The idea that there's enough housing but "in the wrong place" is like saying there's plenty of jobs, they're just in third world countries and Scandinavia.
The idea that the solution is "play Robin Hood with the global economy" is literally a fairy tale.
There's no such thing as affordable housing[0]. Just housing. You can certainly argue that building a house is too expensive -- and due to NIMBYism, discriminatory policies, and anti-density regulatory environments, this is often true -- but affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building, and the problem is generally that housing stock simply doesn't keep up with demand in places which demand lots of housing (e.g., San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, London, etc.).
0. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/1/3/theres-no-such-...
Also, if you want to use it colloquially, then housing is, by definition, affordable for most of the people who live in housing and are not running a spending deficit.
Ah, more pithy, meaningless slogans.
Surely municipalities and landlords know the median gross incomes of households in the areas they serve. Surely there are bands of income where certain types of housing are classified as "affordable" and then "cost-burden", and the quantity of households which fall into these bands are well-known to those who serve them. Landlords set the market rent based on what the market will bear. HUD sets the allowances according to market rent as well.
Yes, to a homeless bum, all housing is unaffordable. To George Soros, it's all affordable housing. But you need to remember that the definition is proffered by Housing And Urban Development, a US Government agency which does things like subsidize rent and help people purchase homes, so I doubt that the state of feline vitality is entirely unknown to them.
You can "solve" the equation by reducing housing costs, but it is also possible that the "problem" isn't housing costs per se but wage depression, and that the "real" solution is to fix the gross monthly income.
"The" gross monthly income, as if there is one blob of income that we could turn a knob and increase, by say, 10%? Are we doing this across the board, from migrant farmworkers to the Fortune 500 C-levels? Does this dovetail with UBI so that people who earned $0 + entitlements, lose their entitlements and begin receiving cash instead?
If rental housing is the #1 monthly expense for the working class, or say, the socio-economic class who needs Affordable Housing, and you "fix" their income (which I think you mean raise it, rather than the financial term of art) if you raise their income by a given amount, and housing costs stay constant, then more people get housed?
As you increase the difficulty of staying married, and make it trés gauche for women to fulfill destiny as mothers, you increase their difficulty of bearing and raising >0 children, DINKs emerge as the Ideal Consumer, but then you've decimated your future workforce, taxpayers, and caregivers.
I mean, the 50s/60s promoted the Nuclear Family for some reason, and it was probably intended to blow up extended family ties, which can make a populace harder to track and control, and because Nuclear Families tend to drive up demand for discrete housings, and also demand for any and all household goods and resources that can no longer be shared. Hmm.
This is fantastic, and I do think this definition is meaningful, but what legally binds this definition to what politicians and interest groups discuss? Without a legal binding the term "affordable housing" will continue to be a floating signifier indicating housing that is somehow generally affordable conveniently without defining the mechanism by which this will be delivered.
Therefore, people will colloquially refer to HCV-participant communities as "Affordable Housing" because if a landlord charges $1801.00, they're not eligible to receive HUD payments and HCV holders literally can't afford to live there.
Therefore, the landlords are presented with a bright-line; either they're in this public housing "project" or they're not.
Speaking of Projects, the "old way" was for HUD to build the buildings and HUD more-or-less directly managed the Project Housing, and the way it's gone with commercial landlords is a relatively new development, if you will.
Adding one home at the top of the price range, increases the number of affordable homes for someone, somewhere, by at least one.
Developing in Vancouver is outrageously expensive. Its voters chose a lengthy approval process for new housing. High housing costs are a political choice.
At some point the market would flood and there wouldn't be as much demand anymore, but if every single person in Canada wants to live in Vancouver everyone is in for a world of hurt until Vancouver has 30 million dwelling units.
The building of dwellings has outpaced immigration so that alone is unlikely a silver bullet.
Several years ago I was living in a lovely, historic, but no-frills apartment in a desirable area (Cobble Hill, Brooklyn) when several new “luxury” apartment buildings opened nearby, all around the same time. They were only a bit more expensive but offered lots of amenities (doorman, elevator, gym etc) that my building didn’t have.
The impact was remarkable: when other apartments in my building went on the market they sat unrented for weeks, when they’d previously rented in hours. The landlord actually lowered the rent on them! In NYC! Our lease was up soon after, and we managed to negotiate that they gut renovate our kitchen in exchange for extending our lease.
Not to be a doubter, but it seems like this note completely changes the context of the problem they stated. A slightly more expensive housing is competitive with the current housing you had. A higher-end luxury building being built costing 10x as much would likely have different effects.
Value is, by definition, "An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return." Having the money to buy a house (for its advertised value) or not is what determines if you can afford it or not.
