Unicorn - not only in museums . . .
In no small part, affordable housing is a victim of housing industry propaganda, not actual facts. The housing industry, by and large, sings a two-note song.
The high note: luxury housing is profitable for private market builders and/or managers, which is why the housing industry prefers to build it/manage it.
The low note: affordable housing is just barely profitable for free market builders/managers as long as government (or charity) chips in with a healthy subsidy. But only if the term ‘affordable’ includes what the middle class can afford (never mind poor folks), because that’s the only ‘affordable’ housing that the housing industry is prepared to build/manage.
This relentlessly repeated song implies that free market affordable houses for those with the lowest incomes are indeed unicorns — mythical creatures that are not encountered in real life. (That’s free market affordable homes).
But sensible people should stop listening to the housing industry’s plaintive two note song, and start believing in unicorns. Free market affordable housing can be built, and is being built.
Welcome to a world in which two different kinds of affordable housing unicorns actually exist.
First, dramatically different construction methods can make truly affordable housing profitable for private industry developers.
And what could be more dramatically different than housing that is constructed with a flat pack of materials, an allen key, and a set of simple diagrams? That’s the world of IKEA. And IKEA has been been making and profitably selling flat pack housing in partnership with Skanska for a number of years..
In much of the developed world, the housing industry has been careful not to notice flat pack housing. But things are changing. Read more about how the UK is taking notice of IKEA’s influence on housing in The Guardian: Company Gets Green Light To Build Affordable Homes In UK
A second kind of affordable housing unicorn might well appear in a neighbourhood near you. Sharpening a pencil and playing with income and expenses has demonstrated that there is a modern free market model of a very old form of housing that can be profitable for a landlord. Welcome to the world of PadSplit. Read more in Forbes: Can A Modern-Day Rooming House Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis?