Many of you may have seen Trump’s announcement regarding his Freedom Cities. Obviously, his fascist proposals are something out of the Albert Speer catalogue and should be mocked and ridiculed at every turn. However, Trump is proposing it because he knows it will likely resonate. His advisors know that the average American sees the housing cost situation as absolutely hopeless. And they know that it’s the primary reason that despite all of the other good economic indicators, Americans still feel that the economy is terrible. They see it in their mortgages. They see it in the explosion of homelessness. They see it in their kids and grandkids not being able to afford to buy homes anymore. They blame immigrants, as citizens guided by fascists always have. As climate change gets worse, as energy and resources become more scarce, as disasters take their economic toll, as things tighten up, that impulse will only increase and fascists will take advantage. People who study these issues are warning us to prepare for that. But in terms of our immediate future and the 2024 election, I think housing is at the core of American negativity right now. And it’s not something we can solve in time. But it is an issue we could propose a bold new solution on to inspire voters to flock to our banner.
It’s my personal belief that if Biden doesn’t come forward with a bold vision for building millions of new residential units in the next 5 to 10 years, then he very well may lose the election. Trump of course likely has no real intention to build these new free-dumb 19th century cities. And frankly, we probably shouldn’t be focusing on building “new” cities at all. We should be focused on infill, on shoring up, on infilling the desolate spaces in our existing cities and suburbs created by the new global economic realities. We should be focused on transforming cities designed for cars, offices, and mindless shopping into cities designed for pedestrians and social activities, urban play, theater, music the arts, gardens, parks, amateur sports, and the other things that make life worth living. We should be focused on greening and preparing for the coming disasters, not escaping to Mars or new suburbs in the desert (or soon to be deserts).
We should be converting un-leased commercials spaces into residences. All over the country these spaces sit empty following the pandemic, as more people work from home and shop on Amazon. Frankly, they’ve been trending into desolation ever since your local Wal Mart moved in at the edge of town. We’ve all seen it happen. We should be focused on subsidizing the ability for every home in America to have a rentable guest house behind it, so that we never have to see another elderly person priced out of their home or a homeless person on the street or shuffled off into a hellscape of mental institutions, tent cities, or prisons. An affordable home is the basis upon which any career is built or any education attained. Drug use is a problem but it isn’t THE problem. In parts of Scandinavia they have such a successful homelessness solution because they don’t kick people out of their new subsidized spaces for relapsing. And let’s face it, what percentage of our working productive population use drugs from time to time? It’s a lot. So we need to stop focusing on treating the homeless like hopeless drug addicted animals and simply give them a place to live and build a life. Period. Even for people who’s empathy stops at the point where they’re only bothered by the aesthetics of the homeless problem and don’t have any real compassion for these people, they should get on board with the solutions that work if they want to clean up the streets for good.
The government should be buying and developing dilapidated properties and building new 5-story mixed income walk-ups, so that people who work at grocery stores are mixing with people who work at universities, tech companies, and hedge funders, building the social connections that move them up the ladder. And of course many of these new buildings should have drug counseling and prevention services built in, so that we have places to move our homeless population to. It makes no sense to build inescapable fortress-ghettoes of non-diversified housing for the homeless and poverty-stricken anymore. We’ve learned those lessons and demolished those experiments. There should be dedicated subsidized housing units for social workers in many of these new mixed-use buildings so that people working up from the bottom can get on-site help when they need it. And yes, we should even be buiding some single family residential mixed in with these other more dense uses, in or close to cities. Despite all the negativity about cities, density is still the single best thing we can do to protect the environment. It is the most efficient form of development. It goes without saying that all of these projects should be aspiring towards the electric, heat pump, super-insulated, solar/wind energy-based construction we already know how to do. They should be aspiring towards the off-grid wherever possible.
Without a vision that resonates with people for how to fix the housing affordability problem, we can never fix the homelessness problem. I’m not sure that the proper fix that people who study these issues know is necessary will resonate with the public as much as Trump’s Freedom Cities will, as they don’t rely on the concept of “escape” or “suburban flight” that Americans are again falling for. They rely on the principle of density and fixing what we already have. So someone smarter than me may need to find a way to market this as an inspiring new vision. But we know it needs to start now and that we’re already way behind. I think part of what would be inspiring would be to talk about speed, about doing all of this fast. This should be a moonshot proposal, something we put the full force of our entire society behind. It should be something we see happen in real time, something where we see huge results by the end of Biden’s next term.
Without some kind of bold new proposal, I fear for our future, folks. I really do. I fear for what average Americans will vote for if Biden can’t come up with something more inspiring on the housing affordability issue… the issue that I believe (and many analysts believe) is actually at the center of why the country still feels so negatively about modern life.