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In her five years at Coalition for the Homeless, policy analystJacquelyn Simone has seen thousands of New Yorkers come throughthe doors of the coalition’s Manhattan office, often looking for a hotmeal, access to shelter or job training to help them get back on theirfeet in a city that’s often described as a concrete jungle.

However, Simone said she’s noticed a disturbing trend in the past few

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Reformers at the gate: Progressives set theirsights on the housing marketIn cities across the country, housing advocates, civil rights groups anddefenders of the homeless are chipping away at housing laws, one state at atime. Why now?

Melany Rochester/Ygor Lobo/John Moses Bauan/Jesse Roberts

BY MARIAN MCPHERSON | Staff WriterNovember 18, 2019

Marian

years — a growing share of those asking for assistance are workingNew Yorkers who simply can’t keep up with booming rental pricestopping nearly $3,000 per month. As a result, she said the city isfacing it’s worst homelessness crisis since The Great Depression.

“Many people who are experiencing homelessness are working andthey’re just not making enough to afford the rent,” said Simone, whoadded that the length of stay for people in the shelter system hassteadily risen as the the supply of affordable apartments has declined.“About a third of families in shelter have someone who is working andjust can’t afford an apartment.”

Simone is part of a burgeoning movement, where a number of citiesand states across the country have set their sights on radical rentcontrol and zoning reforms as record numbers of residents are pushedto the streets in the face of booming housing costs.

In August, Oregon became the first state to nix single-family zoning incities with more than 25,000 residents, and Minneapolis followed suitin October with the passage of the city’s Minneapolis 2040 plan,

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which included a $25 million subsidized housing fund and newinclusionary zoning requirements.

During the same period, California, Washington D.C. and New YorkCity became hotspots for rent control reform, with legislators andadvocates going toe-to-toe over passed and proposed bills to improveaffordability.

Indeed, the reformers are clamoring for the real estate industry.

‘Everyone’s trying to figure out how to get outof this mess’

Zillow senior economist Skylar Olsen said the groundswell of supportfor wide-ranging rent control and flexible zoning laws has been nearlya decade in the making, as former homeowners flooded the rentalmarket in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash.

“After that recession trauma, we’ve had very slow but steady economicrecovery, which made people be finally able to form households, butmainly in the rental market,” she said.

Skylar Olsen

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During the housing boom, developers placed their focus on single-family detached homes, thereby creating a rental market unable tomeet the needs of the nearly 10 million homeowners who lost theirhomes to foreclosure between 2006 and 2014.

As a result, national rent growth increased as much as 12 percent year-over-year, with nearly 50 percent of renters spending more than 30percent of their monthly income on housing.

Olsen said developers quickly responded to the increased demand bybuilding large, luxury apartments, so that renters that would’vecompeted for existing housing stock now had a new unit to move into.While that inventory boom benefitted investors and higher-incomerenters, it left renters in the middle-to-low income range with fewoptions.

“Rent is growing fastest in the affordable housing stock segment, andyet, all the units are being added at the top and that’s not providingany relief for the affordable segment,” she said. “More and morepeople who are experiencing market-rate rent are doing so where yourrent is exceeding the affordability threshold of 30 percent.”

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Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2019 State of the Nation’sHousing report backs up Olsen’s assertion — the stock of low-cost units priced below $800 per month has declined 17 percent(4 million) since 2011.

Olsen said it’s difficult for developers to secure financing foraffordable housing projects because it limits the return oninvestment investors could experience, and its difficult fordevelopers and cities to force investors’ hands.

“It’s hard to force the people who have the finances to direct[investments] where you want it to be directed,” she said. “So, itsa whole swirl of events. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to getout of this mess.”

46% of homeowners say rising home prices have made life worse

Washington's rent-control laws hang in the balance

Minneapolis has officially eliminated single-family zoning

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BRIDGE Housing board of directors member Molly Turner saida good starting point for solving affordability issues are the“three Ps” of production, preservation, and protection, which isevidenced by the recent moves legislators and advocates aremaking in terms of zoning and rent control reform.

“I think with a lot of the up-zoning, you’re seeing a huge push formore production to increase density, particularly in cities andneighborhoods in cities that are close to transit and jobs,”Turner explained.

“With rent control, you’re seeing an emphasis on [the]protection of tenants with the philosophy being thatmaintaining [lower income] tenants in their housing is a lotmore affordable for society than if they were to be evicted andhad to housed in subsidized housing or god forbid, enteredhomelessness.”

‘Rent control isn’t a panacea, zoning isn’ta panacea’In October, Minneapolis made headlines for becoming the firstAmerican city to eliminate single-family zoning through its 10-

Molly Turner

year comprehensive plan, Minneapolis 2040.

Although the elimination of single-family zoning gained themost attention, Minneapolis 2040 included several housingpolicy measures, including an increase in density near transitstops, a $25 million subsidized housing fund and a newinclusionary zoning provision that 10 percent of apartmentunits must be reserved for moderate-income households.

Minneapolis Long Range Planning for Community Planningand Economic Development director Heather Worthington saidMinneapolis 2040’s housing policies are based on feedbackgathered from more than 100 community meetings over thecourse of three years.

During those meetings, Worthington said residents began toshare their concerns about housing, which included makingfrequent moves and grappling with ever-changing rental ratesthat required anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of their monthlyincome as the city’s attached-housing inventory (e.g. duplexes,triplexes and fourplexes) declined by 43 percent.

Although the lowest-income residents could rely on housingsubsidies and public housing, residents making 80 percent ofthe median area income were struggling to find permanentaffordable housing as Minneapolis’ naturally-occurringaffordable housing stock decreased by 15,000 units in 15 years,

Heather Worthington

due to market-rate conversions.

With that information in hand, Worthington’s team went towork, digging into mounds of data and conducting hundreds ofinterviews with residents who had been silenced through yearsof racism and segregation.

“We looked at a lot of data, and we were interested in looking atit by race in particular because we learned back in the 2014-2015time range, we had the deepest racial disparities in terms ofoutcomes in the nation,” she explained.

Worthington realized the racial disparity was helping fuelMinneapolis’ housing crisis since wealthier, white-identifyingresidents in suburban neighborhoods with access to moreamenities such as good schools, parks, and transit stops hadgreater influence on zoning and housing policy plans thanresidents of color, who often didn’t know what their city councilrepresentative’s name was.

“There’s a whole element of this work that I think is really tiedup, in an important way, in how people participate in ourdemocracy and how people participate in local decisionmaking,” she said.

Worthington said the passage of the Minneapolis 2040 plan isonly the first step. Her team is currently working on creatingspecific inventory and project goals, as the elimination of single-family zoning gives the city an opportunity to effectively tripleits current housing stock through the development of triplexes.

“It’s a question we haven’t quite answered yet, and we’re in theprocess of defining what our metrics will look like and we’reworking with a couple of different groups to do that, and one of

them is the University of Minnesota and the other is the FederalReserve Bank in Minneapolis,” she said.

However, looking forward, Worthington said she recognizeszoning isn’t the final solution for Minneapolis or any other cityfacing worsening affordability. She believes zoning along withother measures such as greater housing subsidies, inclusionaryzoning, and rent control are needed.

“For instance, Washington D.C. already has rent control andthey have a lot of subsidized units, and they still have anaffordable housing problem,” she added. “So, rent control is nota panacea, zoning is not a panacea, none of these things alonework. They have to work in tandem with one another.”

D.C. Tenants Union organizer Stephanie Bastek knows whatWorthington is talking about all too well — the D.C. resident isone of the leaders of Reclaim Rent Control, a coalition of morethan 30 tenants’ rights, labor unions and state organizationslobbying for more comprehensive rent control in the nation’scapital.

