My housing story
Will my kids' hometown make more space for them than mine did for me?
(Also published on StrongTowns.org)
I was born and raised in a middle-class family in the San Francisco Bay Area. By the time I graduated high school in the first dot.com boom, the modest ranch house my parents had bought in the 1970’s had soared in value to over $1,000,000. I knew when I left for college that I would never be able to afford to return to where I grew up, let alone raise my own family there.
In college and later in graduate school I studied climate science and urban sustainability and I developed a passion for urban planning and development. After graduate school, I settled in Cambridge, MA--enjoying a great quality of life, but struggling with high and rising rent. I worked as a city planner for several years and then for a real estate developer, learning the complexities of building new buildings.
When my wife and I started looking to buy a home in Boston, we realized that even with two well paying professional jobs we would never be able to save up a down payment faster than the prices were rising. So we looked for another walkable city that we could afford and settled on Providence to make our home and raise our family.
It is a hard fact of my life that I will never be able to live in the place where I grew up.
Now I have two young children, born and raised in Providence. I don’t want them to lose their home like I did. I want them to have the possibility of returning to the city where they grew up. Heck, I’d hope to live near my grandkids someday! But for that to happen they will need some place to live. Twenty years from now, my wife and I will still need a home… and my kids will each need their own too. Providence will need to build new homes so that they have some place to live. If we don’t build, my kids will either have to buy your house (meaning you and your kids can’t stay here) or they will have to leave (”displacement” either way in the current lingo).
I’ve been priced out of two metropolitan areas that didn’t build enough homes and I want to avoid something like that happening to Providence. Everyone’s child should have a reasonable chance to make a life in the community they were raised in. I think that we can make different choices than other cities. We can build an abundance of homes instead of scrabbling over a scarcity of homes. We can’t make space for my kids, and your kids, and everyone’s, by circling the wagons and fighting change.
Lessons:
If we don’t build new homes, someone is not going to get a house: whether it’s my kids, your grandparents, a refugee, or someone else. The best time to start was ten years ago. The next best time to start is right now.
The path toward abundance means embracing growth, change, and mutual-interdependence–we must all work together to make space for each and every one of us.
Everyone has a different housing story. The details of each story—the difficulties, the opportunities, and the workarounds—can teach us more about what’s really going on than broad-brush housing statistics. I hope to share more housing stories in the future to highlight the different paths and lessons that we can learn.