Sucks in the City: The Death of Affordable, Urban Housing
My neighborhood’s name, Windsor Terrace, reminds me of subdivision names from my Cook County, IL suburban youth: Cedar Court, Excelsior Circle, White Oak Commons. Windsor Terrace’s cheesy name is not helped by its lack of coolness. It’s not the Brooklyn from Girls. The restaurants are blah. The cafes few and far between. The residents — a mix of old school South Brooklyn and new school professionals — err on the culturally conventional side. But its quiet streets are lined with trees and decent architecture. It’s a stone’s toss from Prospect Park. It has solid transit options and excellent schools.
The neighborhood’s charms are reflected in the housing prices. Less than 30 years ago, you could pick up a townhome here for $200,000. Apartments even less. Today, the median sales price for any home is $902,500. Townhomes sell anywhere from $1.5–2.5 million, with prices going sharply up as you approach the park.
Prices were not always so high. Pass by Farrell’s Bar and Grill, located on Prospect Park West, the neighborhood’s main commercial drag, and you’ll see teamsters, contractors, plumbers, off-duty firemen and cops brandishing large styrofoam cups of cheap beer — all speaking to the neighborhood’s working class roots.
Developed primarily in the first 20 years of the last century, Windsor Terrace became home to the growing number of working class Irish and Italian Americans who wanted something more spacious than a Manhattan tenement. Housing stock is made up of some apartment buildings with mostly family-sized units (no buildings top 10 stories), and numerous “two family townhouses” — modest brick townhomes, often with garden apartments and a small yard.
The neighborhood, while retaining many of its earlier inhabitants, many of whom have become extremely house-rich, is completely inaccessible to anyone resembling middle class.
While there is much ballyhoo about experience-thirsty millennials heading to cities, the data paints a different picture. As a recent Bloomberg article reported (as well as others) millennials are moving to the suburbs with as much, or more quickness, than they are the cities. The reasons are pretty straightforward: most cities — at least economically vital ones — are too damn expensive.
Consider that the median sale price for an existing single family home in the U.S. is $260,000. In Brooklyn, the median sales price for a home is $736,500, which includes the farthest reaches of the borough. SF is $1,227,900. Boston is $560,300. Seattle is $690,300.
And these prices only hint at actual costs. The housing you get for the big bucks sucks. For $260,000 you might be able to get a closet in a decent neighborhood in city like Boston (forget about Manhattan, Brooklyn, or SF), or you could get an okay place in a neighborhood with abysmal schools and high crime. So it’s no wonder why millennials choose suburbs.
But to say they prefer the suburbs because they’re moving there also misses the point. It’s like saying that a starving man prefers gruel when he’s eating it to avoid death.
Millennials want to live in cities. The 2015 National Community and Transportation Preference Survey found millennials prefered walking as a mode of transportation by 12 percentage points over driving, prefered living in attached housing within walking distance of shops and restaurants, short commutes, and were the most likely age group to use public transportation.
These lifestyle preferences leave aside the ecological and economic benefits of urban versus suburban living. High density, transit friendly urban housing is far greener than its suburban equivalent. And many suburbs — particularly the more affordable ones — are becoming slums. There are 17 million people living in poverty in the suburbs of the US’s big cities, which is 4 million more than in cities themselves (source).
Like the starving man and his gruel, people are choosing suburbs because there are no other options. If there were still places like Windsor Terrace was 100 years ago, our national housing patterns would likely look much different.
In coming posts I’ll look at examples of ways cities might be made affordable again and people and places innovating to make it happen now.
