Using COVID for Good Density

Strangely, with the hundreds of hours I’ve been trapped inside, I still haven’t managed to finish the updated design of this blog nor even post new content. Why is that? Something else to deliberate in my racing mind later.

This morning, however, in a NY Times Opinion, Carol Galante from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, caught my attention.

Like many of us, Carol is wondering how the new norm can be an unprecedented opportunity to shift the scales of economic and environmental inequalities and injustice. From her perch and her decades of professional practice, Carol promotes using this moment in time to “make cities denser, by loosening restrictive zoning that effectively blocks less-affluent American families from improving their lots in life.”

It’s quite brilliant. She draws comparisons to the housing boom following WWII, but cautions that the negative consequences of that federal investment was a sprawling suburbia with subsequent racist policies of displacement and exclusivity.

This time around, “we have an obligation to ignore the short-term reactionary impulse to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus and instead use this opportunity to rethink the policies that impede the construction of new housing, at more price levels, in the places where housing is most needed.”

These new outcomes mean access to jobs, quality education, and affordable housing for a greater proportion of our population. It means another step closer to equity and inclusion and shared opportunity. Read the entire NY Times Opinion HERE.

Written by Stephen Samuels