Every Reason Given But The True One
Help! More people will be moving “here” soon. It doesn’t matter where “here” is people, those people need or will need more housing.
To think you can keep them out is ridiculous. And then why would you? At one point in our lives, we all became independent from our parents. Very few of us are living in an ancestral home passed down from parent to child. Good housing is a necessity.
Where and how we live changes over time. Most young people begin their lives in small rental apartments. As time goes on, we either buy something or continue to rent depending on our preferences.
As we go through life stages, the home we bought when our kids were small often gets traded in for a bigger model as our children and our incomes grow. At some point, our children leave, and we look to have less living space. Perhaps we no longer have the desire or ability to manage what owning a home entail. We look to a condo or apartment so that someone else does the work.
Too often today, people want to pull up the gate and erect a moat around their communities to keep anyone else from entering. Sometimes this form of NIMBYISM is cloaked in environmental concern believing that building equals the death of the environment.
Often, some will claim they want to make sure their children will have the same “small town” experiences that they had. Where do they believe those children will live if nothing new is built that they can afford? They will not have those experiences if there is no room for them to live.
Saving open spaces requires us to build within the urban core. That means density. How much density can be tolerated depends on where the location is. No one in my adopted hometown of Stuart in Martin County, Florida wants to see the building intensity that would be considered non-controversial even in cities like Miami or Fort Lauderdale.
In the past few weeks, a former New York City Council Member identified 171 sites in Manhattan where 73,000 new homes could be built. That equals more than 200,000 new residents in new homes. Currently, the identified properties in New York are empty lots and boarded up buildings.
Manhattan currently has 1.7 million residents in its 23 square miles. That is 10 times the number of inhabitants of Martin County. If Stuart had the same density there would be 480,000 people within the municipal boundaries. Thank God nothing, even 15 times less, will occur here.
Most places do not have Manhattan’s tolerance for density. But even there, a developer proposed a new housing complex on a vacant lot on 145th Street. He wanted to build a high-rise complex with a civil rights museum. Half the units would be priced for a family of 4 earning $80,000 per year and 20% for those earning under $40,000.
The council person who represents the district killed the deal because she claimed “gentrification” would change the neighborhood. Instead, the property has been turned into a parking lot for trucks since it is already zoned for that use. A $700 million project for the neighborhood was blackballed and the residents ended up with the smell of diesel fuel and idling trucks.
In that instance, it was reverse racism…the fear of rich white folks coming to the neighborhood even if half the apartments would be at market value. Usually, it is the other way around. Also falsely, some believe that apartment living equates to a poorer and browner element moving in. Exclusionary zoning is alive and well in most of the United States.
This happens in small town America as well as the nation’s most populous city. It all has the same reasoning behind it…fear of change. Mostly caused by the specter of outsiders coming to the neighborhood.
When we insist on only single-family homes being built, we exclude poor, young, and people of color from living in our towns and neighborhoods. And for those that say we have to be mindful of the environment, the worst thing that can be built is a single-family home. In every respect, it creates much more ecological damage than any other form of housing.
Whether you call yourself a liberal or conservative…a Republican or Democrat…there is no excuse to bar density in an urban area. Let’s make room for everyone, even those not yet born…those children who we are so keen on having the same experience as we did.
