Out Of Balance

Housing is a regional issue that is crucial to economic competitiveness.

Metropolitan regions across the country compete as population, cultural and employment centers; they are judged by residents and employers alike according to economic, environmental and social justice concerns. Advocates and researchers tend to compartmentalize these issues: smart growth initiatives generally emphasize environmental and quality of life issues, while housing advocates pay greater attention to urban poverty and social mobility. Yet all these factors are profoundly affected by housing policies and development.

Although concerns over the cost, quality and availability of housing are pervasive throughout the region, the issues are seldom addressed on a metropolitan scale.

This obscures the reality that housing choices are intra-regional. Residents’ choices are not constrained by state or county lines, but rather are based on a wide variety of issues, including cost (direct housing costs and taxes), amenities such as schools and parks, proximity to work, transportation options, and perceptions about the future of neighborhoods. Similarly, employers make business location decisions partly based on the ability to attract talent from the surrounding region. Housing conditions and affordability have a large impact on employee recruitment and retention. While high prices animate most housing discussions, the issue is far more complex. It is not simply what we pay for housing, but what we get in return, whether choices and burdens are equitably shared, and how the housing market affects economic growth, land use and travel patterns. Fundamentally, a healthy housing market provides a balance of affordability, choice and quality with limited disparities among those of different income levels, races, tenure, and age. A low-cost housing market with an old, deteriorating stock and limited diversity may be affordable, but hardly desirable or competitive.

The opposite extreme is a region with a broad range of high-quality housing that is unaffordable or unavailable to large parts of the population. A balanced housing market is, by contrast, one that provides satisfactory housing options affordable to all residents. The region’s hundreds of political jurisdictions can have an enormous effect on housing price, quality and attainability, by implementing policies that are favorable to housing creation, or by maintaining polices that are adverse to it. Local jurisdictions can aggressively utilize federal and state funding for affordable housing, and even add their own resources to the effort, or create obstacles to affordable housing through restrictive zoning or other regulatory barriers. Because residential and commercial location decisions are intra-regional, housing policy in one state or city affects the housing market throughout the region. The map shows the region stratified by urban and suburban rings. Primarily consistent with population densities, these rings are used throughout the paper to elucidate intra-regional comparisons of housing market conditions. Likewise, the nine largest metropolitan regions in the United States are compared to the NY-NJ-CT region throughout the paper.

This paper is the first phase of a collaborative effort of Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Housing and Planning Council to survey regional housing trends and identify housing problems that pose obstacles to regional development or diminish the quality of life. We intend it to provide a springboard for further discussion of the policy options facing the states, counties and municipalities that comprise our region. RPA and CHPC will be exploring those policy options in a forthcoming report.