Surly Urbanism: Jamaal Green on building a pro-housing political alliance
“You’ve got to be willing to do some horse trading.”
by Michael Andersen | July 26, 2017
Maybe being a self-consciously temporary Portlander is what helps Portland State University’s Jamaal Green, known online as @surlyurbanist, keep a usefully independent perspective on local housing politics. Or maybe it’s the torrent of information he takes in most days via Twitter and redistributes in the form of bitingly smart tweetstorms about how development policy can advance social justice.
Either way, one of his recent flurries was especially relevant to this blog. Portland for Everyone is a campaign to convene, among others, two categories of housing affordability advocate: those whose top housing priority is preventing displacement and those whose top housing priority is building enough homes to fix the underlying shortage.
Green has an excellent diagnosis of the ways these two groups sometimes piss each other off, and how they could avoid it.
I met Green over pizza at PSU’s Urban Center plaza to talk about displacement, development and the difference between a good argument and a winning coalition.
I feel like you’re one of relatively few folks who closely follows both of these categories of housing advocates.
We go maybe two or three years now seeing these folks snipe back and forth with each other. The two groups, the so-called “anti-gentrification” folks vs the “YIMBY” folks, they’re really talking about two different policy problems that are related, but at least to me are distinct. That is, anti-displacement policy and housing supply policy. At least in some of the more contentious areas of certain cities, these two goals are at odds.
Where?
The perennial thing that comes up is San Francisco. People always use the Mission as an example. There’s this group of working-class Latino folks who’ve been there for a couple of decades now and they’re fighting against development. The way that’s framed by some of the YIMBY folks is “these folks don’t understand the fundamental forces of the economy that would make housing cheap.”
The argument that advocates for these folks are making is defensive. We can argue about the efficacy — but they’re trying to keep people in their homes.
I think this constant focus on the Bay Area really takes away from a legitimate greater debate about housing affordability and displacement. Because not every city is San Francisco. Not every neighborhood is the Mission. San Francisco is a huge outlier in this stuff.
It is not a myth supply does matter. We have cities where we have an absolute dearth of housing. Portland is one; we need to build more units. But again, those are two different policy questions toward two different ends.
You’ve also been arguing that NIMBY homeowners are a bigger obstacle to housing than NIMBY renters.
An argument I often make is the people who are preventing housing, writ large, are not renters at all. They’re certainly not working class or poor renters. The people who are defending and maintaining the most restrictive forms of zoning are almost entirely homeowners.
The people who are standing up against the infill projects in Portland aren’t tenants. Renters are not the people who are keeping the suburbs, for instance, as almost entirely exclusionary. Those are homeowners.
I live in Irvington, I see people in Sellwood and Eastmoreland — these people are not about building anything. They have a MAX stop dead in the middle of the neighborhood and they continue to fight housing.
I think maybe the reason YIMBY types sometimes get upset about the odd anti-development tenant is that they feel like they should automatically be on the same side. Like, “you’re providing legitimacy to this illegitimate argument.”
Yeah. So much of this is coming out of this acrimony in San Francisco. I don’t want to overstate the animosity here. It could just be a Bay Area thing — the region that has arguably the worst housing crisis in the country, or the worst middle-class housing crisis in the country.
If you look at a housing crisis, we could talk about places like Detroit or Jackson, Miss., or whatever, where the problem is not supply, the problem is that you have a shitload of poor people who cannot afford rent. That’s a different problem altogether.
You’ve also made the interesting point that YIMBYs may have already been more successful than they realize.
In many ways, the YIMBY argument is winning out in many cities. For these larger cities on the West Coast, everyone agrees that housing supply is an issue. In that sense, the YIMBYs have won. The sense that there’s this massive group of tenants that’s, like, swamping the claims of the YIMBYs is not what’s happening.
What advice do you have for YIMBY types who want to be better allies with anti-displacement folks?
My perennial complaint is this fall back to a supply-and-demand Econ 101 argument, which a lot of times is spouted in the most condescending manner. And there are some folks who are just as hardcore on the other side, who just don’t believe housing supply is an issue. I don’t agree with those people. It is an issue — overly restrictive zoning is a real thing.
To a certain extent, yes, build more units. You build enough units, then eventually, yes, that price is going to come down. If the primary obstacle is zoning, liberalize that zoning. I think that’s a relatively uncontroversial thing to say.
But when you have people who are trying to stay in their units — not be displaced from their neighborhoods — yelling about housing supply doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t help them. We might have a year lag as units start to come into line. And, again, that doesn’t necessarily help to keep you in your own house.
So what do you think an effective pro-housing argument to tenants might sound like?
I think you just have to sit down and make the medium to long term argument and say “Hey, this is the issue now. It’s certainly going to get worse. People are moving to this city, they’re not going to stop moving to this city, and they’re going to be able to outbid you.” [If there’s a housing shortage,] even with rent control, if a person loses that unit, it’s not like they’re going to find an equivalent unit.
In Seattle, HALA [the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda] has been credited across the country for doing something that a lot of cities across the country have not been able to do, which is get a lot of really big upzones — upzones in areas where you would never tread if you were a planner or a city politician, which is the middle or upper middle class areas of your city.
The folks at [the pro-HALA] Sightline [Institute] are like, “Yeah, we had to get the tenants on our side.” That second half of that is always forgotten. There was a huge amount of back and forth with the tenants.
It is not a natural allyship between homeowners and tenants. But if you do want those folks on your side, you’ve got to be willing to make the effort. And you’ve got to be willing to sell. You’ve got to be willing to do some horse trading.
I think the question [to higher-income tenants] becomes, Do you like where you live? Would you like to be able to stay there? And do you really think that a person should be kicked out of their home regardless of whether they own it or not? Regardless of whether they cannot pay?
So you’re sort of saying, free your mind from this property rights assumption. Or something like that.
Yeah, yeah. I come from the equity planning school. I try to represent those folks who generally have the least amount of choice. That’s my particular political bent; I try to be honest about that and transparent. If you don’t fall on that, that’s fine.
A lot of this stuff is like, I’m choosing to represent the people who can’t move here. I’m like, fine, those people can also use an advocate. But these people here, in this particular area, aren’t necessarily those people’s enemies. Maybe they’re not natural allies, but they’re not enemies. And maybe there’s a way to draw them into a coalition.
It’s not my main area of research, you know. I’m just a dude on Twitter.
Green is a doctoral candidate in urban studies and planning at Portland State University who specializes in land use and economic development. He is also a dude on Twitter.
Qs & As edited.
Portland for Everyone supports abundant, diverse, affordable housing. This is a reported blog about how to get more of those things. You can follow it on Twitter and Facebook, or get new posts by email a few times a month.
