Introduction

Take an evening walk around your neighborhood. As you stroll, count the windows of the homes you pass. If the lights are on, take a casual glance at what you can see from the outside. You don't need to snoop; just glance.

Housing is everything. It is the basis for our ability to meet most of our other needs and wants. It is our tether to a place and to a community. Home is where we make nearly all our most consequential plans. Our career trajectories, our close relationships, and our health all depend in part on what kind of housing we are able to secure and where.

Behind one of those windows, perhaps, is the place where somebody proposed to their sweetheart. Behind another may be a chair where someone sat and wept for hours after receiving tragic news. A college acceptance letter sits on a desk somewhere. A jury summons. Unpaid bills. An eviction notice. A letter from summer camp, or one from rehab.

Behind one of those windows, an elderly widow's live-in caretaker sweeps the floor. An office has been converted to a nursery. Somewhere there is a couch where an old friend looking for a new start has been sleeping. In one of those homes, somebody has made plans to start a business. Or move to another state. Or finally buy that motorcycle.

Ponder, for a moment, the irreducible complexity of the web of decisions that lead particular people to live out their most pivotal moments behind the particular windows of particular buildings. Let yourself be humbled by it.

Most of us, at the end of the day, have pretty simple aspirations. We'd like to live a good life in a place that is prospering. And though each of us will define “good life” a little bit differently, nearly everyone's conception of “good” is going to involve a home in which they are secure and comfortable.

This is the third in a series of books outlining the Strong Towns approach to the growth and development of cities and neighborhoods. Central to this approach is the recognition that cities are complex systems. They are shaped by countless decisions made by millions of individuals over time, with interconnections that are challenging to trace or fully grasp. When attempts are made to simplify or ignore this inherent complexity in organizing urban life, challenges and disruptions arise.

The first Strong Towns book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, reveals an epidemic of financial insolvency across North American local governments and outlines a citizen-led approach to growth and development that can make our communities financially strong and resilient. The second book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, describes the failures, in spiraling costs and a mounting crash death toll, of America's transportation system. It proposes a paradigm shift in how we plan and prioritize infrastructure projects. Both books, in large part, are stories of the failures of top-down institutions, and the promise of bottom-up alternatives.

There is massive complexity to the subjects covered in the first two books because of the human factor: our biases and fallibility, our capacity to make shortsighted decisions and convince ourselves of faulty priorities. However, both of those topics also have an element that is very discrete and quantifiable. Budget math is budget math. Asphalt is asphalt. Physics is physics.

Housing is more complex and arguably has the highest stakes of all.

In the early stages of developing this book, we would often mention to people that we were going to be coauthoring a book about the housing crisis. This tends to elicit nods of affirmation: “Oh wow, yes, what an important topic. Wait: which housing crisis exactly?”

You could probably survey 100 Americans and get 100 different answers as to what the “housing crisis” consists of. And if you had conducted this survey in 2009, you would have gotten a very different set of answers. Different still in 1975. Or 1933.

What you will not find is a lot of disagreement with the idea that there is a housing crisis. Virtually no one has ever responded by telling us that they don't think there's a problem. Indeed, the sense is widely and acutely shared across all strata of society that there is a profound problem with housing, and that sense is not new.

If you have a modest income and/or rent your home, the “what” of the crisis is probably not all that elusive to you. Today, we have a crisis of unaffordability. This problem isn't new, but its contours have expanded. The US Census Bureau reported in 2022 that nearly half of American renter households pay over 30% of their income in rent, an amount seen as likely to strain their personal finances and their ability to build up savings. Ownership is no easier. According to the Urban Institute, in December 2022 households earning the median US income could only afford to purchase 20 percent of US homes for sale. In some regions, homeownership is even more out of reach: in metropolitan Seattle, the figure was 7.6 percent. In Los Angeles, a mere 1.9 percent (Choi and Zinn 2022).

It has long been true that burdensome costs, substandard conditions, and the constant threat of displacement have shaped the housing experience for poorer Americans. Today, a broader sense of precarity extends to a lot more people.

“Precarity” is a more subtle issue than just “unaffordability.” We use it to convey that many people who can, on paper, “afford” their housing are nonetheless being stretched or finding their lives disrupted in some way. The housing options available to them do not grant them stability and the means to freely make important life decisions.

A single parent raising a teenager in a high-crime neighborhood.

A 30-year-old living with her aging parents.

A 40-year-old far from his aging parents and unable to assist them with their health and mobility.

Someone who cannot afford to move to pursue a desired career.

Someone facing eviction who will be displaced from their neighborhood, and with it, from a community of shared culture, faith, or ethnicity.

Someone fleeing prejudice and discrimination who cannot obtain a home in a community where they will be accepted.

An elderly, disabled homeowner, with significant home equity but cash-poor, who cannot move without losing a vital support network of friends and neighbors.

A middle-aged couple mired in debt, who forgo vacations and visits to the doctor in order to make the mortgage payments.

A young couple, powerlessly watching their ability to purchase a home locally evaporate because of a decision to raise interest rates made a thousand miles away at the Federal Reserve.

Someone afraid to leave a troubled relationship because she does not know how she will afford housing on her own.

A couple who rent a house from a distant landlord, after losing their previous home to foreclosure following a period of unemployment and missed payments.

A college student living in his car.

People making uncomfortable trade-offs. A roommate they don't get along with. A punishing commute. Still living with an ex because neither can afford their own place.

All of those scenarios do not even include the direst of circumstances. As of January 2022, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, approximately 582,000 Americans were experiencing homelessness. About a quarter of those were chronically homeless. About 28% were people living in families with children (National Alliance to End Homelessness n.d.).

Approximately one in seven children born in large American cities between 1998 and 2000 experienced at least one eviction for nonpayment of rent or mortgage between birth and age 15 (Lundberg and Donnelly 2019). Among those born into deep poverty, the figure is one in four. Eviction can have spiraling consequences for health, for academic performance, and for the ability to secure housing in the future.

A widely circulated 2021 article in Works in Progress was titled “The Housing Theory of Everything” (Bowman, Myers, and Southwood 2021). It made the case that housing precarity is behind a range of issues that bedevil the wealthy Western world, from slowing economic productivity and innovation to rising inequality, from low birth rates to poor physical fitness. Why can't the wealthiest societies in the history of humanity figure out this housing thing?

The answer, in some sense, is that as a society, we don't want to.

The housing market is our source of shelter, but it is also the foundation of the American economy. Investments whose values are derived from home mortgages literally backstop the solvency of the entire banking system. This is a lesson we learned the hard way in 2008, and yet it remains true today. Not only the financial sector but millions of individuals' finances are dependent on equity in a house they hope will be an appreciating asset over time.

At the same time, we all need shelter. And there is no way for shelter to remain broadly affordable while home prices rise faster than incomes.

The tension between these two objectives may be clearer than ever. But we are no closer to identifying a simple way of resolving it. In May 2023, a Newsweek story titled “Housing Market Crash Fears Rise Among Americans” summarized the results of a survey: “Americans seem conflicted about where they would like home prices to be heading: some 43 percent would prefer prices in their area to increase, while 41 percent would want to...