As the D.C. City Council prepares to reauthorize the city’s 34-year-old rent control laws ahead of a Dec. 31, 2020 deadline,

Stephanie Bastek

tenants’ rights activists saw an opportunity to constrict landlordexemptions, extend tenant protections, and lower currentannual rent hike standards, which is 2 percent plusthe consumer price index.

“The real problem is that there is very little available rent-controlled [housing] stock anymore,” Bastek noted whilehighlighting that stock has been slashed from 120,000 unitsdown to approximately 80,000.

Bastek said landlords have been abusing exemptions in thecurrent law, such as a rule that allows landlords and tenants toagree to a one-time market rate increase in exchange forbuilding upgrades and the ability to file a SubstantialRehabilitation Petition to increase rents by as much as 125percent to fund building upgrades.

In addition to landlords using these rules to begin renting unitsat market rate, Bastek said current building efforts are beingconcentrated at the luxury end of the market, leaving lower andmid-income tenants to fend for themselves.

As a result of weak rent control measures and lacklusteraffordable housing inventory, the median rent for one and twobedroom apartments in the city have ballooned to a little morethan $2,300 per month.

Bastek said D.C.’s inflated area median income statistics thatinclude wealthier suburbs, such as Arlington and NorthPotomac, have masked the affordability crisis on the Capitol’sstreets.

“There are over 40,000 people on the waitlist for subsidizedhousing, and over 6,000 people are sleeping on D.C. streets or in

shelters each night,” she repeated from a manifesto on ReclaimRent Control’s website.“Almost half of D.C. residents pay morethan 30 percent of their income in rent, and one in five spendmore than 50 percent of their income on rent.”

“That’s one of the big reasons why we’re pushing for the currentrent control law to change its annual increase [allotments].”

‘We’re experiencing the worsthomelessness problem since the GreatDepression’

More than 200 miles north of D.C., Coalition for the Homelesspolicy director Jacquelyn Simone is dealing with the fall out ofdecades of housing policies that fail to adequately addressresidents’ needs.

According to Simone, New York City is currently facing it’sworst homelessness crisis since 1930s as more than 62,000 NewYorkers, 22,000 of which are children, sleep in shelters eachnight.

“We’ve seen the length of stay for people in the shelter systemhas been going up steadily as the the supply of apartments thatare affordable to New Yorkers with the lowest incomes andpeople on fixed incomes in particular, has been declining,” she

Jacquelyn Simone

said.

The current median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in NewYork City is $2,980 per month — a cost that’s untenable for theaverage New Yorker who makes $50,825 per year.

“In New York City, if you were going to be working 40 hours perweek, given the cost of a two-bedroom apartment at [fair marketrates], you’d have to be making more than $30 per hour and ourminimum wage is $15 per hour,” Simone explained.

Stagnant wage growth paired with booming rent growth hasforced full-time workers in the retail and public service,hospitality, and health sectors to the streets, causing the city topush nearly $3 billion towards homelessness services during FY2018— a 112.5 percent increase from the previous fiscal year.

Simone said the additional funding towards homelessness iscrucial to the work her coalition does. She even lauded MayorDeBlasio’s “Right to Counsel” plan that provides legal counselfor low-income tenants facing evictions, and a new law thatrequires landlords to give tenants who have lived in theirbuilding for more than two years a 90-day notice before eviction.

“We’re seeing some promising signs on the prevention aspect,but what we really need on the back-end is to create more deeply-subsidized permanent housing that will help people move out ofshelters once they become homeless so they can have homes oftheir own,” she said.

For Simone, the path to more affordable permanent housingincludes stronger inclusionary zoning and rent control laws, andcreating incentives for developers who build affordable housingunits.

“If you have a mandatory, affordable set aside, but its onlyaffordable to households making 130 percent of the median areaincome, that’s not actually going to be addressing the housingcrisis for people that are feeling it most acutely,” she said.

The coalition is currently lobbying for the passage of “Intro1211,” a revised inclusionary zoning plan that requires anybuildings that receive any city financial assistance to set aside aminimum of 15 percent of their units for homeless people.

“Especially in New York City where we have a lot of developmenthappening, we’re really trying to ensure the development that isgoing up is better aligned with people’s needs,” she said.

‘That’s the million-dollar question’

Although the push for better rent control and more inclusionaryzoning is arguably a good thing, Urban Land Institute fellow andformer Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy said there’s no guaranteethat any of these plans will deliver the results citizens, advocatesand legislators are looking for.

“Short term, [those changes] will cause a lot of conflict becauseeveryone thinks the idea of affordable housing is great unless it’sgoing to be near them,” he added. “‘How will it work in the longterm?’ That’s the million-dollar question.”

Olsen said the success of plans in places such as Oregon,Minneapolis and New York City will ultimately depend on thecooperation between developers, citizens and cities, whoseneeds sometimes conflict.

Tom Murphy

“As an economist, I may believe overall that rent control is badin the long run for affordability and some of the other issues itstrying to tackle, [however] it still creates some winners, andsometimes those winners are very vulnerable and we, in ourpublic discourse, can decide through various flavors of rentcontrol that we need to protect those vulnerable populations,”she said.

Murphy also added that these current rezoning and rent controlreforms are fitted to meet the needs of today, which may create aproblem during the next, great population shift.

“Changing the zoning gives local governments huge opportunityto experiment and it could encourage developers to look atdifferent ways to do affordability,” he said while pointing to somecities’ acceptance of stylized modular housing.

“However, [long-term success] depends on whether people willwant to continue to live in cities, or will they eventually want togo back to the suburbs?”

Worthington, Simone and Bastek are grappling with the samedilemmas as they acknowledge the success of their plans arebased on unknown factors, such as how developers will respondto rezoning or reformed rent control, possible legal battles andrepeals, or resistance from other community members.

However, everyone agrees that the fight for affordable and securepermanent housing comes down to two things: What do we wantour cities and country to look like, and what values do we wantthem to thrive on?

“If a city is only affordable and accessible to people at the upperlevel of the income spectrum, then the city’s economy will

collapse,” Simone said. “It’s the teachers, police officers, andsenior citizens who really make the city the place we want tolive.”

‘Where next?’Olsen and Murphy said its difficult to predict where the nexthotspot of zoning and rent control reform will be since themajority of American cities are dealing with their ownaffordability crises to their own degrees.

“There’s shared experience that rent and home values aregrowing so much faster than income, and that means there’smore money being pulled out of your pocketbook,” Olsen said.“So everywhere, the potential for a conversation about rentcontrol, about affordability is on the table.”

With that in mind, Murphy said cities that are currentlyconsidered affordable, such as Nashville, Dallas or OklahomaCity, need to begin examining zoning plans before substantialhousing price hikes come their way. That examination shouldinclude streamlining approval processes and considering wider-ranging housing types.

“When I visit cities, that’s one of the big conversations that goeson, whether the city is efficient in processing [applications],”Murphy said. “Part of it is the efficiency of doing it, and theother is maybe the need to change some of the regulations.”

Finally, all experts agreed there’s ample room for real estateprofessionals to join the zoning and rent control conversation,as governments and coalitions need people with first-handexperience to create viable plans.

“We need a table that is made up of people like me who are moreof the policy wonks, and we also need the people who do theconstruction and do the deals,” Worthington said, whilepointing out policy makers sometimes don’t understand theeconomics of making a development deal work for both parties.“It’s a very complex process that people who don’t haveexperience with real estate don’t understand.”

“They need to be involved because for their business to besuccessful, their communities need to be successful,”Worthington added. “I see this process and a system that isinterdependent, so a healthy community that’s thriving is agreat place for developers and real estate folks to work.”

Email Marian McPherson.

Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2019 State of the Nation’s Housingreport backs up Olsen’s assertion — the stock of low-cost units pricedbelow $800 per month has declined 17 percent (4 million) since 2011.

Olsen said it’s difficult for developers to secure financing foraffordable housing projects because it limits the return on investmentinvestors could experience, and its difficult for developers and citiesto force investors’ hands.

