Affordable Housing and Housing Affordability

my dad worked for the state…in the late 90s he did and COULD have worked from home probably 90 percent of the time as he was provided a modem line at home at the time if something went south…though at the time his commute was only about a mile or so due to state govt relocation of certain computer assets.

Cottages of Idiewild will break ground in the new year, finish in 2026. Coach Moton raised $8.3 million from private investors.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article295856279.html

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Eagle Pride Amplified :eagle:

Coach Moton is also a partner developer for another development currently under construction near Carnage MS. :raised_hands:t4:

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WRAL look at the housing industry in this area and potential impacts coming up, particularly tariffs and immigration.

“…Among them, the construction industry, where undocumented workers make up an estimated 10% to 20% of the workforce…the George W. Bush Institute highlighted the positive impact of migrant workers here, concluding, “Immigrant construction workers in Sun Belt metros like Raleigh … have helped these cities sustain their housing cost advantage.””

This isn’t always one-sided. The Biden Admin kept tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. But these proposed changes can definitely have an impact on supply if materialized.

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This poop goes back decades!

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An A+ video here on a lot of what we talk about and advocate for. I still think the problem isn’t data, it’s human emotion but perhaps the rent is getting so high that people might start seeing the light.

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That’s a great video! The part that got me was at the end as she described how she was getting flak for a new multifamily housing project and that she even heard that some nearby residents were nostalgic for the former gas station “because at least they could get gas there”. SMDH

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This honestly is such an amazing video. It does a wonderful job breaking down how a new building with top of the market rent lowers the housing costs city wide because it opens up older, less desirable housing for other people. Everyone should watch this.

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Soon, about 10% of Wake County’s homeless population will call a new development in Raleigh home. Grand opening is planned for January 28 with the first residents moving in the first week of February.

King’s Ridge is nonprofit CASA’s biggest and most ambitious project to date, with 100 units that will house about 150 people in its one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments.

It’s envisioned not just as housing, but as a community with support for people transitioning out of homelessness. King’s Ridge is working with 35 community partners and will have on-site support including two medical clinics, case managers and a tenant liaison.

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For those curious, it’s off Sunnybrook just south of WakeMed.

Great project!

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Finally got around to watching this. I feel like I’ve been thinking pretty loosely about these issues for a while, slowly piecing things together (with a lot of help from this forum) but man did this help a surprising amount in crystalizing a lot of that into actual concepts.

Near the end she talks about how high housing costs means you’re paying extra your barista’s rent. Definitely got me thinking. It’s a hard sell (for left-of-center types) to advocate for policies that lower the overall wages of workers in the city (even if by lowering the CoL). But it’s a much better narrative to point out it’s you actually paying 30%+ of that ‘living wage’ to your barista’s landlord. I wonder how the political conversation would change if you framed this as funneling cash to landlords to spite the developers. I assume this is old news to more plugged-in YIMBYs but I hadn’t seen this narrative painted clearly before.

There’s one prominent aspect of the market that doesn’t feel addressed here, though, which is teardowns and to-the-studs type renovations. In the ‘housing chain’ model, these represent a break, where vacating one of those lower cost units doesn’t lead to someone getting a chance at affordable housing, but instead feeds back into the top of the pipe with mid- to high-cost new development. It’s the kind of wrinkle that is just simple enough to be obvious, but just complex enough to not fit neatly into the presented argument. I’m surprised it wasn’t included in the skeptics section.

Still, I imagine the model still holds, this just represents a delay in the intended affordability benefits as the unit has to restart at the top of the funnel. In this case, the way to accelerate to mitigate that delay would be to either A) incentivize (or simply avoid preventing) the renovated lot to host more housing units than it was before, even if those are higher end, or B) prevent the renovation. The former may help turn a potential delay into an overall acceleration if it adds sufficient units to the pool. The latter, if even legally possible, may be appropriate for already-dense housing or units which are still of good quality, but generally these two scenarios are probably already aligned with market forces so no coercion is necessary. Am I tracking it right?

Even if that system holds at the macro level, though, it still produces displacement from a human perspective as neighborhoods with older homes start to lose that affordable stock to renos. Is that inevitable? Sort of feels like it. Are there programs which can work with that pattern to keep communities intact instead of damming up against it and causing cascade failures down the line?

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I watched both days of the annual city council retreat on YouTube over the weekend. I watched in pieces until I got through them both. They spent a good amount of time on Affordable housing & they played this video for the council. I have to believe that @dtraleigh had something to do with that, or he knew in advance that they were going to play it. :wink:

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I saw on blue sky post last week that said, “no city has a housing crisis because the new homes are expensive. It’s always the old homes getting expensive that makes a crises” and I think that is true.

To your point on the remodels. I live near Enloe High and a few years back I looked at how many new homes has been built near me. It was something like 10 (North of New Bern and East of Raleigh Blvd) in that last year. Then I looked at how many had sold and the number was around 90. From what I have seen around here a sale is almost always a change up in socio economic level. So the effect of sales and remodels was WAY larger than new housing. I bet that is true in almost all of Raleigh except Greenfield areas.

Edit/addition: the argument about how constraining housing helps landlords seems really popular with the California YIMBYs. The state is kind of ground zero for the housing crisis and they turn to that pretty quickly when someone tries to say new development near transit is a give away to developers. I often see them say that stoping said development is a give away to landlords in old dumpy apartments. Which as someone who lived in a crappy old dingbat style apartment off El Camino Real in Burlingame CA for a while seems very true.

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They can’t finance the project with the requirement to include affordable units in the building.
And they’re likely not alone, to date, no units of affordable housing have been produced by any of these projects where developers were “suggested” to include affordable housing. It sounds good in a campaign speech, but it’s not producing any results. There’s a better way to spur the private sector to build affordable units: incentives. We’re seeing this actually work through our incentive-based density bonuses in frequent transit corridors, with hundreds of income-restricted units permitted or under construction, without any public funds.

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I don’t understand the affordable housing mandate. Not trying to be controversial but we aren’t talking about displacing people, we’re talking about new units. Shouldn’t the market determine pricing? In my experience, if I couldn’t afford to live somewhere, I just went and found somewhere I could afford. If the prices are too high and people aren’t willing to pay these high rents, then the prices will come down.

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It’s not controversial. Inclusionary Zoning is a hoax and it’s well documented at this point.
Squeezing the private housing market in hopes that for-profit developers/builders essentially run themselves bankrupt building affordable housing or capping rents is delusional. If government doesn’t step in and build the units that would have been built under a free market, the housing shortage only grows worse.

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Hold on. No, I think that is controversial. Reason is the megaphone of a well-known libertarian think tank. With their kind of ideological bend, I wouldn’t call that an objective or rigorous critique of inclusionary zoning.

Yes, but the issue is that “people” are not a monolith; you get out-of-state transplants, rich bio/tech workers, and condo investors buying up market-rate units, but the people who work the lower-wage jobs that they depend on are the ones who end up not being able to afford them.

Do those people who can’t afford to live closer to downtown end up having somewhere to live? Yes - as long as they don’t run into housing issues (which everyone from Zillow to the US government knows is not a fair assumption to make), and you don’t care if the only way to work in a bustling downtown and to live reasonably close to it is if you’re rich enough.

What you described is exactly how things have typically been happening today. But do you really think that’s how things should be?

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I just fell out of my chair

I’m still waiting on the city of Aspen to build that affordable ski-in ski-out condo for me. It’s not fair I have to share a chairlift with mainly Jeff Bezos and all his friends.

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Look, people post biased news sources all the time. Because the internet leans left in general, most people don’t call it out - the biased information just rides free into the general consciousness.

Is reddit better?
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1fosrqc/argentina_scrapped_its_rent_controls_now_the/?rdt=57454

If it’s true, I don’t care who wrote it. My allegiance is to truth, not a group.

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