The president that sprawl wrought
It’s more than a bit ironic that Trump is from Queens. If assessed as an entity separate from the other five boroughs, Queens would rank as the most diverse city in the world. No, Trump’s Jamaica Estate’s childhood home was not a project in Queensbridge. But it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t take in at least a waft of multiculturalism coming from nearby ethnic enclaves. It’s always been my contention that to be bigoted in New York is to get nothing done and go nowhere — you can’t get a coffee, grab a cab or win community approval for a multimillion dollar housing development without having to deal with someone very different from yourself (NB: My contention might be a more Pollyanna than I previously thought).
Make no mistake about it, Trump’s victory last night was not a triumph of Queens or cities. It was the result of the expansion and separation of our housing.
I recently read a piece on CityLab by Richard Florida explaining the past and present of housing development in America. He writes:
Roughly 60 to 70 percent of America’s existing homes are located in low-density areas, defined as those with fewer than four homes per acre. The overwhelming majority of new homes built across the country since the 1940s (90 percent of them) have been developed in low-density areas.
In the 2000s, nearly a quarter (23.3 percent) of all new homes built were built in undeveloped areas, a third (33.2 percent) were built in areas with a prior density below one home per acre, and another third (31.9 percent) were in areas with a prior density between just one and four homes per acre.
The flip side of low density growth is anemic urban development. The Washington Post’s Emily Badger explains how housing development in cities effectively stopped in 1929. When the economy finally stabilized after WWII, returning soldiers were pushed to the suburbs, abetted by a surplus of industrial capacity perfect for making cars, new, broad highways to drive those cars on and suburban homes along those highways financed by cheap VA loans. This trend hollowed out the cities for decades.
But recently, a renewed interest in cities emerged, fueled their obvious benefits: walkability, access to commercial and cultural capital, etc.
But there was a problem: when people wanted to move back to cities, there wasn’t enough housing. So the rich people who wanted to live in cities pushed out the poor folks who wanted to live in them. Quoting a Trulia study, Vox’s Michael J. Coren writes, “that between 2009 and 2014 the share of households making more than $100,000 rose by 3.6% in America’s 10 most expensive metro areas, while the number earning $30,000 or below fell by 2.2%.”
I own an apartment in Windsor Terrace, a historically working class neighborhood, a 40 or so minute subway ride from midtown Manhattan. Many of its streets are lined with modest, tightly packed row houses that were once affordable to cops, firefighters and other middle class folks raising their families. Today, those houses sell for $2M+.
These development patterns have made cities isolated fortresses of commercial and cultural capital. I was reminded of this isolation last night as I watched the election results roll in at The Embassy Network house in San Francisco — an intentional co-living community populated by creatives, coders and various highly-educated free-thinkers. This group, who has benefitted greatly from the riches afforded in cities like San Francisco, couldn’t believe what was happening.
We shouldn’t have been surprised.
Suburbs and other low density areas have become economic refugee camps of sorts. Sure, these places hold benefits beyond affordability — space, greenery, good schools, etc. But at the end of the day, they are places where you can afford to raise a family and enjoy a relatively decent quality of life — the kind of life places like Windsor Terrace once provided.
But this refuge has become increasingly precarious. Forces of globalization and automation threaten to upend the economic drivers that have historically sustained these places, and people are freaked the fuck out. And they should be. They either need a plan B or for things to return to yesteryear — Trump was more convincing in promising the latter than Clinton the former.
Our pattern of housing development and consequent economic stratification has created a physically, culturally and economically separated nation. Trump’s win — and the divisive rhetoric he spewed — attest to this separation. And as Florida points out, the numbers favor the separated.
Trump’s win better be a wake up call. Yes, we need to come together culturally, but perhaps more importantly we need to come together physically. We need density. We need to build up our cities and make them more inclusive. We need more housing to give more people access to the cultural and commercial wealth cities afford.
And who the fuck knows, perhaps Trump, a real estate developer (albeit a questionably successful one), will usher in an era of urban development. Maybe the economic fear and crashing economies he inspires will make our cities a tiny bit more affordable. One can hope.\
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