A work by Jacob Riis, “How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York,” changed housing.
By revealing to Gilded Age upper- and then middle-class members of society of the 1880s the inhuman squalor of the tenement slums of lower New York City, Riis played a key part in changing political will, impacting reform, and awakening public fervor that resulted in the New York Tenement House Act of 1901. That legislation changed the minimum requirements of tenement housing to include reforms in the amount of light received by living quarters, increased fire safety regulations, more ventilation, restrictions on building height, and increased room space.
As impassioned as Riis–an immigrant who’d arrived in New York with $40 to his name from Denmark in 1870–was, words and his personal sketches of the horrible conditions people lived in in those slums were not enough to spark any action.
He needed pictures, but the problem was those places had no windows. No air. No light. So, it would be useless to try to capture the images by camera, because “the lenses and emulsions of the time were much too slow to capture images in dark alleys and tenement rooms.” Until, of course, he learned about flash.
“In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that “a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way.”[30] The German innovation, by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, flash powder was a mixture of magnesium with potassium chlorate and some antimony sulfide for added stability;[31] the powder was used in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges. This was the introduction of flash photography.”
“Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening, and would soon be replaced by another method for which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan.
Magnesium powder on a frying pan. And the pictures, as they say, were worth a thousand words. Those words and those pictures spurred action.
How the Other Half Lives also inspired reform on a national scale. The Department of Labor published The Housing of the Working People in 1895, which was the second major tenement study of the decade.
It took flash photography to tell a persuasive enough story to get public will behind changes to make housing safe, healthy, fair.
Fast forward to now, our time, our housing crisis, which in spite of the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, has created a larger and larger portion of our working population who are priced out of more and more housing markets.
Choose which term means more to you, “affordable housing,” or “housing affordability.”
Call to mind a recent report that speaks of one major risk area–a biggest worry–in the radar cross-hairs in mega builder D.R. Horton’s outlook on the future, 12 to 36 months ahead.
“Our ability to build affordable quality product.”
Fact is, there’s no market-rate home builder, no market-rate multifamily developer, no affordable low income tax-credit builder, and no manufacturing or materials or distribution partner who does not, or can no share the same “biggest worry.”
That’s because the conditions, the forces, the known-knowns that are exerting themselves on these organizations’ “ability to build affordable quality” housing, and making it harder every day to do so, are getting worse.
Our current “Gilded Age” separates a population of Americans who derive income and wealth from a combination of job compensation and investment returns from a growing number of people who only have working wages to draw from–and no investments–who don’t have access to “affordable quality housing product” or communities.
Our only recourse, we believe, is innovation. Innovation, not in the pie-in-the-sky sense of the word, but in the sense of the term like Jacob Riis lighting up a bit of magnesium powder in a frying pan, and igniting a shift in public will and elected official action to change an ill of society of the late-1800s, which until then allowed people to live in sub-human standard homes.
Innovation in the sense of the word that architects, engineers, and builders break through the turf war barriers that today prevent many of them from gaining access to a large opportunity area for savings and quality control in construction processes.
Innovation in the sense that developers, local policy influencers, regulators, and citizen activists bore through their impasses on local need for more attainable access to housing.
Innovation in the sense that private enterprise capital investment and government incentives could and should focus programming–validated as a model in Low Income Tax Credit Programs–that declares war on the woeful lack of access many working people have to decent, well-located, attainable housing and community offerings.
This is why we’re in full support of and grateful for the following announcement, “Ivory Innovations Announces $200,000 Prize Seeking to Improve Housing Affordability.”
Salt Lake City, Sept. 18, 2018 — Ivory Innovations has announced the new $200,000 Ivory Prize in Housing Affordability, an award that will honor innovations in design, financing and policy that seek to increase access in housing affordability. This new prize is supported by the Clark and Christine Ivory Foundation and the Sorenson Impact Center at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. It seeks to recognize the most ambitious, adoptable and innovative solutions to address housing affordability and generate awareness and new ideas to address this national issue.
“Housing affordability is among the most pressing challenges facing our nation, and we need new ideas to tackle it,” said Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes, Utah’s number one homebuilder. “This country is full of entrepreneurs, advocates and problem solvers who have found impactful ideas that we can highlight and support.”
To find nominees and evaluate ideas for this new award, Ivory Innovations is working with an advisory board of housing experts and partners, including representatives from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley and the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., that represent many of our nation’s top leaders in housing. The emphasis for the prize will be on projects that provide a pathway to homeownership; however, those that address reducing rents also will be considered.
“Housing affordability in the U.S. is a longstanding problem that has worsened in recent years due to supply constraints and rising interest rates. Nearly a third of American households (38.1) paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing in 2016,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, and Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability Advisory Board member. “The Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability is an admirable approach to finding innovative, scalable solutions to addressing this pressing challenge.”
The prize is designed to award innovators for their efforts and provide material support to allow them to advance their projects and is open to private-sector organizations, nonprofits and public-private partnerships. Proposals must make an impact through construction and design (including rehabilitation projects), public policy and regulation reform and finance, where some of the greatest barriers to affordability, such as qualifying for a mortgage or meeting down payment or monthly payment requirements are impacted.
The issue of housing affordability is especially relevant in Utah, which has long been considered a leader in homeownership. A recent report by the Eccles School’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute highlighted that since 1991, the increase in housing prices in Utah ranks fourth-highest in the United States. The state is not alone in the trend as rising home prices across the country are making it increasingly difficult to find reasonable accommodations, with many families facing a cost burden of more than 30 percent of their household income.
“As I learned while touring the state this summer, housing affordability is a critical issue in Utah, one directly related to economic vitality,” said University of Utah President Ruth V. Watkins. “To enable the state’s continued robust growth, Utah’s workforce must have access to affordable homes. On behalf of the University of Utah, I am pleased to partner with Ivory Innovations to find creative and scalable solutions to this problem.”
Ivory Innovations believes that dedicating time, talent and funding to solving the crisis in housing affordability can create momentum for change in the housing market. The hope is that no one will be priced out of reasonable housing.
“Housing affordability is an urgent, seemingly intractable problem. I’m a realist in knowing that you have to keep chipping away if you’re going to make change, but I also know we need big ideas to make that change as transformative as it needs to be,” said Carol Galante, faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, and Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability Advisory Board Member. “It’s going to take multiple solutions and a political commitment. The Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability is a real effort to find the entrepreneurs, innovators and other problem solvers who are deploying new approaches to impact millions of people by making housing more affordable.”
The prize also will give students the opportunity to become the next generation of housing affordability experts, with the creation of the Housing Affordability Innovations Lab. The class, a partnership between Ivory Innovations and the Eccles School, allows students the chance to investigate and perform due diligence on the companies nominated, giving them insights into the housing market, as well as valuable contacts in the housing industry. Students are not only from the Eccles School, but also other diverse departments across campus.
Nominations for the prize open on Tuesday, Sept. 18, and self-nominations are welcome. Preliminary nominations are encouraged by Monday, Nov. 5, with the final deadline being Saturday, Dec. 15. Finalists will be announced at the Utah Winter Innovation Summit Feb. 6-8. Awardees will be announced in March 2019.
Housing’s costs to develop and build, and the cost for access to safe, decent, relatively attainable housing can not continue outpacing inflation without comeuppance for all. This is why “the ability to build quality affordable product” is D.R. Horton’s biggest worry.
Innovation is no longer just a fancy word about something that happens in Northern California. It’s a non-negotiable. It’s about action.
