public policy

Gentrification is Anti-Family

April 19, 2018

When you think of a vibrant city, what kinds of people do you envision? The artsy hipster barista? The forty-something entrepreneur dressed in jeans? The fashionable women in high heels enjoying rosé in an outdoor canopy cafe? Now try to picture another demographic living in the city: a family.

As a general rule, cities aren’t designed (or redesigned) to accommodate the needs and desires of families. A series on cities from The American Conservative describes how more and more cities are being transformed into what the industry refers to as the Vibrant Urban Neighborhood. “The VUN—with its standard-issue bike shops and vintage clothiers, its “authentic” live-work spaces and dive bars, its predictable purveyors of vinyl records and locally-sourced foodstuffs, its de rigueur venues for generically hip “live music,” its uniform throngs of overwhelmingly unmarried and childless active or aspiring knowledge workers ritualistically intoning the shibboleth of “diversity”—has metastasized from those erstwhile white-hot centers of hipness—Williamsburg, the Mission, Wicker Park, Silverlake—converting Bell Town and Bushwick, Echo Park, Seward, and the Pearl District, transforming D.C.’s H Street Corridor, LA’s Highland Park, and dozens of other districts.” (source) This approach to city development is eager to attract young working professionals but doesn’t plan for how these working professionals can “remain in our cities as they age, change, or grow.” (source)

A city made or remade to accommodate young adults doesn’t require good schools. It doesn’t need to provide a diversity of housing options beyond the studio and one-bedroom apartments. Affordable eating options aren’t really on the radar and neither are playgrounds. In short, a city not built to accommodate families won’t be able to accommodate families.

Even worse for families is the process of gentrification. Indeed, gentrification is inherently anti-family. When a city undergoes this process of becoming the kind of place that attracts young, childless urbanites, it raises rent prices, often resulting in driving out poorer families that can no longer afford to reside in the city or at least forcing them to allocate more of their income to basic housing.

As we seek to revitalize and develop our cities, we must remember our obligations to the family. Being consistently pro-life means promoting the flourishing of all people of all demographics.

Seeking the Good of The City

July 24, 2016

City of Charlotte

In May of this year, Montgomery County, one of the largest and wealthiest suburbs in DC, held a forum on urban development. Paul Grenier, writing for The American Conservative, commented on what he saw as a divide in the way the word “development” was being used. On the one side, council member Marc Elrich and economist Michael Shuman used the word development to refer to the good of the city. Grenier explains that “They asked qualitative questions about how to create as good a city as possible, and how to make the economy serve the interests of that good.” On the other side were the well-paid consultants who focused on “growth” and fixated on the development of the economy.

Grenier notes that this divide represents the difference between classical thought and modern thought. Whereas classical thought emphasizes the particularities of local communities and emphasizes the shared pursuit of citizens for the common good, modern thought strips away the particular quirks of particular places and instead emphasizes the universality of the market.

Council member Elrich began the forum by asking “what is the best kind of city.” Such a question likely conjures up thoughts of the local coffee shops and the diner where everyone knows your name and the older buildings with a strong sense of history. Elrich refers to “small spaces” which I take to mean those places that provide a sense of intimacy and locality. If development means seeking the good of the city, not just its growth, then perhaps creating (or more often, preserving) these small spaces might be just as important as bringing in big corporations with the hope of stimulating the economy and driving growth.

While small spaces often create jobs and generate market growth, participation in the big, global market can generate even greater profit. But is that really what matters? Can the good of the city really only be understood materialistically? Grenier, in parsing through this difference of thought between classical and modern thought writes:

Modern politics has no well-defined location, not any more than the global marketplace has a location. Classical politics, by contrast, takes place in the city. The city is what classical politics is about.

From the perspective of classical political thought, the city is the optimal scale for organizing political life because it is a scale that is sufficiently complex to allow for human flourishing, but not so huge that the crucial questions can’t be addressed by means of reasoned debate. Scales larger than that—such as the national or the global scale—are so vastly complex that such a conversation can no longer be concrete and to a purpose.

Michael Shuman believes that truly good economic development consists of applying four rules:

Maximize the percent of local industry and trade that is locally owned.
Emphasize local self-reliance, not as a means of becoming disengaged from the wider (including global) economy, but so as to engage with it from a position of strength.
Maintain high labor and environmental standards.
Create, or maintain, a social, institutional and investment framework that fosters a sort of local entrepreneurial eco-system.

Economic growth is important but it is not the only or even the most important rubric for measuring the flourishing of a city. More important than mere economic growth is the ability for small spaces to give room for tightly knit communities to have the kinds of conversations about justice, goodness, and beauty that grow the human spirit and cultivate friendships.

David Brooks on Lost Hills and Strengthening Communities

June 22, 2016

If you ask New York Times columnist David Brooks what he thinks is the defining issue of our day, he would say social isolation. In one of his columns, he writes that “gaps have opened up among partisan tribes, economic classes and races. There has been a loss of social capital, especially for communities down the income scale. ” Brooks is thus pointing to the same negative phenomenon noted by Luvin in his new book The Fractured Republic (read my review of that book here).

To illustrate this problem, Brooks references Lost Hills, a farming town, writing that “there’s still no permanent church. Up until now there has been no library and no polling station. The closest police station is 45 miles away. Until recently there were no sidewalks nor many streetlights, so it was too dangerous to go trick-or-treating.” Fortunately, Lost Hills is the location for a new experiment in developing the social capital of the community. Brooks writes:

The experiment is being led by Lynda Resnick, who, with her husband, Stewart, owns the Wonderful Company, which includes FIJI Water, POM juice and most of the pistachios and almonds you eat. You should know that I’m friends with Lynda and Stewart and am biased in their direction. But what they are doing is still worth learning from.

…They’re not trying to find one way to serve this population. The problems are so intertwined, they are trying to change this community from all directions at once. In Lost Hills there are new health centers, new pre-K facilities, new housing projects, new gardens, new sidewalks and lights, a new community center and a new soccer field. Through the day, people have more places to meet, play and cooperate with their neighbors.

Brooks concludes by noting that communities are where social repair takes place. “The community is the right level, picking a piece of land and giving people a context in which they can do neighborly things — like the dads here who came to the pre-K center and spent six hours building a shed, and with it, invisibly, a wider circle of care for their children.” – Read the whole thing here.