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Comment by pclowes | Hacker News Reader

Affordable housing in a vacuum disincentivizes development and results in worse affordability.

Affordable housing used as an incentive or way to overcome other barriers to housing (density limits, height limits, zoning etc) that makes the market more “free” net is will produce more development.

You don’t need it for development but it can be used effectively depending on other policies. As with all things it depends on what policy makers are optimizing for. These are all tradeoffs. But affordable by itself all else equal limits developer upside and incentives less development meaning less supply and higher prices.

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>Affordable housing used as an incentive or way to overcome other barriers to housing (density limits, height limits, zoning etc)

I'm not sure what type of affordable housing program doesn't meet this definition. They are almost always tied to incentives for developers, including sometimes in the form of a removal of other housing restrictions. Or are you specifically objecting to financial assistance on the renter/buyer side? Because I assumed the “it” in “it doesn’t need to be “affordable”” was referencing the new development.

See San Francisco. Also generally anywhere else where prices are rising and developers can’t develop and yet there are a lot of affordable housing policies. CA as a whole has mismanaged this so badly they have a net migration outflow.

Also removing other housing restrictions that ostensibly were put in there by constituents is a valid reason for constituents to oppose AH. They get called NIMBYs for this but if the local populace wanted more high density development then the density limits wouldnt be there to be excepted by AH

>Also generally anywhere else where prices are rising and developers can’t develop and yet there are a lot of affordable housing policies.

Like I said, the “it” in “it doesn’t need to be “affordable”” seemed like it was referencing the previous “Build more housing”, so situations in which nothing is built are different. If your original intent was that not all housing policy should be about affordable housing, then we agree. But I do think it's an important part of the solution.

> if the local populace wanted more high density development then the density limits wouldnt be there to be excepted by AH

If people didn't want housing there, it wouldn't be built. If they didn't want the exemptions to be codified, then they wouldn't be.

The only way your statement makes sense is if you restrict "local" to a sufficiently small subset of the people (a town? A block? One single address?), but in that case, a greater number of people within a greater definition of "local" seem to disagree.

If the state gifts a locality power to impose zoning restrictions, then the state can usually alter (or withdraw) that gift when it stops being beneficial to the people of the state, even if a small subset of those people living in that one locality don't like it.

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