Las personas que trabajan conmigo por lo general se sorprenden de hasta qué punto mi canon filosófico deriva de las películasno convencionales de bajo presupuesto, especialmente de la década de 1980. Cuando busco sabiduría, suelo recurrir a las enseñanzas de la película “Repo Man” (traducida al español como “Los recolectores”) o, en el caso de este ensayo, a la obra maestra alegórica de Terry Gilliam, “Time Bandits” (“Bandidos del tiempo”). En esta película, un grupo de trabajadores públicos son empleados por el Ser Supremo para rellenar los agujeros que quedaron en el continuo espaciotiempo por el apresuramiento de haber creado el universo en siete días: “Verán, fue un trabajo algo chapucero”.

Al igual que los bandidos del tiempo, los gestores de políticas generalmente tienen la tarea de rellenar agujeros: agujeros literales, como los baches de las calles, o agujeros más teóricos, que son los artefactos de los mercados privados disfuncionales; uno de ellos es la oferta inadecuada de viviendas sociales. Por ejemplo, los economistas especializados en vivienda de los Estados Unidos se han vuelto bastante expertos en hacer el seguimiento del tamaño de este agujero, que cada vez es más difícil de rellenar desde que el gobierno federal se comprometió a tratar el tema como una prioridad de política nacional a partir de la Ley de Vivienda de 1949, que fue parte de la legislación conocida como Fair Deal del expresidente Harry S. Truman.

En su discurso del Estado de la Unión de 1949, el presidente Truman resaltó que, para poder suplir las necesidades de millones de familias sin una vivienda adecuada, “la mayoría de las viviendas que necesitamos deberán ser construidas por el sector privado sin subsidios públicos”. Casi 70 años más tarde, nuestro fracaso colectivo para resolver el déficit de viviendas sociales tenga que ver con un análisis incorrecto del problema y con la conclusión de que pueden diseñarse soluciones basadas en el mercado con el fin de resolver la discordancia entre la oferta y la demanda de viviendas sociales.

Para apoyar esta idea, me desviaré brevemente hacia la teoría del mercado. Partiendo del enfoque matemático para analizar la economía que predomina hoy en día, un mercado es, simplemente, un sistema de ecuaciones diferenciales parciales que se resuelve mediante un único precio. Estas captan las decisiones complejas que toman los consumidores y los productores de bienes, y concilian las preferencias y los presupuestos de los consumidores con la elaboración de técnicas, capital y costos de transacción por parte de los productores para así llegar a un precio que despeje el mercado mediante el acuerdo de las operaciones que todos los proveedores y consumidores están dispuestos a intercambiar por ese precio.

Los prestigiosos economistas Arrow, Debreu y McKenzie demostraron la existencia teórica de un conjunto único de precios capaz de resolver simultáneamente la cuestión del “equilibrio general” de todos los mercados en una economía nacional o mundial. Un aspecto importante de esta contribución (que obtuvo el Premio Nobel) fue la observación de que un único precio despejaba cada mercado: un mercado, un precio. No se esperaba que un único precio mantuviera el equilibrio en dos mercados. Y este es el defecto fundamental del mercado de la vivienda: en realidad, no es un mercado, sino dos. Los mercados de la vivienda proporcionan tanto lugares para vivir a los consumidores locales como bienes de inversión comercializables en todo el mundo, gracias a los grandes mercados de capital al servicio de los inversores a nivel mundial. Esta condición de mercado doble correspondía al sector de viviendas ocupadas por sus propietarios; sin embargo, con la proliferación de los fideicomisos de inversión inmobiliaria, los mercados de alquiler se encuentran ahora en la misma situación.

Los mercados de bienes de consumo se comportan de manera muy diferente a los mercados de inversión, ya que responden a “reglas básicas” distintas. En lo que a la oferta se refiere, los precios de los bienes de consumo se derivan de los costos de producción, mientras que los precios de los mercados de inversión tienen que ver con los beneficios esperados. En relación con la demanda, factores tales como gustos y preferencias, ingresos de las familias y características demográficas determinan el precio de la vivienda como lugar donde residir. La demanda de vivienda con fines de inversión está relacionada con aspectos tales como la liquidez y las preferencias de liquidez de los inversores, las ganancias esperadas de inversiones alternativas, o las tasas de interés.

En los países desarrollados, los mercados de capitales mundiales y el mercado de la vivienda colisionan a nivel local, con pocas probabilidades de reconciliación. Los hogares a nivel local compiten con los inversores a nivel mundial para decidir el tipo y la cantidad de viviendas que se producen. En los mercados que atraen la inversión mundial se produce una gran cantidad de viviendas, aunque la falta de viviendas sociales es aguda y empeora con el paso del tiempo. Esto se debe a que una gran parte de las viviendas nuevas se produce para maximizar las ganancias de la inversión y no para suplir las necesidades de vivienda de la población local. Por ejemplo, no escasean los inversores mundiales dispuestos a participar en el desarrollo de apartamentos de USD 100 millones en la Ciudad de Nueva York; sin embargo, escasean las viviendas sociales por la dificultad de conseguir fondos para desarrollarlas. En los mercados que han sido abandonados por el capital mundial, los precios de las viviendas caen por debajo de los costos de producción, por lo que existe un excedente de viviendas que se acumula y se deteriora. En casos extremos como el de Detroit, el orden del mercado sólo puede recuperarse mediante la demolición de miles de viviendas y edificios abandonados.

Tal vez sea este el momento de cuestionar la conclusión de que las soluciones basadas en el mercado pueden resolver el desafío de proveer de vivienda a la población del país. Truman concluyó que “al producir pocas unidades de alquiler, frente a una proporción demasiado grande de viviendas de alto precio, la industria de la construcción se está excluyendo a sí misma rápidamente del mercado debido a los precios”. No obstante, Truman se refería al mercado de la vivienda para residir, no para invertir. Es destacable que la cantidad de unidades habitacionales en los países desarrollados excede en mucho la cantidad de hogares. En el año 2016, el censo de los EE. UU. calculó que en el país existían 13 millones de unidades habitacionales y 118 millones de hogares. Una de cada siete unidades habitacionales se encontraba vacante. Este excedente de la oferta de viviendas es una característica de todos los mercados metropolitanos de Estados Unidos, incluso de aquellos mercados con una escasez extrema de viviendas sociales. En 2016, el 10,3 por ciento de las unidades habitacionales se encontraban vacantes en el Nueva York, un 6,0 por ciento en el área de la Bahía de San Francisco, un 8,2 por ciento en Washington D.C., y el valor sorprendente del 13,7 por ciento en Honolulu. El problema radica en que muchas familias no tienen suficientes ingresos para acceder a las viviendas que están disponibles.

Al final, los bandidos del tiempo decidieron, en lugar de rellenar los agujeros que existían en el tejido de espacio y tiempo, aprovecharse de ellos para “hacerse indecentemente ricos”. Los bandidos querían capitalizar las imperfecciones celestiales, al igual que los inversores mundiales desean obtener rentabilidad de las dislocaciones del mercado a corto plazo. A fin de ilustrar los peligros de dicha especulación desmedida en los mercados no regulados, consideremos un relato apocalíptico de un mercado muy diferente. En 1974, en Bangladesh, se sugirió que, debido a las copiosas lluvias que habían caído durante la temporada de siembra, era posible que existiera una escasez de arroz en la temporada de cosecha, y el precio del arroz comenzó a subir. Los especuladores expertos en bienes comercializables se dieron cuenta de que obtendrían una buena rentabilidad del arroz que mantuvieran fuera de mercado. La cosecha real produjo abundante arroz, pero la interacción entre las expectativas del mercado y las manipulaciones del mercado por parte de los inversores en bienes comercializables generó una de las peores hambrunas del siglo XX, que causó aproximadamente un millón y medio de muertes relacionadas con el hambre. Esta hambruna no fue el resultado de una escasez real de alimentos. La colisión entre el mercado de bienes y el mercado de inversión especulativa causó tal aumento del precio del arroz que hizo que quedara fuera del alcance de las poblaciones locales, lo que dio como resultado que las familias sin tierras sufrieran una tasa de mortalidad tres veces más alta que las familias con tierras.

Tal vez la vivienda y el alimento sean aspectos demasiado importantes para ser administrados por los mercados no regulados. Quizá las políticas públicas deberían concentrarse en proteger una parte del mercado —y del público— de los estragos de la especulación. En este número especial antológico de Land Lines, Loren Berlin describe las medidas tomadas a fin de preservar la vivienda social en forma de viviendas prefabricadas y promover la accesibilidad permanente a dichas viviendas mediante la conversión de comunidades de viviendas prefabricadas en cooperativas de patrimonio limitado.

Los fideicomisos de suelo comunitario y las políticas inclusivas de vivienda también son formas efectivas de apartar a las viviendas sociales de la especulación, según lo demostró una investigación del Instituto Lincoln. Después de casi setenta años de medidas fallidas para lograr que los mercados privados suplan las necesidades de vivienda social de la población, tal vez sea el momento de desarrollar y exportar estos otros enfoques que se fundamentan en una comprensión más realista de la complejidaddel mercado de la vivienda y del mercado del capital.

Este artículo se publicó originalmente en el número de Land Lines de julio de 2015.

In 2015 and 2016, representatives from various public agencies, foundations, and nonprofit groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Denver participated in “capital absorption” workshops, to forge solutions to local affordable housing shortages through strategies that attract land, capital, and other resources. They represented not just housing, but transit, planning, and economic development organizations—stakeholders that often don’t join forces to solve problems, even though they work on overlapping issues in identical geographies.

At one of these meetings in 2016, Abigail Thorne-Lyman, program manager for transit-oriented development (TOD) at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)—a public transportation system that annually shuttles more than 125 million passengers across the region—realized her agency might be able to make a game-changing contribution to solving the local housing crisis, which is among the nation’s largest. More than 250,000 of the region’s very low-income households lack access to affordable housing. The median home value is San Francisco is $1,147,300, compared to $197,500 nationally; the median monthly rent is a whopping $4,350, more than three times the national median rent of $1,500. Nearly half of local renters spend more than 30 percent of income on rent.

Each six-member team of participants from each region had drafted a spreadsheet of all pending development projects that included affordable housing units. “Staring at our list, we realized that capital wasn’t the primary constraint to building more housing,” explains Thorne-Lyman. “What we needed—the missing piece, so to speak—was land.”

In the Bay Area, developers don’t buy land until they are confident they can assemble the necessary financing for their project, making it difficult to compete in a hot real estate market, Thorne-Lyman says. But BART already owned 300 acres across the region.

