Developers have gotten a bad rap in recent years over the fight for affordable housing, but it may not be completely justified, the New York Times reports.
In Seattle, Austin, New York, Denver, Minneapolis, Washington and the Bay Area, developers are the antiheroes of an urban drama over the high cost of housing and what must change to bring it down.
The notion that development is inherently bad, or that developers are inherently bad actors, seems to ignore that the communities residents want to protect from developers were once developed, too, and often by people who made money at it.
The story of why that happened is less about developers themselves than the forces around them: the economics of the industry, the politics of growth, the available land that’s dwindled and the inequality that’s grown.
