Inclusionary Housing: Some Doubts
by Mike Pyatok

Designer/Builder Magazine
August 2000

As an architect I have had an opportunity to work with many nonprofit corporations, some community-based, some working citywide, some regional in scale. At last count, the number of affordable units I have designed was somewhere around 8,000. And as I assembled the book Good Neighbors, I had a chance to touch base with hundreds of other affordable housing projects nationwide that had been executed by nonprofits, for-profits, and public housing authorities. Obviously, there are many strategies for achieving results and each has its place. But I want to make it clear why "inclusionary housing," while it has a place in some circumstances, is harmful in others.

It arose as a strategy in suburban communities and small towns where there has been a long history of de facto segregation by class and race, and where there was no network of nonprofit affordable housing producers, except for maybe a local housing authority. Forcing private developers to do it seemed like a good way to get communities to "bear their fair share," since they were the only game in town. But when applied to communities were there is a long tradition of racially and culturally cohesive lower income neighborhoods with their own community-based development corporation, it can be very inappropriate. Let me explain through a series of actual case studies, which are just a sample of many more I could enumerate.

1. In a predominantly white upper-middle-class town in southern California, a Latino neighborhood, with help of a attorney, sued the city for not producing its fair share of affordable housing. The city offered inclusionary housing as one idea. But the Latino community said absolutely not: a) they wanted their people to live together in a cohesive community in which they can maintain their cultural tradition; b) they wanted the political clout in town that they could have by remaining geographically cohesive; c) they wanted to form their own development corporation and develop their own housing themselves so they could build their own economic capacity and development savvy. In short, they wanted to determine their own destinies. None of this was possible if private developers did it all for them. In the end they would be a 20 percent minority presence in someone else’s culture and economy. Within less than three years after getting the money from the city and hiring a consultant and myself, they had a mixed-use housing development with almost 100 units. Since then they have gone on to produce hundreds more affordable units, a teen recreation center, child care, etc. All of this world would have been subverted and never would have happened had they been coopted with the inclusionary model.

2. In a town in western Washington, four different language groups of southeast Asian immigrants were organized by a nonprofit corporation to get affordable housing to meet their needs. They were offered an inclusionary opportunity within a suburban subdivision and they agreed on one condition: they would co-exist within the predominantly white suburb only if their housing were developed exclusively by a nonprofit organization that serves Asian immigrant needs and not by the developer of the rest of the subdivision. They wanted this for several reasons: a) the codes, covenants, and restrictions that accompanied the larger white middle-class subdivision disallowed many behaviors that typify the cultures of the four language groups- no exposed laundry drying in the sun, no hanging food stuffs from porches to dry in the sun, no large unkempt community vegetable gardens in public view, no religious rituals in open public spaces, no combining of houses for large family clans; c) they wanted the architectural character to reflect their cultural tradition, not at all like the typical suburban subdivision that surrounded them; c) they wanted their nonprofit to gain the expertise in developing this type of housing. They now have a fifty-three-unit development with a 6,000-square-foot vegetable garden, front and back porches designed to allow for hanging clothes and food, a pig-roasting area, etc. The housing is designed so that these activities do not face the surrounding white suburb, and the surrounding community exerted control only over the colors of the buildings.

3. In a city in Washington, a group of African-American, either recent or descendant from West African immigrants of several nationalities, wants affordable housing for families like themselves in the Pacific Northwest. These are very large families of eight to twelve people, with proud cultural and religious tradition, and no developers are providing them with what they need, either in price, size, or freedom from regulation controlling their behavior. They have said that inclusionary housing is simply out of the question for them: they want to maintain their traditions and build their economic strength as a minority within the larger community, but not as unequal minorities living in someone else’s housing, passive residents under house rules made by others. They want to run their own home-based industries, which are messy, and no condo or homeowners’ association or developer-owned rental development will ever allow such enterprises to flower on site. So they are now well on their way as a nonprofit, with the use of various local and federal subsidies, to developing their own community within a suburb of Seattle (where the land is cheaper).

I have many more such stories about how the absence or avoidance of inclusionary housing helped to spawn local self-determination. I am particularly sensitive to this argument about the value of "mixed-income" housing because I see how it is being used by HUD’s HOPE VI programs as a means to disguise federal efforts to actually reduce the amount of housing affordable to very-low-income households. For myself personally, I was born into a single-parent family that started on welfare, and I attended public school in Brooklyn. I had a scholarship opportunity to attend a private junior high in a middle-income neighborhood about a mile away. While attending that school. I encountered such shocking displays by my peers of arrogance, disrespect for authority, spoiled and self-centered attitudes, and a flaunting of their economic rank, that I considered myself lucky when at the end of each school day I could walk back into the tenements among the factories where I was living with "real people". It was bad enough I had to attend school with these brats- I would have been devastated had I been forced to live with them. So much for mixing incomes and the children of welfare with the children of doctors, dentist, and lawyers. Maybe this is why to this day I still feel more comfortable living in a lower-income neighborhood of East Oakland rather than the wealthier North Oakland or Berkeley.

Oakland is a city of very proud and capable minority and lower-income communities. Up to now, the available subsidies have spawned a network of nonprofits, both local to the neighborhood and some that produce citywide. They are not perfect, but they have been responsible for nearly all of the affordable housing and other neighborhood-related projects produced in Oakland in the last twenty years, many receiving national attention for the quality of their programs and designs. It is this local self-determination that gets undermined when the limited supply of subsides gets funneled into the hands of for-profit developers. Except for a very few, these latter developers working in Oakland merely produce units as a measure of success, while the nonprofits work to rebuild communities and revitalize neighborhoods. The for-profit development community in Oakland consistently fought to undermined these local grassroots efforts. They fought against producing housing in the downtown when office building were all the craze. They fought against the introduction of rent control, even though new construction was exempt. And they are now working with the mayor to buy out and shut down the single-room occupancy hotels in the downtown.

For all these reasons, this financial fuel for self-determination in the neighborhood and capacity-building in the nonprofit sector should not be siphoned off to assist the for-profit sector. If there is to be inclusionary housing, they should fund it primarily from their own profits. The for-profit developers are not silver bullets who will slay the dragon of unaffordable housing: they take as much time, If not much longer, to produce their housing, because they and their investors fear even the slightest of risks. We have to be very honest about whom we are going to bed with here: to get inclusionary housing it must be buried within risk-free market-rate housing, and to get the risk-free market-rate housing, we will watch these same developers conspire to shut down SRO’s and remove the homeless shelters. The limited subsidies needed for such populations should be reserved primarily for nonprofit developers; let the private developers bear their fair share from their profits.

I think that affordable housing advocates should be using their energy and political capital to work with others to raise those subsidies that will be needed by nonprofit developers. Without their ample availability, neither the private nor the nonprofit sector will be productive, because without them, affordable housing advocates will continue to beat up the private developers, slowing them down or chasing them away. To waste time and energy on inclusionary zoning ordinances only hurts the overall effort to get more affordable housing. Instead, efforts should be focused on working in concert to increase the overall subsidy pool that will be needed by all developers to meet the need.