The Right Way to Do Urban Development

In his new book, Jonathan Rose talks about the importance of accurately assessing a city’s resources and opportunities

In writing his new book, The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life, developer Jonathan Rose says he learned one primary lesson: how important it is for cities to recognize and manage their opportunities.

“The policy decisions that cities make have enormous implications for prosperity within a few generations,” says Rose.

In 1950, for example, Delta Airlines, then a small regional carrier, wanted to attract business from travelers from Mexico and Chicago. The airline approached Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta as possible sites for expansion. The two Southern steel towns had roughly the same population, demographics and median income. Birmingham balked, wanting neither an influx of Mexicans nor union-affiliated travelers from Chicago, and even raised its aviation fuel tax.

Atlanta, however, embraced the airport’s potential. Today, Atlanta—with one of the world’s busiest airports—has a much larger population and twice the median income of Birmingham.

Rose does his best to practice real estate development and management that matches his rhetoric. The Jonathan Rose Companies has invested some $1.8B in mixed-income, sustainable projects across the U.S. The projects he builds, invests in, and manages are typically close to mass transit and also involve community-building initiatives like education and healthcare. Rose believes that such efforts add value because they create a more stable foundation for residents, which feeds back into the community. Still, successfully leveraging opportunities brings its own challenges, Rose says.

“America is a land of opportunity,” he says, but that underscores “how important it is to distribute that more equally.”

In other words, cities need to make sustainable policy choices conducive to the development of resources such as affordable housing, good schools, healthcare, meaningful jobs, parks and open space, and arts and culture. “The more communities provide access to those resources, the more opportunity they will have,” he says.

As healthy as that sounds, Rose understands that achieving such a well-balanced environment is no simple task, and indeed becomes more difficult as a city prospers.

“Affordable housing has to be subsidized and needs inexpensive land,” he explains. For example: “There is a tremendous consensus that we need to build affordable housing in New York City. Now the question is, can we find enough money and land.”

New York may be the signature example of a city with an affordable housing shortage, but Rose says that thriving urban areas across the country are facing similar problems. “Prosperity has created a crisis in affordable housing,” he says. This is just part of what he calls the “prosperity/well-being conundrum,” which arises as growth inhibits, rather than promotes, positive change for a significant percentage of an area’s population.

Rose highlights homegrown initiatives in two rapidly growing Western metropolitan areas as models for success. In Denver, the city council set aside a percentage of real estate tax income for an affordable housing fund, and also created an inclusionary zoning program. Meanwhile, the private nonprofit Enterprise Community Partnership created a community land trust to acquire housing development sites close to planned light rail expansion stations. As the Salt Lake City region blossomed during the 1990s, a group of business leaders commissioned a regional master plan, based on Smart Growth concepts, that was adopted and implemented by city government.

“It starts with vision,” says Rose.