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Housing

One Affordable-Housing Solution for Cities: True Home Rule

Independence is the difference between dense cities that achieve affordable housing, like Hong Kong and Singapore, and the ones that don't.
Jonathan Woetzel of McKinsey, Ben Hecht of Living Cities, Vishaan Chakrabarti of SHoP architects, and Mike Alvidrez of the Skid Row Housing Trust at The Atlantic's CityLab 2014 summit.
Jonathan Woetzel of McKinsey, Ben Hecht of Living Cities, Vishaan Chakrabarti of SHoP architects, and Mike Alvidrez of the Skid Row Housing Trust at The Atlantic's CityLab 2014 summit. Melanie Leigh Wilbur
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Chicago generates more GDP than 42 states, according to Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP Architects and director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University. New York City generates billions of dollars in economic activity per square mile. "We should have plenty of money to build affordable housing," he said. "We don’t, because we distribute it."

Any time, though, that Chakrabarti writes about government and decentralization and redistribution—topics that framed a discussion about affordable housing at The Atlantic's CityLab 2014 conference this week in Los Angeles—he gets loads of hate mail.