Tag: Social Justice

Housing & The Nuclear Family

November 4, 2020 / odrozd

By: Elijah Gullett

Introduction

Despite its noble origins, zoning in the United States has often acted as a means of exclusion. Instead of implementing regulations to protect the health and safety of community members, zoning has been used by local homeowners and NIMBY groups to enforce a particular vision of who belongs in society. This has taken form, and continues to appear to this day, in the form of class and racial exclusion under the guise of protecting “property values”. This exclusion is only furthered by “single-family” zoning, which enforces a normative view of what counts as “family” and, in practice, excludes the millions of Americans who live in multigenerational households, communes, chosen family kinship groups, and foster families.

Visions of white suburbia made of small nuclear families are not, and have never been, the reality of America. Since America’s inception, as everywhere else in the world, people have formed family groups in as many ways as there are families. And, despite the increasingly restrictive family zoning laws of the late 20th century, this has only become increasingly true. America’s demographics are rapidly changing, and with those changes come fundamental shifts in what it means to be a “family”.

The Shifting American Family

The current American family structure looks nothing like the nuclear families of 20th advertisements. Currently, only 46% of children are living in this “traditional” nuclear family, defined as living with two, married parents in their first marriage (Pew Research, 2015). As the population ages, more people will seek to live with other retirees or grand/children. Immigrant families often continue to live multigenerational, and currently 20% of Americans live in multigenerational households, the highest it has been since 1950 (Pew Research, 2018). Furthermore, as housing prices continue to rise, people are living with roommates for longer and longer.

Another often less discussed shift in American families is the rise of LGBTQ+ acceptance. Many LGBTQ+ families do not look all that different from their heterosexual counterparts, and anti-discrimination policies can protect their ability to access housing. However, LGBTQ+ people often find solace and safety in chosen families, made up of unrelated people who choose to build their lives together. These chosen families may be denied access to housing where laws restrict the ability of more than 2 or 3 adults to live in a household together. Prohibitive zoning policies restrict the large, chosen family many queer people choose to have.

Responding to These Shifts

These shifts in family structure will require an overhaul of America’s restrictive zoning laws. Much ink has been spilled on how single-family zoning restricts housing supply, increases housing costs, enforces class and racial segregation, and contributes to environmentally disastrous urban sprawl – all of which is true. But beyond these issues, single-family zoning is a simple question of liberty – the liberty to form family bonds that make the most sense to the individuals within them.

Local governments can begin the process of liberalizing their housing restrictions by upzoning single-family housing zones. This upzoning process does not have to be all at once, nor does it entail that suburban neighborhoods will be overrun with apartment complexes. Even small changes, such as permitting duplexes and triplexes, allowing for additional dwelling units (ADUs), and medium density “cottage clusters”, would all have massive benefits for nontraditional families and communities.

Conclusion

Single-family zoning is not the only problem facing non-nuclear families. HOAs, realtors, landlords, and community members all contribute to both legal and social restrictions on where non-nuclear families are allowed to live. In order to allow for liberty and justice for non-nuclear families all of these problems will have to be addressed, but ending the reign of single-family zoning is the systematic place to start.

As America continues to shift and our understanding of family expands, we must ensure that our housing and zoning policies are accommodating for the full range of human family structures and contributing to an environment of inclusion.

Works Cited

The American family today. (2015, December 17). Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/

D’Vera Cohn, & Passel, J. S. (2018, April 5). A record 64 million Americans live in multigenerational households. Pew Research Center; Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/05/a-record-64-million-americans-live-in-multigenerational-households/

Featured image courtesy of Michael Tuszynski from Pexels

Featured Image: Suburban Zoning. Photo Credit: Michael Tuszynski from Pexels

Elijah Gullett is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Public Policy with minors in Urban Studies and Environmental Justice. His academic interests include fair and affordable housing, sustainable development, and LGBTQ+ urban life.

Edited by William Anderson

One Year Later: Reflections on the Habitat III Conference

November 14, 2017 / odrozd

Every 20 years since 1976, the United Nations has convened an international “Habitat” conference to develop a unified global vision for the future of urban development. These conferences provide opportunities for policymakers, practitioners, and civic leaders to come together to exchange knowledge and best practices to help inform more effective urban development. And like other counterpart UN conferences, they have invited non-technical actors the opportunity to interface with a global institution that at times seems bureaucratic, inanimate, and cumbersome.

