Neoliberalism: It’s Time to Engineer Our Way Out of This (Herbst Fellow Essay)

Published: Nov. 6, 2023 • By Kristina Petrov

In almost every borough, suburb, and city block in America, quality of life is decreasing while cost of living is increasing. A stunning 69 percent of people can’t afford new median priced housing, driving over a third of American households to rent (United States Census Bureau, 2020). But the rental market is also deeply unaffordable, with the median asking rent soaring to over $2000 a month in May 2022 (Ellis, 2022). This leaves millions of people in very precarious positions, vulnerable to neighborhood changes they might otherwise be able to weather. In Boulder, Colorado, this is an all too familiar story. Colorado is one of the most moved-to states in the nation, ranking number four in 2020 (Wheelwright, 2021), but more recently more people are leaving than moving in, a shift driven by the unaffordable housing market, with home prices rising as quickly as in New York and California (Weis, 2022). Colorado is now one of the least affordable places to live. The population influx to our cities has done us no favors – Denver’s rents are now almost 16 percent above the national average (Apartment List, 2023). This is a global trend. All around the world, people are flocking to cities, and by 2050, an estimated 68 percent of people around the world and 89 percent of Americans will live in urban environments (United Nations Population Division, 2018). How we develop them at this stage, both physically and politically, will set the tone for the coming decades as we move forward into a rapidly changing world. It’s important we, as engineers, examine the social context we’re entering into, and since the 1970s and 1980s, that’s primarily been a neoliberal one.

Neoliberalism shouldn't be confused with "socially liberal" or left of center politics in the United States. Rather, it’s an economic and political approach to governing and policy characterized by three main components. The first is privatization of the public sector – think clean water for profit, the medical insurance industry, and homeowners associations paving roads and such rather than local governments. The second is deregulation of the corporate market – this is pretty easy to see in our tenant protections or, rather, our lack thereof. The third is the lowering of both corporate and income taxes through government austerity – basically, it's cutting public spending and gutting social programs. Lack of investment in energy and transportation infrastructure, food assistance programs, and our public housing programs are some of the most glaring examples. Neoliberal approaches to development are those that place ultimate faith in the free markets to generate social improvement, relying on trickle down economics to deal with poverty (Riley, 2007, 3). It’s an ideology we know well here in America, famously made prevalent by the Reagan Administration in response to stagflation and a growing distrust in the government during the Cold War. The impact of those economic policies and the government's continued adherence to neoliberalism permeates almost every aspect of our society today, but is quite noted in our hubs of rapid development and our most socioeconomically diverse centers – cities (Peck et al., 2009, 57).

Let’s take a step back and explore how neoliberalism is impacting people right now through something a bit more tangible – rent. Here in Boulder, high rent isn’t exactly a new conversation. More than half of Boulder residents are renters, a number that’s only expected to grow due to how expensive home ownership is in Boulder (RentCafe, 2023). Unfortunately, only about 8 percent of rental housing in Boulder is considered affordable– defined by the city of Boulder as costing less than a third of your income a month (City of Boulder, 2021). One potential way to make housing more affordable is through rent control, or by regulating how much rent can actually cost. The main goals of policies like this are to keep rent affordable, increase neighborhood stability, and give people protection from being forced out of their homes by rent increases. There’s many different kinds of rent control, but one useful model is price control – regulating either how much rent can cost, or how much rent can increase each year. Because the share of Americans renting their homes is increasing, many communities are considering instituting some form of rent control, and because of this, there’s been an uptick in economists and sociologists studying the effects of rent control in states like New Jersey and New York and cities like San Francisco with established or newly instituted rent control policies. Others are studying the effects of a lack of rent control in cities like Boston, Massachusetts, which removed their rent controls in the 1990s.

