Affordable Housing and Housing Affordability

The Pub
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https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article231113598.html

Raleigh has affordable housing, I think its in areas people that want affordable housing don’t want. I think people want to be in the most popular spot, that is the most expensive for development… yet a price they can afford. It just doesn’t work like that.

Yes, in an ideal situation, it would be great for a teacher to walk a block over to his or her school every morning to teach or a police officer to walk next door to the police station… BUT we don’t live in a city that dense. For the most part, no matter what, you will have to get in a car or on a bus to get somewhere. So why does it have to be in the most expensive locations? There are plenty of affordable options that happen to be outside the beltline… and we are still talking about only 10… 15 min from the core of downtown.

I’ve said this before… but just because you build an affordable unit downtown doesn’t mean downtown becomes affordable… you are still paying $15 for a cheeseburger… $200 for a pair of jeans… $14 for a cocktail. These prices are the way they are because they are in the most desired areas… which makes them more expensive. This isn’t a pay what you want situation… it would be great if it was… I would have suggested paying a whole lot less for the house i’m in… but its not.

There are affordable pricing options even inside the beltline… but sounds like its just not ideal locations for the people that want it.

Me personally, I have always lived in a spot that I could afford. I’ve never expected anyone to drop their price just because it didn’t fit my budget. I would LOVE a lake front property at Gaston… BUT… I can’t afford it… I don’t expect someone to sell their land to me below cost just because I want to be there and I think it would be good for all the properties around to have me there.

I also think by mandating developers to have to include lower priced units is simply holding back development.

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I also think by mandating developers to have to include lower priced units is simply holding back development.
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Personally, I feel like that makes it fair to the people who tend to be forced out of their neighborhoods after being there for 50-70 years. It gives them an option to stay in the neighborhood and not be forced to leave.

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Gentrification ‘benefits local residents’, research finds

“a report published on Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found.”

It’s behind the TBJ pay wall but if you look up “Fed Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Gentrification Study” I’m sure there are other articles on the implications of the study.

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The affordable units DHIC or the city own have like 8,000 people on their waiting lists, so I don’t think that the locations are stopping people. There just isn’t enough of it.

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I don’t think anyone actually expects this (at least on this forum), but I think it ties to a bigger discussion about housing affordability. The “problem” isn’t really well-defined, so proposed solutions are kind of like throwing shit at the wall until something sticks.

I think the biggest reason affordable housing is currently such a big issue is because existing affordable (lowercase “A”/non-subsidized) housing stock is being removed and replaced by luxury housing (i.e., gentrification). Case in point is the Tiny Town area in the Mordecai/Oakdale area. The people who lived in those units have been displaced from housing they could afford (because their landlord sold the property), and there are fewer and fewer alternatives for them in the neighborhood where they already lived. There are several other developments like this ITB that are either under threat or have already been redeveloped. Imagine living somewhere for years, then being forced to move and having to move to the other side of the city because you can’t afford your own neighborhood anymore.

I’ve also always lived in a spot that I could afford (although I wouldn’t be able to responsibly buy my house at current RE prices). Several of those places were missing middle type housing in neighborhoods where million-dollar homes were on the next street. This type of housing is rapidly disappearing, and what’s left are the two extremes of slumlord rentals and luxury housing. That doesn’t seem like the best way to have a vibrant, diverse city.

I read about the study in this article: Philly Federal Reserve study challenges conventional wisdom on gentrification.

It’s interesting, but the headline is just one part of the findings and problems still exist. Here’s an excerpt that somewhat addresses what I’ve mentioned above:

The paper shows that much of the neighborhood demographic change was generated by newer, better-educated residents moving in rather than lower-income residents being forced out. That reinforces previous research, also released by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, that found that demographic change in gentrifying neighborhoods was a result of typical levels of population churn in lower-income neighborhood — but with existing residents more often replaced by higher-income people than by similarly situated poor people

“Some people have referred to this as indirect displacement, where a neighborhood is no longer affordable to low-income people,” said Reed [co-author of the study]. “That’s a reason we think you shouldn’t just design policy to protect people who are already there. If you are in a world where people just move a lot, and this change is happening through replacement effects, maybe you should make sure people can afford to move there in the future.”