Photo Credit: Adam Hasan, Ezra Rawitsch, and Aisling Henihan

In October 2016, I attended the Habitat III Conference in Quito, Ecuador. Like its preceding Habitat I (Vancouver 1976) and Habitat II (Istanbul 1996) conferences, it concluded with the adoption of a policy document, the “New Urban Agenda,” intended to set the direction for urban development priorities until Habitat IV in 2036. Building on the work of its predecessor document, commonly referred to as the “Istanbul Declaration,” it is the actualization of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11, “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.” The New Urban Agenda (NUA) sets priorities, guidance, and desired outcomes for achieving this goal through a nonbinding, multilateral international agreement. In the months leading up to Habitat III, UN-Habitat convened a series of thematically structured meetings that brought together experts, grassroots activists, and practitioners in cities around the world to discuss urban challenges ranging from security of land tenure to water and sanitation issues. Many of the recommendations from these meetings were ultimately included in the final draft of the NUA.

Photo Credit: Adam Hasan, Ezra Rawitsch, and Aisling Henihan

The New Urban Agenda has been described by its detractors as both vague and ineffectual, and by its proponents as ambitious and forward thinking. Despite the NUA’s criticisms, I found resonance with a number of key themes and stories from the Habitat III Conference and its attendees.

Approaching urban planning and related fields through a rights-based approach. A key element of the New Urban Agenda was its inclusion of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” as its guiding development philosophy. At times nebulous, the right to the city is a right to human dignity, access, inclusion, and participatory democracy. It means having the opportunity to build the communities we want to live in – regardless of background or geography – and producing spaces and institutions that allow us all to do that. For an illustration of a rights-based approach, the Urban Law Lab, a project of Thomas Coggin at Fordham University Law School, uses narrative storytelling to demonstrate the links between human rights and urbanism.

Technical information must be shared across related disciplines and fields to allow for greater collaboration between practitioners, academics, and other stakeholder groups. We can build better communities, institutions, and cities when diverse stakeholder groups are incorporated in planning processes. Initiatives like the Local Pathways Fellowship, sponsored by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, are working to empower cohorts of young people to take an active role in shaping their cities by providing tangible resources and a global network for collaboration. The program connects a cohort of discipline-diverse youth to technical experts in a variety of fields to spread knowledge and encourage collaboration on implementing the New Urban Agenda in cities around the world.

Photo Credit: Adam Hasan, Ezra Rawitsch, and Aisling Henihan

Expanding the conversation to involve more stakeholder groups requires new methods of engagement – and new ways of thinking. Relying on conventional forms of media to reach broader non-technical audiences is insufficient. Narrative nonfiction storytelling and works of art can also be incorporated as instruments to reframe our thinking about cities. They are a great reminder of the diverse ways individuals shape the city through the production of social and cultural urban space. In Kinshasa, D.R.C., which is commonly regarded internationally as dysfunctional, seeing the city through the eyes of a fashion designer opens the door to a lesser-known identity as a design capital of Africa. Using creative, mixed media approaches helps broaden the perspective of practitioners and engage a wider swath of the public.

Think local! Localizing solutions to big picture challenges is always relevant for planners. But outside the context of best practices, thinking local means empowering citizens and communities to co-produce data and solutions alongside practitioners. Slum Dwellers’ International, a global network of grassroots informal settlement dwellers, has profiled over 7,000 of their own communities in almost 225 cities worldwide through their “Know Your City” campaign. Identifying community needs and assets using an adaptable, localized, and co-produced action research method is empowering slum dwellers with powerful tools to advocate for themselves.

Photo Credit: Adam Hasan, Ezra Rawitsch, and Aisling Henihan

A year after Habitat III, I remain encouraged and empowered by the diverse stories I heard from leaders and urban dwellers around the world. But I came to realize by the end of the conference that the great urban challenges of our time will be solved as much with quotidian solutions as with extraordinary ones. As dense as UN policy documents can sometimes seem, implementing the New Urban Agenda simply means working to make our communities more inclusive and sustainable for ourselves and our neighbors. As a student, the experience of attending Habitat III continues to challenge me to think creatively about our world’s urban future, and the role we all have to play in shaping it.

About the author: Adam Hasan is an undergraduate senior at UNC.

After the Flood, the Decision to Rebuild or Leave Permanently

October 19, 2016 / odrozd

As I write this, residents from flooded neighborhoods in eastern North Carolina are sitting in crowded high school gyms, staying at area motels, and bunked with family and friends. While Hurricane Matthew threw high winds and storm surge at coastal communities, devastating flooding came to inland communities. Rivers bulged over their banks, entering homes and covering roads in a growing mass of moving water.

When the floodwaters recede, each household will face a difficult decision: tear down the soaked drywall and rebuild the home, perhaps higher than before, or sell the property and move on. After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, some entire communities faced this decision.

