Chapter 3: Being Creative in Planning the Future

Okay, here’s my challenge. Apply the big thinking that creates climate change concerns to affordable housing, in fact, all of urban real estate. Here’s my contribution, and I’d like to hear yours:

• Make housing units smaller. Smaller means cheaper and more people are living alone, particularly as they get older.
• Put housing in urban areas. Use in-fill locations to design and build dense units with community features.
• Align new small housing with mass-transit. Either build on busy streets, or change the routes of buses to fit population changes. I own a car and a motorcycle, and I’d still like to use public transportation often, especially commuting.
• Combine housing with other uses, like retail, self-storage, child care, and office.

I could spend time arguing that making cities denser, as opposed to encouraging urban sprawl, is more effective in combating greenhouse gasses, but it seems so obvious it doesn’t need to be argued. (Let me know if you disagree). 

Being a capitalist, I prefer to let the open market determine products. That works for phones, clothes, and restaurants, but it's not working for real estate. Through a complex chain of inter-related players, it's too expensive to build apartments. City fees, insurance, architects, construction, and attorneys all add up to, in my area, costs of about $135 per square foot to build apartments, plus the cost of the land. Rents are about as high as working people can afford ($.80 to $1.20 PSF), so it does not make financial sense to build apartments. Upper class single family homes, yes. Hospitality? Yes. Apartments? No.

Here’s my thesis: smart urban planning and development beats climate change initiatives in financial sense. And it needs smart government to make it happen.