Affordable Housing and Housing Affordability

Lots of input, much of it good, some of it more on the bullying side by @Phil

What did I just stumble onto you thinking this is Reddit and you just downvote people without contributing anything productive to the conversation? #Brave. This is an example of the toxic comments by some on here. Gross. Grow up. Middle finger right back at you, bud, I guess? Why didn’t our community flag his post? Definitely makes this an unfriendly forum sometimes but tit for tat?

I don’t want that either, but it’s already happening with business booming and construction investments happening all around Raleigh and the 'burbs (North Hills, Fenton, Wake Forest) for a number of reasons. Easier to put together a large parcel of land to develop, more affluent customers closer and in greater quantities (in their McMansions) than in downtown Raleigh. I mean why would Kaine or Hines NOT develop where they are lately?

TBH, This sounds like Bernie Sanders politics, but even worse. I’m NOT on board with this playing Robin Hood and taking things away from private corporations to…do something I’m not sure what? I’m guessing that somehow the lower profits mean it helps someone poor somehow? “Destabilizing corporate profits” ? Really easy to say about other people’s money.

You’re free to risk your own capital, start a business, and “destabilize” your own profits if you want to give it away to others for their living expenses. But you’re not taking MY business’s profits or penalizing me for the risk I took when I started MY business. Marxist Socialist much? No thanks. Not in this country.

It really IS that easy. But much of the reason people don’t change is not having the self discipline to better themselves. Many want to take shortcuts and aren’t willing to do what it takes (the whole thing with minimum wage needing to become a “living wage” bs and so on.) If someone’s job is not paying them enough? Have an aspiration of a better paying career? Find out what skills you’re missing and get the training you need. Nobody is making you keep a job that doesnt pay enough, and there are MILLIONS of jobs in the US going unfilled right now. I’m in the business of career counseling and actually matching people up for things like this, so I do know what I’m talking about. If you need somehing you don’t have to get a better higher paying job, you go to school, get training (much of it free, online), do an apprenticeship, an internship, anything. If you’re stuck in a job that your expenses exceed your income or prevent you from saving, there are plenty of other jobs. “But I want to work downtown” they might say. “I like the 400H lifestyle.” There are plenty of jobs other than downtown, but just like the rest of us, you have to make compromises and see what your priorities are.

Anyway, I still don’t get why people have to live close to their downtown jobs and expect it to be a) affordable and b) when it’s not affordable, that it’s someone else’s responsibility to make it affordable somehow. Middle finger me all you want, @Phil but better yet, contribute to the dialogue vs bring it down.

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I do take issue with the discussions around affordable housing, in part because I often see them made in ways that I perceive to be bad faith in order to argue against increasing the housing supply. I also think if you were to ask people if they wanted to pay less in rent or mortgage it would be hard to find someone who would say no but we’re not going to build buildings that won’t pencil. Even if some of the financing comes from donations or taxes to build non-market housing, the building will still need a budget in order to get built and going over that still jeopardizes it’s completion.

It’s hard to save money on the construction of building, especially in a way that doesn’t eventually jeopardize the income. We can use cheaper non-union labor but that doesn’t do a whole lot. We can use cheaper materials but that doesn’t do a whole lot. If we shrink the building, we jeopardize it’s income. The construction cost difference between a luxury building and a non-luxury building different isn’t that different in absolute terms. A lot of the cost is the land beneath whatever building we build.

In a market economy, on average if you pay less, you get less. So if we want to build affordable housing in a market economy we could to do one of a few things. We could make the location less desirable, if the area is less desirable building owners seeking income will reduce rents. We could build smaller units, the largest costs are spread amongst more people, therefore each person needs to spend less. Lastly, we could build a lot more units, increasing the competition for tenants encouraging landlords to decrease rents to attract new ones.

Aside from that there is also the idea of building non-market housing. Which I do support but I don’t believe is a scalable solution given the current regulatory environment in the United States and NC. There is also the idea of rent control which I don’t believe is sustainable. I look at rent controlled units in NYC that people hold onto for 30/40 years and let fall into disrepair and it doesn’t feel great to me.

Given the current regulatory environment, I believe that we should be building a lot more units. We should build luxury and non-luxury. We should build family size units and micro studios. We should encourage but not mandate affordable units unless we compensate developers for them somehow. We should be partnering with nonprofits and our own city funds in order to build non-market housing in places that make sense.