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In the case of affordability and being forced out, then the city should require Kane to give the owners of Finch’s a steep break on retail space to open up their business again, since they were located where he wants to put a 40 story tower. Nobody was immediately previously living in any of the land currently being developed at Smoky Hollow.
You know were affordable housing was downtown? It was on the plots of land that are now occupied by half million dollar new build SFHs and townhouses on the east side. Are we going to require each of those homes to have an affordable room to rent?

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There is no ‘preach’ emoji, but it’s often warranted

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This is the biggest reason for me personally leaning against the force bigger developers to make affordable housing strategy. Flippers change neighborhoods, homeowners selling for way more than they bought change neighborhoods. Pretty much everyone is involved, so we should all be part of building affordable housing. Just pushing for new people building big stuff to fix things always seems like letting everyone else off the hook.

But I do think the city should get aggressive about building affordable units.

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I’m getting the vibe that this thread is about to start repeating itself with the same circle of arguments (instead of slowly making some sort of progress/understanding like the stadium thread)… I want to bring your attention to some older posts, since I noticed they kinda answer more recent questions.

The question at hand

VERY IMPORTANT EDIT: my goal of this post is NOT to comment on any particular post. Instead, it’s to summarize things that have already been said, fly through some older posts, and respond to general ideas that are thrown around. It was pointed out to me that this wasn’t clear at all, so this post was reformatted and edited extensively to reflect that (see edit notes). Please think of it as a checkpoint so that you don’t have to read all 151 earlier posts on this thread to say something.

On that note:

Defining the problem
The broader context
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No hard feelings, but please don’t misquote me. If you are going to use my words, please use them the way that I used them. That said, I think that it’s more than fine to quote me and then add that you think that I should have included apartments as well. That’s fair game in my book.
My point in my post was intentionally provocative because nobody seems to want to hold the SFH and TH owners to account in the same way that they want to hold developers of large projects to account. Additionally, I wanted to highlight the irony that Smoky Hollow isn’t displacing a single affordable housing unit, yet they represent some sort of de facto villain in the affordable housing fight.
The broadening gentrification of downtown’s eastern neighborhoods is arguably doing the most damage to affordable housing inventory, and most of that is happening house by house, and small TH project by small TH project. I’m not making a value judgment on whether this classic gentrification is a good thing, a bad thing, or more complex of an issue than either side of the equation; I’m just stating what I see as having the greatest impact to affordable housing supply near downtown.

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It is true. I didn’t click your sources because I don’t need sources to tell me what I did not that long ago. I was living in a HOTEL ROOM, making $7.25/hr and I was able to buy a car. It cost $500 iirc. EITC makes a world of difference when you’re poor, and poor know this. Yes minimum wage is worth less now, but compared to 15 years ago? Not that much less. You can still get a car that runs and will last 1 year for $500.00. It only has to last 1 year because next Feb. will come again.

Overall I agree with your post, but you don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to being poor. Like incredibly clueless, so much so it’s offensive.

I definitely agree there is an imbalance of economic power. Very strongly agree. And when you are poor, it’s very, very difficult to improve. I am where I am today because a lot of things went right back to back to back after years and years of things going wrong every single time. The best thing that the poor need is a job and the ability to manage money, especially when you get $2000-$8000 dropped in your lap every February

I stand by my previous statements. I’m all for affordable housing, but see no reason it needs to be in DTR.

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Oh, my apologies, then. It sounded to me like you were against the idea of allocating parts of any/all new downtown housing developments for affordable housing in general.

In that case, yeah, I agree with you entirely. If Penmarc, for example, gets a stadium and gets redeveloped af, then I think it should be scrutinized just as harshly to have affordable housing options. No special treatments.

15 years ago, that’s true -but I was talking about way back before then.

