icon Blueprint for June

Community

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4 min read

I grew up in a suburban community of 18,000 in which the homes were built on potato fields and mostly bought with the help of the G.I. Bill. Walking to school, I would say hello to the local firemen who were playing handball against the wall of the firehouse. When the cops were called by neighbors to break up a backyard party that got too loud, we knew them by name. I refereed basketball games that included my teachers’ kids. On Saturday morning after Little League games when we sat at the candy store counter over burgers and malteds, the owner asked about our parents. And my Spanish teacher took me to his favorite pub for a meatball hero and a beer the day I turned 18. One friend’s dad was a big-time television director who told Henny Youngman stories. Other friends’ dads edited Sports Illustrated and Mad Magazine. Photos of Lenny Bruce and Roone Arledge hung on the alumni wall in our high school wrestling room. But if anyone was considered a star in our town it was Mr. Rhoden, the Spanish teacher, or Vinnie, who owned the candy store. There was no stratum. We were a community. We all seemed the same. I’m sure some families made more money than others but we never saw it or felt it. There was no specialty category called workforce housing back then, no need for it. Everyone was the workforce. All of our homes were workforce housing.

It all sounds idyllic—and it was. I would like to believe that the sense of community inspired us to focus on our sameness rather than our differences.

I spent two summers during college commuting, for an hour-and-a-half at the beginning and end of the work day, from our community to the big city and decided then that you need to live where you work. And I have been fortunate to afford myself that privilege.

Now we find ourselves in a stratified society where too many people, many with good and significant jobs, cannot afford to live where they work. Such an arrangement has its costs on our society. It may well be the core of our current divisiveness. It certainly was the theme of our recent election.

The good news is that there are many people all around the country working on bringing the workforce back home. And that is the focus of this issue.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City is taking an aggressive approach to adding affordable housing, planning 200,000 new units, including 44,000 for the workforce. Eric Enderlin leads the New York City Housing Development Corporation, one of numerous agencies working on this impressive program, which he explains to Darryl Hicks in this month’s Talking Heads feature.

In Massachusetts, the MassHousing Workforce Housing Initiative is providing significant soft funding to encourage new development, and staff writer Bendix Anderson visits with the executive staff at WinnCompanies that is utilizing this program on a project in Quincy that will be more than half workforce. (Middle-Income Housing…Really!)

I consider Ikea Disneyland for adults and I enjoy wandering through their small model apartment units, everything you need within 250-500 square feet. What was once considered a tenement can now be a luxury. Microunits have suddenly become a hip trend in American cities, most notably in Seattle, where roving staff writer Scott Beyer visits them. (Housing USA)

In this issue you will also find a fun history of workforce housing in America by staff writer Mark Olshaker (Colleagues & Neighbors) and provocative thoughts on the role employers can play in housing from our guru, David. A. Smith. (The guru is in)

If you miss that old sense of community as I do, this issue will take you back to what it was, as well as look at what it might be.

Marty Bell
Editor