A new book explores the housing affordability crisis

The author, who grew up in Davenport, writes about some of the reasons and the potential for change

Sep 26, 2023

Brendan O’Brien remembers growing up in Davenport in the house where his parents still live.

Inside its walls, he raced toy cars and invented games with his brothers; outside, he spent summers playing with friends a short distance from where he went to high school. He says it’s a place he can always call home.

Unfortunately, finding an affordable place to call home these days in much of the US can be difficult; for many, it’s impossible.

There is no shortage of headlines about the lack of affordable housing across the country, including in Iowa, where communities are striving to boost the number of housing units where people can rent or buy without breaking the bank.

O’Brien, now a 33-year-old writer and guide living in Arizona, has written a new book that seeks to explain just why we face such unaffordability. And, as importantly, he offers potential solutions to change things.

The book is called “Homesick: Why Housing is Unaffordable and How We Can Change It,” published by Chicago Review Press. O’Brien will be in the Quad-Cities for two events to promote the book, one on Saturday, Sept. 30, at 10:30 a.m. at the Davenport Public Library’s Fairmount branch and the other on Monday, Oct. 2, at 10:30 a.m. at the downtown Rock Island Public Library.

I spent some time reading this fascinating book last week and interviewing O’Brien. (Disclosure: I don’t know the author, but his parents are friends and also subscribers to Along the Mississippi.)

In the Quad-Cities, and in many parts of Iowa, our reputation is as a fairly low-cost housing area. However, there is a distinct lack of affordable housing in certain pockets, especially for people down the income ladder. The Quad-Cities Housing Council has estimated that this area is more than 6,000 units short of affordable rental housing for extremely low-income people (those making 30% of the area’s median income.)

O’Brien’s book, which grew out of his master’s thesis in geography, initially focuses on short-term rentals in places like Flagstaff, Arizona, where he says tourists are plentiful and these alternatives to hotels, often marketed on platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo, are pushing up the cost of housing.

Beyond that, however, O’Brien considers other aspects of housing unaffordability, as well some deeper questions about its implications and how we got to where we are. He writes: “As I questioned the state of housing in the United States, I also questioned what it meant to belong. Before long, I was left grappling with the pattern of violent displacement and broken promises that characterizes this country’s history.”

Brendan O’Brien (Photo courtesy of the author’s web site.)

“Homesick” is more than just a scholarly work about housing in the US, but also an examination of some of the social history of this country, especially as it affects Native populations and Black people. It encompasses discriminatory practices in federal housing programs in the 20^th century and land seizures early in our nation’s history.

It also ruminates on what having a house can mean — to us and our communities.

O’Brien acknowledges that there is a housing shortage today, but he pushes back against the notion that simply building more units will solve the affordability problem. He points to what he calls the commodification of housing that treats that roof and four walls as less a place for home and hearth but as an investment to maximize.

“There’s a lot of incentives at all levels to raise the price of housing,” O’Brien told me.

He writes about developers building homes for investors or remote workers or as weekend retreats and investors who, in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, purchased houses and turned them into big profits.

But it’s more than just institutions, he says. Even individual owners, who want a reasonably priced home when they buy have an interest in seeing that home’s value rise over time to help pay for such things as a college education for their children, or their own retirement.

O’Brien also proposes some potential solutions to our affordability crisis. Among them are community land trusts.

These CLTs, as they’re called, are often run by non-profits. The idea is that people buy a house but lease the land underneath from the trust. Because they’re not buying the land, this lowers the home price and, when it comes time to sell, the homeowner agrees to do so at a lower price, thus keeping costs more reasonable over the long term.

There are other ideas, too, along with a section suggesting ways to take action for individuals, advocates, governments, tourists and short-term rental hosts, among others.

O’Brien also proposes that we change some of the ways in which we think about housing; that instead of turning it into a commodity, with the uncertainties, segregation and inequality that go along with it, we imagine it from a different perspective.

As he writes in the book’s conclusion: “Houses are meant for living in.”

Spreading the word

Last Saturday, Sept. 23, I had the pleasure of being a guest on WVIK’s “Saturday Morning Live” program with host Kai Swanson.

It was a great hour of conversation with one of the most erudite people in the Quad-Cities (him, not me.) We talked about the Along the Mississippi newsletter, the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, journalism, politics, the Iowa caucuses; we even talked about baseball and the Baltimore Orioles, which readers of this space probably know is one of my favorite subjects.

If you have the time, give the program a listen. I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

Along the Mississippi

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