Bricks Without Clay
On Abundance's re-exam and housing's data problem.
About a year ago, city planners became Public Enemy #1, to my chagrin. We were told, through books like Abundance and Why Nothing Works, that zoning and NIMBY public hearings had completely stalled built environment projects and caused our modern day housing crisis.
Their argument was that power can manifest in peculiar ways – we’ve gone from Robert Moses paving away whole neighborhoods to a few influencers shutting down a 123-unit building for elderly housing on NYC’s Elizabeth Street Garden. Power has decentralized – and planning failures like California’s high-speed rail are the proof that the system needs an overhaul, lest we part with innovation entirely.
My stance on Abundance, even a year ago, was that it was an incomplete portrayal of power, of building, and of progress. This week, the authors revisited how the Abundance movement created plenty of discourse and legislative efforts but has little to show for it in terms of new housing starts. It seems like the real barriers to delivery were always the harder-to-solve-in-one-small-book problems: labor, materials, and financing. Here’s an interesting article that critiques Abundance and the trickle-down housing theory from an Australian lens:
My geography professor used to say: for every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it’s always wrong.
Sneesby explains that planning was never the primary brake on housing supply – there’s plenty of approved dwellings that sit idle as developers squirm over costs and margin. And a 2022 study proves that even when developers get their way and build luxury housing at dastardly prices, the expected ‘filtering’ is slow and often interrupted. Sneesby names a stronger solution to this crisis: counter-cyclical social housing construction. We’ve seen social housing at scale enacted in the Netherlands – 1 in 3 houses are subsidized by the government. Sneesby details how we could house our elderly, our schoolteachers, our essential employees, all while capturing the value publicly, not privately.
It seems like a common sense solution, especially when underlying demand does not equal effective demand, as we see with housing. However, building and maintaining social housing has proven to be a challenge in the US. Even when a politician has a supply-side mindset, they might be too hampered by budget crises to plug the gap. And public housing in the States faces stigmatization at levels higher than European counterparts due to a history of racial discrimination.
So if we cannot build our way out, at least not immediately, what might we do to advance housing affordability and infrastructure development? Enter the Terner Center:
Housing has a data problem by Rosanne Haggerty and Ruby Bolaria Shifrin
Major data gaps mean we often don’t know which parcels of public land sit idle, how many units are vacant, and where development proposals stall. And without common definitions for fundamental terms, it becomes difficult to make comparisons across contexts – “affordable housing” means one thing in London, another in Lagos, and something else entirely in Los Angeles.
I’m no stranger to data governance – harmonizing fields and semantics and ontologies while enforcing new rules and standards is deeply unglamorous but can be incredibly impactful. When the underlying data is clean and uniform, we can simulate policy effects on housing, test financial feasibility of new construction, and make more informed decisions with our infrastructure dollars.
Consider this Terner Labs project in Denver; their Housing Policy Simulator forecasted that removing Denver’s parking mandate could result in an additional 460 homes built per year, or 4,600 homes in 10 years. Cool, right? Yet Denver needs 50,000 more homes by 2028 to keep up with underlying demand. Our affordability crisis must be attacked from all angles, and data is just one of them.