Build Neighborhoods, Not Housing

We all have that story to tell about home: moving out of our parent’s house, our first apartment, and the memories and the mortgage-formed with our first house. Our parents have their stories, too: the joy of welcoming us back (or God forbid moving back in), the grandchildren, or the need for a smaller place that is easier to get around and maintain. We make friends and forge connections with each other and our neighborhoods along the way. If we are fortunate, we will capture the wealth our homes help create as we sell to the next generation that will create its own memories. 

Today, there is a lot of national discussion about the housing crisis. It is also being discussed locally on both sides of the river. The Northern Kentucky Area Development District (NKADD) recently released its report and the topic was covered last spring at the Chamber’s ‘Eggs n Issues.’ Most analysis and discussion is focused on the symptoms over root causes. As such, it is generally less focused on diagnosis or implementable solutions. This has serious implications for our economy, our builders, and most importantly, our residents. 

The common reasons listed for this housing crisis usually include one or more of the following: high interest rates, uncertainty around broker roles, inflation’s effect on materials, insufficient purchasing power, and zoning constraints. Again, these are largely just transactional symptoms of a more structural set of problems that are uniquely of our own making. In a departure from a more time-honored past, the last few decades have been set on housing instead of homes, developments instead of neighborhoods, highways instead of streets, and ignoring changes to demographics that require, but are not offered, a broader range of living options. 

All of this has led to building density without livability, infrastructure costs that exceed what can be carried by each housing unit, and unit sizes that are oversized and under-amenitized for smaller yet more multi-generational demand. When an empty nested couple doesn’t have a smaller unit to move into, a move-up household has fewer options. When younger folks do not have an affordable apartment close to amenities and jobs or if a young couple cannot afford a small starter home our kids tend to leave for regions that have more of those options. Employers are following them there. When these things happen, our whole region suffers even if we do not have kids or are not facing our own personal housing crisis. 

It is more useful to think of our current predicament as a neighborhood crisis, not a housing one. When we build new neighborhoods and rebuild old ones, we are inherently solving for housing in all its forms. Simply building housing only worsens the underlying issues. How we do this is rooted in a leaner and more economical approach to building places. 

We must hold the reinvestment in our current neighborhoods and the growth of new ones as one interrelated enterprise that follows the same principles of neighborhood building that have been around for centuries. Both our master-planned community developers and smaller, more incremental mom-and-pop builders need our support. Rather than just one or two types of units, we need to allow for a much broader array of housing types and sites. This mix of types must be located near an equally abundant mix of amenities, services, jobs, and schools. Their arrangement should be one where the car is not the only enjoyable or efficient way to accomplish daily trips as every dollar spent on transportation is one less that can be spent on a home. We need to honor homeowner rights around renting a place to a kid or elderly parent, working from home, or inviting a short-term guest to lodge. We need to build and maintain a much leaner and safer infrastructure that not only fits the capacity of our public budget but does not place an outsized infrastructure burden on the cost of building or maintaining an individual home.

Winston Churchill famously stated, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." That should mean something very different in war than in our current predicament. While we do have a crisis on our hands, that is no cause to create a lot of waste. Because building neighborhoods takes a long time and they tend to be around for a while, a typical crisis response for Cities means building too much of the same thing at the same time in the same location, which ultimately exacerbates the current crisis while needlessly creating a new problem for the next generation. Instead, we need a nimble, principled approach to neighborhood building that can sustainably rise up to the challenge. If we do that then we will have gone much further than solving a housing crisis, we will have built stronger neighborhoods to call home.