Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More

When I first came to the town of Boca Grande in southwest Florida (where I am now spending a week with my family), it consisted of a drugstore, a grocery, and a big antebellum hotel. In the last forty years the housing stock on the island has completely changed. There are condos galore, club communities, and houses lining the once empty beach. There are benefits: the restaurants are more numerous, the food is better, the old railroad tracks have been replaced by a bike path. But the house my grandmother rented for so many years, right on the beach, is now worth 6 or 8 million dollars. She was offered the house for $400,000 or so in the late 1970s. She didn’t want it. No one who works on the island as a shrimper or a fishing boat captain can afford to live here anymore. They commute from the mainland. Like New York, or the Hamptons, there is no place here anymore for middle class people.

Last week I attended a briefing at City Hall given by Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen about housing in New York City. Many of those in attendance felt, as I did, that much though the city may continue to need low income housing, middle income housing matters even more. But somehow middle income housing seems to fall into a bureaucratic no-man’s-land in many of the places where it is needed. The government subsidies are not always available, the 80/20 rule requiring 20% subsidized housing in new development projects does not provide an adequate number of units even when that 20% is designated for middle income purposes, and middle class neighborhoods are increasingly subject to the forces of gentrification. The mayor is a believer in increasing vertical density in many parts of the city as a way of generating additional units, which is a good plan but not an adequate solution.  And storm proofing the middle income neighborhoods like the Rockaways and Breezy Point which have been rebuilt after Sandy remains a critical component of any longer term housing strategy.

But the big question remains: what is a longer term plan for the economic viability of communities as diverse as Boca Grande or East Hampton or New York? As property values rise, regardless of whether that rise is due to employment opportunities, physical beauty, or convenience, entire sectors of the population become priced out of neighborhoods in which their skills are still very much in demand. Can the police or firefighters possibly feel the same commitment to the communities they serve when they live two hours away? Half of my office employees commute for more than an hour each way to get to work; how long before it is a two hour commute or more? White collar workers may be increasingly able to work remotely at least some of the time, but plumbers and electricians cannot work by computer any more than can members of the fire and police departments.

As a society we are still dealing with the disastrous consequences of the low income high rises of the “urban renewal” years. That solution exacerbated rather than ameliorated the problem of urban poverty. Today, with housing in communities all across the country moving out of the range of most working Americans, we need new solutions. Great urban planning, at every level, requires visionary thinking. Let’s hope it is out there.