James Howard Kunstler Quotes

Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.

To give everyone a house and garden is very difficult in urban areas.

Why can't we, with a more intelligent policy, actually have houses that are affordable, built at higher densities than they are at the moment and built on brownfield sites.

I'm proud to report that in 2004 alone, we approved 3,600 new units of housing - our best year ever!

The emphasis of the program should be changed from traditional publicly built slum based high rise projects to smaller units on scattered sites.

I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.

What we see out there is an affordable housing crisis, particularly in the rental market in cities big and small, and we don't have the resources necessary to fill that gap.

I think it's not just a matter of building more houses, more flats. We need to have the right policies. I want people to be able to own their flats.

Building and preserving housing, along with keeping people housed, are critical to making our city more affordable for all.

I'm going to rely upon the advice of affordable housing experts to make sure we meet the public's expectations.

By scrapping the government's centrally dictated density targets we'll ensure that the right type of new homes are built where they're needed, ending the glut of one- and two-bedroom flats.

Cities around the United States do not have land use planning like we have in Oregon, and they are all struggling with issues like affordable housing.

Tackling affordable housing via land use planning won't necessarily solve the problem.

We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.

The construction of social housing and the attempt to support families seeking to buy their own homes are all projects from the 1960s and '70s. It all sounds old-fashioned, but it is actually completely modern.

What kind of city are we living in, if we encourage the development or ownership of large, expensive properties for investment and land banking... while people are sleeping on the streets?

We need find the space to build more affordable homes in the city. That involves a number of different policy responses. For example, I've spoken about the need to rethink the greenbelt - the protected land around the edge of London that was originally intended to be protected and retained as an area of natural beauty but in many cases is neither natural nor beautiful.

New York should be a place where everyone can afford to live.

Growing companies need commercial space, and their employees need to live nearby.

Environment, homelessness, infrastructure and immigration - I'm very focused on all four, which are critical to the success of Los Angeles.

While it's absolutely important that we build housing for our low-income residents, when we are talking about opening up hundreds of sites for housing, we should be trying to build affordable housing for all of our residents struggling to pay rent. That means housing for teachers, for nurses, for janitors.

If we are ever going to fix our housing affordability crisis, we have to make significant changes to how we plan and construct, and we have to be open to solutions that make it easier and faster to build much-needed housing.

Fighting for tenants' rights has never been about political posturing for me. It's very personal. It's why I fight for everyone who's struggling to stay in San Francisco.

The more the government has centralised, the less houses we have built.

I'd hate to see new housing building accelerating while taking down buildings where there's 50 people living in rent-stabilized apartments.