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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

The HUD disagrees with the author.

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.

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Exactly, there are real definitions for these things. There are also great programs for people making 80% or less of the area median income (AMI) - HomeReady/HomePossible that not enough people take advantage of.

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.

More-over, the government agency is using a much better definition!

Affordable should mean affordable, not taxpayer-funded.

I agree that the HUD definition is better, but what do we do when there are large numbers of people in an area where there is not available affordable housing? Like if market rent starts at $1000/month for a bachelor suite, and a minimum wage worker earns $2000/month, what do we do (societally)?

Build housing and transit! Aggressively! Angrily! Eminent domain aggressively to build better transit, force the placement of stations where it make sense geographically, and fucking roll over NIMBYs within 4 miles of stations.

>Build housing and transit! Aggressively! Angrily! Eminent domain aggressively to build better transit

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.

Except they don’t end up feeling the effects. What happens is they start offering rent control or voucher programs to help lower income families. This gets presented as “equitable”, when all it really does is push wages down for a specific class of people. These same people get “stuck” in affordable housing because they won the housing lottery and can no longer afford to move out.

Offer and demand, increase offer to lower prices, basic economics

Has anything thought about just doing... nothing? If a city doesn't want to make itself affordable for minimum wage workers, then why exactly is that a problem? I would encourage other municipalities to try to lure away these workers with some incentives, like a relocation bonus, but if places like SanFran refuse to build affordable housing, I feel like it would be better if they simply couldn't get anyone to work there for less than, say, $200k/year. If that means locals have to pay $50 for a Starbucks drink and $500-1000 for a sit-down restaurant meal for 1, then that seems like a good thing to me. At some point, the whole thing will collapse.

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.

That definition doesn’t work in this context. Plenty of Bay Area tech wizards are not paying 30% of their gross income for their housing.

It doesn’t make their housing “affordable” in the same sense that zoning committees insist on “affordable” unit splits for new development.

I think it's important to note that not all affordable housing is subsidized. We can achieve affordable housing without* direct government manipulation of prices

Exactly (to your first sentence)! Affordable housing is affordable, period.

Affordable housing may or may not be subsidized, may or may not be rent controlled, may or may not be awarded, etc.

If market-rate housing is affordable already, what is there to argue about?

"Direct government manipulation of prices" never works (see rent control data for just one of many examples).

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.

Yeah sorry meant to say without. Fat fingered the keyboard

Never works is not quite fair. A huge proportion of the housing market in Vienna is government owned and Vienna seems to work fine.

I find it surprising that its a percentage of gross income and not net. 30% of gross income will be close to 40% of net income.

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.

The issue with HUD is it doesn't define a house. Is it a room you can rent? A studio, 1bd, free standing home? What is weird to me is we use different definitions on what is acceptable by area instead of what human needs we have. In Texas a studio might be small but in NYC it is a luxury.

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