pandemic, my mother would make me promise not to put her in senior housing. The urgency in her voice came from the nightmares her cousin and others were having being locked down. But it was also my mother doubling down on something she had decided long ago: her little house was her home, and she was determined to age in place.
As my mother enters the final phase of her life, my father and I are hopeful we can fulfill her wishes. Renovations can make the house more livable as they age. The ADU they built in the back as an office for my father can be renovated for a caretaker. Hopefully we can find help for my father to maintain the house without getting on a ladder or crawling under the building. Hopefully the money and people’s bodies and the care system we will have to build can hold out in order for my mother to stay put as long as she chooses.
My aunt, my mother’s sister, made precisely the opposite choice. She recently sold her longtime home and moved to a retirement community. She couldn’t be happier. She’s more social than my mother, and loves living with more community. She’s also by herself, and maintaining that suburban house designed for a much bigger household had long ago lost its appeal.
My mother and my aunt are fortunate that they have these choices. More people should have this choice, and not just about where they live at the end of their housing lives. As Emeryville Councilmember Courtney Welch and I discussed in her recent visit to my new podcast, we need choice and support and flexibility at every stage of our housing lives, because our lives and needs change. Hers is a ‘housing across the lifecycle’ approach, one that I think is essential for housers to embrace.
“From the day you are born to the day you die, you will need housing. It is non negotiable … When we talk about housing abundance and the life cycle, it’s really about stability and being able to serve people and their families and be accessible to their needs no matter how gradually or quickly they may change and make sure that a minor change in their life doesn’t completely disrupt them.”
Courtney Welch - Vice Mayor and Councilmember Emeryville, CA
Creating housing across longer and longer lifecycles means building a housing system that enables, and values, both mobility and stability. The most important step we as housers can take is to recognize that mobility and stability aren’t opposites - in an effective and just housing system, they work together.
Housing Stability and Mobility in America
American housing is a great place if you like pretending that everything has two opposing sides.
Owning | Renting City | Suburb Place-based | People-based Market | Affordable
What housing tribe we belong to is often determined by which side of these false dichotomies we stake our claim.
I’ve written about a couple of these dichotomies before, as I think confronting them is essential to changing housing politics, and thus housing policy. I wrote about individual and community homeownership, and how they need to become allies. The same goes for temporary and permanent housing - we need both desperately, and we need them to stop being rivals. If these dichotomies were only Housing Twitter noise or academic debates, everything would be fine. But they get baked into policy, into the choices available to households and housing organizations alike, and especially into the mindsets of housing professionals and policymakers.
Mobility and stability in American housing policy have been made into competitors, especially when it comes to issues of segregation and the housing needs of lower income people.
One school of thought favors ‘place-based’ approaches - putting money into buildings and communities, particularly existing low income communities of color which have faced disinvestment or investment-led gentrification and displacement or both. Place-based approaches often focus on stability as the dominant value, and often on stability-as-staying-put - no small feat in a housing system in which lower income people and people of color are being displaced constantly.
The other favors ‘people-based’ approaches like housing vouchers, or strategic investments in place-based solutions in ‘higher opportunity’, often exclusionary areas. Here, mobility is a core value - giving people the choice to move to another neighborhood or town or county from which they have previously been excluded. Given the brutal history of segregation in the United States, one that is just as present today as during the darkest days of redlining, this too makes sense. Mobility is so important for those that want and need it.
If only it were as simple as declaring ‘both/and’, or, ‘let’s invest in both people and places and let folks make a decision”. These beliefs in which approach is ‘better’ are fought over and have been for generations. Advocates fight over whether vouchers should be project-based or people-based, or where affordable housing dollars should be spent (exclusionary neighborhoods or poorer ones?). There are debates about which approach is better for the ‘community’, and debates about whether moving or staying is better for the people involved.
Beliefs about prioritizing mobility or stability get baked into so many of our programs, or into decisions about what gets funded. Some public housing agencies and nonprofit housers still measure ‘exits’ from public or Affordable housing as a sign of success. This forced mobility mantra is not based on what is good for people or communities but is often based instead on the ideology that public housing is somehow bad, and that ‘success’ means moving to a more profit-oriented corner of the housing market.
When mobility gets turned into an ideology and then policy, it not only undermines actual stability, it makes it seem as if mobility is the enemy of stability. Housing choice, which should be something we can all agree upon as a worthwhile goal, becomes a political football. The same thing can happen for stability - the arguments for place-based investment can be so intense that they make mobility seem like the problem.
Mobility and stability are also fought over endlessly in increasingly expensive and extensive studies and pilot programs. In an era of evidence-driven policy mantras and dreams of randomized control trials, researchers and advocates try to prove that“Mobility is better! Give people vouchers!” We then get counterarguments from equally smart people saying that “Stability is better! We need place-based solutions!”.1
One major blind spot of so many studies trying to understand or evaluate mobility is that they narrowly focus on one group of people - lower income families with children. While this is understandable, mobility and stability are issues for everyone across the lifecycle - young adults2, seniors, people without children, complex multigenerational households, and all kinds of eclectic households that don’t easily fit into census boxes and research studies.
If we can move beyond the ideology and arguments around whether policy should encourage moving or staying, our research could be super helpful to understand how to enable both. How do we help people make stable moves when moving is what they want and need? How we can make changes around people to help them stay put when that is what they want and need? What kind of stability do people need to be mobile? And without being paternalistic, can we help people decide what is best for them at that moment?
