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Comment by jwestbury | Hacker News Reader

> Most Metro areas do not have enough affordable housing.

There's no such thing as affordable housing[0]. Just housing. You can certainly argue that building a house is too expensive -- and due to NIMBYism, discriminatory policies, and anti-density regulatory environments, this is often true -- but affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building, and the problem is generally that housing stock simply doesn't keep up with demand in places which demand lots of housing (e.g., San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, London, etc.).

0. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/1/3/theres-no-such-...

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Building any housing is building affordable housing.

Adding one home at the top of the price range, increases the number of affordable homes for someone, somewhere, by at least one.

Come tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year for two decades and we're at around 3k/mo for a 1br.. tell us more about how building units that "regular" people can never afford that it's always helping them.

> tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year

Developing in Vancouver is outrageously expensive. Its voters chose a lengthy approval process for new housing. High housing costs are a political choice.

It's like induced demand, but for houses! "Just one more house!"

At some point the market would flood and there wouldn't be as much demand anymore, but if every single person in Canada wants to live in Vancouver everyone is in for a world of hurt until Vancouver has 30 million dwelling units.

Your population is booming. You're not building as much as you think you are.

A little bit dated (probably by a year) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230613/dq230...

The building of dwellings has outpaced immigration so that alone is unlikely a silver bullet.

Where exactly do you think the people who afford those luxury condo live right now? In the woods? And just because "countless" have been built doesn't meant that there have been enough to meet demand.

Canada also has one of the highest immigration rates in the world

It’s exasperating how many people will fight this. I believe it has been supported by research as well. Anecdotal, but I experienced it firsthand:

Several years ago I was living in a lovely, historic, but no-frills apartment in a desirable area (Cobble Hill, Brooklyn) when several new “luxury” apartment buildings opened nearby, all around the same time. They were only a bit more expensive but offered lots of amenities (doorman, elevator, gym etc) that my building didn’t have.

The impact was remarkable: when other apartments in my building went on the market they sat unrented for weeks, when they’d previously rented in hours. The landlord actually lowered the rent on them! In NYC! Our lease was up soon after, and we managed to negotiate that they gut renovate our kitchen in exchange for extending our lease.

>They were only a bit more expensive

Not to be a doubter, but it seems like this note completely changes the context of the problem they stated. A slightly more expensive housing is competitive with the current housing you had. A higher-end luxury building being built costing 10x as much would likely have different effects.

> affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building

Value is, by definition, "An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return." Having the money to buy a house (for its advertised value) or not is what determines if you can afford it or not.

If you can't afford a house it's not affordable. If your city has housing, but a large population who can't afford said houses, then you have unaffordable housing. If you don't have any housing at all, you still don't have affordable housing.

This isn't really something worth debating. Affordable housing is a very well established part of the governance of cities, regardless of what contortions a blogger wants to use to reframe a discussion away from economic inequality.

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.

What is that specific definition? It seems in many cases the term is used to AVOID being pinned to any specific definition.

Affordable housing is defined by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as housing that does not require a household to spend more than 30 percent of its gross monthly income on housing costs. For rental housing, these costs include monthly rent and utility payments; for owner-occupied housing, these costs include mortgage payments and additional expenses associated with homeownership. A household that spends more than 30 percent of its gross monthly income on housing costs is considered “cost-burdened.”

It appears to me that the definition is compatible with the poster's notion 'affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building' in the sense that the definition depends on income as well as the housing itself. Problems could be addressed by increasing housing or by increasing household income, or by decreasing price, or some combination thereof.

That definition really has no value outside the context of analyzing a given household’s situation. In the context of housing regulation, zoning, etc it really isn’t helpful since all housing is both affordable and unaffordable. Schrödinger’s housing.

> all housing is both affordable and unaffordable. Schrödinger’s housing.

Ah, more pithy, meaningless slogans.

Surely municipalities and landlords know the median gross incomes of households in the areas they serve. Surely there are bands of income where certain types of housing are classified as "affordable" and then "cost-burden", and the quantity of households which fall into these bands are well-known to those who serve them. Landlords set the market rent based on what the market will bear. HUD sets the allowances according to market rent as well.

Yes, to a homeless bum, all housing is unaffordable. To George Soros, it's all affordable housing. But you need to remember that the definition is proffered by Housing And Urban Development, a US Government agency which does things like subsidize rent and help people purchase homes, so I doubt that the state of feline vitality is entirely unknown to them.

That's explicitly the problem with the definition.

You can "solve" the equation by reducing housing costs, but it is also possible that the "problem" isn't housing costs per se but wage depression, and that the "real" solution is to fix the gross monthly income.

> the gross monthly income

"The" gross monthly income, as if there is one blob of income that we could turn a knob and increase, by say, 10%? Are we doing this across the board, from migrant farmworkers to the Fortune 500 C-levels? Does this dovetail with UBI so that people who earned $0 + entitlements, lose their entitlements and begin receiving cash instead?

If rental housing is the #1 monthly expense for the working class, or say, the socio-economic class who needs Affordable Housing, and you "fix" their income (which I think you mean raise it, rather than the financial term of art) if you raise their income by a given amount, and housing costs stay constant, then more people get housed?

That's the "affordable housing" twist - housing could be 99% affordable in an area, and due to lack of supply, there could still be a housing crisis.

Have families considered living with one another, rather than constantly splitting apart at first blush and divorcing at drop of hat? Who doesn't hate it these days when Uncle Billy has to move back into the garage? He's your uncle, think about it.

As you increase the difficulty of staying married, and make it trés gauche for women to fulfill destiny as mothers, you increase their difficulty of bearing and raising >0 children, DINKs emerge as the Ideal Consumer, but then you've decimated your future workforce, taxpayers, and caregivers.

I mean, the 50s/60s promoted the Nuclear Family for some reason, and it was probably intended to blow up extended family ties, which can make a populace harder to track and control, and because Nuclear Families tend to drive up demand for discrete housings, and also demand for any and all household goods and resources that can no longer be shared. Hmm.

> Affordable housing is defined by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as housing that does not require a household to spend more than 30 percent of its gross monthly income on housing costs.

This is fantastic, and I do think this definition is meaningful, but what legally binds this definition to what politicians and interest groups discuss? Without a legal binding the term "affordable housing" will continue to be a floating signifier indicating housing that is somehow generally affordable conveniently without defining the mechanism by which this will be delivered.

Every year, HUD establishes the ceilings for rental payments, plus utility allowances. Let's say that the ceiling in Houston is $1,800 for a 1BR apartment. That means that landlords who charge $1,800 or less to rent such a unit, are the only ones eligible to participate in the HCV (Section 8) program.

Therefore, people will colloquially refer to HCV-participant communities as "Affordable Housing" because if a landlord charges $1801.00, they're not eligible to receive HUD payments and HCV holders literally can't afford to live there.

Therefore, the landlords are presented with a bright-line; either they're in this public housing "project" or they're not.

Speaking of Projects, the "old way" was for HUD to build the buildings and HUD more-or-less directly managed the Project Housing, and the way it's gone with commercial landlords is a relatively new development, if you will.

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