This debate between geographer David Harvey, an avowed Marxist and  author of Rebel Cities and Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City who calls himself an old New York Republican, took place awhile ago, at the end of 2013. I’m posting it now because the discussion of the economic forces of growth are changing New York then are relevant to discussions about growth in Seattle now.

There are two points made during their discussion that bear on our local debate. The first, raised by Harvey, is the nature of the commodification of housing. Housing is like bananas or cars or anything else produced then bought and sold in a market  Harvey doesn’t like that. In his view, housing is a right and an entitlement: everyone should get an equal share.

This view, while intellectually consistent, isn’t a recipe for an abundance of housing. Even if today, we collectively decided housing to be a right we’d still have to produce enough of it to keep up with demands. Housing scarcity would take the shape of rationing, meaning long waits for promised housing to be available. Nevertheless, it would seem that many in Seattle favor this view.

Second, Glaeser points out that increases in poverty around transit is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary it could be a good thing, indicating lots of poorer people saving money by giving up their cars  or shortening their commutes. His point is a good one, too, because locally we hear that light rail somehow causess the destruction of neighborhoods around it. It changes those neighborhoods for sure, but maybe it opens them up to poorer people as well rather than forcing them away as some have argued.

Part of this misunderstanding of poverty rates and what they mean is linked to the strange ways we measure poverty and affordability in the United States. What does it mean to be poor? What is affordable? We’ve got terrible ways to measure these very qualitative experiences and we use those measures poorly when making policy. I’ve pointed out that there isn’t a single reference to price or how we’d measure, as a city, the impact of the Grand Bargain on housing prices. Instead, the proposal relies on a deeply flawed affordability measure based on a normative standard that dictates a household should spend 30 percent of its gross monthly income on housing, hardly a standard that gives an accurate sense of what it means to be poor in Seattle or the way in which people trade housing costs (either paying more or less) based on things like schools, location, and other household costs.

The debate between these two thinkers might not be as quite as exciting as a throw down between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, but it certainly presages the substance of that spectacular debate: will it be the market or governments that determine the future or cities or some balanced and nuanced reliance on both?

 Thanks to Simone Keyah for sharing this video with me.