Hurricane Matthew flooded many low-lying communities. Photo credit: Ryan Johnson/Creative Commons

For the past few months, I have been researching two African-American communities where different decisions — to stay or to go — were made by or for an entire community. In Kinston, the town pursued a buyout program in which 97% of residents in a floodprone African-American neighborhood known as Lincoln City sold their property to the city and moved. In Princeville, the nation’s first town chartered by blacks, the town decided to rebuild a levy instead of accept buyouts.

Last week in Kinston, an evacuation map highlighted the buildings with evacuation orders in red. It also shows a tightly knit tangle of streets in the evacuation zone where there are no homes. This area is Lincoln City, a former neighborhood of 2,000 residents, where floodwaters after Matthew rose several feet deep. Seventeen years ago, almost all the homeowners in this neighborhood were bought out with funds from the State and FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP). After Floyd, the State of North Carolina committed to move as many people as possible out of flood zones, offering to pay HMGP’s local match requirement on behalf of towns and counties. In Kinston, these property acquisitions removed over 700 households in Lincoln City, protecting them from repeat catastrophic loss. (However, buyout participants are not prohibited from moving into a floodplain elsewhere.)

It is clear that buyouts permanently reduce hazard exposure, but I was interested in how participants viewed the long-term impact of buyouts on their own economic well-being. For Lincoln City families that owned properties, buyouts were an individual opportunity. Most did not hold flood insurance, and the buyout provided pre-flood equity on their homes. Some moved to higher income areas of Kinston, others moved to more rural parts of the county, and a few left for places with more jobs. “It’s the best deal that ever happened to them in their lives probably,” one community leader told me, a theme reiterated by others in my interviews.

They didn’t have nowhere to go, didn’t have anything to start with…

Still, I learned that buyouts also had an intangible cost for the community. The social network that had provided rides to work and shared parenting responsibilities disintegrated. Lincoln City had been a point of working-class stability for the eastern part of Kinston, where many live in poverty. One resident explained to me that poorer families who had rented in Lincoln City had nowhere to go but into a high-poverty neighborhood. “That’s why that side of Kinston is still a rough side of Kinston. They didn’t have nowhere to go, didn’t have anything to start with.” A survey from the 2000s documented that some participants felt that the buyouts were not voluntary. None of the residents that I interviewed mentioned the risk of future flooding in Lincoln City. Even officials stressed that the chance of Floyd-level flooding occurring in their lifetime was just that — a chance. But I’m sure that Hurricane Matthew has changed many people’s perspectives on the value of buyouts for risk reduction.

When floodwaters recede, some households may choose to leave, whether or not they are offered compensation for their homes. Photo credit: Ryan Johnson / Creative Commons

In the tiny town of Princeville, in Edgecombe County, residents also evacuated last week. After devastating flooding from Hurricane Floyd, Princeville, like Kinston, was given the option to pursue a buyout program. The town also had an alternative to rebuild in place under the protection of a new dyke. In a close city council vote, the town decided to rebuild. Sadly, while the new dyke held last week, the floodwater found a back way into Princeville, and the town is once again underwater.

Princeville was founded by freed slaves in 1865. “We got too much history to turn our backs,” one resident told me. In Princeville, interviewees emphasized honoring their history of self-determination and resilience against racial violence and floodwater alike. To one community leader, it seemed unfair that Princeville, of all floodprone places, should disappear because of its vulnerability. “Think of New Orleans, think of the beaches. We’re just like them.” Even Princeville residents and local leaders who had advocated in favor of buyouts also did not view flood risk reduction as a primary motive. For them, buyouts offered economic opportunity.

Buyout programs typically work in low-income communities like Princeville and Lincoln City for a few reasons. For one, there are upper limits to the amount the government will spend to buy your property. But it’s probably more impactful that the relative value or benefit of moving is higher in a poor neighborhood than it is in other places, like higher-income coastal flood zones. No coastal homeowners took a buyout after Floyd. Aside from home values and neighborhood conditions, African-Americans are more likely to live in flood zones, in no small part because of housing discrimination throughout the twentieth century into today. In fact, Princeville was built on floodprone swampy land because it was not wanted by whites.

None of this is a problem if buyouts are all benefit without side effects. For most individual participants, this might be true. But because there is some collective loss in historical value, social capital, or neighborhood stability, it’s more complicated.

There are no easy answers for floodprone communities of any racial or economic background. Future buyout programs can learn from the experiences of places like Lincoln City to support nearby neighborhoods in maintaining community social functions like carpooling and shared childcare.

