Why not let developers build all the luxury housing they want? Affordable housing is often luxury housing built 30 years ago. It's very difficult to solve affordability today but much easier to solve it in the future. Let time do the work.
> It's very difficult to solve affordability today but much easier to solve it in the future.
I'm not sure what the reasoning behind this is. I see no reason that affordable housing should magically solve itself. The only possible explanation that comes to mind is if you think population will collapse, but the population of the US is projected to continue growing apace for the next 40 years: https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/#/country?COUNTRY...
When a government interrupts that process for years on end by disallowing any new construction, you end up with a backlog, and can't afford to wait the decades it would take for affordable housing to be available.
In the future, given sane zoning, the process will work. For now, though, there's a dire need to fill in the gap with affordable housing today.
Why can't the millions of homes that exist today be the mid-range to affordable and just flood the market with market rate homes/
Subsidizes are fine, requirements are not.
Affordable housing subsidies help, because they enable both to be built.
So often in the bay area we see large market rate developments blocked for the potential of an affordable project that never comes. Let them build, because until we make up the MASSIVE shortage of housing, there is no getting around needing to build more.
Because you can’t get there from here. The only way to “flood the market” with any kind of homes is to build at higher density. But building market rate units at higher density won’t, itself, make lower-density units in the same area more affordable, as lower density is itself a thing people will pay a premium for; it will just allow more rich people to move in to an area and drive gentrification o the lower-density areas. (If preferentially done in urban cores to an extent that overwhelms other, particularly transportation, infrastructure, it may make lower density homes in peripheral areas less valuable simply by making jobs less accessible, but that also doesn’t solve the problem of housing affordability.)
If you flood the market with enough high density homes, some of those will be affordable. The ONLY true affordable housing is to make market rate affordable.
Don't get me wrong, I think BMR housing has a place, but morally, number of units is the most important metric. If we can build both, do so, but when you block market rate housing for the potential of affordable housing (that may never come), we just make the situation overall MUCH worse.
> If preferentially done in urban cores to an extent that overwhelms other, particularly transportation
High density in urban cores makes commutes shorter and lowers the stress on transportation infrastructure per person.
Therefore the primary thing that matters is how many units are built. If there are N people and N-1 housing units, then if you build super cheap housing the poorest guy can move off the streets into it. But if you build a luxury unit, the richest guy moves out of his unit into the new one, which opens up rich guy's place for a not-quite-as-rich person, etc.
The price of housing is not dependent on how nice the housing is in aggregate, only how much of it there is. The argument for building "affordable" housing comes from landlords who own luxury housing not wanting the new housing to hurt their investments.
As the city metropolitan area expands, neighborhoods that used to be marginal, are now tony.
Brooklyn is turning into quite the yuppie stronghold. It used to be known as a fairly scrappy, affordable area.
Because the requirements on the local governments that the builder’s remedy deals are failures to provide affordable housing on a much shorter timescale than 30 years from now.