That evening, Thorne-Lyman started imagining scenarios in which BART made all its land available for developments that included affordable housing. She ran the numbers. “I saw that we could produce maybe 30,000 units if we put our land in play,” she explains. Ten thousand units could be affordable—which is significant, given that the typical affordable housing development in the Bay Area produces 50 to 200 units. “And if we put ourselves out there first, maybe other transit agencies in other counties would come along,” as BART serves only four of the Bay Area’s nine counties. Together they could make an even bigger dent. “The 30,000 units could turn into 60,000 units, all on public land,” says Thorne-Lyman.

Thorne-Lyman and the rest of the capital absorption team delivered the analysis to BART’s general manager, Grace Crunican. Both Crunican and the BART board of directors decided to increase the agency’s commitment to both market-rate and affordable housing on BART land. Then they asked Thorne-Lyman and the team to model scenarios above and beyond any they had privately imagined.

“That conversation with Grace was like a slingshot,” says Thorne-Lyman. “We had these ideas and played them out. Then the board asked for an even more ambitious vision for our land. Through our work with the capital absorption team, we had all these willing partners—including the affordable housing advocates, community development financial institutions, and foundations—who backed up the idea and pushed it out to the public.”

BART’s new TOD development targets, adopted in December 2016, call for production of 20,000 new housing units and 4.5 million square feet of office space on BART land by 2040. At least 35 percent of these units—7,000, to be exact—will be affordable to low- and very low-income households. So far, BART has produced 760 affordable units on its land, meaning the agency has some work to do. Nonetheless, Thorne-Lyman is encouraged by the challenge. “California has this affordable housing crisis, and we can say that BART will be part of the solution,” she explains. “We have land. And we are willing to offer it up.” 

“Someone has to be thinking big about how to address this crisis. We are putting forward something big,” she says.

The Capital Absorption Framework

The capital absorption workshops that Thorne-Lyman attended were part of a pilot program designed to help cities attract and deploy community investment and to leverage other critical resources, such as land and expertise, to achieve their goals. Community investment is defined as “investments intended to achieve social and environmental benefits in underserved communities—such as loans, bonds, tax-credit equity, and structured investment vehicles.”

The program’s chief architect, Robin Hacke, says, “It’s a way to make resources go to places where they’re not going by themselves, to address the failures of mainstream finance to produce enough affordable housing, reduce health disparities, or minimize the impact of climate change on vulnerable places, among other factors tied to land use.”

Hacke, who is the director of the Center for Community Investment at the Lincoln Institute, is utilizing a new “systems change” strategy that she designed in collaboration with colleagues David Wood of Harvard University’s Initiative for Responsible Investment, Katie Grace Deane, and Marian Urquilla. Called the Capital Absorption Framework, the model is predicated on this idea that mainstream capital markets frequently fail to address the needs of low-income communities, requiring a systemic approach to repair this breakdown and achieve meaningful outcomes at scale (opposed to one-off projects that are difficult to accomplish and, even when successful, fail to move the needle in a significant way). By “bringing to the table” stakeholders who rarely join forces to solve problems despite having aligned interests, the model also augments available assets and power, helping to identify effective new tools and strategies to address unmet community needs.

The framework is a response to challenges Hacke and Urquilla faced while working on The Integration Initiative, an $80 million program begun in 2010 to improve the lives of low-income residents in five pilot cities—Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Newark. Administered by Living Cities, the idea was to align interests across a range of players and invest capital in neighborhoods that traditionally can’t access funds.

The Integration Initiative demonstrated that participating cities not only lacked capital; they lacked the capacity to absorb and deploy the funds allotted to them through the program, says Hacke.

“Spatially inequitable distribution of low-income people across the United States grew from decades of public policy that basically starved communities of capital, through redlining by banks or redlining aided and abetted by the Federal Housing Administration,” says George McCarthy, president and chief executive of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, who was involved in The Integration Initiative during his tenure at the Ford Foundation.

Systems Change

In order to overcome the effects of discrimination and the market’s failure to deliver adequate goods, services, and opportunities to disadvantaged communities, we need to ensure that capital can flow to those places. Ensuring that residents can thrive means finding ways to finance affordable housing; developing healthy environments with access to fresh food and safe places to walk, bike, and play; and providing access to quality education and jobs. It is not enough simply to invest in a single project and expect places to be transformed. The Center for Community Investment is committed to strengthening the systems that engage a community in planning for its future, creating a platform and network of relationships that unite the institutions and individuals with the capacity to advance the community’s vision; developing and executing investment transactions that implement that vision; and shaping the policies and practices that accelerate how transactions proceed.

—Robin Hacke

“Because we starved communities of capital, we think the way to help them recover is just to provide them with money. But that misses the point that over the years we didn’t just strip out the capital but also the capacity of those places to help themselves. Many people in the community development movement believe that if we just find a way to get more capital to places, then good things are going to happen. But one of the hard lessons we have learned is that, even if you can get the money to those communities, they don’t necessarily have a way to use it. It may sound like I’m blaming the victim, but that’s not it. Rather, it’s understanding that when you deny a place critical resources for long enough and then suddenly provide it, the community may not be ready to deploy it. It’s like people. If you starve someone for too long and then provide food, that person may not be able to eat it.”

