Diseases, even pandemics, have historically been the dark underside of the vitality of great cities. The very term quarantine, based on the Italian words for “40 days,” originated in 14th-century Venice, when what was then the world’s greatest trading empire and wealthiest city tried to stem the import of the Black Plague by forcing visiting ships to wait that long before passengers could disembark. The cruise ships of their day sat in port, as do their contemporary equivalents.
The same concern about disease and urban density has, for more than a century, cast a long shadow over American housing policy. There is every reason to believe it will do so again as we deal with the long wake of COVID-19. Density has historically been a key way to provide inexpensive housing on a large scale. But as the plague-like concentration of COVID-19 amid the apartments and crowded subways of New York City reminds us, density can be a threat to public health.
Just as the fruitless search for a tuberculosis “climate cure” led to the settling of Los Angeles and Denver, so might we see a retreat from the “densification” movement led by advocates of high-rise urban living and transit-oriented development. Such development portended the growth of more New York-style petri dishes. Yet we will still need to find ways to accommodate those of modest means and to make it possible for them to get to work. There are ways to do this, but they’ll require persuading municipalities to rethink their approach to building regulation.
It is hard to exaggerate the role of disease and the fear of it in driving American housing policy since the 1890s. The housing reformers of that era — chief among them Jacob Riis, with his gripping 1890 photojournalistic account of New York’s Lower East Side, How the Other Half Lives — portrayed the slums not just as crowded and ill-lit, but as hotbeds of disease. “Poverty and penury are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease,” wrote Riis, calling attention to the concentrations of typhus, smallpox, and “consumption” to be found in and around the tenements of Five Points and Mulberry Bend. By 1900, the housing reformer Lawrence Veiller, who would go on to become the leading advocate of municipal zoning to separate residential from industrial use and to ensure housing standards, would sponsor an exhibit replete with maps in which specific clusters of TB spread through coughing amid crowds.
So it was that dense urban life came to be associated with disease, an association now being revived anew. One can, in fact, understand the arc of housing patterns and policy that played out over the 20th century as a flight from density, in part for just that reason. This became one of the justifications for the wholesale clearance of so-called slums that were actually thriving, working-class communities, such as Detroit’s Black Bottom and Boston’s West End. But its main antidote, beginning in the 1920s, was zoning. Veiller, as the leader of the National Housing Association, was the link between tenement housing reform and the adoption of density-limiting zoning across the country.
The result was suburbanization — first inner-ring developments with small, multifamily structures and then, after World War II, the commuter suburb of single-family homes. Even these became, over time, less and less dense, as the small homes of first-generation suburbs such as Levittown, New York, were followed by the multiacre lots of exurbia. As the informative blog Old Urbanist notes, Levittown’s small homes (they were just 800 square feet) were close enough together that 7,500 people lived in 1 square mile. By contrast, in the town of Easton, Connecticut, 2- and 3-acre zoning makes for a population “density” of just 260 per square mile.
Americans, in other words, have long been on a flight from population density.
There had, however, lately been signs of change prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Most notable has been California’s pro-density YIMBY (“yes in my backyard,” a response to the all-too-common “not in my backyard” sentiment) movement, led by Bay Area state Sen. Scott Wiener. It advocates selective state preemption of local, low-density zoning so as to permit the construction of mid-rise apartment buildings along new transit lines, such as those already operating in San Jose, where housing prices are among the highest in the country. The underlying logic is undeniable: More residential units per acre means lower housing costs and could offer a way for emigrants from economically struggling parts of the country to move to booming Silicon Valley. The historic association of density with disease had seemed to be forgotten in our era of antibiotics and clean drinking water.
But Weiner’s legislation to relax zoning and make possible “transit-oriented development” had failed to pass the California legislature three times, even before the COVID-19 outbreak. The virus seems sure to finish it off. Crowding will again be associated with disease — doubly so because YIMBY-ites and environmentalists are wedded to moving Americans to the trolleys and buses they will now, more than ever, want to avoid. Neither will this association be obviously misguided, especially because there is no reason to believe that there will not be deadly successors to the novel coronavirus, bringing with them new plagues.
So, what’s next for housing policy and patterns, post-COVID? One should never bet against stagnation, of course. The California “model” could persist: low rates of new construction, long commutes for those who can only find inexpensive housing far from centers of employment.
But it’s not hard to imagine other possibilities. If the COVID-19 outbreak has reinforced any trend, it is the further shift toward working from home for those who can. If even a portion of Google and Facebook employees leave Silicon Valley for the Columbia Valley in Washington state, for example — or any place in what is currently flyover country — and work remotely, the landscapers and baristas on whom they rely will have reason to live there as well. Of course, those lesser-paid employees will need affordable places to live, and some will still need to get to company headquarters. This could lead to profound changes.
Cities experiencing decline but that have solid, inexpensive housing stock, good infrastructure, and amenities — think Buffalo, Cleveland, or certainly Chicago and Milwaukee — could be just as good work-from-home sites as Brooklyn or the Bay Area, both wildly overpriced at present. Any trend that lessens pressure on the cities that have been disproportionately thriving will matter greatly.
What follows further is less a prediction than a hope. We could, or should, see what might be called dispersed densification: new growth in what was once called “the poor side of town” or “the other side of the tracks.” Even in areas of continued high housing demand, there is room, zoning permitting, for density that takes a form other than high-rise, one-bedroom buildings built along train tracks. Historically, healthy cities have offered a range of housing types. Two- or three-family homes, a small block of row homes or bungalows, offer lower-income families a chance to become property owners and build neighborhoods rather than getting just the “affordable, set-aside” units in New York apartment buildings. These homes would be as useful for lower-paid tech employees looking to raise a family and new immigrants working their way up. Of course, this will require modest zoning relaxation in some places that requires persuading small-town and city planning boards that it’s in their own interests to permit the construction of housing where teachers, police, firefighters, nurses, EMTs, and tradesmen can afford to live.
This is a vision of new and restored middle-class and working-class neighborhoods — not reservations for the very poor (such as public housing). Yes, these are neighborhoods that will be somewhat denser than those filled out with single-family homes, but these will still be far less dense than clusters of apartment buildings, where, today, residents must worry about the virus germs lurking on elevator buttons. And, as Richard Florida has noted in City Lab, poor, dense places may always be at greater public health risk than wealthy ones, if only because the latter can get food delivered during lockdowns. (Although the New York neighborhoods where COVID-19 fatalities are highest, such as the Bronx, are also the places where underlying health conditions such as diabetes are also clustered.)
Such new residential patterns, both in already-wealthy cities and in cities that may see an influx of work-at-home newcomers, will undermine the case for costly new transit systems, which rely on super-density to make financial sense. That does not, however, mean that we will stick with single-passenger auto commuting. One can imagine that new transportation developments, such as the small, Uber-like, on-demand buses that are supplanting failing public bus systems in some places, will help employees get to jobs both near and far.
Put another way, if, as seems likely, higher-income employees simply take advantage of working remotely to fan out more broadly across the country, the housing market and the nature of cities will change dramatically. The peaks in places of high demand will fall. Demand may be spread out, making housing easier to afford. New construction of less-dense housing types may find a place in today’s highest-cost cities, and renovation may take off elsewhere.
Some will argue that this will undermine the intellectual and commercial innovation that has historically sprouted from the close contacts of cities. The popularity of Zoom meetings and flexible hours suggests otherwise.
Without a doubt, though, the coronavirus will have implications for where Americans want to live and work. The status quo ante is unlikely to return.
This piece originally appeared at Washington Examiner
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Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he directs the Tocqueville Project, and author of the new book, Who Killed Civil Society?
This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner