Affordable housing looms as a critical urban challenge

Once the nation’s shaken economy recovers, real estate analysts expect a growing number of urban neighborhoods to become so expensive that people of modest income will be priced out of them. This would undermine socioeconomic diversity, which has long been a new urbanist ideal.

Consequently, some consultants, such as David Dixon, head of planning and urban design at Goody, Clancy Associates in Boston, are urging cities — and new urbanists — to take steps now to make sure the anticipated urban boom doesn’t reinforce a pattern of segregation by income.

During the two-year-long recession, housing in walkable neighborhoods in center cities and inner suburbs has fared better than competing properties in outlying, automobile-dependent locations, says Christopher Leinberger of the University of Michigan and Brookings Institution.

Dixon concurs. “What has been fascinating about this downturn is that in most cities, the core has held its value much better than the periphery,” he says. “In Washington and Boston, in the core, real estate values are about where they were before the recession,” he reports. “They’re $600 to $700 a square foot in the core of Boston. At the periphery they’re 30 percent lower [than before the recession].”

Though strong demand for walkable, close-in locations is in most respects a victory for urbanism, Dixon sees it as also posing a problem: “When you remove the effects of the recession and credit limitations, there will be an explosion of demand for housing in older urban neighborhoods” in the next few years.

The demand — much of it attributable to young people and the baby boom generation, mostly one- and two-person households — could easily outrun the supply, pricing out people of low to moderate income, including artists and workers who do the modestly paid jobs upon which a complex urban society depends.

“When demand is unfettered, how do you meet the demand so that prices don’t go entirely through the roof?” Dixon asks. He believes answers can be seen in two cities where his firm has recently worked: Alexandria, Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina. Both of those cities are encouraging redevelopment at higher density and are trying to ensure that some of the new housing is reserved for people of moderate income.

Building around a Metro station

In Alexandria, an old Potomac River city whose population is estimated to have jumped by 12.2 percent, to 143,885, since 2000, housing is in great demand. Because of escalating prices, “the black community is being pushed out,” says Dixon. The housing crunch and concern about displacement last year spurred the City Council to adopt a strategy favoring greater density and mixed-income housing in the blocks around the Braddock Road Metro rail station.

Directly in front of the station sits a two-acre swath of land that for years has been used for little more than “loading, moving, and storing buses, taxis, and private automobiles,” the Braddock Metro Neighborhood Plan points out. That parcel is now viewed by the city as a prime site for mixed-use redevelopment, including housing, ground-level retail, and a plaza.

Nearby, the city wants to establish community-serving retail and a gathering place for people who live and work in the neighborhood. Sites once used for warehousing, light industry, and other commerce will likely be redeveloped for housing, hotel rooms, offices, and stores. Nine blocks of public housing, starting with the five-block James Bland public housing project, are to be redeveloped as mixed-income housing.

Valerie Peterson, principal planner for the city, says that over 10 years, 194 units in the James Bland development will be razed and replaced by 379 new townhouses and multifamily units. Sixty-five percent of them will be market-rate, the rest public housing. A fifth of the market-rate units may become “workforce” housing (generally defined as units for households earning between 80 and 120 percent of the region’s median income). Additional public housing will be constructed in another part of the city, so there will be no overall loss of public housing units.

Land now occupied by public housing will be reconfigured into smaller blocks with generous sidewalks, reinforcing the neighborhood’s street grid. Most new buildings will be two to three stories (plus lofts in many instances), to harmonize with houses in the neighborhood’s Parker-Gray Historic District. Some may add to the Alexandria tradition of “alley houses,” though those narrow passages will be private, not public. (The alley houses have been envisioned as three-story rowhouses with a recessed fourth floor and small front yards.) Elsewhere in the neighborhood, as many as 171 other units of aging public housing are eventually to be replaced by mixed-income development as well.

Close to the Metro station, buildings will rise higher, but will be modulated to avoid overwhelming their surroundings. Guidelines set maximum heights for building faces and call for “shoulders” stepping down next to the street; extra height will be permitted in the centers of some blocks. “New development projects will provide enough underground parking to avoid aggravating the on-street parking crunch, but not so much that it encourages households to own additional automobiles or employees to drive to work,” the plan stipulates.

Dixon sees the Braddock plan as an example of how new urbanists can use their place-making skills to fashion satisfying urban environments that are not limited to residents of above-average means.

Where will workers live?

The need for such strategies is profound, according to government leaders such as Ron Sims, who was county executive of King County, Washington before becoming deputy secretary of the US Department of Housing & Urban Development in May. Sims told a Regional Plan Association conference in New York that by 2013, King County, which includes Seattle, “will be a sellers’ market,” and workforce housing there will be hard to find. Microsoft, the region’s leading employer, “is alarmed by the trend data,” because inordinately costly housing will make it hard to recruit talent from elsewhere, Sims said.

Laurie Volk of Zimmerman/Volk Associates says that nationally “there hasn’t been a whole lot of affordable housing built in a downtown or a [sought-after] neighborhood” in quite some time. “At least for the next 15 to 20 years, we expect there to be increasing demand for urban housing, urban neighborhoods, transit-oriented developments,” she says.

