“Rethinking Federal Housing Policy,” or, What One Swarthmore Resident’s National Perspective Suggests About What We Can Do in Our Small Town
If you’re working to make your small town’s housing more affordable, and that town turns out to be home to a well-known housing economist with a book about the affordability crisis, you probably ought to read that book.
A couple of months ago, I learned that Joseph Gyourko, a professor of real estate, finance and business economics, and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, lives right here in Swarthmore. Or rather, I knew a guy named Joe Gyourko lived in Swarthmore; our daughters had been friends back in elementary school. What I learned was that this neighbor was a well-known housing economist.
One surprise about Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable, which Gyourko wrote with Edward Glaeser, was how readable it was to a non-economist like me: lucid and direct.
As the title suggests, the book is largely about what the authors think the federal government should do to address the affordability problem. But a lot of what they say has implications for what can be done on a smaller scale—a borough scale—too.
We Need More Housing
When they published their book in 2008, Gyourko and Glaeser already observed that in a “growing number of metropolitan areas, housing prices have soared, making housing unaffordable even for middle-income Americans.”
The main reason? “Stringent land-use regulations make it too costly to change the quantity of housing very much.”
In other words, while zoning serves an important function, overly restrictive zoning laws were making it nearly impossible to build more housing, which was driving prices up.
This is still the case—and it’s very relevant to the housing situation in Swarthmore.
Two Affordability Crises
One still applicable tenet of Gyourko and Glaeser’s book is that America is suffering from two separate affordability crises with different causes and different solutions.
One crisis is that many people are so poor that they struggle to afford any housing, even inexpensive housing.
Another is that, in many parts of the country, housing has become unaffordable to even middle-income people.
Unless you understand which crisis you are talking about, the writers explain, you’re not going to be able to implement a solution.
I found this extremely clarifying.
In my reading and thinking about affordability over the last year, I’ve often found myself stuck in a thicket of confused ideas about what “affordability” is. I wrote about this a few weeks back in a post called “What Is Affordability Anyway?”
Gyourko and Glaeser helped me see how the word “affordable” is such a flexible, protean term that it can be more obfuscating than useful.
Their book spends most of its time discussing the lack of housing affordable for middle-income earners. The principal solution, the authors argue, is to loosen local zoning restrictions in unaffordable markets to encourage the creation of more housing units.
Gyourko and Glaeser argue for limiting the federal mortgage-interest deduction and sending the resulting tax dollars back to municipalities that build housing. This is a national and therefore efficient approach, but not one I imagine seeing implemented any time soon.
So What Can We Do Locally?
Loosening land-use restrictions in Swarthmore alone would likely not drive down the price of existing homes. That would probably require changes across the Philadelphia metropolitan area. But it could open the door for the creation of housing units at lower price points.
Other communities have done just that by, for example, permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to offset the cost of homeownership while providing affordable rentals. They have rewritten their zoning laws so large houses can be divided into several condominiums. They have designated areas for townhomes like Swarthmore’s Village Green near the Princeton Avenue underpass.
Changes like these could make our town more accessible to middle-income earners like teachers, small merchants, data-science consultants, writers, and college professors who were able to afford to buy homes in Swarthmore twenty years ago but mostly can’t anymore.
As for the poor who struggle to afford even inexpensive housing, Swarthmore has long been mostly out of their reach. A 1972 proposal by local religious leaders that the borough allow twenty units of subsidized housing went down to defeat. The words of one of the proposal’s advocates at a borough council meeting, quoted in the January 23, 1973, issue of The Swarthmorean, show that our forebearers half a century ago had some of the same concerns many of us do today: “[The proposal] bears on Swarthmore’s ability to remain an open, socially mixed community in which material achievements aren’t the only measure of human worth.”
An article in the Delaware County Daily Times described an exchange, not mentioned in The Swarthmorean’s account of the meeting, in which a citizen named William Allen Raiman said the proposal “would little by little make one big Scrapple Hundred out of Swarthmore.” Scrapple Hundred is a derogatory term for the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore.
I’m guessing no one in Swarthmore today would speak that way in a public meeting. But I worry that opposition to making housing more affordable is driven in part by stereotypes and prejudices about the kind of people who would live in it.
I’d like to think we could find ways to make Swarthmore more accessible to low-income workers, especially those employed in our community as restaurant servers or custodians at Swarthmore College or home health aides.
Two Takeaways
One optimistic nugget I unearthed from Gyourko and Glaeser’s book is the idea that—since the lack of affordability for middle-income earners is largely the result of overly restrictive zoning policies—changes in government policies can supply solutions.
Here’s a more ambiguous nugget. The book notes that in some big cities, mayors fight for the creation of housing units so city workers can afford to live near their jobs. But, the writers continue, “In leafy suburbs…there is no group to oppose existing homeowners’ natural desire to restrict construction.”
As I read this, I found myself wondering how, in our own leafy suburb, such a group might be created.
I chair Swarthmore’s Development and Affordability Task Force, which is charged with making recommendations to our borough council next year. But beyond that, a critical mass of residents who see the benefits both to themselves and to others in creating more affordable housing in Swarthmore will be crucial to bringing about change.
