How US urban planning legislates loneliness

I’m currently reading, The Lonely Century. Author Noreena Hertz makes a super important point: The housing crisis is making us more lonely by forcing people to move frequently, severing community ties and disincentivizing community investment.

It’s also the worst of all worlds. Fewer Americans are moving than in previous decades. In 2021, 8.4% of Americans moved in the past year, down from 2019 and 2020. It was the lowest percentage since reporting began in 1948. And since job creation is extremely unevenly distributed, that means lower economic growth, more unemployment, and more underemployment.

So who’s moving? Low-income renters, usually under duress. Between 2000 and 2016 landlords evicted about one out every 40 renter households and served notice to one in 17.

I cannot stress enough that urban planning in the US is an exercise in legislating loneliness.

Hertz brings up the obvious fix, rent stabilization measures. To her credit, Hertz admits rent control raises average rents. What she doesn’t mention, but is also true, is that rent control also disproportionately helps the rich and creates slums.

She also fails to note that high housing costs are the main factor forcing families to move. Lastly, and most damningly, she mysteriously neglects to mention the most obvious and empirically supported answer to this problem: legalizing density. And claims that “market forces need to be mediated” when in reality, the problem stems from local governments’ stranglehold on the market. More specifically, disproportionately wealthy white homeowners’ stranglehold on land use regulations and permitting.

Hertz identifies solo living as another loneliness culprit. Again, this is, at least in part, a policy choice. When land is expensive, housing developers prioritize the most profitable homes per square foot, which are one-bedroom apartments and condos.

In America’s superstar cities like San Francisco, multi-bedroom apartments are in such high demand relative to supply that they’re barely any cheaper on a per bedroom basis. So a roommate doesn’t save you much money, and parents are shit out of luck.

But government attacks on coliving don’t stop there. Many suburbs actually ban coliving among unrelated adults. And San Francisco, for example, destroyed its SROs which were extremely affordable and facilitated coliving for unrelated adults. It’s probably not the only city to do so, but it’s the only one I’ve looked into.

Lest you think that there might be a good reason for the government to make it inordinately difficult to share a living space with other humans, let me assure you that all these policies are part of the ongoing effort to forcibly exclude “undesirables” like BIPOC, low-income families, and sex workers from US neighborhoods.

And the laws and policies that effectively ban affordable housing, including exclusionary zoning and discretionary review, don’t just make us more lonely. They also entrench racial disparities in wealth and health outcomes, decrease economic mobility, increase wealth inequality, rob the economy of hundreds of billions of dollars every year, harm our health, and pollute the environment.

So, in closing, my babies. If we could just not ban density, that would be great.