Join us for the Whatcom Housing Alliance Fall All Members Meeting on October 16th at Structures Brewing on Holly St! We are honored to host this year’s All Member Keynote, Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Strong Town’s Director of Movement Building.
Talk of a “housing crisis” pervades American cities—be it about off-the-charts rents in coastal cities or hyper-vacancy in the Rust Belt. These problems are symptoms of a deeper dysfunction. Over nearly a century, through often well-intended top-down policy interventions, we’ve turned a complex system that should be adaptive and self-correcting into one prone to a never-ending cycle of boom and bust, crises and overcorrections. To address the dysfunction at the root of our housing problems, we need to shift our approach. We must move away from a model in which large developers and centralized financial institutions have unprecedented sway over what is built and where, to a more antifragile housing ecosystem in which the bar to entry is low, and every neighborhood can undergo incremental change over time.
Doors open at 8:45 am for networking and snacks with programming starting at 9:00 am.
Keynote Speaker
Norm van Eeden Petersman
Director of Movement Building, Strong Towns
Topics Covered
- A brief history of how we arrived at the current set of problems, beginning with how crucial federal housing policies instituted in the 1930s created a set of perverse incentives still affecting the market today.
- A look at the 2008 housing market crash and its continuing aftermath.
- Why housing markets today are so prone to boom and bust cycles.
- How the incremental development of cities used to meet our housing needs, and why it no longer does.
- Why our cities have a “trickle or fire hose” problem, in which a small minority of neighborhoods undergo rapid, dramatic transformation while the majority see only a trickle of needed investment.
- How a growing number of places are adopting reforms that can break them out of the “trickle or fire hose” dynamic and make incremental housing development possible again.
Following the presentation, Q&A and Discussion with Norm Van Eeden Petersman we will have lunch provided by Structures Brewing and networking. We will then welcome a presentation by Northwest Youth Services. Representatives will be updating us on their new Lincoln Street Housing Project. This housing project or Healing Space, will partly rely on middle housing to create a unique community for youth who are transitioning out of homelessness. It’s an important case study of how middle housing can create community. Get to know the project, their goals and how you can help make this project a reality!
All Member Meetings
Whatcom Housing Alliance hosts two All Member Meetings every year. They provide an opportunity to strategize and align on mission and goals and to assess the direction of the organization. Often, keynote speakers are invited to speak on current housing topics. Stakeholders from the private and public sector convene in these meetings to learn, network and innovate. We encourage you and your organization to become a member, in order to attend and enjoy in these opportunities!
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Diverse housing choices will help us be a more sustainable region by improving our environment and creating a stronger economy.