Stability and Mobility Together
For both my mother and my aunt, their current housing success - or hopes for success in my mother’s case - comes from a symbiotic relationship between stability and mobility. My aunt’s story was one of stable mobility. The only way she could find the stable housing she wanted and needed was to move.
My aunt is very fortunate. She was a homeowner with equity, so she could afford to move. Recent policy changes helped too - she benefited from Prop 19 property tax mobility which enabled her to downsize without a crippling property tax bill.3 She found a senior unit to her liking (even if she did have to move counties). She had a network of friends and former professional colleagues who could help her navigate her choices. And she had that combination of health, wealth and informal support that enabled her to take her time and move when it was right.
But it was still very hard - a lot of choices and transactions, one that involves finding trained professionals you can trust and afford - even if policy, and the financial system, was on her side. She was able to do most of this on her own, which is great, since there is very little official support network to help elders with these transitions.
My mother is the opposite - in order for her to stay put, lots of things will have to change around her. The physical house will have to change. Another human being or family may eventually need to move onto the property, in which case her home will go from a single-family house to something else, my parents will become employers and landlords at the same time, and someone else’s housing will change.
Just like with my aunt, there will be a lot of hard choices and transactions, almost none of which are supported by any kind of official system. Finding people with good advice you can trust is hard, and our real estate system isn’t set up to support in this way, but rather to do specific tasks or transactions. Hopefully, we will have the health, wealth and support we need to be successful, but this remains a very open question.
There are so many other examples of how stability and mobility can and should work together. In April, I’ll write about work I am doing with one of my fantastic clients on multi-family homeownership. We focus in part on ways to support intergenerational families, small groups of friends or even just two friends or siblings to buy homes together and transform them into co-owned structures, or to have the homes they already own together informally be recognized legally and financially as co-owned. This work connects with important efforts to create ADU development programs for lower income homeowners - ways of stabilizing one household by building a new home for another. There are so many ways we can weave together one household’s stability with another’s mobility by transforming who owns the home and how many homes are on the property.
We also talk about combining Housing Choice Vouchers with homeownership, something that is theoretically possible but too rarely done. By expanding our thinking about homeownership beyond the ideology, we can give people both the mobility and stability that homeownership done right can provide. After all, at the root of both my mother and my aunt’s choice is one thing - a home they own, bought under very supportive conditions, enabling one to stay and one to go.
Building a More Supportive Housing System
So how do we design a housing system that enables both mobility and stability and realizes that they are connected? How do we create a system that gives everyone real choice in their housing, including whether to stay or move, and stops judging people or ‘successful’ outcomes based on what they choose?
Step 1: Embrace making choice real
The first step is shifting our mentality to see stability and mobility as linked, essential, and part of the dream of real choice4 in housing - to stay or to move, to stay in decent conditions if you do stay, and have a choice where to move if you do move. This is something most low-income people and people of color have never had in American housing history. Choice has instead turned into a ideological debate or a political football.
Building real choice means going beyond policy or the sociology of mobility, and asking what are the important changes we must make in the housing industry so that we can provide real choice, as real choice doesn’t exist in housing unless a whole lot of professionals make it real. And we must also ask hard questions of our housing industry about how we can prevent the constant abuse and exploitation that undermines both mobility and stability. Choice isn’t choice if it means choosing between a raw deal and a worse one, or having to choose from under someone’s boot.
Step 2: Redesign the housing system
The second step is to embrace designing a more supportive housing system across the board. While my mother and my aunt have 100x more choice than so many less privileged Californians, they don’t necessarily have the formal support system to make those choices well.
What does this supportive housing system look like? I’ll come back to that in a future post, but part of it is recognizing that we all need help in our housing lives, whether we want to stay or want to go. By shifting our thinking on support - and realizing it isn’t only something that lower-income people need - we can build the subsidy, technical assistance, property management, and other systems that are currently stratified between nonprofit, public and private sector actors. We can help so many housing professionals in California work together in new ways, ways that make housing choice real and make a living at the same time. These changes are part of my larger dreams of a housing economy retrofit, or what in 2023 I will call ‘redesigning the housing system’.5
In the meantime, I’ll keep hacking at the false dichotomies like stability and mobility that paralyze our housing imaginations - and our housing policy. Coming up soon: the most infuriating, and most inaccurate, of them all - ‘market-rate v. Affordable’.
Thanks for reading.
See for instance the long history of the Moving to Opportunity experiments. There are many, including a well known relatively recent one in Seattle. For a general critique of this approach, and lots of debates about it, see the various conversations incited by Cincinnati's finest David Imbroscio. I cover segregation debates and the limits to the conversation extensively in Chapter 1 of The Road to Resegregation. One challenge with these studies is that they are mostly focused on lower-income families with children, but mobility and stability are issues for everyone.
I could have written this essay about the 18-25 year olds in my life, who have very specific needs when it comes to being mobile or stabile. In many ways our housing system cares the least about young adults. I will write about this more in the future.
Real choice for me is choosing between two decent options, especially when those options are available to lots of people. It’s also not being fed constant streams of bad choices, or being told you have choices when you don’t. It does not mean you always get caviar. But it means you have options for something tasty to spread on the cracker that fit your dietary needs.
I call it retrofitting in my first post, which is a more accurate term, but redesign has better brand recognition, so I’m trying it out. Thoughts welcome.