PERSPECTIVE ON AFFORDABLE HOUSING : Making NIMBY-ism Passe : People want more that a roof over their heads. They also want safe, comfortable neighborhoods.
I remember standing in the driveway of a nearly completed affordable-housing complex in Watts last spring, when a Los Angeles police officer and his partner drove up to the attractive townhouses to ask if the 130-unit development was another “housing project.” We both understood that he didn’t mean project in the real-estate development sense; he meant “project” in the sense of poverty, crime, drugs and other seemingly intractable problems.
Months later, a groundbreaking ceremony for another affordable-housing development in Southwest Los Angeles was marred by protesting working-class African-American homeowners, saying that their neighborhood didn’t need any more problems.
In Sacramento, Gov. George Deukmejian has signed NIMBY (not-in-my-back yard) legislation, which will shield local governments from efforts to locate affordable-housing developments in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods that don’t want them. Yet, it’s clear to me that low-income and working-class residents sometimes don’t want affordable-housing developments in their back yards, either.
As efforts to build more affordable housing gain momentum, NIMBY-ism and the reasons that it exists must be more effectively challenged.
The first part of the problem is semantic, or, more accurately, a problem of people saying one thing and meaning another. In many minds, affordable housing is synonymous with people of color or poor families. The typical homeowner’s response is simple: Affordable housing attracts the kind of element they don’t want in their neighborhoods.
But if you believe in the American dream, as I do, you believe that all families should have the opportunity to purchase homes in safe and comfortable neighborhoods. The California Assn. of Realtors reports that Los Angeles County has a median housing price of $215,000 and that only 15% of its residents earn the $70,900 a year it takes to buy a house these days. In other words, 85% of us need affordable housing of some kind.
The housing needs of many are being ignored. Increasing the number of housing units, however, is just part of the solution. An affordable-housing strategy will be successful only if it also creates communities that work. People want more that a roof over their heads. People also want housing in safe and comfortable neighborhoods.
Communities in which unemployment, crime, high infant-mortality rates and inadequate education are no longer tolerated are communities in which affordable-housing developments can make a lasting difference. Concentrating more and more people into economically depressed surroundings can only add to the problems in a distressed community.
The crisis is a symptom of much larger problems, which are economic in nature and devastating in their social consequences. Hopelessness, fear and apathy are the eventual results of the joblessness and lack of opportunity that plague too many of our neighborhoods.
To really solve the crisis, we must use affordable housing as a catalyst to build neighborhoods where people can work, shop, recreate and live in a safe, comfortable, nurturing environment. This requires a comprehensive community-development strategy. Stores and services to meet the needs of residents can’t be overlooked when housing is planned. We also should use affordable-housing developments as a means of creating jobs and opportunities. Some of the same people that many see as only needing affordable housing are also equally in need of a job and an opportunity.
That was the simple idea put forward when the lawsuit over the Century Freeway was being settled in the early 1970s. Don’t just build replacement housing for the torn-down homes, the court said, but create jobs and economic opportunities through the construction of the housing and the freeway. That simple idea needs to be expanded and improved on to create real change in the cycle of hopelessness and poverty that grips too many neighborhoods.
Too often, we dwell on the differences among us while ignoring our many similarities. Among these similarities are the need for shelter, for safe, decent surroundings and for opportunities to make a better life for ourselves and our children.
We must begin to build on affordable-housing efforts to create neighborhoods that are both ethnically and economically diverse. Only then will NIMBY-ism become a thing of the past.