“It’s hard to force the people who have the finances to direct[investments] where you want it to be directed,” she said. “So, its awhole swirl of events. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to get out ofthis mess.”

BRIDGE Housing board of directors member Molly Turner said a goodstarting point for solving affordability issues are the “three Ps” ofproduction, preservation, and protection, which is evidenced by therecent moves legislators and advocates are making in terms of zoningand rent control reform.

“I think with a lot of the up-zoning, you’re seeing a huge push for moreproduction to increase density, particularly in cities andneighborhoods in cities that are close to transit and jobs,” Turnerexplained.

“With rent control, you’re seeing an emphasis on [the] protection oftenants with the philosophy being that maintaining [lower income]tenants in their housing is a lot more affordable for society than ifthey were to be evicted and had to housed in subsidized housing or godforbid, entered homelessness.”

‘Rent control isn’t a panacea, zoning isn’t apanacea’In October, Minneapolis made headlines for becoming the firstAmerican city to eliminate single-family zoning through its 10-yearcomprehensive plan, Minneapolis 2040.

Molly Turner

Although the elimination of single-family zoning gained the mostattention, Minneapolis 2040 included several housing policymeasures, including an increase in density near transit stops, a $25million subsidized housing fund and a new inclusionary zoningprovision that 10 percent of apartment units must be reserved formoderate-income households.

Minneapolis Long Range Planning for Community Planning andEconomic Development director Heather Worthington saidMinneapolis 2040’s housing policies are based on feedback gatheredfrom more than 100 community meetings over the course of threeyears.

During those meetings, Worthington said residents began to sharetheir concerns about housing, which included making frequent movesand grappling with ever-changing rental rates that required anywherefrom 40 to 50 percent of their monthly income as the city’s attached-housing inventory (e.g. duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes) declinedby 43 percent.

Although the lowest-income residents could rely on housing subsidiesand public housing, residents making 80 percent of the median areaincome were struggling to find permanent affordable housing asMinneapolis’ naturally-occurring affordable housing stock decreasedby 15,000 units in 15 years, due to market-rate conversions.

With that information in hand, Worthington’s team went to work,

Heather Worthington

digging into mounds of data and conducting hundreds of interviewswith residents who had been silenced through years of racism andsegregation.

“We looked at a lot of data, and we were interested in looking at it byrace in particular because we learned back in the 2014-2015 timerange, we had the deepest racial disparities in terms of outcomes inthe nation,” she explained.

Worthington realized the racial disparity was helping fuelMinneapolis’ housing crisis since wealthier, white-identifyingresidents in suburban neighborhoods with access to more amenitiessuch as good schools, parks, and transit stops had greater influence onzoning and housing policy plans than residents of color, who oftendidn’t know what their city council representative’s name was.

“There’s a whole element of this work that I think is really tied up, inan important way, in how people participate in our democracy andhow people participate in local decision making,” she said.

Worthington said the passage of the Minneapolis 2040 plan is onlythe first step. Her team is currently working on creating specificinventory and project goals, as the elimination of single-familyzoning gives the city an opportunity to effectively triple its currenthousing stock through the development of triplexes.

“It’s a question we haven’t quite answered yet, and we’re in the processof defining what our metrics will look like and we’re working with acouple of different groups to do that, and one of them is the Universityof Minnesota and the other is the Federal Reserve Bank inMinneapolis,” she said.

However, looking forward, Worthington said she recognizes zoningisn’t the final solution for Minneapolis or any other city facing

worsening affordability. She believes zoning along with othermeasures such as greater housing subsidies, inclusionary zoning, andrent control are needed.

“For instance, Washington D.C. already has rent control and theyhave a lot of subsidized units, and they still have an affordable housingproblem,” she added. “So, rent control is not a panacea, zoning is not apanacea, none of these things alone work. They have to work intandem with one another.”