None of these new studies have found any evidence that introducing or strengthening rent control decreases new housing construction, despite it being one of the central concerns surrounding instituting it. On the flip side, there’s also no evidence that removing rent control increases it either. While rent control’s effects on new development are clear, their effects on the amount of rental housing is still contested. There’s some evidence that suggests that the amount of available rental housing decreased as landlords converted their renter-occupied units to owner occupied ones (Sims, 2007). Still yet, there’s evidence of the opposite–that it increased the amount of rental housing by incentivizing landlords to subdivide their units (Gilderbloom & Ye, 2007). Regardless, what rent control has done is successfully keep rents low in the places it’s been instituted, while in the places it was removed, rents doubled on average (Mason, 2019). It’s also increased resident tenure lengths, leading to greater neighborhood stability, and keeping neighborhoods socioeconomically diverse. This enables people to live in the cities where they work. Rent control has also successfully prevented gentrification in the areas it's been instituted. With this protection in place, cities can undergo renewal projects without worrying about pricing out the very people they aim to help. All this isn’t to say it’s a miracle policy or a one-size-fits-all solution, alone it won’t be enough to confront the affordable housing crisis, but it is a powerful asset in our political toolbox.

Unfortunately, it’s one we have to do without. In 1981, Colorado enacted a statewide ban on rent control policies in response to a citizen initiative in Boulder to allow rent-stabilized housing–a more flexible kind of rent control (Sargent, 2021). Colorado is one of 32 states with similar bans preventing local legislatures and municipalities from permitting rent controls in their communities (National Multifamily Housing Council, 2022). Recently, there was a bill in the state senate to repeal this ban, HB-1115, but despite popular support–over 80 percent of young people aged 18 to 34 support allowing local legislatures to set rent controls–it still failed (New Era Colorado, 2023). Governor Polis has historically vetoed other bills aimed at instituting housing regulations, citing concerns about future development (Kenney, 2022).

Opponents to rent control primarily focus on the impacts that it could have on the developers, landlords, and property management firms involved. Among other things, they argue that instituting these controls would deter developers from building new homes. While that has been a consensus for decades, new studies have found no correlation between rent controls and diminished rates of new development, indicating that the issue is more nuanced than it seems (Mason, 2019). But even disregarding these doubts, from 1990 to 2019, the total number of rental units increased by about 13.3 million, while the number of rental units at the low end of the price range, under $600 accounting for inflation, fell by almost four million (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2020). New development isn’t going to solve the housing crisis if it’s all aimed at attracting those with money rather than those that need it. Additionally, opponents argue that being unable to raise the rent on an apartment discourages landlords from making repairs and upgrades to their properties, driving values down either way, and that it discourages people from moving, stalling out the rental market. Rent control policies, however, aren’t just strict price limits, and many account for how upgrades to an apartment change its fair market price (Mason, 2019). Investing in housing programs like Housing Choice Vouchers (more commonly known as Section 8) and expanding tenant protections to include repair standards and a right to a lawyer in housing court as well as investing in other needs to go hand in hand with rent control policies if we want equitable housing.

This resistance to rent control stems from a central misunderstanding of its goals. They’re not designed to create affordable housing out of thin air, and they’re not just to keep rents low–they’re supposed to foster community and recognize the interests of long term tenants to remain in their homes. They’re to keep neighborhoods socioeconomically diverse. We can’t continue to treat rental housing like it’s just a short stop on the way to homeownership because that is becoming increasingly untrue for young people. But this opposition is the neoliberal position. The assumption is that by regulating the housing market, we would be limiting it and its capability to house people. By limiting the economic market at all, we would be limiting its capacity for good.

But the goal of today’s market is profiting and pursuing so-called infinite economic growth. Whatever positive impacts it has on people are side effects, and its negative impacts are collateral damage. A neoliberal government inevitably prioritizes the wellbeing of corporations over the wellbeing of its people, purely by the nature of what neoliberalism is. If we measure success the way neoliberals do, we’ll only ever see how the industry is performing, not the impacts of our legislation and development on those most vulnerable. Neoliberalism has had an unforgivably negative impact on the economic stability and mobility of people, as well as on the social fabric of our communities. As engineers, we have an obligation to resist neoliberalism in our education and industry, and as a society, we need to seriously consider moving past it if we want to experience truly just development in our lifetimes.