All this said, I’m against the concentration of poverty. I think that by concentrating poverty you create a lot of social ills amongst both well-off and poor people. We create rich or middle class people afraid of being around people different from them and I think that decreases community cohesion. I believe it creates people who think they’re better than other people because of their wealth or the resources they have access to. I believe prevents poor people from accessing the educational opportunities that would help improve their situation. It concentrates the ill effects from poverty allowing more brutal policing in those communities.

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I think you misunderstood my tongue in cheek suggestion, which I knew you wouldn’t like based on your post. Though I’m gratified by you saying I’m worse than Bernie!

The point of my post was to say, hey, you suggest businesses pay their workers more to either help them afford to live closer or incentivize them to drive further instead of taking a closer job. With what money? Are they raising their prices, or are they reducing their profits? Corporations can’t (yet) mint their own currency.

This is what I’m talking about. Affordability means both price to rent or own, plus overall cost of living. The best way you get your “voila” is by corps reducing profits. If they raise prices, which they would probably have to do for everyone across the board, the equation to make these places affordable for their workers gets less efficient.

Unfortunately it’s potentially illegal to reduce profits unless necessary to survive the next fiscal quarter with public corps, so the conclusion is, if nobody steps in to make it necessary, no “voila.”

Since the city doesn’t have the power to raise minimum wage or cap corporate profits, the only lever it has to incentivize workers to come in and do these jobs is build housing in some way that makes it cheaper. Either lots more supply, or subsidized. Otherwise everything slides toward wealth enclave “ski resort.”

And while maybe the city shouldn’t care as long as they get taxes, many if not most of our leaders have principles beyond “we must obey the Market,” which I personally appreciate.

So basically, yeah, something unpleasant needs to happen. Cost of living for companies might increase, like everyone else’s. If the only argument against it is “I don’t like that for the corporations,” I think I’m satisfied.

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Let me toss a hot-take into the conversation that I have talked about in the past, and this has to do with providing suburban, car oriented affordable housing in or extremely near our core.
If we look at some of our more recent affordable housing projects in the city, they have tended to be developments that could easily be in the suburbs if you didn’t know that they were in downtown, and that’s a problem IMO.
While the conversation about entitlement of downtown affordable housing will likely continue ad nauseam, arguments that affordable housing needs to be downtown for immediate access to jobs downtown, AND that housing needs to be car oriented should be challenged. I’m more than happy for the city to explore both urban and suburban style affordable housing options in proper context, but I’d like the city to frame it similarly to what market rate housing choices pose to the general market. That is to say that when you choose to be downtown, you choose to live is less space, have a substantial cost associated with housing a car, and yield to an urban format of living that isn’t led by suburban lifestyle markers. If that is not amenable, then the city should also provide suburban style, car oriented options for those who would prefer it, and manage parking downtown for those residents as required.
In the end, I don’t think that the city has an obligation to provide large, car oriented, suburban style affordable housing units in the core of the city. Like the majority of people who make tradeoffs to live downtown in market rate housing, I think that it’s equitable for those qualified for affordable housing to make similar decisions for themselves.

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im not sure how well this applies. my dads state govt office left jones st downtown…late 80 maybe. went to falls of the neuse. he could then walk to work and did. prior to that he caught the No 2 to downtown and hopped off the bus on salibury.

North Carolina faces a significant housing inventory gap that is set to further grow if not addressed, a new report found.

The report found that North Carolina faces a five-year housing inventory gap of 764,478 units. That gap comes as The number of households in the state is projected to increase by 218,160 households (5%) by 2029.

Eighty counties in North Carolina are projected to see more households by 2029, with Wake (41,241) and Mecklenburg (35,676) counties projected to have the largest increases. The report found that only nine counties have a median list price under $200,000. Statewide, the median list price is $419,000.

While statewide vacancy rates are within what the report describes as a “healthy market range,” affordable rental programs show near-zero vacancies and over 41,000 households are on waitlists for affordable housing.

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The lower end of the market got squeezed hard by decades of under building and the trigger event that was Covid migrations and massive household formation rates along with rock bottom interest rates.

Older housing almost by definition is more affordable. When you underbuild new housing for decades, it turns out you also underbuild older housing.

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:fax::fax::fax::fax:

Fax, Characters

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Interestingly, Raleigh lands in the middle of this list of the 10 most affordable cities for renters.

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