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167 H Housing and Community Preservation A Home for All Toni Coyne Hall and Linda Silka ousing is central to all of our lives. As Michael Stone has written: Housing is more than physical shelter. The residential environment consists not only of the dwelling unit but the site and setting, neighbors and community, municipality and public services, habitability and accessibility, rights and responsibilities, costs and benefits. Yet housing is even more than the residential environment, for it is only in relation to those who inhabit and use it that housing has meaning and significance—not only physical and economic, but emotional, symbolic and expressive. We occupy our houses, and, for better and for worse, they become our homes. (1993, 14) It is becoming increasingly difficult for American families to achieve even the most basic National Housing Goal (declared in 1949) of “a decent home and a suitable living environment ” (42 U.S. Code Sec. 1441a). There is simply not enough housing available that is adequate , accessible, and affordable. The solution that communities often turn to when faced with a housing crisis is to build new housing. Certainly new housing is needed, but this singleminded focus on its construction is increasingly recognized as contributing to sprawl and also as failing to take advantage of the many opportunities to reclaim existing underused structures for housing. As we shall see in this chapter, the great benefit of the community preservation approach is that it calls attention to the need to consider all elements together that shape a community’s future—that is, transportation, open space, historic preservation, economic development, and housing. Each factor influences the others: new housing is a major consumer of open space, transportation needs are affected by decisions about where to locate new housing, adaptive reuse can create more housing, and decisions about which industries to recruit affect the need for housing in the future. In short, all these factors must be considered together if there is to be any hope of adequately addressing housing needs. 12 168 Enhancing Community Strengths The intent of this chapter is to look at how communities can proceed in analyzing their housing stock while also taking into account transportation, open space, economic development, and opportunities for historic preservation. We will show how the creation and preservation of housing can become a key part of community preservation, compatible with the protection of open space and historic features, and enhancing of the quality of life in our communities. A further purpose of this chapter will be to demonstrate the importance of communities considering housing opportunities across the range of incomes. We will show that housing considerations need not degenerate into divisive debates. Instead, discussions of how to provide housing for all community members can be opportunities for community initiative, community involvement, and community control. Two additional points will underlie our analysis. First, we want to emphasize that it is never too early for communities to begin considering the adequacy of their housing stock. The unfortunate fact is that communities often realize only too late that something is amiss with the range of housing available. For example, a community may find that housing prices have rapidly skyrocketed and suddenly young people who grew up there can no longer hope to raise their own families in that place. Or, in trying to recruit a new company, a community’s leaders may discover that they can’t “land” that prospective company because of insufficient housing or because the housing that is available is priced beyond what new workers can afford. The second theme that links the various concerns raised in this chapter is that many stakeholders must contribute to solving the housing problems faced by our communities. Too often people assume that the housing crisis is somebody else’s responsibility, perhaps that of federal, state, or city government, housing agencies, community development corporations, private developers, or individual homeowners . Most communities have discovered, however, that no single group has sufficient authority or sufficiently deep pockets to single-handedly fix the housing problems. Housing problems generally cannot be solved by one group or even in most cases by one community working in isolation . Only when groups work together and draw upon their many collective resources are communities able to put into place an array of attractive housing options that will maintain a city’s vibrancy. In keeping with the community preservation focus, the information provided here is focused at the community level rather than at the state or national policy levels...

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