"Affordable housing" always means "affordable high value housing for well adjusted middle class families" in politico.
Sure, the poor elderly, the homeless, and those with mental health and addiction challenges need a place to stay too, but it can't be here. We don't have people like that around these parts.
> 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.
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.
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).
There's plenty of affordable housing around, it's just not in places people want to live. Some markets require you to shell out 50% of your income on housing, but it's not like people have no choice. They do it because overall it's worth it to them. If they didn't, there wouldn't be enough takers.
Affordable housing is a blight on any neighborhood. The people that qualify are often damaged or traumatized from a life of poverty. If you have too many in any given spot it’s just a place where gangs violence and drugs will congregate. Like any undesirable nuisance most places can accommodate a few but 50% is way too much.
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.
"Affordable" can mean a lot of things. Usually the official definition is housing that costs less than 30% of the income of someone at some multiple of the local poverty income level. Housing can meet that bar in a number of ways: rising incomes, smaller/less equipped units, no parking, public subsidy for rent, public subsidy for land or development fees, etc. Due to the terrible experience with public housing across the USA in the 1950s-1980s, most governments avoid owning the units if they can avoid it.
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.
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.
Sure, the poor elderly, the homeless, and those with mental health and addiction challenges need a place to stay too, but it can't be here. We don't have people like that around these parts.
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