An Urbanism For At-Risk Residents
When we say "cities are for people," who are we talking about?
Forgive me if I’ve shared this anecdote before, but my path into urbanism wasn’t through a trip to the Netherlands or reading Jane Jacobs. It was a Baltimore Ravens game in 2013.
In near-blizzard conditions, the Ravens won in miracle fashion against the Minnesota Vikings in what’s been called the craziest final two minutes in NFL history. But that wild finish wasn’t what’s stuck with me most over the past 11 years.
I remember leaving the stadium and seeing a homeless man sitting against a wall, covered in snow, likely hungry, and certainly lacking any sort of financial resources. He sat there in the cold and watched as thousands of people walked by, all of us with the collective means to change his life in an instant. But we didn’t. We all walked to our warm cars and went home.
I never learned his story, but he was out in the cold, freezing and without shelter. I still think about him, and he’s why I’m an urbanist.
I’m not a native urbanist. In truth, I have a deep burden for helping the homeless and snuck into the movement because I think it can help me do that. I’m commandeering urbanism’s ideals as a means to an end because I believe its core tenets and approach offer the best path to creating cities, states, and countries where fewer people face the same fate as that man in Baltimore.
That’s what made my recent trip to Portland, Oregon such a mind F’er. Having never experienced Portland before, I was curious to see it for myself. You try to check any preconceived notions, but everywhere you look you can’t help but test what you’re seeing against everything you’ve heard.
What’s amazing (and confusing) about Portland is that it’s almost everything almost everyone says it is, for better and worse. But as much as I fought to not overreact to it, you simply can’t ignore how felt the homeless population is. It made me think of that in Baltimore. And it made me question urbanism in ways I haven’t before.
Here I was in one of America’s most “urbanist” cities, with bike lanes and light rail stretching as far as the eye could see. And yet there were also encampments as far as the eye could see.
This posed existential questions for me. If Portland, which does urbanism better than most places in the U.S., still faces these challenges, can urbanism deliver on its promises? Is the light at the end of the urbanism tunnel merely a confusing fusion of heaven and hell?
“Portland in 2024” is not the future urbanists are advocating for. I fully recognize that. But it might be the one we ultimately “copy/paste” if we’re not careful.
One of the urbanism’s strengths is putting people at the heart of policy and design. “Cities are for people, not cars,” as we like to say. But there’s an entire class of people who tend not to be considered at forefront of urbanist ideas: those whose lives get turned upside down as a direct or indirect result of a city’s “Nashville” or “Austin” moment.
I’m talking about the 20-year tenant in an affordable 2-bedroom apartment that just found out their building has been sold and is going to be torn down next year for “luxury” apartments outside their price range. It’s easy to forget about these people. Because big picture, having their 80-unit building replaced with a newer 350-unit building adds more housing stock and is a net positive for the city. In the grand scheme of things, more housing is always an urbanist win.
But even with the most pro-urbanism and pro-housing policies in places, there will always be those who get pushed out and don’t get to reap the benefits of the otherwise-positive transformation in their neighborhoods. And many end up homeless or are simply forced to uproot their lives and start over somewhere new. At worst, you end up with something like what Portland is experiencing: built environment wins left and right but with thousands of our neighbors slipping through the cracks.
Much of the urbanism discourse revolves around real estate developers and how we can enact policies that empower them to build more housing stock. That’s not inherently a bad thing; developers arguably the most critical role in transforming our cities, creating more housing stock, and equipping neighborhoods to sustainably support growth. But developer-centric discourse can also make it hard to have conversations about considering the people above without sounding like you’re suggesting it’s on developers to take care of them.
“What, you want the developer to take a loss to build affordable units? They’re running a business.” We can get so developer-focused that every problem gets filtered through the lens of “Can this be solved by a new development, and the developer building it, or not?” It’s certainly not on developers to solve all of our problems, but that doesn’t mean those problems just go away.
What we need is local governments that can proactively anticipate and prepare for growth and change, and leverage its platform and authority to organize and mobilize resources (public dollars, non-profit resources, etc.) to ensure there are opportunities for as many at-risk individuals to be long-term residents as possible.
What does this look like in action?
A couple of examples:
Constructing aesthetically-pleasing (this is critical for mass adoption) transitionary public housing units across several neighborhoods with a variety of floor plans that can accommodate singles, families, and multigenerational households. Proactively market these as an option to those in affordable rental housing that is at risk of no longer being an option.
Enacting “right to shelter” laws to ensure all homeless individuals have shelter, and partnering with public and private local shelters to ensure there are enough beds, staffers, etc. to support needs. Once this in place, work with local police to enforce and prevent the creation of new homeless encampments and direct homeless individuals to these shelters.
Proactive programs connecting those at risk of foreclosure or eviction with financial counseling and other resources that keep them off the street
Of course, the classic “urbanism playbook” tactics also apply here:
Reduce minimum lot and unit sizes
Legalize accessory dwelling units
Eliminate parking minimums to reduce housing construction costs
Expand bike lanes and transit infrastructure to make neighborhoods less car dependent
But the reality is that even in the most proactive cities, things take time. Implementing these policies never happens overnight, and the positive effects may not be felt for months or years.
That’s why we need a “transitional urbanism” playbook, and we need to make it as much a part of our message as the long-term vision casting for what cities can become. Those at real risk of the negative effects of gentrification are not just an obstacle standing in the way of realizing our urbanist dreams for our cities’ neighborhoods. And they are not one in the same as those who lob disingenuous complaints about “neighborhood character.” The urbanism movement should be an ally to those at risk by advocating (loudly) for measures and resources that ensure they get to be a part of the cities we want to build.
When we do that, we work to create the world that attracted me to the urbanism movement in the first place. A world with cities where there are fewer and fewer individuals that end up outside the stadium in the snow. A world where “cities are for people” includes the people who currently live there. All of them.
Otherwise, whether we like it or not, we’re saying that upending their lives is just the cost of doing business. And we’re better than that.