A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America by Vishaan Chakrabarti Metropolitan Books, 2013

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt Vintage Books, 2012

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher Penguin, 2013

There is a familiar story about the history of government-subsidized housing in the United States, and it goes something like this: during the Great Depression, amidst widespread public concern about degraded dwelling conditions amongst the poor, federal housing programs of unprecedented scope and ambition are approved and implemented. An enormous burst of public housing construction ensues, and continues through most of the 1960s as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Unfortunately, much of the housing is ill-conceived: it is architecturally out of scale with its surroundings, and designed in such a way that it eventually becomes unsafe. Furthermore, its management is ensnared in a tangle of hopelessly incompetent and unresponsive public housing authorities and federal bureaucracies. By the late 1960s, public housing has become a nightmarish trap for its impoverished denizens, worse than the original slum neighborhoods that it often replaced, which at least offered a modicum of safety and social connections to their inhabitants. This ill-conceived overreach of the American welfare state, along with a sharp rightward lurch amongst the U.S. electorate with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, eventually leads to an almost total retreat of the federal government from financing below-market housing. Ever since, the message from the American public sector to the poor has been that they are essentially on their own for finding adequate, safe, affordable housing.

Affordable housing often, these days, appears to occupy a low rank on the planning agenda. Emergent issues such as climate change and the obesity crisis, along with the various solutions that planning proposes for them, seem to take up much of the available planning communication bandwidth. Indeed, with a widespread foreclosure crisis in the United States and drastically depressed housing prices in much of the world, many have come to see housing affordability as a less urgent concern than it once was. But Nico Calavita and Alan Mallach, editors of Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture, shine a spotlight on a quiet revolution that has sought to integrate affordable housing provision directly into the planning system. Although inclusionary housing arose four decades ago in a few high-cost pockets of the United States—principally in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland—the practice has, as Calavita and Mallach show, spread worldwide since then.

The University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED) held four lectures during the first week of February 2010 to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary. CED, at its inception, became the first school in the US to combine the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning into one college. I attended three of the four lectures, finding them to be edifying and thought-provoking and, moreover, directly related to the theme of “crisis” that we are exploring here in BPJ Volume 23.