Can your city be great when teachers, fire fighters, and service workers can’t afford to live in its neighborhoods? This is the crucial, challenging question facing major cities across the country, which are struggling to provide long-term solutions to housing affordability.

High-growth cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver are reacting with wholesale strategies to provide affordable housing, usually through the subsidization of public-housing, or by placing the responsibility on the private-sector, requiring new housing projects to include a percentage of “affordable” units. Both practices may make the problem worse by inflating the cost of housing, either through the inefficiencies of bureaucratic process or the added expense of mandated subsidies. This makes it even more difficult to provide housing at a low cost, especially for smaller projects. Whether there is a sustainable affordable housing solution for these high-demand, “first-tier” cities is unclear, but what is clear is that none of them is meeting the need for low-cost housing attainable to low-income households.

For mid-sized cities, however, the opportunity exists to avoid the affordability predicaments major cities are facing. With low-cost land and property within a few miles of the city’s most valuable downtown and midtown areas, Kansas City is one of those places. As a result of Kansas City’s historic redline, Troost Avenue, there is a clear dividing line between the east and west sides of the city, where property values decrease dramatically to the east. This presents an incredible opportunity. While low-cost property is still available, mid-sized cities like ours can secure low-cost housing options to become more culturally, racially, and economically rich.

This availability of low property values is not going to last much longer. The Troost boundary is beginning to blur as a more open-minded younger generation is moving into all types of neighborhoods that offer urban living. Developers are following this trend, as significant investments in new homes and apartment developments are becoming more normal. Speculative investors from other cities are also recognizing the dramatic disparity in real estate costs and buying up these undervalued properties. Concerns about displacement and inequity are growing, and a better future for housing will require a multifaceted approach: we need new policies, focused philanthropy, and a simplified approval process for small-scale development and rehabs. We also need a return to traditional principles of urban design that produce incremental growth that results in lasting wealth.

Many mid-sized cities can relate to these trends, and growing political pressure is causing leaders, advocates, and professionals to reconsider housing policy. Here are a few considerations for how mid-sized cities can enable an incremental approach to supporting low-cost housing and revitalization of neighborhoods:

Build it productively Consider the cost of transportation, not just housing Secure already low-cost housing as a source of future affordability Support adaptive reuse of existing homes before it’s too late Make housing diversity legal again Energize your ecosystem of small-scale developers

1. Build it productively.

It is no secret that there is an infrastructure crisis in our country. Most municipalities in the U.S. cannot afford to keep up with the maintenance demands of streets and pipes spread across the landscape. Cities are just now beginning to recognize that the development patterns of the past 75 years are not sustainable, because they don’t produce enough in property value to pay for the cost of maintenance.

Most people tend to track the geography of wealth in their city by looking solely at the market values of individual properties. Market value, however, is a poor measure in terms of infrastructure costs. There is a considerable difference when value is measured per acre, a methodology best illustrated by Joe Minicozzi of Urban3. This measure of wealth is more proportional to the amount of public infrastructure needed to support development. Neighborhoods with greater value per acre are more productive, meaning they generate more tax revenue in proportion to the cost of infrastructure and public services.

The way we have built cities in the U.S. has enabled major inequities that are not typically discussed. Many disinvested east side neighborhoods in Kansas City’s urban core are more productive per acre than “wealthy”, large-lot neighborhoods that have higher property values, but are less productive on a per acre basis. In many ways, the poorest neighborhoods subsidize the wealthiest ones.