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Q&A
Perris Straughter on strategies for significantly increasing housing production
1:35:19
·
4 min
Commissioner Anita Laremont questions Perris Straughter on what measures, beyond current practices, would drastically increase housing units, given the city's housing crisis and the role of aldermanic privilege.
Straughter responds that while private applications are part of the solution, significant impact on the housing crisis will come from neighborhood-level interventions and transformative rezonings, rather than solely relying on individual private projects. He emphasizes the need for more comprehensive neighborhood planning and increased capacity for the Department of City Planning, acknowledging that even if more housing were as-of-right, market conditions and other factors beyond zoning also play a role in underbuilt areas.
Anita Laremont
1:35:19
Hi, Paris.
1:35:20
I just wanted to to say a thing and then ask you a question.
1:35:24
You know, I think we on the commission all agree that we really have a true crisis in terms of the production of housing in the city.
1:35:33
It's a crisis.
1:35:34
We're not anymore able to just incrementally increase the number of housing units if we don't want people to end up having to flee the city.
1:35:44
So we are really struggling here to find something that will sort of change the dynamics of the number of housing units on an annual basis that are created through our land use process.
1:35:56
And, you know, I heard all of the things that you said, but I didn't understand from those things what of those things is going to drastically increase the number of units.
1:36:08
Because one of the things that we heard from the very outset of people who studied this all over the country is that the aldermanic privilege that we're talking about right here is one of the things that in almost every city in the country stands in the way of production because small neighborhoods have parochial interests that need to be protected through their elected representatives.
1:36:32
And the system that we have where the individual council members are deferred to in land use decisions is a reason that we don't get more units.
1:36:42
And I mean, in all my years working with the city, you can't tell me that that there's no truth to that.
1:36:48
Even if a rezoning is approved, there typically are less units that come out of the end of it than there would have been at the start of it.
1:36:57
And so I just am wondering what it is in your thoughts that would change that to allow us to grit more units because I don't see it other than doing something to change this structure.
Perris Straughter
1:37:10
Yeah.
1:37:11
No.
1:37:11
I appreciate that.
1:37:14
I think so I'm not gonna say that that some certain applications do not come through or don't start the process or, aren't right sized, I would say, through the process.
1:37:30
But I think talking about the scale of the housing crisis and and the scale of a intervention we need to move the lever or move the needle on the housing crisis, it's not gonna be private applications from individual developers across the city that that change that.
1:37:49
I mean, that that's a part of it, but it's a smaller part of it.
1:37:53
What is gonna what what is needed to actually affect the housing crisis is neighborhood level interventions that are, at times, transformative.
1:38:05
You know, what we're doing in these these five neighborhoods is really unlocking a lot of housing opportunity.
1:38:11
It's making a big change as opposed to smaller changes, and it's unlocking a lot of units at all at the same time.
1:38:19
In my mind, we should be doing this much more than we're doing.
1:38:23
And I understand capacity constraints.
1:38:26
You know, I understand budget constraints, but we're not gonna unlock a whole bunch of new even if we made a lot of housing as of right.
1:38:37
Like, if we started allowing a lot of density and low dense density areas, which we're not you're not proposing to do, at least I hope, that doesn't necessarily won't necessarily move the needle either because there's reasons that reasons beyond zoning that those low density neighborhoods are often underbuilt.
1:39:00
I recognize zoning as a major obstacle and parochialism is a major obstacle, but there's also market conditions that are a real obstacle to housing development of scale in those areas.
1:39:12
We need to increase housing where it makes sense to put housing, where there's infrastructure to put housing, you know, and and along with infrastructure that could be improved to enable more housing in those areas.
1:39:27
It's a real planning effort that you know, I've worked in other cities.
1:39:31
Other cities are way ahead of us on this front in part because we don't have a comprehensive planning process.
1:39:38
We don't have real kind of neighborhood planning infrastructure in the city.
1:39:45
And I think, you know, you didn't I didn't mention comprehensive planning in my testimony because there are there's issues with that as well.
1:39:51
I know others have testified around that, but the neighborhood planning piece and thinking through zoning interventions that are at at scale and not reliant just on individual private applications is really how we move the needle.
Sharon Greenberger
1:40:09
Thank you very much.
1:40:11
Appreciate that.