Affordable housing is people infrastructure

Affordable housing is people infrastructure

By: David A. Smith, CEO AHI | Affordable Housing Institute

Housing is where jobs go to sleep at night and affordable housing is where the essential jobs go to sleep at night.

Housing is the glue of modern cities

Modern cities are held together by infrastructure: big built networks that everyone uses regularly.?Roads and rails to get you to and from work, school, shopping, or leisure. Utilities to power the vehicles that take you here, there, and back again.?Without functioning infrastructure, cities collapse.

And what keeps all that infrastructure functioning??Housing.?Erase housing from your city and what remains is an empty office park, a silent factory, a dead shopping mall.?

Housing is where jobs go to sleep at night

Housing is where jobs go to sleep at night and affordable housing is where the essential jobs go to sleep at night.?The information workers think they can work anywhere, but without the delivery van, the plumber or electrician, the grocery store clerk, the nurse, and a score more professions, Work From Home doesn’t work.

Those essential workers have to go to their work, and where they work is seldom where they can afford to live. Instead, housing prices in cities rise directly alongside rising incomes, and newcomers outbid the locals for newer or better properties. This is inescapable land-use economics: in a rising market, where land costs money – basically, any city – new housing supply costs what affluent people can afford, not what poorer people can afford.?Those whose incomes do not rise as fast, get priced out. They move out, stretching their commutes, eating into their waking days, squeezing their household budgets.

Housing unaffordability is a side effect of growth

Simply put, the purely private market will never produce enough affordable housing, because the minute it becomes more affordable, new people move in and the demand for housing increases yet again.?That’s why every developed nation, and most of the world’s developing nations, have realized – often belatedly and often reluctantly – that they must rebalance the scales of land-use economics by incentivizing affordable housing. This makes housing affordability into a political construct, and in politics, it often seems that what you do is much less important than what you say.?

Per household assisted, affordable housing is expensive, and the stronger the local economy gets, the more expensive that unit of affordability becomes.?It also takes time to create or even to break ground on new affordable housing, and the neighbors invariably oppose it, preferring to have it be built somewhere else, anywhere else.?Getting the property approved, much less built, usually takes longer than the next election, and those who are already housed in the city tend to be more vocal in local politics who are in the city only to work and live farther out.

People make the city

The people who keep a city’s infrastructure humming should be able to live in it or convenient to it. If not, the widening gap between whom they serve and whom they live next to will make the city unsustainable economically, ecologically, or morally.?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the measure of society is how it treats the weakest members,” he might have been thinking of the urban poor.?To enable them to aspire to the lives we all want for ourselves, we need policymakers who don’t just say they want affordable housing, they vote resources and laws for it even when that’s unpopular.