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Comment by beaner | Hacker News Reader

All housing is affordable, otherwise it would never be bought or sold.

"Affordable" in this context is a misnomer that just means "subsidized."

No, it's a fairly precisely defined technical term that has nothing to do with subsidy (but the part about the income group for whom it is affordable and the standards by which it is affordable are omitted from media accounts; there are HUD guidelines for affordability based on income level, and the plan at issue addresses housing affordable, by those HUD standards, for households at or below 50% of the Areawide Median Income for Santa Clara County.)

Those units would earn for more on the open market than they will at the regulated rate. The difference is the subsidy.

I really dislike the "affordable housing" model. The right solution for supply constraints in any market is to increase supply!

It sounds like you’re kinda stretching the definition of the word a bit. If everything that can be sold is “affordable”, what does the word even mean?

I think is was meant, not can be.

Who is it affordable by though? By that definition a Manhattan penthouse is affordable.

Yes it is affordable by those who can, you know, afford it. That was the point OP was making.

It is, if you're a billionaire who can afford to buy it.

That's right. "Affordable" by itself doesn't say anything about who can afford it. If we were talking about affordable for the middle class, we'd call it "Affordable for the middle class." This is why the term is a misnomer. All housing is affordable, but the term is being used to describe something other than affordability (subsidization).

You’re being so pedantic as to be completely wrong. Affordable does not mean that at least one person on the planet could theoretically purchase it.

You're arguing different things. You're using a plain English version of the definition of "affordable," beaner is trying to describe the real estate term of art "affordable housing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing

I don't think there's anything pedantic about it. The term "affordable housing" implies that housing which isn't subsidized isn't affordable. But the vast majority of housing is bought, sold, and owned by regular people without subsidizing. The term is not accurate at all. The fraction of housing that is only available to a number of people in the single digits is so small as to not be worth considering. "All but 0.0001% of housing is affordable" would be pedantic; "all housing is affordable" is not.

> I don't think there's anything pedantic about it. The term "affordable housing" implies that housing which isn't subsidized isn't affordable.

No, it doesn't, because “affordable” doesn't mean “subsidized”, it means the purchase or rental cost is (and, usually when it comes to rental-committed units in a development plan, is guaranteed by contract or some other binding arrangement to remain) within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s income-based affordability guidelines for a specified income level; in the case of the plan under discussion, that income level being 50% of the Areawide Median Income for Santa Clara County.

It's like "accessibility". Several times (long ago) I've mistaken that for meaning "easy to access" and been disappointed to find it was useless. I still don't know what a "walkable neighborhood" is. Can't you walk just as easily in any neighborhood? When I read this article, I wasn't sure if affordable meant restricted to poor people, subsidized, or small (cheap) houses. I only learnt the answer from this thread. These words are only useful to the groups who already use them and impede understanding to outsiders.

This guy understands market principles.

af·ford·a·ble əˈfôrdəb(ə)l adjective inexpensive; reasonably priced.

Very little Bay Area housing meets this criteria.

The term as actually used in, e.g., the an at issue is not a misnomer, it's a well-defined and precise technical term, with all the relevant qualifiers attached.

The media accounts drop the reference to the income-based affordability formula from HUD and the income level in the plan to which the formula is applied, but that isn't a problem with the term, it's a problem, if anything, with the media accounts.

Purchasable does not mean affordable. Affordable is defined as being "whether you can afford it" which in this case is the aggregate "you", meaning a large plurality of the population.

You can't say something is affordable just because someone can buy it.

A large plurality of the local population can afford these units; the discount is for people well below the median.

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