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> The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people."

From a policy perspective, "affordable housing" refers to programs which through some incentive or another, get developers to rent some units at below market rates to people at certain income thresholds. They usually go away (for a specific building) after 10-15 years.

This is confusing, because sometimes it really is cheap housing for poor people and other times it's nice, very expensive but below market rate housing for middle class people.

The other problem, as mentioned in the OP, is that as you start trying to shift cost for more units you end up with higher overall prices. Thus making the market rate higher, and making it harder to get developers to make the same concessions they did before for future development.

> The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people."

I like to call it what it really is: "lottery housing." It is only affordable to the lucky few who win the jackpot.

Indeed.

Oh, you want Section 8? Well, fill out these 20 forms, be in the right office at the right date and time, and you'll be entered into a lottery IF the paperwork you filled out matches our unstated criteria and allotted apartments.

Oh, and if you don't get in this YEAR, there's a nice city park. And the cops only harass you every other night.

I often wonder how much damage the term "affordable housing" has done to the goal of true housing affordability.

Politicians can pretend to be working on improving housing prices, while in reality doing nothing of the sort. As far as I can tell, "affordable housing" requirements produce only false hope for lower-income residents and increased market rates.

Indeed.

I know where I'm from, we have an influx of foreign students, paying out-of-country education costs. I have no issue with people from wherever coming here to study. It's cool, since it brings in a lot of ethnic stuff, as we all benefit.

The downside is actually that, alongside city government allowing "luxury highrises" for the students. We're in the middle of Indiana, and these rooms are going for $1400/mo.

It's a combination of many different things; Indiana University owns a great deal of land and pay taxes on pretty much nothing, the city council refuses to say no to the luxury condo makers, the council refuses to allow low cost apartments or assist funding them, the state refuses to let bloomington to annex more land. And of course, NIMBYs are in many neighborhoods, but this is only one facet.

What's "affordable housing"? The common refrain is 'The Market will tell us'. Well, the market also says "if you can't find a good job, you're gonna live in the city park".. So I don't put much trust in that market religion. Takes people in decision making roles to solve this one - Government.

Somewhere here on HN I read that in russian there would be a special word for having connections with someone who knows when goods will be in stores. Maybe we need a word like that for every language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)

Of course it's important to distinguish between the YIMBYs and the Yes In Your Backyard types, who typically masquerade as the former.

You'll find them on discussion boards enthusiastically supporting development and/or sanctioned homeless camps in other neighborhoods because they "have better transit" or "closer access to services" than their own neighborhood.

As long as "local control" is enshrined in California law, and anybody anywhere can come and stop development in somebody else's yard, YIYBY is an important counter to the NIYBY that dominate these meetings.

It's important to remember that NIMBYs aren't actually protecting their back yard, they're restricting what others are doing in their fully-owned backyard. So if you're going to complain about YIYBYs, then the category of NIMBY doesn't really exist, it's just NIYBY.

> enthusiastically supporting development and/or sanctioned homeless camps

These things seem quite different from each other.

And zoning should be a city wide discussion. If a city doesn't zone for density near to heavy transit, the city is zoning irresponsibly and should no longer have local control, and the State should take over zoning.

> These things seem quite different from each other.

Two things that are often considered "undesirable" by the people living near them.

That's why there's room for skepticism when self-described YIMBYs actively root for other neighborhoods to take on these and other "undesirable" projects. In addition to demonstrating their public display of enlightened urbanism, it also happens to be in their interest to keep these projects out of their own neighborhood.

Yes, exactly. Too much of "the YIMBY movement" consists of relatively wealthy people telling poorer people that they should re-develop their neighborhoods for the good of everyone. We'll all have cheaper rents! (...by like $10 a month, on average...but your rent, Mr. Poor Person, will be 10x higher. Sorry. It's for the good of the people.)

It's sad, for example, to see so much discussion of the Mission in San Francisco (which is already quite dense, by any standard short of "midtown manhattan"), when the western 3/4ths of SF (much of which consists of wealthier people in suburban-style mansions) is routinely ignored. And though I believe that YIMBY people do want to raise height limits and density everywhere (good, fine), in practice, the debates usually center on re-development in poorer neighborhoods, since it's an easier political lift.

> Mission in San Francisco (which is already quite dense, by any standard short of "midtown manhattan")

Not so dense by the standard of Brooklyn, either. Brooklyn is 1.5x denser than Mission.

And that is the average density for all of Brooklyn, Brooklyn being 40x larger than the Mission District.

"Brooklyn is 1.5x denser than Mission"

Citation absolutely needed. Show me source of your numbers. Brooklyn runs the gamut from skyscrapers to single-family houses, but the average construction is 1-3 story apartment buildings, just like the mission.

In any case, even if you're right, it's not a counterargument: how does the western 3/4ths of SF compare to Brooklyn? Why should we be focusing on the Mission, and not, say, Sea Cliff?

Let's try to put a condo building to Jack Dorsey's mansion and see what happens.

> Show me source of your numbers.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_District,_San_Francisc...

> Why should we be focusing on the Mission, and not, say, Sea Cliff?

Why not both?

You're comparing SF in 2008 to Brooklyn in 2017. Click the source link, and you'll see that current estimate for the Mission (30,408/mi^2) is much closer to that of Brooklyn. The difference is only ~20%.

http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Mission-District-San-F...

Because the Mission has easy access to BART, Caltrain, highways, and is central-ish to the SFMTA whereas Sea Cliff is just sort of out there.

Great. You've just excluded 75% of San Francisco, and made my argument.

You should think of Barcelona, Paris, and Amsterdam. Beautiful places with most buildings at about 8 stories high with large bike ridership and good public transit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona#Population_density

Not manhattan.

Like look at this random spot in barcelona: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3974472,2.1586211,3a,60y,125...

Huh, that reminds me a lot of Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon (roughly the same building height and streetcape, although the Barcelona buildings are prettier).

Well Barcelona has been developing under the Cerdà plan since mid 1850. That's I think the issue: won't the average American clamor against "cUmmUnism" one minute after he's told his grotesquely styled McMansion is not allowed?

I am a YIMBY who lives in the western neighborhoods of SF and would love to see them upzoned. I always think it's silly that there are perfectly pleasant pre-zoning 5-8 story apartment buildings down the street from my place that would be illegal to build under current regulations.

> The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people."

More specifically, it's come to mean "subsidized housing for poor people". It's often contrasted with "luxury housing", which is implicitly anything new-built and market-rate.

Here's a question:

"If the distribution of wealth is incredibly skewed, how exactly could the distribution of home ownership not be similarly skewed?"

YIMBY seems reasonable as response to homeowners leveraging zoning to distort building priorities and so protect their home values. But if one millionaire will pay (rent or mortage) more for a mansion on a hill than all the potential poor occupants of entire apartment building on that hill could pay, then the developers will build just that mansion, even freed from NIMBY constraints. And that's not even taking into account way that the most developers are going to have an incentive to keep rents overall high and so have an incentive keep the housing markets tight.

State housing projects and zoning that actually incentivizes affordable density indeed could help that. But here, not only have housing project not been build but a lot of these projects have been torn down (leveraged by poor-people horror-stories of course).

Anyway, I would answer my question above as "the way we've have decent housing for working class and poor people has generally involved the rich and powerful being far-thinking and seeing improving everyone's conditions improves their position overall." But a variety of factors have thrown out all the far-thinkingness of the powerful today, as is evident in any number of fronts.

But if one millionaire will pay (rent or mortage) more for a mansion on a hill than all the potential poor occupants of entire apartment building on that hill could pay, then the developers will build just that mansion, even freed from NIMBY constraints.

If so, then yes, but how many millionaires are there trying to grab up huge tracts of urban land for their own personal residences?

And that's not even taking into account way that the most developers are going to have an incentive to keep rents overall high and so have an incentive keep the housing markets tight.

They have that incentive collectively, but when rents are high, an individual developer's incentive is to build more apartments to rent out. Sure, building them might reduce the per-unit rent, but that developer collects more rent in total.

I agree with all of the above, but it's worth noting that YIMBY policies economically pollute the areas they upzone with an influx of investment that can have disasterous consequences in the short term.

Obviously, we need more housing, which needs to get built. And in the very long term, "increasing the supply of housing will lower the price". But in the short term, increasing the supply of housing will raise the price of housing. And regular people still have to buy housing every single day, regardless of the daily price.

YIMBYs have never had an answer for the short and medium term, and therefore like to ignore the short term and medium term, which causes them significant opposition from local communities at both ends of the spectrum. The wealthy people want to restrict zoning to inflate their wealth, but the poor/middle class people want careful applications of zoning, so as not to be displaced by the violent increase in 'market rate' for the next 5 to 20 years while we wait for the increased supply to lower the price. They can't just sit around for years while we all wait for the demand to fall -- they need housing to live in during that time, and have to pay for it at whatever the developer chooses to set 'market rate' as.

YIMBYs have developer money behind them, so they will win this fight. But they have no answer for the short/medium-term economic pollution they cause, so they are hurting a lot of poor/middle class people they claim to support, and will continue to do so with each victory they achieve over the next decade or two.

Low and middle class voters outnumber wealthy voters. Why do lower and middle class voters not vote for government regulation of housing? Or government creating land trusts to ensure enough affordable housing now vs 20 years from now? Is it simply apathy?

Tangentially, I’m a huge fan of how Germany (Berlin in particular) uses government regulations to keep housing affordable.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/30/then-we-take-berlin-2.html

What sort of regulation do you have in mind? Directly restricting price won't make room for all the people who want to live here. It just changes how the (currently too rare) living space gets allocated.

Because the less skin you have in the game the less reason you have to go to the polls.

Not like it matters much anyway, politicians break their promised by ascending economic order to whom they were made.

I am also a fan of how Germany (and to some extent, the Netherlands) handle their housing regulations to keep housing affordable.

Except for a few minor exceptions, America has nothing even remotely similar. The assumption is that owning your home/condo is the one and only way you are supposed to keep housing affordable in the US.

That assumption sort of / kind of worked for a while, back when there were heavy restrictions and regulations on how non-human and/or non-citizen entities could own and invest in housing, and when jobs/"demand" were somewhat-more-evenly distributed. But as soon as that was deregulated, the wheels came off the bus and it's been gotten steadily worse every year.

> Why do lower and middle class voters not vote for government regulation of housing?

They do, and in some respects, they already have this -- that's why they have some local control of zoning today. The regulatory control lower and middle class voters have is this local control of zoning that YIMBYs are trying to eliminate. Part of the problem is that "YIMBYs" are attacking that authority, by pretending anyone who is anti-YIMBY must be NIMBY. This is because it just so happens that the local control lower and middle class voters can use to promote public housing or "affordable" housing is the same control that wealthy voters can use to eliminate new housing entirely.

Voters can't vote in municipalities where they don't live. So if you have a muni that has low destiny zoning regs, voters would have to move there first before having any say.

Real "local control" would let people commuting to Cupertino from Stockton decide zoning in Cuptertino.

> Real "local control" would let people commuting to Cupertino from Stockton decide zoning in Cuptertino.

That's a sham argument. That would be letting corporations who demand workers be on site decide zoning by way of commuters from other areas. Every local zoning/district must then bend to the will of temporary workers (temporary in the sense that their employment is less permanent than land ownership).

Local voters, through property ownership or residency is the only acceptable form of governance. Workers should be angered at employers who demand them to be on site, not zoning regulations.

So police, teachers, firefighters, gardeners, construction workers, tradesmen, who work in a community and commute from outside it shouldn't have a say in the policies of the community? Most bay area cities don't have any of those people living locally anymore.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/08/25/cops-living-in-r...

https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/03/08/school-district-con...

When your city cannot house the people required for its basic functioning, its government is broken.

I agree with you that it's a problem. The solution is to find equitable ways to provide housing to those workers in the city where they should have a stake. Providing commuters a voice is a (pardon my language) shitty hack and ignores the underlying issue (wealth/income inequality in a constrained geographic region).

I would not be against subsidized housing (both rentals and coops where you acquire ownership interest) that is means/income tested, to fend off speculators, foreign investors, and high income/net worth individuals from soaking up all the housing stock.

I'm confused both by your proposal, and your resistance to this one. Commuters and "people with less wealth who have a stake in the community" are exactly the same group of people. What other criteria would you use?

I think we're talking past each other. Mind if I email you to continue the discussion?

Yes, YIMBYs do have the answer.

it's in not doing targeted upzones so small that only the wealthy can afford to move in.

it's in doing enormous upzones so large that it makes no sense to sell to only the wealthy.

And upzoning such that the cost of land per unit of hosing you can build is affordable.

A price that you can't actually buy at is a fake price. When you replace a $100k single-family home with five $200k apartments, that's one person who's price has gone up (from $100k to $200k) and four people who's price has gone down (from infinity to $200k).

Have you got any specific listings for a $100k house in Wallingford? The 3/1 in the article was reportedly $1.3 million.

At a location where apartments sell for $200k, a single-family home is probably worth at least $400k, not $100k.

correct, when adjusting for location, SFHs are more expensive than multi family housing, like 99.9% of the time

I totally agree, it's all about increasing supply: build more housing. Getting rid of zoning laws and increasing building heights, etc, are a great start.

But, to do that, we also need to work with developers to help reduce the underlying cost of housing. It's not just the cost of land, but also the actual cost of building it too. Once the actual cost of housing goes down, they'll be able to build much much more and they'll be able to profit even when the price decreases significantly which keeps them building more and more, as long as there's enough competition.

"Affordable housing" is not good for everyone. If it was, we'd probably already have it.

Existing real property owners have a serious financial incentive to oppose policies that might decrease the value of their property by 25-40% (or more), especially when a plurality of their net worth is tied up in that property.

Yeah but "us" aka normal people who are not capitalists don't care. Every single person who is not a land owning capitalist wants affordable housing. If you can handle post-Marxist thought, a great manifesto called the Housing Monster addresses this. http://prole.info/thm.html

Please don't disparage capitalism, it has no opinion on affordable housing, only people do. I'm a self-proclaimed capitalist, and affordable housing for ~all should be one of the highest priorities of a functioning society, capitalist or not.

