Sustaining Cities: Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions

3. Reframing Housing Value

43 Housing is fundamental to sustaining the quality of our cities: how we conceive, craft, conserve, and transform our residential communities shapes the health and vitality of our civic realm. Yet how we characterize and value housing in this country has been parochial. A narrow, privatized construct of housing value—most visible in economic positions of affordability and ownership, but also lurking in our social assessments of status, entitlement, and citizenry—has contributed to the sanitized and sometimes even crumbling nature of many American communities that cannot survive as a monoculture . Take, for example, the Phoenix area where I lived until recently, which has long been characterized by its series of monocultures : Sun City for retired seniors; Biltmore Estates for retired sports celebrities; Paradise Valley for its venture capitalists; Apache Junction for its snowbirds’ mobile home parks; the ten-year-old fringe city of Maricopa for its “affordable” subdivisions financed by subprime mortgages; and so on. These monocultures survive, for the most part, by preying outside their borders. By depleting such natural resources as clean air, open space, and potable water, and requiring public investments in road, sewage, and energy lines to link a lifeline to the more diverse mothership, they transfer some of Sherry Ahrentzen Reframing Housing Value i their costs to those of the larger public realm. To maintain needed services and activities, workers must commute from one place to another (e.g., the landscapers and grocery store cashiers who drive from their homes across the county to their workplaces in Paradise Valley). Popular phrases like ownership society and cocooning and the growth of homeowners’ associations and gated communities that characterized residential trends of the last couple of decades diminish the extraordinarily dynamic and public face of homes embedded in our physical and cultural landscape. Homes fortify, or cripple, our educational systems, economic security, employment opportunities , and our individual and social health and development. Having witnessed the recent economic meltdown that was precipitated by the highly unregulated mortgage market, most citizens today are acutely aware how housing is the bedrock of national and global financial markets and of powerful construction and real estate industries. Instead of the ownership society (and similar terms being promulgated today as they were in the Bush administration era), today’s city officials and citizens talk about sustainability and sustainable housing. But again this rhetoric is too often narrowly construed: sustainable housing means more than LEED-certified buildings, solar panels on the roof, or a deed to a home; here again, the rhetoric often focuses on valuing the individual, privatized household or residence . But by embracing biodiversity as a fundamental tenet underpinning healthy residential landscapes, we can craft a sustainable platform on which our cities can thrive. Biodiversity includes not simply a variety of living organisms but also the diverse ecosystems of natural habitats that effectively accommodate differing varieties of life and the ways in which species interact with each other. In terms of human settlements, an economically diverse city is a sherry ahrentzen 44 resilient one.1 In his book The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken claims that biodiversity is the source of all wealth.2 To accommodate and encourage such diversity, natural and built landscapes could be designed to moderate extreme environmental factors and increase cooperative ventures among often disparate partners.3 For sustainable housing, this would translate into generating and maintaining residential ecosystems with fine-grain landscapes and systems— environmental, social, and economic—that foster symbiosis. If we think of valuing housing in this sustainable context (that is, biodiversity of the residential ecosystem), then housing affordability migrates from a focus on the individual household or unit to one considering community affordability in all its costs and resources: financial, environmental, human, and health. The disregard of the last few decades to recognize and debate housing policies and practices from the perspective of public costs, gains, and biases makes it increasingly difficult, yet imperative, to challenge and change social and institutional systems to those that can act to enhance diverse, healthy, and thriving residential environments. Public Nature of Private Homes Before considering how to enhance our residential ecosystems, it is important to first demonstrate with two examples how the singular, privatized manner of construing housing’s place in the public realm is an unsustainable endeavor, notably through the ways that housing affordability is conceived and the conventional homeownership of single family homes is promulgated. Entrenched in national economic...