An article in the Baltimore Sun puts the boots to America’s current favourite way of building affordable housing — through inclusionary zoning projects that produce partially affordable housing complexes. It is written by Emily Hamilton a research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, based on her own research, and garnished with her opinions about the best way forward.
Hamilton reaches the conclusion that inclusionary zoning projects do not work. She gives two reasons. Stemming from her own research she has found that inclusionary zoning projects push up housing prices in a jurisdiction at the rate of approximately one percent a year. That burden falls heaviest on those would-be owners of the affordable housing who are generally least capable of handling the price increases.
Her second reason is fairly obvious to anyone who studies inclusionary housing projects. They simply do not produce enough affordable housing quickly enough to begin to make the slightest dent in America’s low income earner housing crisis.
As far as opinions go, Hamilton believes that if the housing industry is unfettered to build what they want where they want and in the way they want, they will produce the housing the nation needs and solve the various housing crises that afflict Americans at apparently every level of income save the upper classes.
Most certainly, as she points out, the housing industry is forced to carry some affordable housing on its back, trading the right to build higher density projects for lower prices to be offered on handfuls of affordable homes. But if housing developers are no longer fettered by density requirements, their sole incentive to offer affordable homes in inclusionary zoning projects simply vanishes.
What then?
Further freed from regulations that force the housing industry to grudgingly (she provides examples) build a few affordable units, will they suddenly reverse course and build housing for everyone at all levels of affordability, while making profits across the board that understandably drive their corporate focus?
We wish. But it sounds a little happy-clappy to us. Read more in the Baltimore Sun: Study: Affordable Housing Policy Backfires In Baltimore, Washington Region
P.S. we agree with Hamilton that the public private partnerships, the foundation of the current approach to inclusionary zoning, simply aren’t working in practice, no matter how socially desirable inclusionary zoning may be.