D.C. Tenants Union organizer Stephanie Bastek knows whatWorthington is talking about all too well — the D.C. resident is one ofthe leaders of Reclaim Rent Control, a coalition of more than 30tenants’ rights, labor unions and state organizations lobbying formore comprehensive rent control in the nation’s capital.

As the D.C. City Council prepares to reauthorize the city’s 34-year-oldrent control laws ahead of a Dec. 31, 2020 deadline, tenants’ rightsactivists saw an opportunity to constrict landlord exemptions, extendtenant protections, and lower current annual rent hike standards,which is 2 percent plus the consumer price index.

“The real problem is that there is very little available rent-controlled[housing] stock anymore,” Bastek noted while highlighting that stock

Stephanie Bastek

has been slashed from 120,000 units down to approximately 80,000.

Bastek said landlords have been abusing exemptions in the currentlaw, such as a rule that allows landlords and tenants to agree to a one-time market rate increase in exchange for building upgrades and theability to file a Substantial Rehabilitation Petition to increase rents byas much as 125 percent to fund building upgrades.

In addition to landlords using these rules to begin renting units atmarket rate, Bastek said current building efforts are beingconcentrated at the luxury end of the market, leaving lower and mid-income tenants to fend for themselves.

As a result of weak rent control measures and lackluster affordablehousing inventory, the median rent for one and two bedroomapartments in the city have ballooned to a little more than $2,300 permonth.

Bastek said D.C.’s inflated area median income statistics that includewealthier suburbs, such as Arlington and North Potomac, havemasked the affordability crisis on the Capitol’s streets.

“There are over 40,000 people on the waitlist for subsidized housing,and over 6,000 people are sleeping on D.C. streets or in shelters eachnight,” she repeated from a manifesto on Reclaim Rent Control’swebsite.“Almost half of D.C. residents pay more than 30 percent oftheir income in rent, and one in five spend more than 50 percent oftheir income on rent.”

“That’s one of the big reasons why we’re pushing for the current rentcontrol law to change its annual increase [allotments].”

‘We’re experiencing the worst homelessnessproblem since the Great Depression’

More than 200 miles north of D.C., Coalition for the Homeless policydirector Jacquelyn Simone is dealing with the fall out of decades ofhousing policies that fail to adequately address residents’ needs.

According to Simone, New York City is currently facing it’s worsthomelessness crisis since 1930s as more than 62,000 New Yorkers,22,000 of which are children, sleep in shelters each night.

“We’ve seen the length of stay for people in the shelter system hasbeen going up steadily as the the supply of apartments that areaffordable to New Yorkers with the lowest incomes and people on fixedincomes in particular, has been declining,” she said.

The current median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in New YorkCity is $2,980 per month — a cost that’s untenable for the average NewYorker who makes $50,825 per year.

“In New York City, if you were going to be working 40 hours per week,given the cost of a two-bedroom apartment at [fair market rates],you’d have to be making more than $30 per hour and our minimumwage is $15 per hour,” Simone explained.

Stagnant wage growth paired with booming rent growth has forcedfull-time workers in the retail and public service, hospitality, andhealth sectors to the streets, causing the city to push nearly $3 billiontowards homelessness services during FY 2018— a 112.5 percent

Jacquelyn Simone

increase from the previous fiscal year.

Simone said the additional funding towards homelessness is crucial tothe work her coalition does. She even lauded Mayor DeBlasio’s “Rightto Counsel” plan that provides legal counsel for low-income tenantsfacing evictions, and a new law that requires landlords to give tenantswho have lived in their building for more than two years a 90-daynotice before eviction.

“We’re seeing some promising signs on the prevention aspect, butwhat we really need on the back-end is to create more deeply-subsidized permanent housing that will help people move out ofshelters once they become homeless so they can have homes of theirown,” she said.

For Simone, the path to more affordable permanent housing includesstronger inclusionary zoning and rent control laws, and creatingincentives for developers who build affordable housing units.

“If you have a mandatory, affordable set aside, but its only affordableto households making 130 percent of the median area income, that’snot actually going to be addressing the housing crisis for people thatare feeling it most acutely,” she said.

