What Makes A Healthy Community? Art? Affordable Housing? Both? Careful Thought From Durham, NC

Let’s begin in the most intimate and familiar corner of your community: your own home.

“In this new era of Artificial Intelligence, modern families will soon realize that a robotic Personal Assistant is essential to the health of their home.“¹

Really? Really. One day in the near future, thanks to relentless marketing, you and all your neighbours may well be firm believers that owning a personal assistant is essential to the ‘health’ of your home.

Move outward from the home to the collection of homes in a community — what most people and all developers think of as ‘the real estate market.’

“In a healthy market, buildings become less desirable as they age, and older units serve as an important source of market rate affordable housing through a process known as filtering.”²

Really? I personally have lived in a modern apartment. I now live in a larger, older 1928 era apartment by choice, not necessity. The housing development industry promotes the idea that ‘old’ is an unhealthy choice, while ‘new’ is healthy one. The reasons why are obvious. Building new housing is what the housing industry actually does! Still, should we simply accept their perspective as a meaningful sign of health in a housing market?

Move one step beyond the collection of homes in a community, to the structure of roads and transportation that ties the community together.

“Toronto’s ‘atrocious’ commutes make gridlock a key election issue”³

Thankfully, one great North American community health cure for cities has fallen into disrepute — the notion of carving up a city with high-speed car-clogged road corridors. It has proved possible to stand up against a powerful transportation industry’s notions of community health and instead to at least identify, if not build, healthier alternatives such as public transport.

A thoughtful article in Citylab pinpoints a freeway protest as the start of Durham, North Carolina’s unique legacy of social and political activism which prevails in the city today.

Why does this matter to everyone? Durham’s racially inclusive grass-roots movement offers some important insights as well as some solutions for the health of a growing community with increased housing unaffordability, gentrification and community degradation.

What factors contribute to a truly healthy community that are recognized, not just by powerful special interests with an eye on the public purse, but by the inhabitants of that community? Read a very great deal more on the subject in Citylab: How a Booming City Can Be More Equitable

1. Neither Amazon, nor Google, nor Apple may have yet said these words explicitly, but you can be sure it’s what they would like you to believe. Their marketing drumbeat will only grow louder with time.
2. From What can old housing tell us about the future of affordability?— a research and analysis publication of Apartment List, Inc. [US] 
3. Headline of a Toronto Star article, October 18,2018.