There are no easy answers for floodprone communities of any economic or racial background. Photo credit: Ryan Johnson / Creative Commons

The prickly parts of buyout decision-making are more fundamental, though. The worth of risk reduction or economic opportunity or a historic location is deeply subjective. The practices used to make decisions about buyouts, like cost-benefit analysis or majority-rules democracy, are not always equipped to guide value-driven decisions that depend on collective action. Over the next several weeks, local governments will decide how to proceed with recovery, and the state will decide how to support them. For now, families are simply waiting to get back into their homes and salvage what they can.

About the author: Amanda Martin, AICP, is a PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill. Originally from Boston, she has worked in policy and planning in Washington, D.C., northern Nevada, New Orleans, and Rhode Island. Amanda’s doctoral research explores how regions or neighborhoods that receive major private or public investment can share that prosperity with low-income communities and communities of color. Her dissertation will answer this question in the context of coastal communities’ recovery from major storms. Amanda holds degrees from Harvard and MIT, and you can follow her tweets on these topics @bornonland

Selections from La Ciudad Actual

April 8, 2016 / odrozd

In 2014 and 2015 I spent nearly a year in Mexico City as a Fulbright National Geographic Fellow, exploring the city’s feathered edges. While the anchor of Mexico’s capital, the Distrito Federal (or Federal District) has around nine million residents, the larger metropolitan zone of the Valley of Mexico is home to more than twenty one million people. The sixty municipalities surrounding the DF form an archipelago of separately planned and governed islands; several hold more than half a million people. And while DF is considered (both by tourists and many of its residents) a unique blend of pre-Columbian ruins, colonial-era palacios, handsome European-inspired avenues and apartment buildings, it’s toward the edges of the metro area that the western hemisphere’s largest city has feverishly been building a twenty-first century megalopolis.

Undeveloped land in sale in Tecámac, Estado de México. 34 km north of the city center.

This is a selection from that project, to be published online in 2016, entitled La Ciudad Actual—or the Contemporary City. Since 1940 the population of the valley has septupled, Corbusier-inspired “towers in the park,” housing many thousands sprouted. Hilly nature reserves and vast lakes were replaced by dense, (illegally) planned and designed informal districts. Millions of subsidized single family home developments have been constructed on cheap, distant lands, and shiny office parks have followed freeways through the canyons and ridges. In a suburban fit inspired by Mexico’s neighbor to the north and amplified by a destructive earthquake in 1985, the city has turned itself inside out. Broadly speaking, the rich flocked to gated communities and guarded towers to the west, the growing middle class secured loans from the government to buy small, aspirational homes to the north, and the poor built their homes themselves to the east and anywhere else they were able. Meanwhile, the Distrito Federal has yet to return to its 1980 peak population.

La Mancha, an informal neighborhood in a ravine in Naucalpan, Eastado de México. 14 km west of the city center.

A transect of Mexico City’s fringes captures the phenomenal diversity apparent in housing and development, and begins to reveal the commonalities inherent in all of the seemingly divergent typologies. Across economic, social, and geographic boundaries, residents confront water shortages, stupefying immobility, terrible insecurity and balkanized, wrong-headed, and often corrupt development policy, to name only a handful of the challenges. To me, the city’s built environment speaks to the breakdown of any planner’s conception of a binary between formal and informal urbanism, an ever-present adaptation to fluid (and trying) urban conditions, and a coming era of urban growth throughout the burgeoning parts of the world that will be evolving, unfamiliar, and yet inextricably suburban.

The Centro Urbano Presidente Aleman, a large housing project constructed in 1950 on empty, then-distant land within DF, 8km south of the city center.

Government sponsored homes in a development called Galaxia, Cuautitlán, Estado de México. 28 km north of the city center.

A row of government sponsored homs abuts open farmland in Cuautitlán, Estado de México. 28 km north of the city center.

People rise for commutes, often four hours daily, in Las Américas, a government sponsored housing development in Ecaptepec, Estado de México. 21 km north of the city center.

An ad for Los Héroes, a government sponsored housing development, “your best option,” in Ecatepec, Estado de México. 22 km north of the city center.

Bosque Real, a luxury golf-oriented housing development in Naucalpan, Estado de México. 15 km west of the city center

Feature Image: A shack in front of luxury condos and offices in Santa Fe, Estado de México, the city’s largest office district. 17km west of the city center.

Los Angeles native Michael Waldrep is a documentary filmmaker, multimedia artist, and researcher focused on cities. He holds degrees in Film Studies and City Planning from UC Berkeley and MIT, respectively. He has worked as a filmmaker in the Bay Area and New York and, in 2014, was one of five inaugural Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows, based in Mexico City, where he used writing, video, and photography to research the history and future possibilities of planning and architecture on that city’s edges. He now works with the interdisciplinary design group Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zürich.

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