If you can't afford a house it's not affordable. If your city has housing, but a large population who can't afford said houses, then you have unaffordable housing. If you don't have any housing at all, you still don't have affordable housing.
This isn't really something worth debating. Affordable housing is a very well established part of the governance of cities, regardless of what contortions a blogger wants to use to reframe a discussion away from economic inequality.
Not only that, the definition of "affordable housing" is skewed. In the big metro area near me, "affordable housing" means 1500 to 2000 USD per month. That is not affordable to any normal person. To me, affordable rent should be below 1000 USD.
You think this homeless crises is bad, wait 30 years and then you will see Cities with large slums like many "third" world countries have.
And yes, it is the Gov. job to fix this, but the politicians wants to continue receiving their "bribes" from companies, some of which are buying up rental properties as fast as they become available. Ever see "cash for your house" ? Those properties are probably being bought up for use with AirBNB or being turned into rentals for around 3000 USD.
[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/ugly-truth-behind-we-buy-...
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/behind-the-scenes-of-we-b...
[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/state-federal-laws-do-lit...
[3]: https://www.propublica.org/article/want-to-sell-home-for-cas...
and then act surprised when they get out with zero useful skills
They’re screwed either way, might as well get 4 years of college out of it.
They make 12-15 dollars an hour. That's 2400 dollars a month. That means at 30% of income (rental maximum in most areas), they can afford $720. (This assumes that they can work 40 hours. Their hours are often variable because they need two jobs - places mostly hire part time to avoid needing to give out health care.)
There are only a handful of apartments in the area that will rent a two bedroom for 1400. (I assume a roommate.) So, considering a moderate cost of living area, you are unlikely to ever make it out of sharing an apartment as nearly every job paying more than $30 an hour in this city requires a bachelor's degree.
Look around your job. How many people don't have a four year degree? It is near impossible to make it up the ladder without one.
Sure, some will be alright. However, looking at statistics, the best way of not falling behind in terms of income is to get a good degree. Because that’s what we are talking about: average wages have been increasing more slowly than inflation for quite a few decades now. So we are talking about a generation falling behind, not a greedy generation.
It’s less and less the case that a degree is the best path forward (depending on the field), but still.
We could reduce student usury by demanding that all loans be paid back at a maximum percentage of income for a set number of years. If the degree isn't worth 5% of expected job salary for 15 years, too bad. Obviously the numbers can be adjusted but the whole sale pitch is "spend $X, get a leg up on the pile and make twice $x yearly". Just codify that, and suddenly the loan companies are on the hook for $500k loans for basketweaving degrees that produce baristas.
So "forced"? Not with a gun to their head, but when every authority figure, parent and friend you've ever trusted tells you to do the thing at 17...
I won't convince you because you've got your anecdotes. Though I'd say if a public school counselor, parents and teachers all tell a 17 year old it's "college or bust", it's laughable to argue "ah, those teenagers should have been rational, informed consumers of professional training and eschewed the advice of every trusted adult in their life".
Bro, when did you last look at the cost of college, the 70s?
I went to a community college and then transferred to a state college that was also in my town, so I didn't have to pay absurd dorm expenses. I worked 30-35 hours a week while going to college.
I still came out with ~$45K in loan debt.
And you're proposing even the possibility of a four-digit loan?
> when you have low or zero income.
Have you missed the part where adults are lying to children and telling them that the high salary their degree will earn them will pay for the loan?
>Have you missed the part where adults are lying to children and telling them that the high salary their degree will earn them will pay for the loan?
Lying to teenagers who should, at some point, use their own judgment. You signed a paper for the loans, yes? Were you able to calculate that it would equal 45K or more of debt? How did you, yourself, think that you would manage to climb out of that debt with a job that you did not have, and would only have a chance of getting four years after graduating?
But when it's in the service of the finance industry - bam; all gone!
Children were told "you can be anything you want to be" and also "in order to get a good job you have to go to college" which, in effect, forced children who otherwise didn't need to go to college, to go to college.
In the same way a child cannot consent to sex, a child cannot fight social pressure coming from every institution they have access to. Your insistence on the word force is manipulative, pointless, and in bad faith.
It's like birthing an animal in captivity and setting up a snare trap outside the only exit to their cage and then claiming you are hunting when they step on it. Truly disgusting.
The younger generations certainly seem capable of that reasoning. They aren't taking on nearly as many student loans.
Except this was exactly what was offered. Schools used to brag about placement rates. This message came from your parents, the staff at your school, etc.
Setting up, I repeat, a literal trap for children to fall into, and then getting on this stupid high horse about how you didn't fall for it. I cannot begin to express how depraved that concept is, and I know you can't begin to comprehend it. Maybe one day you will.