The coalition is currently lobbying for the passage of “Intro 1211,” arevised inclusionary zoning plan that requires any buildings thatreceive any city financial assistance to set aside a minimum of 15percent of their units for homeless people.

“Especially in New York City where we have a lot of developmenthappening, we’re really trying to ensure the development that is goingup is better aligned with people’s needs,” she said.

‘That’s the million-dollar question’

Although the push for better rent control and more inclusionaryzoning is arguably a good thing, Urban Land Institute fellow andformer Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy said there’s no guarantee thatany of these plans will deliver the results citizens, advocates andlegislators are looking for.

“Short term, [those changes] will cause a lot of conflict becauseeveryone thinks the idea of affordable housing is great unless it’s goingto be near them,” he added. “‘How will it work in the long term?’ That’sthe million-dollar question.”

Olsen said the success of plans in places such as Oregon, Minneapolisand New York City will ultimately depend on the cooperation betweendevelopers, citizens and cities, whose needs sometimes conflict.

“As an economist, I may believe overall that rent control is bad in thelong run for affordability and some of the other issues its trying totackle, [however] it still creates some winners, and sometimes thosewinners are very vulnerable and we, in our public discourse, candecide through various flavors of rent control that we need to protectthose vulnerable populations,” she said.

Murphy also added that these current rezoning and rent controlreforms are fitted to meet the needs of today, which may create aproblem during the next, great population shift.

“Changing the zoning gives local governments huge opportunity toexperiment and it could encourage developers to look at different waysto do affordability,” he said while pointing to some cities’ acceptanceof stylized modular housing.

“However, [long-term success] depends on whether people will want

Tom Murphy

to continue to live in cities, or will they eventually want to go back tothe suburbs?”

Worthington, Simone and Bastek are grappling with the samedilemmas as they acknowledge the success of their plans are based onunknown factors, such as how developers will respond to rezoning orreformed rent control, possible legal battles and repeals, or resistancefrom other community members.

However, everyone agrees that the fight for affordable and securepermanent housing comes down to two things: What do we want ourcities and country to look like, and what values do we want them tothrive on?

“If a city is only affordable and accessible to people at the upper levelof the income spectrum, then the city’s economy will collapse,”Simone said. “It’s the teachers, police officers, and senior citizens whoreally make the city the place we want to live.”

‘Where next?’Olsen and Murphy said its difficult to predict where the next hotspotof zoning and rent control reform will be since the majority ofAmerican cities are dealing with their own affordability crises to theirown degrees.

“There’s shared experience that rent and home values are growing somuch faster than income, and that means there’s more money beingpulled out of your pocketbook,” Olsen said. “So everywhere, thepotential for a conversation about rent control, about affordability ison the table.”

With that in mind, Murphy said cities that are currently consideredaffordable, such as Nashville, Dallas or Oklahoma City, need to begin

examining zoning plans before substantial housing price hikes cometheir way. That examination should include streamlining approvalprocesses and considering wider-ranging housing types.

“When I visit cities, that’s one of the big conversations that goes on,whether the city is efficient in processing [applications],” Murphysaid. “Part of it is the efficiency of doing it, and the other is maybe theneed to change some of the regulations.”

Finally, all experts agreed there’s ample room for real estateprofessionals to join the zoning and rent control conversation, asgovernments and coalitions need people with first-hand experience tocreate viable plans.

“We need a table that is made up of people like me who are more of thepolicy wonks, and we also need the people who do the constructionand do the deals,” Worthington said, while pointing out policy makerssometimes don’t understand the economics of making a developmentdeal work for both parties. “It’s a very complex process that peoplewho don’t have experience with real estate don’t understand.”

“They need to be involved because for their business to be successful,their communities need to be successful,” Worthington added. “I seethis process and a system that is interdependent, so a healthycommunity that’s thriving is a great place for developers and realestate folks to work.”

Email Marian McPherson.

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