I am sure true capitalists also think that people should be able to build multi-family units on their own land if they so desire. Or to sell their land to the highest bidder.

Restrictive zoning regulations have nothing to do with capitalism or free market economy.

Most programmers/coders/software engineers could easily be considered capitalists by this quote from your article:

"X-ray techs can't take X-rays without access to expensive X-ray machines in the hospital, owned by the hospital's shareholders. Cement masons can't lay the foundations for houses without access to expensive concrete mixing trucks. Those of us who don't have property we can make money from are forced to sell our ability to work to a capitalist--we become wage workers. "

Even when I was the most de-humanized corporate drone at the largest company I've ever worked for, all I did was type on a keyboard. And I can easily afford those means of production.

I liked that article, it had great info on the workings of the construction industry, but I can't say I understand what, if any, action it was suggesting as a better alternative to build shelter?

"Not good for everyone" as in not good for "existing real property owners"?

Given that they are a significant subset of "everyone", yes.

This argument is so funny because it's true that owners make it, and the owners are narrow-mindedly mistaken. Right now in SF, a developer doesn't know if they'll be able to buy a single family home and replace it with a 3 story multifamily unit - even if the area is zoned for it. Because California doesn't have by right zoning, so anyone can just come along and get the project stopped.

Presumably, if a developer knows they'll be able to do whatever they can that's allowed in the zoning regulations, then the property value should increase even more as a significant risk has been removed.

If there are 1 million such single-family houses, and replacing 200,000 of them with multifamily structures is sufficient to sate all the demand that is driving up costs, then that zoning reform seems like it will reduce the value of 80% of the homes in the area.

Except it is good for everyone. Just not in the same term lengths.

For homeowners, constraining housing supply and ballooning their property values in the immediate sense stalls the economy at multiple layers. Without housing companies cannot attract hires, no hires means limited growth, or companies stop moving to your city. in the US, since this housing epidemic is practically national in scale, it means businesses just stop trying to expand in US markets where its impossible for people to live.

It means people who could otherwise be productive are instead destitute, and in macrospect that trend produces rampant poverty and criminal enterprise to compensate for the lack of legitimate business opportunity.

For every home owner individually the idea of deflating their ludicrous property values sounds bad until they can come to terms with the fact that their collective behavior contributes to diminished or absent growth both locally and nationally. You cannot grow industry on inflated single family home prices in major cities but you can wreck an economy and the lives of millions.

I don't know I think something has got to give before YIMBY can move forward. For example, communities where new residents are simply not allowed to have a car. I'm just shocked no one cares how much traffic will increase if you increase housing. It's already past capacity. Not sure why the fire-department can't put a max-capacity on a freeway when they can on a per-building level. If we restricted our freeways to have 10% of the traffic they do, maybe things would get better in cities.

This is backwards, traffic doesn't come from housing, traffic comes from jobs.

Rush hour is from people traveling to jobs, not from everyday living. So if you want less traffic, get rid of the jobs in the area, or provide ways for people to commute other than by car.

In fact, putting housing closer to jobs is probably the best thing that could be done to reduce traffic. At least then people have a chance to live close to where they work, and are on the road for fewer miles.

As it is, people live further out, travel further, and create more traffic than they would if there was more dense housing close to jobs.

People can't afford housing where the jobs are, because there isn't enough housing available there. So a large fraction of people end up moving far away and commuting in. That's how traffic happens. If you want to decrease traffic, build more housing where the jobs are.

Traffic doesn't have to increase with higher density. That's what public transit is for, and cities like New York or Tokyo (especially Tokyo, which has very little traffic jams) manage to increase density without scaling traffic proportionally.

A more direct example - if people have to live in McSprawlsBurg and commute an hour each way every day to work in NIMBYville highways and endless leagues of single family copy pasted houses will be built to accommodate job demand in that city, and you will get ludicrous amounts of traffic.

If NIMBYville stops being awful and recognizes how high the land values are they dezone the city limits to enable substantially higher density. And then, a decade later after the demand bubble has been drained, you might finally have the workers living in the actual city they work in, commuting by train, bike, tram, walking, etc instead of with cars that, unless you go out of your way to subsidize, will be prohibitively expensive to own when the square footage land value is so high.

And everyone wins in that world. If you previously owned an upzoned house developers will buy your house for more than they would if it were just zoned for a single family dwelling because they can put a dozen+ apartments on it. Letting density happen would mean you can actually choose between a small inner city condo or apartment that dosen't cost a magnitude more than a several thousand square foot house fifty miles away because when housing demand happens in the city housing can actually be built to meet it.

It is all wrapped up in short sighted greed on the part of everyone involved. Nothing gets better because nobody wants to wait for the best outcome if they can make marginal victories by sacrificing the well being of the whole and even their own long term prospects in the immediate term.