Managing the Pipeline

“To deploy capital successfully, places need to identify sources of capital as well as projects that can use it. Proponents of impact investment have focused on organizing capital supplydemand for investment,” Hacke says. “For example, in Detroit, Baltimore, and Cleveland, they were not primarily looking at housing. They wanted to accelerate all kinds of development, including commercial and mixed-use developments. Getting the right set of deals and the right conditions to supply capacity to those deals required much more than just investment capital. The work took longer than we expected and required much more upfront arrangement of the plumbing than we had anticipated,” she adds.

“Despite the great need in disadvantaged communities, stakeholders have to overcome major obstacles to complete projects,” says Hacke. “If people don’t believe that the deals have a decent-sized chance, they give up on them. So we organize stakeholders around what is most urgent at that time and organize the resources that way as well to increase the probability and the confidence that the critical deals will get done.”

The lack of confidence stems from the cold truth that community development projects are usually difficult to realize (figure 1). Hacke confronts that fact head-on by asking participants to identify what she calls “exemplary community impact deals. The ones that stick out in people’s minds as representative of the field tend to be complex, time-consuming, and politically fraught, balancing the interests of many stakeholders and blending many different sources of capital with varied constraints and requirements. Practitioners evoke the language of heroic quests to describe these deals.”

Identifying and examining “exemplary deals” is helpful in two ways. First, it highlights the complex and convoluted nature of many community investment projects, clarifying the need for a more efficient, scalable strategy. More importantly, analyzing exemplary deals can help stakeholders determine the potential resources and constraints of the larger community development system, including the engagement level of various players, the availability of an array of skills and resources, and opportunities for collaboration.

3 Components of an Effective Community Investment System

Once stakeholders in a region have used the exemplary deals framework to examine how the community investment system is currently operating, the next step is to identify ways to improve the functioning of that system so that it can deliver impact at greater scale. As organized by the framework, an effective system requires three things, which are the focus of Hacke’s work with communities.

Identify Shared Priorities

First, stakeholders must articulate a well-defined set of priorities that are widely embraced across the community. Affordable housing is not always the anchor for establishing these priorities, but it was the easiest starting point in Hacke’s pilot programs—in part because the field has reliable, effective funding sources, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, and a robust network of experienced organizations.

“We work really hard to convene and build cross-sector relationships so that we can operate from a set of shared priorities,” says Thomas Yee, the Initiatives Officer at LA THRIVES, a nonprofit that works to advance the equity agenda around smart growth and participated in the Capital Absorption Framework pilot.

“There’s going to be disagreement among really progressive advocates, elected officials, and private developers, so it takes a lot of working together, building trust, and finding common ground. But that’s the way to organize system-level approaches. It allows you to boil down the work to a few principles that excite people and keep them focused on the system instead of their particular neighborhood or project.”

One of the shared priorities to emerge out of the Los Angeles work is the importance of ensuring that LA Metro, the public agency responsible for bus and rail services in Los Angeles County, effectively serves low-income residents, who are the agency’s core riders.

Prior to joining the workshops, LA Metro knew its core riders were low-income. Based on the findings of a research study the agency had commissioned prior to joining the Los Angeles team, the agency also understood how it could assist those riders to live near transit lines. It was developing aggressive housing targets on agency-owned land when it joined the LA THRIVES collaborative.

“The sea change was coming together to get LA Metro to think about what that means for how the agency runs its business—about the bottom-line question of what happens if those core riders are living farther and farther away from existing transit systems,” explains Yee.

According to Yee, LA Metro was interested in additional ways to counter displacement, and joining the collaborative was “really the water needed to grow those seeds.”

The idea that low-income riders would be pushed farther afield disturbed the other members of the pilot’s Los Angeles team. The transportation planners balked at the cost and inefficiencies of expanding service to outlying areas, while the conservationists worried about the environmental impact.

The community advocates were concerned about economic and social isolation, and the housing folk feared there was a lack of affordable housing in the outer ring areas. Resolving this issue correctly would present an opportunity to simultaneously address these seemingly unrelated concerns, and so it became a shared priority among the collaborative. In response, LA Metro adopted a new term for thinking about transit in the context of displacement: the Transit-Oriented Communities frame.

But LA Metro wanted to do more. It was clear that, unlike BART, the agency did not have much additional land that could allow for thousands of new affordable housing units. Instead, LA Metro, in partnership with other members of the team, created a loan fund to support the development of affordable housing and retention of existing low-rent, nonrestricted units near the agency’s transit lines. Critically, the units do not have to be on agency-owned land, but they must be close enough to provide easy access to the transit.

“We are so excited that LA Metro is willing to make investments off their property,” says Yee. “Making it easier to develop affordable housing on agency-owned land is one thing—and obviously a huge step in and of itself. But for them to go beyond agency-owned land is a big innovation and demonstrates a commitment to limiting the displacement of core riders.”

Establish a Pipeline of Deals

Once stakeholders identify a set of strategic priorities, they can then focus on establishing a pipeline of deals—the second step in implementing the framework. Stakeholders begin by examining deals in progress, analyzing whether they support the priorities and where there may be gaps.

The practice of examining the deal pipeline also helps to highlight the resources that are necessary for success.

For the Denver team, analyzing the city’s pipeline resulted in the recognition that the team needed to focus more on attracting mission-driven private capital, says Dace West, a leader of the Denver pilot and, at the time, executive director of Mile High Connects, a nonprofit with a mission to ensure that the Metro Denver regional transit system fosters communities that offer all residents the opportunity for a high quality of life.

“We had this powerful moment as a community when we realized that the way we are doing community development work is really driven by specific, restrictive funding sources that are more mature systems—like tax credits, which are oversubscribed—or, in other cases, sources of capital that are not very predictable,” says West, referring to the takeaways from the pipeline analysis.

“We realized that we are so often falling short in the developments we are working on because of an inability to be very systematic about the way we draw down and deploy capital. So, going forward, we are very focused now on how we leverage private-sector impact investment capital into the system, looking at traditional capital sources in new ways and at what we need to do to unlock significant capital seeking a place to land,” West says.

“We have discovered, from deep and intentional work, that impact means really different things to impact investors. When some say they want impact, what they are really saying is that they want to be able to squint and see something good; that is good enough for them, because what they really want is liquidity and rates of return. We think, ‘That’s good to know, because we have been wasting our time on these things that aren’t real issues.’ Now we can focus on questions such as: what is that target rate of return, and where are the right places to leverage that capital versus other kinds of capital? And that’s been a real ‘aha’ moment—this recognition that real estate, which is something we had been thinking of as a more traditional investment, can be an actual community impact investment, which creates new and interesting connections.”

One of those connections is to Denver’s housing finance agency.

“As we have been thinking about ways this new capital could land, we have discovered that we have a very unusual housing finance agency.

It is very creative and flexible and is already managing a huge number of siloed, structured funds that have a community purpose in some way,” says West. “We are working to build out a platform that uses the agency as a base to draw in capital that can go to specific sleeves but can also flow across those gaps and allow us to pursue projects driven by the community and its needs. The housing finance agency is not responding merely to existing funding sources any longer; it’s acting as a broad-based intermediary that can work across and among agencies in the system.”

Create an Enabling Environment

After building out a pipeline of deals, it’s a natural next step to the final piece of the framework—strengthening the “enabling environment.” This is defined as “the latent conditions that shape the system’s operations,” including but not limited to “the presence or absence of needed skills and capacities, political realities, formal and informal relationships among key actors, and the cultural norms and behaviors that manifest differently in different places.”

In the capital absorption workshops, participants are asked to figure out which areas of the environment are or are not working well, and which policies and practices directly affect their strategic priorities. In doing so, they can better grasp the opportunities and limitations inherent in the current system.

For Thorne-Lyman and the rest of the San Francisco team, it was analysis of the enabling environment—of what resources are and are not available and functioning well in the ecosystem of affordable housing—that immediately revealed that shortage of land.

Center for Community Investment

Thorne-Lyman is not the only one excited by the work that has come out of the Capital Absorption Framework. McCarthy is also encouraged.

“Land is one of a community’s most valuable and scarce resources,” he says. “Land policies can play a central role in attracting or generating the investment needed to tackle vacancies and blight produced by dysfunctional land markets or to address the disparate impact of pollution and climate change on poor and disadvantaged families.”

For that reason, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy launched the Center for Community Investment in 2016 with support from The Kresge Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Surdna Foundation. The Center is a leadership development, research, and capacity-building initiative to help communities mobilize capital and leverage land and other assets to achieve their economic, social, and environmental priorities. Hacke will direct the new center and use it as a platform to advance the capital absorption model.

“We have seen over and over again that land really is an important part of the solution, whether we are talking about the health of people or green infrastructure and the health of natural ecosystems. Being at the Lincoln Institute, which has such tremendous expertise in the use of land to generate and capture value, is a real boon for us,” says Hacke.

Building on the success of the pilot, the Center for Community Investment has launched a new initiative, Connect Capital, aimed at helping cities and regions across the country improve access to opportunities so that everyone has a fair chance to lead a healthy and productive life. The Center is working with cross-sector partnerships that are reshaping local systems and deploying capital to make their communities healthier, more cohesive, resilient, and vibrant. Selected teams receive coaching and the opportunity to participate in learning sessions to help them strengthen their local community investment system.

At Lincoln, Hacke hopes to expand her work by piloting it in additional communities. Participants in the pilot cohort encourage those cities to seize on the opportunity. “When we started this work two years ago, it felt like an abstract academic exercise replete with homework assignments. But we hung in there with their approach and have seen such value in the framework,” says Christopher Goett, a senior program officer at the California Community Foundation, one of the supporters of the Los Angeles pilot. “Robin, Katie, David, and Marian pulled together a safe space that allowed us to tackle difficult work and created a support system that strengthened over time. In hindsight, these activities have been critical moments for us in our evolution and growth.”

“Community and economic development work is often addressed through programs in their own respective silos, but that’s not how the world operates,” Goett says. “Average Angelenos wake up and use transit to get to work or drop off their children at school. Systems such as housing, employment, and education all interact, and that’s how the Center’s frame is laid out.”

“For someone who manages a smart growth portfolio here at the California Community Foundation, the framework continues to become increasingly useful; smart growth is, by its nature, integrated. We have to think about public health at the same time we think about infrastructure and housing, and with this frame we can walk through the transit-oriented development door and still see the anti-displacement and housing angles.”

Revised in January 2018, this article originally appeared in April 2017 Land Lines.

Loren Berlin is a writer and independent communications consultant in Chicago.

