Need small houses, too; address sense-of-place deficits
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Housing in America, especially in and around the richest cities, such as Boston, has become too expensive for many workers, which can make it difficult for some employers to get the employees they need. In Massachusetts this led to launching the new Starter Home Zoning District, in 2016. The idea was to encourage suburbs to loosen restrictive development rules to encourage the building of the sort of small, affordable and close-together houses on small lots that went up like mushrooms in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
But four years later, reports Commonwealth Magazine, not one house has been built in the program.
It seems that a killer is that the law requires that any new starter home be close to a train station and/or other amenities. The admirable idea is to encourage walkability and discourage sprawl and its environmental damage. But the laws in Massachusetts and some other states have advocated the construction of condos and apartments near train and other transportation hubs to encourage the sort of anti-sprawl density you don’t get with single-family houses; there’s little room for single-family houses in or near many of these hubs. And at the same time, “snob zoning” in many communities has set big space minimums for land for houses away from these hubs. This has encouraged the construction of many McMansions on parcels of at least an acre, keeping out the peasantry.
To read the Commonwealth piece, please hit this link.
In practical terms, all this means that there’s not much space available for the old American dream of a house affordable for people of modest means.
Obviously, a lot of people would prefer to live in a detached house, however small, than in an apartment they rent or own. Healthy communities and regional economies need a mix. Owning and living in a house gives a certain kind of resident a strong sense of place, with the local civic-mindedness and stability that goes with it, that they don’t feel in a condo or apartment.
Dispersed and often solitary Americans, who live so much of their lives online and many of whom don’t even shop together in person anymore, as Amazon, etc., continue to ravage in-person retailing, makes it all the more important that as many people as possible feel anchored to a physical place and so feel some commitment to participating in the community there.
Civic disengagement and social disintegration (starting at the family level) continue to undermine America. Fixing some of our housing problems would help mitigate this.
Perhaps the sort of places where small houses could be built without hurting the environment would include on the land at the ever-growing number of closed malls, with their vast parking lots.
Increasingly, America has become what Gertrude Stein complained about Oakland, Calif.: “There’s no there, there.’’ This leads to a sense of loss and to anomie, that, among other things, leads to the success of demagogues. The pandemic has only increased Americans’ growing solitariness.
For sale
Chris Powell, the excellent columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., noted that The Hartford Courant, for many decades the nearest thing that the Nutmeg State had to a state paper, is selling its big headquarters in downtown Hartford. Its few remaining journalists will work from home, and its printing is already done in Springfield, Mass. Can they really call it The Hartford Courant anymore? It’s another example of how we’re losing the sense of place provided by institutions. Local newspapers, with their big downtown offices, used to be an important part of the public square, along with local government, schools, locally based stores, churches, etc.
Maybe a Connecticut sugar daddy, perhaps a hedge funder from the Fairfield County Gold Coast, will come along to save The Courant, now owned by Tribune Publishing, which is apparently about to try to sell it.
To read the Powell column, please hit this link.