Every city is an argument. The width of a sidewalk, the height of a building, the distance between a front door and a grocery store — each is a claim about what a human life is for and who gets to live one.
We have been losing that argument. In the metropolitan areas where most of the economic growth of the past two decades has occurred, we have made it functionally illegal to build the homes that growth requires, and then expressed surprise at the results: teachers commuting two hours, grandparents exiled to cheaper states, a generation for whom the basic sequence of adult life — a job, a home, a family — has been scrambled beyond recognition.
This is usually described as a housing crisis, and economically it is one. But I have spent twenty years walking neighborhoods with the people who live in them, and I have come to believe the deeper damage is moral. A city that cannot house its own workers is not merely inefficient. It has broken a promise.
The encouraging news — and there is encouraging news — is that the solutions are no longer exotic. When Minneapolis ended single-family-only zoning, rents grew more slowly than in comparable cities. When Vienna treats housing as infrastructure, like water or rail, two-thirds of its residents live in homes insulated from the market's wilder swings. These are not utopias. They are choices, made by ordinary governments, and they can be made elsewhere.
What stands in the way is rarely technical knowledge. It is a failure of imagination — an inability, among those of us comfortably housed, to see the zoning code as the moral document it is. Every “not here” is a “somewhere else,” and somewhere else, increasingly, is nowhere at all.
We will build the cities of the next century in the next twenty years. The only question is whether we build them on purpose, for the people who actually live in them — or by default, for the people who used to.
