Any serious strategy for the ambitious development of Targeted Housing requires affordable land. Private developers scour city neighbourhoods to find the best locations. In many municipalities, market forces have driven up prices to “beyond affordable”. Post acquisition, developers spend years seeking various zoning changes for usage and density through height. Without these changes most planned projects would not be economical.
Targeted Housing means social, affordable, and family housing
Waters Edge Definition
Approvals require:
I could go on. Often, it takes a developer five years or more to negotiate a development agreement and for permits to be issued. This leads to an even longer delay in the build-out of the relevant tranche of social, affordable, and family housing that is tied to the new development. A regulatory approach of imposing standards on private developers do not work. These lead to inevitable delays in the development of Targeted Housing.
For ambitious housing programs to become a reality, cities need to own and / or control the largest land inventories in their respective jurisdictions. Cities do not start out with zero land holdings. There are municipal buildings, parking lots, and garages to assess. Every year cities take possession of real estate for the non-payment of taxes.
Other arms of government own vacant land and developable volume over public infrastructure such as transit stations and highways. In mosts cities, there are land assemblies in great locations that look abandoned .
There are strategically located, under utilized sites in almost every municipality. Cities should consider the various tools at their disposition to increase the ownership burden of vacant land, empty storefronts, and surface parking lots (“Ugly Assets”). These could include:
These tactics could create opportunities for city governments to add to their land banks. After all, ambitious development of Targeted Housing requires affordable land.
Part 3 of this series will look at deregulation.
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Vienna had been a poor city even before the First World War. “Normal” housing arrangements meant six to eight people sharing one room and a kitchen. Then, in early 1919, just after the Armistice, the cost of living tripled in two months. Bed lodgers could no longer afford their 8-hours a day in a shared […]