For decades, we've been living under an unspoken grand bargain when it comes to housing. It’s an arrangement that most people don’t think about explicitly, but it shapes nearly every conversation we have about growth, change and affordability in our cities and towns.
The current grand bargain is simple: No neighborhood needs to change; they can all stay in their current form, but in exchange, one or two neighborhoods will experience radical transformation.
In practice, this means that most neighborhoods are locked in amber, fiercely resisting any change at all, while a select few are subjected to sudden, large-scale redevelopment that reshapes their character overnight. It’s an all-or-nothing approach. It works for almost no one.
This arrangement might have seemed like an expedient tradeoff when it first emerged, but it’s proving to be an increasingly bad deal for everyone. The neighborhoods that avoid change aren’t static; they’re slowly declining. Costs keep increasing. The tax base does not. The lack of incremental adaptation means that they’re becoming less financially productive, more expensive to maintain and increasingly fragile.
Meanwhile, the neighborhoods that are chosen for transformation experience a kind of shock treatment that leads to skyrocketing costs, displacement and a sense of loss for long-time residents. It also creates a cycle of disinvestment, where the prey neighborhoods know that the financial predators have marked them for redevelopment, so why paint the house? Why mow the yard? If the future value of the home is as a scrape-off, why care about it at all?
In most cities, the expectation is that neighborhoods should remain the same forever. If there’s a fight over growth, it’s usually about where the change should happen (anywhere except near me). Cities end up channeling all their growth into just a handful of places — often low-income neighborhoods that lack the political clout to push back. And when the pressure for new housing builds up, the changes come suddenly and dramatically.
It’s time for a new grand bargain — one that acknowledges the reality that cities are living, breathing systems that must evolve and adapt over time. This new grand bargain is equally simple but far more viable: Every neighborhood needs to experience a bit of change; they all need to evolve and mature, but no neighborhood should experience radical change.
At its core, this new paradigm recognizes that change is inevitable and the healthiest places are those that can accommodate it incrementally. In a city where every neighborhood is allowed — and expected — to change a little over time, the pressure to radically transform any one area dissipates. We don’t need to build massive condo towers in a handful of areas if we’re allowing backyard cottages and duplexes to emerge gradually in every neighborhood.
Incremental change is the foundation of a strong and locally-responsive housing market. It allows for natural evolution and continuous improvement. Instead of waiting for an outside developer to swoop in with a large-scale project that displaces current residents and overwhelms local infrastructure, an incremental approach enables neighborhoods to grow in ways that are more responsive to local needs and resources.
In fact, this is how cities used to grow before the postwar Suburban Experiment. A neighborhood would start with small, simple homes. Over time, as the city matured and land values increased, those homes would be gradually expanded, converted or replaced with more substantial structures. The growth wasn’t disruptive; it was a natural evolution that provided housing at many different price points.