Photograph: Courtesy of Abode Communities

References

Bay Area Council Economic Institute. 2016. “Solving the Housing Affordability Crisis: How Policies Change the Number of San Francisco Households Burdened by Housing Costs.” (October). http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/files/pdf/BACEI_Housing_10_2016.pdf

Hacke, Robin, David Wood, and Marian Urquilla. 2015. “Community Investment: Focusing on the System.” Working paper. Troy, MI: Kresge Foundation.

Truong, K. 2016, October 11. “Here Are 11 Solutions to the Bay Area Housing Crisis.” San Francisco Business Times. October 11.

Zillow.com. “San Francisco Home Prices and Values.” https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/

Zillow.com. “United States Home Prices and Values.” https://www.zillow.com/home-values/
 

People who work with me are often surprised by the extent to which my philosophical canon derives from low-budget offbeat films, typically from the 1980s. When in need of wisdom, I frequently turn to the teachings of Repo Man or, for this essay, Terry Gilliam’s allegorical masterpiece Time Bandits. In the movie, a group of public workers are employed by the Supreme Being to fill holes in the time-space continuum left from the haste of creating the universe in seven days: “It was a bit of a botched job, you see.”

Like the Time Bandits, policy makers are often tasked to fill holes—actual potholes in roadways, or more theoretical holes that are the artifacts of dysfunctional private markets, such as the inadequate supply of affordable housing. For example, housing economists in the United States have become quite adept at tracking the size of the hole, which has only become harder to fill since the federal government committed to address it as a national policy priority beginning with the Housing Act of 1949, part of President Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal.

In his 1949 State of the Union address, President Truman noted that to fill the needs of millions of families with inadequate housing, “Most of the houses we need will have to be built by private enterprise, without public subsidy.” Nearly 70 years later, our collective failure to solve the affordable housing deficit may stem from wrongheaded analysis of the problem, and the conclusion that market-based solutions can be designed to solve the mismatch between the supply of affordable housing and demand for it.

To support this claim, permit me a short departure into market theory. From the now-preferred mathematical approach to economic analysis, a market is simply a system of partial differential equations that is solved by a single price. The equations capture the complex decisions made by consumers and producers of goods—reconciling consumers’ preferences and budgets with producers’ production techniques, capital, and transaction costs—to arrive at a price that clears the market by settling the transactions of all suppliers and consumers willing to trade at that price.

Acclaimed economists Arrow, Debreu, and McKenzie proved the theoretical existence of a single set of prices that can simultaneously solve for the “general equilibrium” of all markets in a national or global economy. One important aspect of this Nobel Prize–winning contribution was the observation that a unique price cleared each market—one market, one price. There was no expectation that a single price could maintain equilibrium in two markets. And this is the fundamental flaw of the housing market—it is actually two markets, not one. Housing markets supply both shelter for local consumption and a globally tradable investment good made possible by broad capital markets that serve global investors. This dual-market status used to pertain to owner-occupied housing, but, with the proliferation of real estate investment trusts, rental markets are now in the same boat.

Markets for consumption goods behave very differently than investment markets, responding to different “fundamentals.” On the supply side, prices for consumption goods are dictated by production costs, while prices in investment markets are dictated by expected returns. On the demand side, such things as tastes and preferences, household incomes, and demographics determine the price of housing as shelter. Investment demand for housing is dictated by factors like liquidity and liquidity preferences of investors, expected returns on alternative investments, or interest rates.

In developed countries, global capital markets and the market for shelter collide locally with little chance of reconciliation. Local households compete with global investors to decide the character and quantity of housing that is produced. In markets that attract global investment, plenty of housing is produced, but shortages of affordable units are acute, and worsen over time. This is because a huge share of new housing is produced to maximize investment return, not to meet the needs of the local population for shelter. For example, there is no shortage of global investment willing to participate in developing $100 million apartments in New York City. But affordable housing, being much harder to finance, is in short supply. And in markets that have been abandoned by global capital, house prices fall below production costs, and surplus housing accumulates and decays. In extreme cases such as Detroit, market order can only be restored by demolishing thousands of abandoned homes and buildings.

Perhaps it is time that we question the conclusion that market-based solutions can address the challenge of sheltering a country’s population. Truman concluded that “By producing too few rental units and too large a proportion of high-priced houses, the building industry is rapidly pricing itself out of the market.” But Truman was thinking about the market for shelter, not investment. Remarkably, the number of housing units in developed countries significantly exceeds the number of households. In 2016, the U.S. Census estimated that there were 135 million units of housing in the country and 118 million households. One in seven housing units was vacant. This over-supply of housing characterizes every metropolitan market in the United States—even markets with extreme shortages of affordable housing. In 2016, 10.3 percent of housing units were vacant in New York, 6.0 percent in the San Francisco Bay area, 8.2 percent in Washington, DC, and a stunning 13.7 percent in Honolulu. The problem is that many households have insufficient incomes to afford the housing that is available.

