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Depending on Developers to Supply Enough Affordable Housing Will Fail. So Why Keep Doing It?
A perspective from Linda Brown
Giving tax cuts to corporations with the idea that the benefits would trickle down to workers did not work and giving developers a free hand is not going to produce affordable housing.
Smoke and mirrors. Old wine in new bottles. The trickle-down housing idea is nothing but the long debunked trickle-down economics disguised as progressive rhetoric.
So why would anyone vote for people who are selling such falsehoods?
The focus on housing supply obscures our understanding of the larger issue: The problem is not the supply of housing, but for whom housing is supplied. We all want to build more housing but we also must understand that depending on the supply side of the market—developers–only ensures that the result will be the gentrification of communities because developers will only build housing that produces the most profit. Housing for the rich is most profitable, while what we need to build is housing for the poor and working class.
Furthermore, focusing on supply and demand (aka. the market) completely–and deliberately–obscures the real source of the housing crisis: the system by which the landlords/developers exploit the renters. (Meanwhile the American dream of owning a home is on life support for the poor and working class.)
The idea that more housing = lower rents, and less housing = higher rents is false. This might make sense based on the simple law of supply and demand we learned in high school economics but housing markets are far more complex. The housing market just does not operate this way because it is subject to many different financial pressures, and government policies.
In fact, there is no single housing market. It is really a group of interconnected markets in which the greater– and more profitable– supply of luxury housing has failed to reduce the need for the affordable housing that we need the most.
Profit seeking developers are not going to build less profitable housing for the poor and working class. Vacant luxury apartments are investment vehicles for the rich and developers’ losses provide tax write offs. Even if a small number of luxury housing units do eventually filter through to low-income tenants, that process takes years, if not decades. People need affordable housing now.
The most expensive neighborhoods in most cities are the neighborhoods which have built the most housing in the last ten years or so, and if more housing resulted in a reduction of housing costs, housing in the world’s most expensive cities would certainly cost less.
NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s Planning Commissioner, Amanda Burden, said:
I had believed that if we kept building in that manner and increasing our housing supply … that prices would go down. We had every year almost 30,000 permits for housing, and we built a tremendous amount of housing, including affordable housing, …And the price of housing didn’t go down at all.
Chapel Hill has roughly 9000 rental housing units in the pipeline, while the report by consultant Rod Stevens said that the town only needs to build about 500 new units per year. Housing costs have not come down.
We will never have enough affordable housing if we depend on developers to produce it. So, who is benefitting?
If we are not getting the housing we need, why should we keep doing the same thing by electing people who are wedded to this failed policy?
IN DURHAM- A GREAT EXAMPLE OF WHY DENSITY DOES NOT PRODUCE AFFORDABLE HOUSING – BEFORE AND AFTER –
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10229138626831850&set=pcb.1405681006856567
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
