I’m deeply passionate about finding solutions to today’s affordable housing challenges. When I started this project, I was working for the City of New York, financing supportive and senior housing. Previously, I worked in affordable housing development in Seattle and did extensive comparative research about affordable housing policy as a student at University of California, Los Angeles. I currently work for a Community Development Financial Institution that finances community development projects such as affordable housing, early child care and education centers, charter schools, healthcare facilities, and more.*
My interest in housing began as a college student when I was freshly equipped with lessons from my influential Comparative Governments course. Considering place-based differences between sprawling, car-centric Los Angeles with my San Francisco Bay Area hometown’s more integrated, transit-friendly region awakened me to ways that complex policy decisions impact where we live and how we experience daily life. Here, through All Over the Map: Comparing Affordable Housing Policy Across Cities, I’ll recreate my own mini-comparative government lessons to address questions I still sit with about why places end up with such different housing policies. What can be borrowed from lessons learned (and not learned) elsewhere? I hope to uncover how policy, and how I, can help make cities better.
Each All Over the Map entry summarizes a single conversation I’ve had with an affordable housing expert. I ask each expert to address the same five questions:
- What makes your city’s story about affordable housing unique?
- What is the state of affordable housing in your city today?
- If you could wave a magic wand and change any one policy at any level of government, what would it be and why?
- What makes you hopeful about housing in your city?
- What are effective ways to include the people most impacted by affordable housing issues in government-level decision making?
This format gives me, and hopefully you, the opportunity to learn about housing issues in different places by way of comparison. I recognize that each expert enters the conversation with their own biases, as do I, and I accept them as is for the sake of this project.
I’m invested in the affordable housing industry because it is at the crux of so many critical quality of life issues: health, food access, education, wealth accumulation, community, and transportation access. (It’s no surprise that “shelter” is on the base rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.) It is also an industry that can try to right the discriminatory wrongs that are so ingrained in America’s laws and culture. For me, addressing historical inequalities directly through housing is an important part of how to make places better.
–Lily Berticevich
*Any personal views conveyed here are my own and do not represent my employers’ stances.