The dilemma, or at least part of it, is that “a lot of young, bright people [who want to be in cities] are only making $30,000 per year,” Volk says. “They can’t pay the rents that are required.” She sees a strong need for density bonuses, multifamily tax abatements, and other policy tools that will boost production and ensure that the new housing isn’t solely for the well-off.

“There are various ways to free up money” for affordable and workforce housing, Dixon says. In high-value districts, the local government could allow a developer to build higher — creating more units than would otherwise be permitted — if the developer makes some of the units available at reduced prices or pays for other community benefits. “This only works in higher-value real estate markets,” he says, but it’s precisely in those markets that the need is greatest.

Even cities that are off the beaten path, like Spokane, Washington, population 200,000, are recognizing the cost problem. Volk notes that Spokane is “putting together a public development authority” to obtain parcels that can supply new housing.

Asheville fills in

Housing cost has become an issue in Asheville partly because the 74,000-population western North Carolina city attracts so many newcomers and second-home buyers. In 2007, Relocate-America.com rated Asheville Number 1 on its list of “America’s Top 100 Places to Live.” After a period of torpor, the downtown has sprung to life in the past 15 years.

All of this has created an economic challenge for ordinary working people and for the artists and craftspeople who have done much to make Asheville a mountain Mecca. Judy Daniel says that after she moved last year from the Washington, DC, area to become planning director for Asheville, “one of the most interesting things I observed was that the multifamily offerings were very upscale, near the prices of Washington.” On the other hand, single-family houses in areas a mile or two from the center tended to be “very reasonable.”

Asheville consequently is encouraging mixed-use development downtown, as many cities are doing, but is also trying to increase density in “border areas” — neighborhoods that may be only six blocks from downtown, just far enough out to offer considerably cheaper land. “There’s a lot of redevelopment potential in those border areas,” Daniel says.

Some parcels are being redeveloped with multifamily housing, generally in a moderate-density format of up to six or eight units. “There is a history and pattern of interspersing multifamily in single-family districts here,” Daniel says. That history helps to make new multifamily housing acceptable.

“People like mixed-use development, they like walkable,” Daniel says in discussing Asheville attitudes. Older housing that’s not in good condition can be assembled to make way for new multifamily, but it needs to have a civilized urban form — it can’t be simply a block of a building with a conspicuous expanse of parking. If the new cluster of housing is denser than its immediate neighbors but “fits into the scale of the neighborhood,” the neighbors may be amenable to it, she says.

Some of the impetus for tackling housing issues came from Mayor Terry Bellamy and her mayor’s Affordable Housing Task Force, which, in 38 meetings over six months, reached consensus on an Affordable Housing Plan. The plan itself was written by Pisgah Legal Services with consultation from other others, including Goody Clancy, and was adopted in 2008.

Jeff Staudinger, Asheville’s director of community development, says the city works closely with nonprofit builders. Money from the city’s housing trust fund (along with federal community development block grant and HOME funds) helps nonprofits such as Mountain Housing Opportunities to produce market-rate and affordable dwellings in buildings varied enough to appeal to a wide range of households. Those include:

• Clingman Avenue Lofts, 21 condo units in a three-story building constructed in 2008 on a sloping main street between downtown and the River Arts District. The contemporary-style building’s one- and two-bedroom lofts range from 885 to 1,020 sq. ft. and were priced at $120,000 to $215,000. About half were reserved for buyers who needed subsidized mortgages.

• The Griffin, a 50-unit downtown rental complex with a landscaped courtyard, a small playground, and a community room. The building’s 15 efficiency units were targeted to homeless individuals. The 15 one-bedroom and 20 two-bedroom units were offered to people of limited income — a maximum of $28,380 for a three-person household.

• Glen Rock Depot, a three-acre project now under way, which includes 60 affordable apartments in a new mixed-use building; the conversion of the old Glen Rock Hotel into office and community space; and renovation of a second historic building for occupancy by an arts organization.

Nonprofit builders “do a wonderful job of infill and mixed-use,” Daniel says. Private developers have also added new housing through projects like Lexington Station, a downtown project consisting of three buildings with 66 condo units, 25,000 square feet of commercial space, underground parking, and outdoor plazas. Designed by Glazer Architecture, Lexington Station is the first modular, multi-story, multi-family construction in the Asheville area.

Shannon Tuch, the city’s assistant director of planning and development, notes that Lexington Station is wrapped by streets on three sides, and offers a pleasing mix of shops and offices on the ground floor, with three to four stories of living quarters above.

In working on Asheville’s recently adopted master plan, Dixon and Ben Carlson of Goody Clancy encouraged the city to use form-based zoning with specific design guidelines that regulate height, massing, and materials. They recommended using mechanisms through which the value of a development can help pay for affordable housing, streetscape improvements, and other benefits. They also recommended adopting a three-tier development approval process, in which the City Council reviews only the largest projects. This has the potential to remove some of the obstacles from the path of developers.

This article is available in the October/November 2009 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.

By Philip Langdon

From the October/November 2009 issue of New Urban News.

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