Right, you don't build affordable housing, and you don't even reserve housing as "affordable" (that's gratuitously inviting corruption via basically giving away underpriced housing as a 'gift' to cronies and associates). You build as much new housing as you can afford to, and let older housing filter down to "affordable" levels.
Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and then prices decrease from the increase in supply. If you're feeling extra bold, you build dense housing to massively increase the supply.
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.
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”?
You get affordable housing by building more housing not simply designating a percentage of housing to be affordable.
If anything current affordable housing initiatives just make things worse by discouraging new development. Building 10,000 new apartments is strictly better than building 5,000 apartments even if you designate 30% of them to be affordable. The ideal solution is to designate minimum density, so for every acre of land you must have at least X homes.
He didn't say it would be cheap affordable housing. He said it "will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing". Which makes sense. Normally new buildings are the luxury housing and over time, as they become outdated, they become the affordable housing. Building new "affordable housing" is a fools errand, since it costs almost as much to build as luxury housing. You just build more housing period and let nature take its course over the decades.
There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO.
One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable.
The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.
Affordable housing is a band aid at best. Mostly it’s not even that because of pathologies.
What I want is an affordable housing market. If I have to pay you to put up units and then impose rules about who and how you sell or rent them, I’ve already lost.
> Affordable housing is housing that is passed down from generation to generation. We don't need to build "affordable housing". We need to build good high quality housing that will then get transferred down to other people through sales. (And with proper land value taxes - these will not be appreciating assets)
This is just trickle down theory, but for housing instead. What actually happens is that old housing stock is bought by investors who then tear it down and develop it into luxury housing, and often that housing is then either used as speculative assets or bought by some of the world's richest people looking to store value.
Affordable housing doesn't mean "low-quality housing", it can mean high quality housing that is subsidized so that working class people can afford it, instead of just the adult children of the already wealthy, like many neighborhoods in cities are becoming/already are. Do it right, and that housing can become generational wealth, as well.
It becomes approximately fifo. Oldest or otherwise least desirable housing becomes affordable housing as demand is met with newer more desirable housing being built. But if you're never building new housing, nothing gets pushed out the bottom to become affordable.
I agree with this, minus the "shitty buildings" part. The way to create more affordable housing is to create more housing period. I do feel that they should be homes they people want to live in, though!
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