Leveraging the crowd to innovate around the gentrification/affordable housing impasse
As in most cities in 2020, affordable housing is a hot topic in New Haven. It’s a familiar story. In the last few years, following a boom in market-rate/high-end rental housing, numerous anti-gentrification/affordable housing advocacy groups have sprung up. In the last mayoral election, affordable housing, slumlords, housing preservation, and neighborhood stabilization dominated debates. People are pissed.
Market Opportunity
Meanwhile, while government tries to create government solutions (regulatory interventions like inclusionary zoning, rent stabilization ordinances), what’s the market coming up with? Is there a clever market intervention that can capitalize on present affordable housing discontents?
Question: is there a way to leverage the crowd to proactively create crowd-based market solutions to the affordable housing question?
–––> Why bother? if the crowd says it wants it, and someone makes it, maybe the crowd will buy it en masse…
Meditations on crowd-based capitalist processes: Land development has been uber-resistant mostly because, unlike giving someone a ride or renting out a bed for the night, developing land involves a complex web of multiple transactions. The risk factor is higher, levered debt is almost always involved, and all three levels of law (federal, state, and local) and various kinds of law (real estate transactions, project finance, etc) have things to say about land development. So, it’s complex––big deal––no pain no gain (and there is gain to be had. Potentially millions of dollars of gain).
Also, it’s 2020. We have sophisticated distributed ledger technology and quantum computers. We can figure out creative ways to construct housing responsibly and affordably for mass consumption. One just has to frame business discovery at the consumer level.
I’m no expert, but may be useful in solving with crowd-based capitalism, and my thinking is that capitalism should work best and most efficiently when simplified so that buyers and sellers operate on the same level of reality. Also, by dispelling with preconceived, hierarchical notions about project finance, we can refresh capitalism to be more #equitable and #inclusive.
I wrote a Zoning Pilot
The crowd had helped identify a central problem: housing market inflation caused by a number of market factors. Now, rather than waiting on the government to solve the problem through government intervention, I set out to ask what the crowd could do to identify alternative/market solutions. Based on the responses, I wrote a pilot with new zoning.
Katherine McComic 