Newsletter

Spring Strategy Session: One week away!

And a few other items for your consideration

We’re hosting a strategy session to talk about the pro-housing movement, set our agenda, and build momentum to create abundant housing in Central Ohio.

What: Spring Strategy Session
When: Monday, March 20
Where: Parsons Branch — Columbus Metropolitan Library
1113 Parsons Avenue
Who: Neighbors who want more neighbors
Why: To inform our direction, priorities, and strategies

There are only a few spots left for our upcoming event to work on how Neighbors for More Neighbors—Columbus can be a better platform to advocate for increased housing supply, diversity, and density throughout Central Ohio! Join our first brainstorming session to help shape the vision and direction of N4MN in Central Ohio! This event is an opportunity to collectively plan our approach to education, organizing, and advocacy.

Due to limited capacity in the space, registration is required.

Learn more + register

📚 The Book Beat

In Whose Housing Crisis?, Nick Gallent addresses the frequent over-simplification of the housing crisis as something we can just build our way out of.

Gallent, Nick (2019). Whose housing crisis?: Assets and homes in a changing economy. Policy Press; Scopus.

Instead of being entirely about supply, Gallent explains how the crisis of affordable shelter reflects a demand for profitable investment in housing from the real estate finance sector as well as government.

At the same time, Gallent still acknowledges that actually constructing more housing units can be part of a multi-pronged approach to alleviating the housing crisis: “In some places, additional housing needs to be built. … But building new homes is just one part of a bigger puzzle” (Gallent, 2019, p. 132). More importantly, he explains, there is a mismatch between supply and demand of housebuilding. In recent decades, banks re-oriented their lending toward real estate, contributing to rising housing costs for consumers who have simultaneously faces decades of wage stagnation.

Gallent’s overarching narrative casts the housing crisis as a result of our increasing reliance on the private sector for economic activity. “The function of housing,” he writes, has been shifted to one of “encouraging profit-taking from assets as a means of compensating for declining economic productivity” (Gallent, 2019, p. 16). He grounds the analysis with pragmatic questions—like asking how activists and policymakers can ensure that new housing won’t just end up in the hands of investors in places that actually need more homes. He also calls attention to the increasing amalgamation of the housebuilding industry, with small and medium building companies being crowded out by the economies of scale available to big firms. How can the housebuilding field can be diversified—specifically through a framework of “‘Rebuilding plurality’ in housing production”? (Gallent, 2019, p. 98).

Overall, Gallent’s narrative supports a multi-pronged approach to housing. There are elements of Shane Phillips’ work that encourages investment in three areas: supply, subsidy, and stability. Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance, not only building more housing. He offers readers more than 50 policy recommendations, beginning with a set of principles and general recommendations that should apply to all housing policy in his 2020 book, The Affordable City.