New York City is home to the country’s largest economy, but its suburbs are almost all zoned for single-family homes. That lack of development has resulted in a severe housing shortage in and around the city. But Palisades Park, N.J., is forging a different path.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of this audio essay. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.
Binya Appelbaum: My name is Binya Appelbaum, and I write for the editorial board of the New York Times about economic policy issues.
I write a lot about housing because I think it’s a huge problem in this country. We have a critical lack of affordable housing. Trying to put a spotlight on the lack of affordable housing is something I’ve spent a lot of time doing in recent years.
I got an email recently from a guy who works at the American Enterprise Institute and studies housing issues there, named Ed Pinto. He said he had a solution to the housing problem confronting this nation. I get a lot of emails like that, but what really struck me about it was he said that he had found that solution in the town where he grew up.
Clip of Ed Pinto: It actually hasn’t changed that much …
Appelbaum: Ed grew up in a town called Palisades Park. It’s a suburb of New York, just about two miles west of the George Washington Bridge.
Appelbaum: Do you want to just ride with us or do you have a car?
Pinto: Well, or do you want to just walk?
Appelbaum: We met up there recently.
Pinto: It’s right on that corner, yeah. So this is Washington Place, the street that I grew up on. The beauty of this house was I could go down to the corner, go to the grocery store delicatessen, without ever crossing a street when I was 5 or 6 years old. We had a ranch-style house that my father built in about 1951. Had three bedrooms and I think a bath and a half, and a two-car garage that was detached in the back.
Appelbaum: It sounds like a classic postwar American suburban home.
Pinto: It was, it was a classic, postwar suburban home, yes.
Appelbaum: But the house Ed grew up in is gone. It’s been replaced by a duplex.
Pinto: The door on the left takes you to 18A, and the door on the right takes you to 18B …
Appelbaum: Ed grew up in a house with three bedrooms. The new structure has six bedrooms in two units. It occupies the same piece of land and effectively houses twice as many people. And that, in microcosm, is the story of Palisades Park.
Appelbaum: Why should people care about the possibility of adding 7,000 residents to Palisades Park or expanding the population of other New York suburbs. Why does this matter?
Pinto: It matters because it answers the question, where will our children and grandchildren live? That is the fundamental question. We already know what happens when you don’t allow new supply to be built. Your children live in your basement. You end up with the children moving a thousand miles away.
Appelbaum: Let’s walk down to Grand Street again and talk about that on the main drag …
Appelbaum: Palisades Park is weird and we don’t exactly know why this happened, but when the town passed its first zoning code in the 1930s, instead of writing a law that said all of this land is reserved for single-family homes, they wrote a law that said all of this land is reserved either for single-family homes or for duplexes.
So while it was initially constructed as a community of single-family homes, as demand for housing in New York increased and as more people wanted to live there, Palisades Park was able to grow and to accommodate that demand and to make room for more people who wanted to be a part of New York’s story to live there and to make lives there.
Historically, the biggest and most prosperous cities were also the cities that experienced the biggest population growth. People flocked to opportunity, and so economic growth and population growth went hand in hand.
And what’s happened in the United States is that that has inverted. Our most prosperous cities have now shut their doors and they prevent population growth. And that’s a big problem in its own right. It’s also at the root of a lot of our other national problems.
When we talk about the rise of economic inequality, or the fact that America, which long prided itself on being a land where a person could come and rise up the economic ladder and build a better life for themselves and their children, well, in the United States now, it’s actually more difficult to do that than it is in much of Europe. We’ve become a land of economic stagnation where people’s destinies are in large part determined by who their parents are. These problems have at their root the lack of housing.
Single-family zoning grew up in the early 20th century, basically as a system for preventing change and specifically for preventing minorities from moving into these emerging suburban communities. You couldn’t build an apartment building there. You couldn’t build a duplex there. It was basically anybody who can afford a single-family home is welcome to come. Well, in practice, what that meant is that these communities remained white and exclusive. And so by the mid-20th century, what you have is that much of the American landscape around urban areas is reserved exclusively for single-family development.
What makes Palisades Park so important is it’s an example of a place that has allowed itself to grow.
Appelbaum: What’s striking to me is that in many American towns when you visit them, the shopping street looks gaptoothed and run-down — a lot of vacancies, a lot of old stores. And this one is incredibly vibrant. Every bay is filled. The storefronts are new and shiny.
Pinto: This is very vibrant because you’ve now got more people living here as customers than were here back in 1970 or so. And that makes a huge difference.
Appelbaum: There’s a lot of latent capacity in the average suburban American community. Building more houses has a lot less impact in many cases than people anticipate or fear.
Appelbaum: We’re walking past the Palisades Park Board of Education. And one question that comes up when you increase the population of a town by seven, 10 thousand residents is, what does it do to the services? Does it overcrowd the schools? Does it overwhelm the sewer system?
Pinto: We’ve looked at that. From a sewer perspective, most sewer systems were built with a fair amount of additional capacity. Number one. Number two, family sizes are smaller. Number three, energy efficiency has increased. So the amount of water and sewer that’s being generated may not be tremendously more than it was. On the schools, the number of children per household has gone down, but the bottom line is the tax base has gone up tremendously, and they’ve been able to reduce the tax rates at the same time.
Appelbaum: We’re standing right now on the boundary line between Palisades Park and the adjacent town of Leonia. And Palisades Park is now a community of duplexes, and facing those duplexes on the other side of the street are very large single-family homes because in Leonia it is illegal to build a duplex.
Appelbaum: Leonia’s tax rate and Palisades Park’s tax rate used to be basically identical. But over the last few decades, Palisades Park’s tax rate has dropped to about half of the level of Leonia’s, which is a big change.
Pinto: Leonia likes the nostalgia of Leonia and the way it is. But you can’t keep it like frozen in amber forever.
Appelbaum: Ed does not share the nostalgia for the way things were that I think many people feel, nor the fear of change that is extremely common in these communities. And my producer, Jillian, asked him about that.
Jillian Weinberger: Some people might have an emotional reaction to seeing their childhood home torn down and replaced. Did you have any feeling like that?
Pinto: No, I didn’t think much about it at the time. I had a very happy childhood living there, but progress is progress. And if somebody decided that you need to make way for progress, so be it. I really didn’t have any attachment to it.
Appelbaum: In my experience, many residents of suburban communities are really afraid of change. They view it as a straightforward negative force. And in the United States, for the most part, local communities get to make their own land-use decisions and these local politics are overwhelmingly tilted in favor of preventing development. These are associations of homeowners who are concerned primarily about protecting their own way of life and who have very little interest in the question of where will people who might benefit the New York region in its entirety, where will they live? They don’t care. That’s not on their minds.
It seems to me that our politics are misaligned with our goals as a society. We need to think about housing problems not in terms of what is best for the current residents of Palisades Park or Leonia, but in terms of what’s best for the New York region and for the United States. There are no citizens of Palisades Park. Palisades Park is not the name of a polity. It is a place where a certain number of Americans happen to live, and the terms on which they’re able to do that ought to be subject to our broader political system, which is a system for acting in the broader interest of the American people and of the future American people.
We need to change this system in which local communities can essentially veto development and create reasonable mechanisms for requiring communities to accommodate future and necessary growth and to say to them, you don’t get to be the sole arbiters of what happens to this land that you happen to live on. This land is part of the state of New Jersey. It is part of the United States of America. We all have a vested interest in how it’s used, and we all ought to have the ability to participate in a politics of deciding how it is used.
The post We Have a Housing Crisis. This New Jersey Town Has a Solution. appeared first on New York Times.