> The younger generations certainly seem capable of that reasoning. They aren't taking on nearly as many student loans.
That is because they have the mistakes of 2 previous generations as an example and the rhetoric has died down dramatically.
Grow up.
Sure, nobody forced them to take out loans, but for me, the propaganda all throughout high school was "If you want a high paying job, you need to go to college!" and then was told not to worry about the costs and student loan payments, the higher paying job will pay for itself.
Four years of every adult you trust. Your parents, teachers, counselors, and other school faculty. The same message. Go to college. Go to college. Go to college. Don't worry about the loans, the higher salary will pay for it. It's an investment. It doesn't even matter what you get a degree in, employers just like to see you had the discipline and sense of responsibility to complete it.
And then we get out of college, and then we find out we've been lied to. We were children and the adults that we were supposed to trust were lying to us. The degree didn't guarantee a job by any means. Worse yet, many jobs require the degree, but then pay $20/hr, while you're trying to pay $700+/month in student loan payments.
And then dickheads like you come in and pour salt on the wounds.
In short, people with an attitude like yours need to get fucked. Children are being lied to by the adults they trust, and then getting blamed for not being able to handle the responsibilities they took on based on the lies.
Yes, these adults gave these teenagers terrible advice. But the fact of the matter is, they can see exactly how much they would have to pay, with a job that they had no guarantee of. Teenagers of the current age have stopped listening to that advice. If you are stuck with the loans now, all you can do is call out mom, pop, and teachers for misleading you, but also yourself for believing them.
Wealth taxes are not a fairly tale, though of course they are a nightmare for the excessively wealthy! In the UK we used death duties to finish off the aristocracy.
This is a good thing. If SF is so great, many more people will be able to go there.
The ideal situation is Tokyo, where a lack of culture in speculating on housing coupled with population decreases leads (going down in the metro area for the last three years) to housing affordability.
If you increase the supply by enough, that will tip the balance to where the market clearing price will go down.
Just like the entirety of Los Angeles couldn't move to Santa Barbara without Santa Barbara being changed forever.
The closest reasonable equivalent we can do is maintain the quaint "old town" and build a "real city" around it where people actually live and work, and the old town remains as a tourist destination, basically.
This is the case in much of Europe. The Paris you visit and the Paris people live in are often mixed, but they're noticeably different.
Rapid mass transit to city centers can hide the distinction.
Shenzhen grew from 100,000 people in the 1980s to 13M now with no housing affordability crisis...by building. The whole pearl river delta region is essentially an 80M people megacity with no housing problems...because they continuously built. Tokyo is also a classical example of continuously building infrastructure to support millions more people per decade.
That's why we have governments, though.
I wouldn't use China as an example of solving the housing problem by simply building. There's currently a large oversupply problem [0] and, not entirely unlike the US (but more extreme), excess supply of housing has lead to people simply owning more than one property as an investment strategy.
0. https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-smaller-cities-struggle-...
Unrelated to the above, but China's excessive building isn't actually from central planning, but because real estate is the one of the only viable investment methods in China, and because selling land to developers is one of the only ways local governments can raise revenue. Chinese cities are quite expensive to live in (especially if you have Western standards)
Only in idealised markets. Housing markets are often not like that.
Tokyo is an example where houses are torn down every 39 years so a new one can be built. Also, given the lack of population growth in Japan as a whole, the growth rate in Tokyo is anemic. Tokyo metro area has even been losing a small amount of population in the last three years: https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/21671/tokyo/population
Rent is maybe 30% higher in Tokyo, even less if you live on the end of a train line. Can you imagine how many people would move to Bay Area CA or New York City or Boston or Seattle if their rent was only 30% higher? Pre pandemic my 3 bedroom in Boston area was 3500/mo. Since the pandemic rents have gone even higher. We have bidding wars of people trying to win a rental unit. Bidding wars. It’s ridiculous.
Also I don’t see your point about houses being torn down. If anything that should make it more expensive (since buying used and not rebuilding is cheaper). Realistically rebuilding is vital (in conjunction with subdivision) because that’s how you increase density
Osaka and Nagoya are losing people also. The changes are for metro areas, not city cores.
> If anything that should make it more expensive (since buying used and not rebuilding is cheaper).
It simply means that you can't compute new housing very easily by new housing construction rates (you have to subtract old housing demolitions).
Density currently isn't increasing (you tear down one three story narrow house and replace it with another three story narrow house, you need to buy a bunch of SFHs to make a new apartment building).
Where could you built 1M units in San Francisco? It is less than 50 square miles surrounded on 3 sides by water.
> The calculators below are for use by administrative agents and developers of affordable housing to determine the initial sales prices and rents for affordable units in compliance with the Uniform Housing Affordability Controls (UHAC).