In the end, rather than fill the holes in the fabric of time and space, the Time Bandits decided to take advantage of them to “get bloody stinking rich.” The bandits sought to capitalize on celestial imperfections, the way global investors seek returns from short-term market dislocations. To illustrate the dangers of such naked speculation in unregulated markets, consider an apocalyptic tale from a very different market. In 1974, heavy rains during planting season in Bangladesh suggested that rice might be in short supply at harvest time, and rice prices started to rise. Savvy commodity speculators realized that there would be a good return on any rice that was held off the market. The actual harvest produced a bumper crop, but the interaction between market expectations and market manipulations by commodity investors produced one of the worst famines of the 20th century—with an estimated 1.5 million famine-related fatalities. The famine did not result from real food shortages. The collision of the market for goods and the market for speculative investment priced rice out of the reach of the local populations, with landless families suffering mortality at three times the rate of families with land.

Perhaps shelter and food are too important to be left to unregulated markets to allocate. Perhaps public policy should focus on protecting a share of the market—and the public—from the ravages of speculation. In this special anthology issue of Land Lines, Loren Berlin describes efforts to preserve affordable housing in the form of manufactured homes and to promote permanent affordability of that stock through the conversion of manufactured housing communities to limited equity cooperatives. Community land trusts and inclusionary housing policies are also effective ways to insulate shelter from speculation, as demonstrated by Lincoln Institute research. After almost seven decades of failed efforts to get private markets to meet populations’ needs for affordable shelter, it might be time to develop, and to export, these other approaches based on a more realistic understanding of the complexity of housing and capital markets.

This article originally appeared in July 2015 Land Lines.

WeChat, una app social china, fue lanzada por primera vez hace apenas seis años y hoy es una de las más populares del mundo: se informan 938 millones de usuarios activos por mes. Se hizo famosa como servicio de mensajería y luego agregó más funciones. Una de ellas adquirió amplia popularidad en algo que llamó la atención de forma generalizada: los pagos. Si hoy visita cualquier ciudad china, pronto se dará cuenta de que la opción de pagar casi cualquier cosa con el smartphone es bastante inevitable.

El resultado es que WeChat Pay se convirtió en un ejemplo sólido de un ecosistema de pago digital que se establece gracias a una mezcla única de tecnología móvil y el entorno construido. Junto con un servicio rival llamado Alipay (ofrecido por el gigante del comercio electrónico Alibaba), se encuentra en el centro de un fenómeno digital que en parte dio forma el contexto de las ciudades, y que, a su vez, en el futuro podría afectar los elementos de dicho contexto urbano.

La noción general del pago digital no es nada nueva. PayPal existe desde hace años; es probable que los datos de su tarjeta de crédito estén guardados en muchas tiendas en línea; una base sólida y cada vez mayor de usuarios depende de Venmo para realizar pagos personalmente; Apple Pay firmó acuerdos para permitir pagos desde smartphones en una gran cantidad de tiendas importantes de Estados Unidos y el exterior. Y estos son solo algunos ejemplos. Sin embargo, en 2016, los pagos realizados por dispositivos móviles sumaron un total de US$ 112.000 millones en Estados Unidos (RMB 742.700 millones), mientras que en China se informaron US$ 5,5 billones (RMB 36,47 billones). Más allá de los números, la mera omnipresencia de WeChat Pay y Alipay logró que la idea de que el smartphone funcione como billetera virtual sea abiertamente visible, algo ya incorporado en la vida de la ciudad.

Para aceptar pago por WeChat, el vendedor solo debe imprimir un código QR único (que básicamente es un código de barras evolucionado) y vincularlo a una cuenta digital; para hacer un pago, el cliente puede escanear ese código con un smartphone. Pony Ma, director ejecutivo de Tencent, padre de WeChat, dijo que el código QR es “una etiqueta con mucha información en línea adjunta al mundo fuera de línea”. Los vendedores no necesitan algo tan complicado o caro como los dispositivos especiales que suelen necesitar para aceptar pagos por tarjeta de crédito (o, de hecho, Apple Pay); cualquiera puede imprimir un código QR.

Hay un motivo por el que WeChat Pay se hizo famoso no solo entre los comercios más grandes y conocidos, sino también entre los restaurantes pequeños y hasta los vendedores ambulantes. “Es imposible no usarlo”, dijo Kate Austermiller, gerente del programa PKU–Lincoln Center de China en Beijing. Antes era escéptica, pero ahora utiliza WeChat Pay incluso para transacciones menores como comprar agua o una fruta. “Es casi más rápido que encontrar el efectivo en la cartera: siempre tengo el teléfono en el bolsillo”, explica. Hasta los músicos callejeros lo usan para aceptar “propinas” con un código QR con la misma facilidad que podrían recibir monedas que se tiran dentro de un sombrero.

Hace poco, la alianza Better Than Cash Alliance, una organización basada en las Naciones Unidas cuyo objetivo es la inclusión financiera y cuyos miembros son comercios, gobiernos y otros colaboradores, publicó un estudio de caso centrado en el auge de los pagos digitales en China, y qué podría significar esa tendencia a nivel global. “Los pagos digitales tienen una relación muy estrecha con la inclusión financiera”, observa Camilo Tellez, jefe de investigaciones e innovación de la alianza. Explica que, en China, África y otros lugares, los sistemas de pago móvil han ofrecido a millones de personas el primer vínculo directo con el sistema financiero formal.

“En China se hizo evidente que las PyMEs pueden obtener muchos beneficios” afirma Tellez. “El uso de los sistemas de pago digital les puede permitir acceder a nuevas formas de crédito” que no están disponibles en las operaciones con efectivo, y eso puede tener grandes consecuencias en la gestión y el crecimiento de una empresa. Un sistema de pagos incluido directamente en una red social posee otras ventajas; por ejemplo, el informe de Better Than Cash Alliance cuenta la historia de un peluquero que usó WeChat para expandir su base de clientes y para evitar llevar mucho efectivo encima cuando viajaba entre las visitas a los clientes.

Dado que WeChat facilitó el uso de la plataforma para todo tipo de vendedores en línea (e incluso subsidió a desarrolladores externos para ayudarlos), ahora los usuarios pueden hacer de todo, desde reservar un vuelo hasta pagar servicios o pagar la mitad de la comida a un amigo, sin siquiera salir de la app. “Se obtuvo una respuesta veloz de la gente; resultó muy conveniente de verdad”, dice Zhi Liu, director del programa de china en el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo y del Centro de desarrollo urbano y políticas de suelo de la Universidad de Pekín y el Instituto Lincoln, de Beijing.

De hecho, Liu confiesa que, si bien no es de esas personas que se lanzan a las últimas tendencias tecnológicas, esta resultó irresistible, incluso cuando no está en línea. Comenzaba a buscar un cajero automático para tener efectivo y, por ejemplo, dividir una cuenta, y los colegas “solo usaban el celular y decían ‘¡Listo!’”, cuenta entre risas. Pronto uno se suma a los demás. Y allí está la otra cara de la moneda: todos los comercios urbanos se dan cuenta enseguida de que, si todos los rivales de la cuadra aceptan ese modo de pago, es hora de hacer lo mismo.

Es posible que algunos factores específicos del país hayan influido en la explosión del pago digital en China. El ecosistema de Internet es distinto, en parte porque las entidades conocidas, como Google y Facebook, entre otras, están prácticamente bloqueadas, y así evolucionó una especie de universo alternativo de innovación conectada. Y en el caso de los servicios de pago, al menos, los reguladores chinos hasta ahora han permitido cierta libertad para experimentar (los planes actuales del gobierno respecto del desarrollo financiero hasta 2020 incluyen el incentivo explícito de extender los servicios financieros hacia los microemprendimientos y los grupos con bajos ingresos).

Además, los pagos digitales llegaron a China como alternativa en una sociedad muy dependiente del efectivo, y más si se la compara con la cultura de Estados Unidos, totalmente sumergida en las tarjetas de crédito y débito. Algunos observadores sugieren que, gracias a la aversión china por las deudas, los pagos digitales se prefieren a la alternativa del plástico que los estadounidenses aman tanto. El gran salto del efectivo al digital parece estar teniendo lugar en otros países en vías de desarrollo, y el crecimiento veloz de la telefonía móvil es el factor impulsor. Esto también se amplificó debido al movimiento de la población hacia los centros urbanos, donde se concentran las oportunidades laborales; para esta población es más importante poder mantenerse en contacto con la familia u otros conocidos a través de las distancias físicas.

WeChat no es el único agente de pagos digitales del país, ni siquiera el primero. La plataforma de comercio electrónico de Alibaba Group data de fines de los 90, y dejó de ser un mercado entre empresas para convertirse en una variedad de productos y servicios con pago digital que transformó a la empresa en una central global. Su app, Alipay, fue la primera en dirigirse a los comerciantes de carne y hueso con un sistema de pagos fuera de línea basado en un código QR. Pero es de común conocimiento que hace algunos años, cuando Tencent, creador de WeChat, lanzó su función de pago con un importante empuje de mercadeo, cambió el juego.

La campaña fue ingeniosa en enfrentarse a una tradición de hacer regalos de dinero para año nuevo en un sobre rojo. WeChat ofreció una promoción digital llamada Red Packets, y se estima que participaron cinco millones de usuarios, quienes en ese mismo momento aprendieron a asociar la red social a los pagos. Para Tencent, la función de pago no fue concebida necesariamente como punto de ganancias, sino como otro atractivo para que los usuarios de WeChat siguieran atrapados en un servicio que tiene ganancias con juegos y publicidades. La empresa subsidió a desarrolladores externos para que más comercios pudieran adoptar WePay, y las transacciones entre individuos son gratuitas.

Cuanto más crecía WeChat Pay, Alipay lo enfrentaba con sus propias movidas competitivas. Hoy, ambos sistemas tienen amplia disponibilidad en China y compiten con varias promociones de “sociedad sin efectivo” que ofrecen descuentos o reembolsos. Además, ambas empresas se están lanzando en mercados exteriores, a veces en conjunto con empresas locales.

Dado que los pagos digitales se convirtieron en una parte rutinaria de la vida en la ciudad, ya los están modificando con sutileza. Tellez, de Better Than Cash Alliance, destaca el efecto en la recuperación del costo del servicio y las ganancias del interés, en particular en el contexto de países en vías de desarrollo, y la capacidad de recopilar y utilizar datos útiles de transacciones, incluso para los comercios pequeños. Como destaca Liu, el mayor potencial de la recolección de datos de nivel más alto es seductor. Es evidente que hay preocupaciones relacionadas con la privacidad, sobre cómo se comparten y se utilizan esos datos. Pero en el contexto académico o de planificación, puede ofrecer un resquicio en la conducta económica cotidiana con una forma totalmente nueva de “comprender la ciudad”, como dice Liu.

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) es columnista de la sección Sunday Business del The New York Times.

Fotografía: Tao Jin