Really? I think most cities...even here where I live,,have ordinances against 16-18 people living in one house.
Nice post....but wrong headed.
I live in the city and cheer whenever a big housing project is torn down. We have lost a number of them on Capitol Hill over the past 20 years, and the area improves with each one that disappears. But as the projects close, where are the people supposed to go? I have posed that question more than once on this board, and the overwhelming response I get is ... immediate NIMBYism from the suburbanites, followed by ... silence, on the question of just where, when we shut down the project, people should actually move.
I am not in favor of a big federal sledgehammer. I would much prefer to work through voluntary accommodations and adjustments of incentives at the local level, recognizing that communities are different and that one size doesn't fit all. But one consistent planning objective should be to break up very large concentrations of the poor; the culture of poverty cannot be addressed if we continue to concentrate the poor in areas where dysfunction is normalized. Another basic objective should be to encourage affordable housing in reasonably close proximity to job centers.
I suppose, just to round out the discussion, we can also consider the option of bringing jobs to poor neighborhoods. The track record on this is mixed. There have been some notable failures, but also some successes. Here in DC, for example, the old St. Elizabeth's campus in Anacostia is being converted into a consolidated headquarters for Homeland Security. The St. Elizabeth's site is a spectacular piece of real estate that has been begging for a major anchor tenant for many years, and it is finally happening. This will bring thousands of high paying jobs into an interesting, and challenged, area. (Anacostia has a number of quite nice enclaves, some near St. E's; it is not the complete disaster area out-of-towners assume.) This part of town, in 20 years, will be transformed, and the ancillary development will much enlarge the local jobs base. All to the good.
But the point remains, poor people need to live somewhere, and NIMBY isn't an answer. I keep reading that gentrification, in many cities, is already pushing poverty further out into the suburbs. Suburbanites should perhaps give serious thought to this before the displacement reaches critical mass.
I was making a hypothetical argument about what would happen under an absolute private property rights dispensation. Get rid of exclusionary zoning, including occupancy rules, and poor families could double and triple up in four bedroom split levels out in cul-de-sac land. And some would. Some of this already happens illegally, of course, but it is discouraged.
If you don't want that to happen, what would you do to allow poor families access to better school districts and greater proximity to job centers? Not all the poor will want to move -- but a lot of them are desperate to get out. A lot of misdirected policy over the past half-century has conspired to keep them fixed in place.