Des Moines City Council is in the process of hearing readings of new ordinances that will allow law enforcement and city officials to criminalize camping and more swiftly remove personal belongings on public grounds. We would like to use these current events to draw attention to the strong link between housing affordability and homelessness in this country,1 and the steps we could be taking as a community to make housing more attainable for more people.
In Des Moines we often cite our low cost of living as a benefit to our humble Midwestern lifestyle. However, housing costs must always be taken in consideration with income levels, and the fact remains that over 45% of renters are now rent burdened in our community2, meaning they spend more than 30% of their household income on rent. This is happening all over the country as we see an increase in housing prices due to supply constraints. While the dynamics of housing construction and financing are complex, it is clear that broadly as a country we have not pursued policies to facilitate attainable and accessible housing for the most number of people.
Over the past 75 years we have enacted a series of ever increasingly strict zoning and building code ordinances that have made it more difficult, and more expensive, to build new housing. Examples include downzoning wide areas of communities to allow only single family houses, enacting minimum lot size and house size requirements, set back requirements, and increasing the complexity of our codes and processes. We have created a system in which many of the affordable housing types and starter homes of decades ago are no longer legal to build. In most of Des Moines, property owners may not build a duplex, triplex, four-plex, or a rowhouse if they wanted to. Homeowners generally cannot rent a spare room. Nonprofits find it nearly impossible to build shelters, supportive housing, and transitional housing.
In addition, it should be noted that in our communities our planning codes implement a maximum number of dwellings that can be built in a specified area and require a minimum amount of parking to be built. This is the recipe for creating both the housing and the transportation crisis we are now facing.
Make no mistake about it: homelessness is a regulatory failure. The causes can vary on an individual level, but in the aggregate, regulatory limits on housing supply are the primary culprit. The cities and states with the most number of homeless individuals are the ones with the fewest new building permits, tightest regulations, and most burdensome processes. As a result, they have the highest rent and highest home prices. The middle class renter trying to buy a home, the working class renter trying to make rent after yet another increase, and the person in poverty without a support structure all face the same issue: not enough housing to bring prices down to affordable levels. And that last person becomes the most visceral, haunting reminder of this failing when they end up in a tent.
We urge the city of Des Moines (and all our metro communities) to pursue a policy of housing abundance that creates a housing market that is affordable and attainable, rather than maintaining a policy of scarcity and increased punitive measures for those who cannot attain housing. We believe in Housing First3 as a policy towards working with those who need shelter, and building more affordable and attainable housing can help in that process. Steps to increase housing abundance include relaxing zoning and land use restrictions, reforming unnecessary and overly complex building code and site plan requirements, and eliminating minimum parking requirements citywide.
To become an accessible city for all we must be willing to build a community for people first, and not one for only those who can afford a personal vehicle and a 2,000 square foot home. A robust and abundant housing market makes housing more attainable for more people. A robust public transportation system allows those who cannot afford a vehicle to access more jobs and services. A robust community that is welcoming and inclusive to everyone will help us push fewer individuals onto the streets. We will not solve homelessness with arrests, tent clearances, fines, or more layers of regulation and processes. That just moves it somewhere else. We will need to build, and we will need to find compassion.
Together we can build a better Des Moines for everyone.
Comments