How ‘Developer’ Became Such a Dirty Word
Date Posted: July 30, 2019
Posted In: Discussion,
From NY Times: The developers are coming. They’ve got the politicians in their pockets and the gaudy architectural plans in their hands. They will gorge on the entire city. And they won’t stop until peak profit has been wrung from every patch of land.
In Seattle, Austin, New York, Denver, Minneapolis, Washington and the Bay Area, developers are the antiheroes of an urban drama over the high cost of housing and what must change to bring it down.
But their arch-villain status today — merely invoking “developers” can shut down civic debate — deserves scrutiny, for two reasons.
The notion that development is inherently bad, or that developers are inherently bad actors, seems to ignore that the communities residents want to protect from developers were once developed, too, and often by people who made money at it. (That is, unless you believe in “immaculate construction.”)
“When somebody’s attacking this, I do sort of wonder, ‘Well, where did you grow up?’” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a policy analyst who has followed development in New York since the 1970s, from City Hall and academia. “And who built your house?”
In any city with a housing shortage, there are also few practical solutions that don’t at least partly involve more development. The villain blamed for the problem, in other words, must be part of solving it.
“In places where frankly there isn’t a lot of development happening, how is that working for you right now?” said Carol Galante, a former nonprofit housing developer and federal housing official, now at the University of California, Berkeley. “In terms of getting increased housing affordability, it’s obviously not.”
Real estate developers are indeed fraught characters in city life (sometimes they do try to put politicians in their pockets). And the history of American development certainly includes shady land speculation schemes, racist intentions and bloated egos (see any Robert Moses biography).
But at its best, development has also meant progress in America. And that possibility has been banished from recent debate. We’ve gone from allowing that new development might enhance our cities to fearing that it will surely detract from what’s already here. Or, worse, destroy it.