Affordable housing is a misnomer. Definitionally: afford: 'To have the financial means for'.
Affordable housing in London, UK.
Does it cost 3.5x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a single person? ;-)
Does it cost 6x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a couple? Not there yet.
Instead it costs some percentage of market rate.
Which generally ends up being 20x min wage or similar. Yes - as a person you'd need to become three, four, five times more useful before you can get this starter home.
As far as I can tell it's just trolling. It genuinely feels like those with wealth laughing at the lower classes, there's no other explanation for such a ridiculous use of language.
A Bentley does not become 'affordable' if I offer it to you for 50% off.
Even minimum wage would be a high bar to set because it doesn't feel affordable to everyone. But at the moment we're saying 'the top 10% can afford it so that's fine'.
Affordable housing is a misleading term used for a few different situations: unless the problem is well defined, there is no proper solution.
if affordable means anyone should own a house, no matter the income or lack of - that is utopia. If affordable means cheap enough that lower third income bracket can still afford a house, there are solutions - high density blocks of flats like we have all over in Europe. But if you want cheap houses in the middle of an upscale neighborhood, that is nonsense.
The size of the house is an inverse of the income even in Europe: people who can afford live in single homes or lower density constructions, the people that cannot afford that live in high density places, but you cannot build a couple of towers in the middle of a low density neighborhood, it was tried in UK and failed miserably for everyone.
The definition is the relevant one for the context. The definition of affordable here is relative to the people who may buy it. If it is affordable for >50% of new homebuilders in US, Europe, Japan, etc, and for the minority middle classes in middle income countries (china, Brazil..) then it is "affordable" in the context that we are talking about.
1. A polite way to say "housing project" or "subsidized housing" to not scare people.
2. A buzzword to force more housing density and/or promote social engineering agendas. When used in this sense, it isn't actually linked to affordability.
> 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.
On the subject of affordable housing, not to be argumentative, what is it? Why is that term used? If there was sufficient housing, it would be affordable. Seems to me affordable housing means crap housing, thereby cheap in the current environment where there is insufficient housing. Therefore people should stop talking about affordable housing, and start talking about more housing.
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).
That's a pithy, contrarian slogan, not a statement of fact. "Affordable Housing" is a term of art with a specific definition, and yes, it really exists, all over these United States.
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.
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.
> Affordable housing - a limited supply of apartments taken off the market and given off in a lottery to a lucky few who get to pay less than market rate for rent
No, affordable housing for a given income level is defined by a cost formula. Achieving affordable housing for lower income levels is frequently done by the means you describe, because you literally cannot build it in quantity if it is distributed by normal market means because what is new will be desirable, and therefore both expensive and snapped up by the well-off, for that reason alone.
What is “affordable housing”? All housing becomes affordable once you build enough of it. Is it just the politically correct way of saying “low-quality housing”?
Affordable housing is an oxymoron. In the U.S. in general, housing is very, very affordable already. It's just that in the few spots where the money is, it is super expensive, exactly because everyone wants to get there. Build a lot of affordable housing, and you will pay with the time you spend standing in traffic, also an unaffordable amount.
I don't like how this treats "affordable housing" as though affordability were a built-in property of construction. The way to make housing affordable is to build lots of units, so that you don't have too many people bidding on too few apartments. If you don't do that, then everything is going to be expensive no matter how shitty you make it (see San Francisco). If you do do that, then you can make the units nice and they'll still end up being cheap.
The problem is "affordable housing" isnt actually affordable for many. I qualify for it in the city I live in, and despite working full time for significantly above minimum wage, the rent on a 1bd apartment through this program would be about 75% of my take-home income.
Affordable housing in London, UK.
Does it cost 3.5x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a single person? ;-) Does it cost 6x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a couple? Not there yet.
Instead it costs some percentage of market rate.
Which generally ends up being 20x min wage or similar. Yes - as a person you'd need to become three, four, five times more useful before you can get this starter home.
As far as I can tell it's just trolling. It genuinely feels like those with wealth laughing at the lower classes, there's no other explanation for such a ridiculous use of language.
A Bentley does not become 'affordable' if I offer it to you for 50% off.
Even minimum wage would be a high bar to set because it doesn't feel affordable to everyone. But at the moment we're saying 'the top 10% can afford it so that's fine'.
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