Cities, Growth and Housing: Essays on Urban Political Economy

This dissertation explores changes in cities at the onset of a new millennium from different planning prisms, perspectives and geographies. Planning is about accommodating to–even shaping–long term political-economic trajectories. Cities grow, bringing challenges to managing infrastructures, politics and even neighborhoods as they are affected by new waves of infill development, encouraged by state-level policies critical of the sprawl paradigm as it evolved in the post-war years. Other cities lose population due to complex changes in the economy and beyond. Chapter 1 engages with urban modeling knowledge, from the perspective of a regional planning agency charged with making sense of the changing region. Chapter 2 examines the potential for spillovers of new market rate housing on local prices for ownership housing, while Chapter 3 studies a change in how housing subsidies are assessed for voucher holders for rental housing. Lastly, Chapter 4 engages the conceptual debate of shrinking cities, arguing for appropriate analytical clarity.Chapter 1 engages growth projections as a piece of planning practice. Carrying out growth projections decades into the future is often a highly technical exercise involving models based on complicated econometric relationships, estimated based on observed data for the region in question. At the same time, the future of a region is not exclusively a quantitative exercise but a decidedly normative one related to the core of the planning discipline: looking forward, setting design parameters, anticipating challenges and addressing them, or making the future more than just describing it. Thus the core dilemma of the projections work: between describing the world such as it is and how it might evolve, and the world such as it should be, in a normative-planning sense. Questions of urban epistemology abound: How to make “objective“ projections when the future is so much of a normative, design driven exercise? Based on review of historical documents as well as observation from within the agencies charged with preparing projections, we analyze the long term shift in projections as a planning practice for the San Francisco Bay Area. We characterize the projections work as straddling different knowledge domains, and highlight key analytical dilemmas in their preparation, particularly as the role of projections has transitioned from being a standalone informational report to being part of a state-mandated regional planning process with higher stakes and visibility. We identify different styles between the agencies working to prepare them, themselves caught between quantitative modalities and more design-driven sensibilities. The work of projecting, while having substantial technical features, cannot be reduced to a technical exercise alone, and must embrace the complications of being neither purely technical or purely design-focused, but a complex hybrid knowledge product requiring buy-in from a large number of stakeholders.Chapter 2 focuses on housing spillovers. California is in the midst of a state-driven redirection of regional planning with a joint focus on realigning the state’s urban regions towards more infill development as a way to handle transportation demand and reduce greenhouse gases. As infill is encouraged and envisioned as a way to solve planning challenges, questions arise about what the impact of infill on those areas will be: As displacement and gentrification concerns are voiced by many, will the new additions to the housing stock help lower housing prices in those neighborhoods, or might it conversely be a contributor to gentrification through theoretically plausible spillover effects? Empirically, we focus on spillovers, seeking to measure the effect of new supply on sales of the existing multi-family housing stock. Using data from 20 years of arms-length home sales, I examine the San Francisco Bay Area housing market using a series of hedonic regressions relating sales prices to characteristics of not just transacting properties and neighborhoods in general, but with an emphasis on access to new housing in particular. Employing both continuous and discrete difference-in-differences estimators I find support for the conventional view that more housing production leads to a modest decrease in nearby prices, with some exceptions when assessing heterogenous effects of different price tiers of development. Findings suggest new housing is critical, but much caution will be needed to ensure neighborhood price stability of the existing stock.Chapter 3 engages rental markets following a change in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) technical process for determining rent subsidies. The transition from metro-scale to the detailed Small Area Fair Market Rent (SAFMRs) holds great promise in offering subsidies to voucher holders that can better match prices in actually existing housing markets, with much local variation. This potentially opens up more high- opportunity areas to the program’s users. A large-scale assessment of this key rental housing policy has been difficult due to paucity of current national yet sufficiently local, datasets describing rental housing markets. Using recent and spatially comprehensive rental data from Craigslist, a listing website that includes housing, we analyze HUD data for 2,600 FMR areas nationwide and show rental gaps between the actual cost of rentals and the subsidy ceiling. We report on both the areas selected for the SAFMRs as well as those not selected. Based on our findings, we argue that more areas should be included in the program if appropriate safeguards can be instituted.Chapter 4 engages critically with the concept of shrinking cities. Shrinking cities on several continents beset with sustained population losses have been the focus of a number of studies in the past decade, marking an increasing awareness that growth should not be the only preoccupation of planners. Since the Great Recession of 2006-2008, research has widened the map and shown shrinkage even in the Sun Belt cities of California in connection with the recession, leading some researchers to conclude new geographic fault lines for shrinkage. While these works, which have provided such information, are welcome additions to the literature, in this study I will proceed from the observation that the term ”shrinkage” has been used for cities as diverse as Flint, Michigan and San Francisco and San Jose in California. Consequently, I will examine the concept of shrinkage and argue that, while the term’s heterogeneity and flexibility are crucial to the productive employment of the concept, we must, nevertheless, tighten its definition and its application. Otherwise, we risk watering it down to the point where it is no longer useful to describe the vastly different trajectories of differing cities. The study will conclude with reflections on the appropriateness of local scale to address shrinkage