The Affordable City completely changed the way I think about affordable housing advocacy. I’ve been working in the industry ever since my first job out of college at a non-profit affordable housing developer, so to say that this book completely changed my perspective is a real testament to Shane Phillips and the way he breaks down issues around housing affordability.

The three key policies that Shane structures the book around are the three S’s: Supply, Stability, and Subsidy.

The first and third of these S’s, Supply and Subsidy, I’ve understood well. I’ve always come to housing affordability through what has come to be the YIMBY view, that we need to build more housing so that housing supply will meet housing demand. It’s a simple, economics 101 view of the housing market. As someone who has developed affordable housing, I’m also keenly aware of the need for subsidy to build homes for the lowest income families in our communities.

What this book really opened my eyes to was the need for housing price stability. I have often viewed tenants rights advocates as a hindrance to long term housing affordability. Too often, tenant advocates fight against new housing, which in turn makes housing less affordable over the long term. Because of this, I’ve viewed tenants rights in opposition to long-term housing affordability, or at best the choice between housing affordability for current residents and housing affordability for future generations.

In its introduction, The Affordable City makes a convincing case that future housing affordability cannot be achieved at the expense of displacement of existing residents. For a city to be affordable, it must protect existing residents while making room for future growth.

From this starting point, Shane Phillips builds a case for specific policies that, over time, will build an affordable city. The policies are broken down into each of the three S’s. The policies that are most clearly laid out relate to building the housing supply. It is clear that Shane comes from a background similar to my own, and that housing supply is what he has thought about the most when it comes to housing affordability. As the book starts to talk about tenant protections, the lines of thought seem less clear and the passages are filled with more jargon. However, even these nascent policy ideas helped me round out my own thinking about housing affordability.

Most importantly, The Affordable City makes the case that tenants rights advocates and housing supply advocates need to come together and support one another to ensure there is enough political will supporting housing affordability policies. Cities need tenant protections and new housing to ensure that current residents aren’t displaced and that housing costs grow slower than inflation.

The different housing advocacy groups need to be working together to craft policies that work to achieve all of the housing goals simultaneously. In some cases, this might mean not upzoning parcels that already have naturally occurring affordable housing or supporting some rent control. But it also means that any rent control initiative needs to be structured in a way to ensure that it doesn’t create a constraint on future housing development.

The task for any community organizer working toward a more affordable city is to build the bridges between YIMBYs and those most at risk of displacement. Here in California, a lot of work is being done at the state level to marry the policy goals of the two groups (see the YIMBY support for SB 466, which would allow for rent control on newer buildings than allowed currently.) However, at the local level we haven’t yet seen the same coming together of the different advocacy groups. But without joint advocacy, neither group has enough political might to push through any policies that help create a more affordable city.

The Affordable City is required reading for anyone working for housing affordability. It provides the blueprint we need to bring together all of the different groups working in this space. I gave away my first copy of the book to the head of a local tenant union, and I plan to buy more copies to help spread the good word. It’s just that vital of a book if we hope to make our cities more affordable for everyone.

I’m writing this review while wearing my brand new Strong Towns t-shirt. I only bring this up to acknowledge my own bias when coming to this latest text by my friend Chuck Marohn. 

Chuck started the Strong Towns blog a decade and a half ago and has grown it into one of the most influential movements in the urban planning field. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, published in 2021, is the latest outgrowth of this advocacy. 

Confessions is a bit of a followup to Chuck’s 2019 Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. In Strong Towns, Chuck lays out the entire Strong Towns approach to city building. It’s summed up in the idea that cities should observe residents’ needs and do what’s in their power immediately to meet those needs, then repeat. There is a lot more details in the 200+ page text and hundreds of blog posts that Chuck has written, but that’s the foundation of all of it.

While Strong Towns focuses on city building as a whole, Confessions focuses entirely on a city’s transportation network. Confessions starts with a powerful personal story about traffic violence that was caused by roadway design. From there, it builds the case that road design impacts driving behavior and how the engineering profession contributes to unsafe roads and unproductive places.

Along the way, Chuck provides a great primer on how a city’s transportation network can support or hinder the City’s ability to be a productive place. Unfortunately, there is not enough detail on this topic for residents to knowledgeably advocate for a better street network. Chuck does not talk about the different choices cities can make for their transportation network, and the tradeoffs between those different choices. While Confessions isn’t intended as a one-stop shop for transportation advocacy, it could provide additional information or pointers to resources beyond confessions.engineer for people to learn more about how cities can build better transit options. With Strong Towns coming out in early 2019, and Confessions coming out in late 2021, maybe Chuck is working on a more detailed followup exploring these issues to be released in late 2023 or early 2024.

While Chuck leaves out some of the explanations on how the transportation network interacts with other areas of city building, he includes some ideas that don’t seem to fit with the book as a whole. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the routine traffic stop. While this is certainly related to the transportation network and is a key issue for many communities, the way it was addressed in the book felt like a tangent or afterthought. Additionally, there is an entire chapter on transportation fads that already feels out of date less than two years after publication. While these sections were interesting, and some of them important topics, they didn’t help support the overall theme of the book.

The other area where Confessions fell short was in understanding how a city’s transportation network creates the basis for which all land uses are built upon. The book is very focused on transportation, but doesn’t make the connections between transportation and land use and livability within cities. Chapter 2, The Difference Between a Road and a Street, talks extensively about how lower speed streets support a productive place, and higher speed roads are best to connect productive places. However, there isn’t much discussion about the other aspects of building productive places. 

This distinction between streets and roads is a key concept throughout all of Strong Towns. Streets provide for low speed travel through communities, while roads provide high speed connections between them. This distinction makes a lot of sense throughout much of North America where cities are distinct places separated by rural areas. It is much more difficult to apply this distinction within San Angeles (the mega city that spans from Ventura to San Diego). Throughout urban Southern California, there are no real community centers of productive activity that can serve as distinct nodes to connect with high speed roadways. Instead, there is a more or less uniform density and productive capacity throughout much of the southland. This makes it very difficult to apply the lessons identified in Confessions to city building in Southern California. 

Overall, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer provides a great overview for understanding how our existing road designs are failing our communities and what cities could do to improve them. I was hoping that this would be a great first book for new city council members and planning commissioners to introduce them to the ideas related to building better cities. Unfortunately, Confessions is both too focused on transportation and not specific enough in application to be a good resource for city decision makers. But that wasn’t Chuck’s target audience for this book. His target audience was the general public who want to advocate for improvements in their own communities. For that audience, this book is almost perfect.