My main point in quoting your old post was to summarize what’s already been said on this thread (plus other things being pointed out in popular media, news articles, a certain world leader etc). In general, I got the vibe that a lot of popular, messed-up misunderstandings about the daily conditions of poor people by richer people came from outdated assumptions.

Maybe you could’ve gotten by with a simpler life of flipping burgers and maybe working your way up to a fast food franchise manager …if you lived in the 60s and 70s. You and I know this is totally not true, but there’s a more-than-insignificant number of people who buy into that message. That’s why I felt the need to address what you said in that perspective, rather than as a direct reply to your post.

But about that other comment...

If I made more bad conclusions or had more misunderstandings about other things people have said, then I honestly apologize. Obviously, affordable housing (and the countless factors that play into how it’s a conversation we have to have in the first place) is a very sensitive topic, and I’m trying my best to understand where it’s coming from -both for individual people, as well as the “big-picture” approach so that we can have a productive, helpful conversation here. I’m open to learning more and changing my mind if I’m given the chance.

Besides, I may be American, but that doesn’t mean this is even my home country. Japan is a… uh… very different country when it comes to living while rich/poor.

If you’d like to be provocative and attack me for not understanding poor people, then I honestly feel offended about that, as well.

I was also on the free/reduced-lunch program in grade school among other support systems (and had to figure out my own way through high school, college and beyond as the first person in my family to live around the US). Parents were separated both geographically and emotionally, I had to basically teach myself to be a professional interpreter to argue for my family about credit card fraud attempts, etc… Sure, we may’ve had profoundly different experiences, but that does not mean I’m looking down on you, discrediting you, or saying that your experiences are wrong.

TL/DR: I do not doubt your experiences; I just disagree with the conclusion you drew from what you wrote that may or may not have been informed by it.

Credit where credit is due, though, it seems like I made a policy error; the federal minimum wage in 1968 wasn’t $7.50/hr, but it was actually $1.60/hr. This is about $11.70/hr in 2019, which makes my earlier argument weaker but doesn’t really defeat it.

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Another good read…

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You know, why doesn’t the city offer its land at Heritage Park to a developer who’ll provide even more affordable housing within a mixed use project of other tax revenue generating uses like retail, services and market rate housing? Why aren’t they looking at their own land holdings to solve the problems? Wouldn’t that be a terrific bargaining chip for the city, and a win-win for them and the right developer?

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There are a lot of reasons as to why but mainly where do the displaced people go while the site is being redeveloped? Also there is the conflation again of affordable housing and subsidized housing.

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I’ve thought that for such a long time. If the city has single and two story affordable complexes scattered throughout the city, many dating back to the 60’s and severely in need of an upgrade, why not redevelop those as 4-5 story apartment complexes?

Heritage Park and Kentwood both come to mind since they’re not dense, and are both close to the BRT. These would be multi-year efforts but they could start working on it now. They have years of project capacity built up in their own assets, but they push it to the development community rather than cleaning up their own house.

It’s pretty fundamental that the City needs to redevelop and upgrade their properties, just like commercial developers. If the City was serious about this they’d be looking at ways to maximize yield on all of their aging properties.

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That’s just it - they’re not

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The city works with developers on the largest rezoning requests to provide the affordable housing in new projects. They use their new supply to move people into those locations while they redevelop and densify existing properties.
Also, I think that the city should explore and develop new suburban models outside the city center for those residents who will prefer to remain living in a more suburban model with their cars and trucks outside their front doors.

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There are just so many hurdles in the way of this happening. I agree it’s a good plan but the execution of it is extremely difficult. I don’t think we have the density where the city can swing a big enough stick to encourage developers to include affordable units.
(Also I’m still under the belief that there are council-members who couldn’t care less about affordability or gentrification, they just want the issues to use as a cudgel against development.)

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Okay, so maybe an easier path is for the city to replicate the existing suburban affordable housing downtown in the, well, suburban areas of town. Then redevelop their core city properties into a denser, urban model to house more people.

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