The Guru Is In
People Versus Places: The Definitive Argument
By David A. Smith
6 min read
Man: Is this the right room for an argument?
Professor Places: I’m weary of this debate: we’ve been arguing it ever since the 1949 National Housing Act.
Doctor People: Yes, let’s settle it once and for all.
Professor Places: Housing is a place. So is a neighborhood. If we’re going to have healthy affordable housing and healthy neighborhoods, we must invest in places.
Dr. People: Places don’t make communities: people make communities. Warehousing people in places creates an anti-community.
Places: You have to redevelop an economically depressed area or it becomes totally empty, and that attracts squatting, overcrowding, squalor and crime.
People: Redevelop? You mean “planned intervention in favor of economically deficit areas,” as Louis Winnick put it in 1966?
Places: How else do places change? Slums are economically rational: normal land-use economics creates them and then it can sustain them for decades.
People: That’s a market failure.
Man: Oh look, this isn’t an argument!
(Pause) Other: Yes it is!
Man: No, it isn’t, it’s just contradiction.
Other: No, it isn’t!
Places: Why is it that, when your economic theories don’t work, you blame it on the market? Government exists to provide countercyclical resources.
People: You mean resources like slum clearance? That gave us Cabrini-Green. HOPE VI, your major place-centric initiative, proved massively expensive and has been zeroed out.
Places: If we don’t stimulate affordable housing, where does it come from then?
People: Give people effective economic choice and let them decide where they want to live.
Places: A housing choice voucher is a key that works only when there’s a door to an affordable apartment, and behind that door a landlord willing to rent it.
People: If these government-incentivized apartments you’ve built are so good, they’ll choose to live there.
Places: Half of all private landlords don’t take vouchers, for practical and non-discriminatory reasons. The ones who do take them are either specialists, who might as well be property-based, or adversely selected, or modern slumlords who exploit the system.
People: Investing government money in places without attacking the underlying causes just adds to the concentration of poverty via isolation.
Places: You may think that giving people vouchers disperses them, but in reality they wind up concentrating in unregulated neighborhoods that Senator Barbara Mikulski called ‘zip codes of pathology.’
People: Concentrated poverty undermines individual attempts to break out of poverty. That’s why we created school busing programs.
Places: Does that reasoning apply equally to school vouchers and charter schools?
Man: An argument isn’t just contradiction. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
Other: No, it isn’t!
Man: Yes, it is!
People: People’s choices are constrained by their economics, and if the built environment inhibits mobility, it’s discrimination. Chicago’s Gautreaux Supreme Court decision held that moving people into income-limited public housing violated their civil rights and ordered ‘remedial action that extends beyond city limits.’
Places: That was 40 years ago.
People: Inclusive Communities, another Supreme Court decision, held essentially the same thing, only five years ago.
Places: On that reasoning, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Lower Ninth Ward should not have been rebuilt.
People: How’s that rebuilding worked out so far?
Places: Often what makes a neighborhood obsolete is the decay of its infrastructure.
People: Or the lack of it in the first place.
Places: New streets, new power systems, rewiring, new water and sewer systems, better public transit—all the things you want lower income people to access—can’t be done piecemeal, and won’t be done by the market.
People: If you build affordable housing only on the wrong side of the tracks, you institutionalize exclusion.
Places: If investing in place is such a bad idea, why do we have a Community Reinvestment Act that practically mandates banks to put capital into economically depressed areas?
People: Choice is fundamental to independence. People move for schools, for jobs, for a better life. Tying their affordability to a single place cripples their choice and their prospects. As Raj Chetty’s work has demonstrated, social mobility brings economic upward mobility.
Places: I’ll see your Chetty and raise you an Urban Institute. Piecemeal development doesn’t provide the necessary diversity of uses to create the Jane Jacobs 24/7/365 urban environment.
People: Now we see the economics inherent in the system! Invest in an area and it starts to rise. Newcomers move in, displacing poverty somewhere else without addressing its root causes.
Places: I’m all for choice, but vouchers are an imperfect and inherently biased choice ticket.
People: The rich always like to keep the poor at arm’s length – which in our era is defined as a 90-minute commute away. Without the economic buying power to rent in better neighborhoods, they will always be marginalized.
Places: Giving people the illusion of choice without its reality is worse than giving them a decent place to live.
Other: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Man: Yes, but it isn’t just saying ‘no it isn’t.’
Other: Yes, it is!
Man: No, it isn’t! Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
Other: Not at all!
People: Zoning is inherently exclusionary, and by reinvesting in historically excluded neighborhoods, you’re enabling it.
Places: There’s no landlord accountability if the voucher holder doesn’t compel it. The power dynamics will always favor the landlord.
People: We tried your benign landlord model with public housing: by the government, for benefit of the people who most needed it. Now we’ve torn most of them down.
Places: If place-basing is so bad, why is Low Income Housing Tax Credit the most popular and durable affordable housing program in American history?
People: Have you looked at per-apartment LIHTC costs lately?
Places: There’s no need for that kind of talk.
People: If place-basing is so good, why the trend to voucher out public housing?
Places: If you want people to move to better neighborhoods, you must have place-based strategies. That’s what Inclusive Cities and affirmatively furthering fair housing are about.
People: Gentrification is bad!
Places: Disinvestment is bad!
[Bell rings.]
Other: That’s it. The time is up.
Man: But I was just getting interested!
[Long wary pause]
Simultaneously: I’m really glad you’ve come around to my point of view.
[Pause]
Simultaneously: We finally agree.