Future engineers are entering an industry whose relationship with the people it most impacts is shaped by neoliberalism. There’s an exploding interest in global engineering, as well as racial and environmental justice, motivated by addressing very basic human needs and reckoning with a fundamentally unjust history. But the underlying condition in most engineering projects is an utter acceptance of capitalism and the free market, leading to blind acceptance of neoliberal approaches in development (Riley, 2007). Without a conscious resistance to neoliberalism that questions long term impacts and prioritizes the wellbeing of those impacted, it’s easy to end up working on projects that hurt the people they were designed to help. Because engineers are embedded in industry, they typically serve the ends of profit making, and it hasn’t been considered a professional duty to question those ends. Many big engineering aid projects have been launched both in the United States and in developing countries and many have failed. Urban renewal projects–like those in Jobbers Canyon, Ohio, LaVilla in Jacksonville, Florida, and Poletown in Detroit, Michigan–motivated by the goal of creating more jobs, often end up displacing locals and killing the local economy. But these failed projects leave us with opportunities to grow and potential case studies to learn from.

We need to change the way we appraise a project’s success, both in the short and long term, and to ensure that its motivations and ends are questioned throughout (Riley, 2007). The communities impacted should be involved with every step of the engineering process. Projects should be formulated in and organized by them, and industry responsibility simply cannot end when the funding does. Insurance should be provided so in the case that a project fails, those communities don’t get saddled with that debt. Projects should be sustainable and independent of the company–the community should be able to comfortably maintain it.

And as for educating future engineers, universities have a duty to their students to teach ethics in engineering. We need to learn about neoliberalism. If we want to produce multifaceted engineers capable of interacting with and maneuvering around a complex sociopolitical situation, the core economic system we exist in can’t be a blink-and-you-miss-it topic in classes. Engineering schools also need to develop specialized concentrations or degrees with an intersectional or global perspective on engineering. What we have here at CU Boulder–the Mortenson Center–is a good start, but many universities don’t have intersectional programs to begin with. Additionally, there needs to be a critical analysis of the programs and organizations the university works with. Our study abroad and exchange programs are often limited by our intensive engineering curriculums that don’t emphasize understanding of political and economic systems, never leaving enough time to focus on cultural immersion. We need to launch more interdisciplinary programs for engineering students, with a focus on engineering ethics and an emphasis on working with social scientists. Their input is incredibly valuable and outside of our expertise, but too often fields like sociology and history are dismissed as unscientific or unimportant.

Outside of our technical work, we can advocate for the passing of policies that prioritize working people and marginalized groups. This means advocating for repeal of the prohibition on local residential rent control, as well as expanding tenant protections, like providing tenants a right to counsel in housing courts. One study in Denver found that less than one percent of tenants are represented in court while over 89 percent of landlords are (Hasvold & Regenbogen, 2016). In New York, after such tenant protections were instituted, evictions fell 41 percent (Office of Civil Justice New York City Human Resources Administration, 2020). We also need to change the way we talk about and treat housing, both politically and in the industry. Three of four Americans agree that housing is a human right, but that’s not reflected in our legislation or developments (Orth & Bialik, 2022). We need massive federal investment in housing assistance and the creation of much more affordable housing units. Right now, the City of Boulder has set a goal to increase the amount of affordable housing in Boulder to just fifteen percent in 2035 (City of Boulder, 2021). Frankly, that’s pathetic, and we can do a lot better. We need to reinvest in social programs and welfare systems en masse. We cannot continue to depend on companies who have no legal obligation to contribute positively to society to act as our safety nets.

Engineering doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Our projects will be built not in a blank plot of land, but in places with rich histories, within an industry with a difficult legacy. By working with communities to design projects that work for them and actively challenging our neoliberal biases and approaches in development, we can contribute materially to a better, more equitable world for everyone.