What Affordable Housing Means
darrellowens.substack.com
darrellowens.substack.com
Author: what [affordable housing] actually means: subsidized, rent regulated, usually awarded, housing.
HUD: Affordable housing is generally defined as housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities. ( https://archives.hud.gov/local/nv/goodstories/2006-04-06glos... / https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-featd-articl...)
HUD defines affordable housing in terms of, well, its affordability. The author attempts to define it in terms of attributes secondary at best to affordability.
To the extent there's a discrepancy between the definitions of the federal government agency in charge of such matters and a random author on substack (who cites no source for their definitional claim), I'm going to go with the agency.
Ultimately home builders over indexed on building large/expensive homes as there was an easy to get market there. Not enough starter homes were built. This plus no major capital investments in public transportation in.. oh... 75 years has resulted in making commute times longer and longer therefore driving up prices which are commutable.
Affordable should mean affordable, not taxpayer-funded.
I completely disagree. The NIMBYs you complain about are the ones running the local governments. Doing the things you suggest require some higher level of government to basically take the place over and force these things over the objections of the politically-connected locals.
Instead, I think these overpriced places need to be made to die. Let them feel the full effects of their policies: make it so no service workers will work there for less than $200k/year, and just going out to eat costs $1000/person. If a higher-level (state or federal) government does anything, it should be for the lowly workers, to do things like help them relocate to cheaper places and leave these overpriced places full of dried-out poop on the street and boarded-up stores because the NIMBYs didn't want "those people" living anywhere near them.
The reason there's no affordable housing (or public transit) is because municipalities don't want it. They're run by NIMBYs who block every attempt at building it, and who run up the costs for what housing there is. These people need to feel the consequences of their actions, instead of having some higher-level government compensate for them.
It doesn’t make their housing “affordable” in the same sense that zoning committees insist on “affordable” unit splits for new development.
The root cause of lack of affordable housing is zoning based on NIMBYism. If you want the price to go down, you need to increase the supply. That's a good way to not get re-elected in a lot of places.
Affordable housing may or may not be subsidized, may or may not be rent controlled, may or may not be awarded, etc.
The other surprising thing is that landlords will ensure that only rent is below 30% of gross income of a prospective renter. Add utilities and the person will be paying over 40% on housing.
This is important, because the marketing use of the word "luxury" is exploited by NIMBYs to stop the construction of new housing. They oppose the construction of affordable housing by using dog whistles and other dark arts to appeal to classism and racism. They oppose the construction of "luxury" housing by co-opting progressive rhetoric about the need for affordable housing, saying the construction of high-end housing will only make our affordability crisis worse.
Since there is no room for middle ground between "affordable" and "luxury," as the picture in the article shows, their anti-luxury playbook complements their anti-affordable playbook to let them oppose any new dense housing of any kind.
I like George Carlin's bit from the 90s on this; right out the gate he perfectly describes not just this idea, but also a series of other examples of idiotic rhetorical posturing we embrace unironically in 2023.
It is an example of how disconnected the public can be from important details relevant to public policy.
> "The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language."