North America, like so many corners of the world, is facing a critical lack of deeply affordable housing.
Much more needs to be built, but building costs are rising, and developers are growing less and less than enthusiastic about getting involved. If, as they protest, they cannot profitably build truly affordable housing, where could the money come from to ensure that the needed housing gets built? In America, President Biden is proposing to divert funds from the American Rescue Plan1. Read more about the scope of this crisis in Bloomberg: Affordable Housing Developers Look to the White House for Help
Alas, the Bloomberg analysis concludes that the availability of American Rescue Plan funds can only be transitory. The article also restricts itself to building more housing, with no discussion of an essential ingredient of truly affordable housing: ongoing support funding.
Why ongoing support? Why not ‘just build more’?
Alas, the structure and use of public housing in North America prevents it. However much we may lament it, public housing has accidentally/on purpose evolved as ‘up and out’ housing.
Marcia Fudge, current head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is on record as endorsing this approach to public housing as a ‘place to visit,’ rather than to live2. (It so conveniently requires much less housing stock if folks are forever moving on.)
Down on your luck? A temporary stay in public housing will help you pay the rent while you get back on your feet. Up. So you’re earning now? Congratulations. Here’s your notice to quit and join those able to afford ‘private’ housing. Up . . . and out.
Alas, this vision of public housing as a kind of extended rehab does not accord with reality. Seniors do not become less senior. All kinds of people with disabilities will not be able to earn enough money to live in private rental housing. Single parenting is not ‘cured’ overnight. Many least-fortunate citizens will move into public housing and never be able to afford to move out.
As a result, ‘just build more’ needs to be tempered by a longer term funding reality. Before tackling that problem, however, there’s an equally important crisis to be overcome The cost of simply building, let alone maintaining, deeply affordable housing.
A publication written by Jon Gutzmann and Lisa Feidler from the Public Housing Agency of St. Paul unpacks the problem of continuing support for deeply affordable housing that will be needed in Minnesota’s twin cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. They also discuss ‘affordable’ and ‘deeply affordable’ housing, and explain why the two are not at all the same. This detailed article can easily be shaded to provide a careful explanation of deeply affordable housing realities in cities everywhere in North America. Read more from St. Paul PHA: The Cost to Sustain Deeply Affordable Housing in the PHA’s HCV Program
P.S. worldwide, there are several successful models of deeply affordable housing that can self-sustain without a continuous influx of government money3.
North America is far from even beginning to experiment with such ideas. But growing numbers of activists are raising possibilities for a hopefully different kind of deeply affordable housing under the hopefully different name of ‘social housing’ (bearing in mind that this term is often used interchangeably with ‘public housing’ depending on the locale)4.
Footnotes
- The original intent of this legislation, which appropriated a massive amount of money, was to help America weather the COVID-19 storm. With a sense that the pandemic is passing, and time running out on spending it, it seems that existing funds of this plan may be redirected.
- Try: New HUD Secretary’s Housing Experience Is A Mixed Message For Change
- Try: Vienna Achieves “Mixed Income” Within Public Housing, Not Beside It
- For example, try: Toying With Wrong Builders And Wrong Models For ‘New’ Social Housing
