Part of a quality place strategy for competitive communities includes balancing housing growth. Shifting away from unbalanced growth trends, that isolate both wealth and poverty, toward mixed income neighborhoods will address several negative outcomes of current outward growth patterns. The idea of capturing the wealth in a region into homogeneous safe havens may be profitable to developers that market the benefits of this housing, however, the public cost and problems are regionally inequitable and unsustainable. Isolating citizens by income level neighborhoods has exacerbated the problems of low-density outward growth.

A presentation by Robert Puentes, Reframing the Challenges and Opportunities for Affordable Housing, explains why affordable housing is an important part of managing growth and suggests an agenda for policies.

Among the points made by Puentes:

“Smart Growth without affordable housing contributes to the spatial mismatch between jobs and poverty. Working poor get concentrated in areas remote from education and employment… This imbalance worsens traffic congestion by forcing families to travel long distances… Spatial mismatch places stresses on a regions employees by limiting the pool of workers that can live within a reasonable distance of jobs - For smart growth to succeed, affordable housing must be central to the agenda.”

“School and education policy plays a critical role in housing and neighborhood location decisions… Children that live in poor neighborhoods are at greater risk of school failure. When low-income families are given the chance to move to better neighborhoods, school performance improves. Housing mobility is important. Connection with education should be explicit.”

Puentes proposes a five-part policy agenda for affordable housing as part of a smart growth approach:

1. Education and Income – “Low levels of educational achievement lead to low paying jobs, which impedes families’ access to quality housing… households can build wealth through decent housing in thriving neighborhoods.”
2. Regional Planning and Implementation – “Regional approaches help address “Fair Share” requirements for considering and planning affordable housing needs…Regions don’t delineate the difference between hot and cold markets.”
3. Location – “Don’t cluster in low income neighborhoods, especially in the core…Enable low-income families to live closer to employment centers, better schools, quality transit and other amenities…promote infill development, neighborhood revitalization and re-using vacant land.”
4. Regulations – “Identify and get rid of policies that are exclusionary or unnecessary…Promote thoughtful growth management policies with strong affordable housing components.”
5. Private Sector – “Incentives should be provided for private developers to provide more affordable housing…In hot markets, private sector can be encourage to proffer units and/or cash.”

Creating a range of housing opportunities and choices is one of ten categories (See blog entry Auditing Smart Growth) of policies for implementing smart growth assembled by the Smart Growth Network in two volumes: Getting to Smart Growth and Getting to Smart Growth II. Chapter 3 in both publications provides more detailed ideas for utilizing housing policies to better manage growth.