People like the jobs and tax revenue, but they still sometimes complain about the traffic when they open a new office park or condo complex.
Can’t they just buy a 50 lb bag of it in the baked goods aisle?
How are they going to get a 50 lb bag in their electric cart with the goat in there?
I think the idea is that the affordable housing has to come at a loss to someone. Either people will have to build it at a loss, or rent it out at a loss.
Incidentally, I’ve found it ironic that it’s the ***liberal ***places like San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Portland, etc., that tend to have ultra-high costs of living that price out the poor and middle class.
No, because they are poor, duh. They have to buy small bags of sugar at high prices.
I live in a neighborhood with a lot of affordable housing and a lot of racial diversity. And I live there on purpose because I believe in the value of diversity - cultural, racial, economic. But there have been days I wish I’d raised my kids in a school district with a better tax base, more kids with professional college educated parents, and more of a college focus - and those neighborhoods tend to be wealthier (and whiter). Not because I’m some sort of classist racist elitist in theory, but because these are MY KIDS.
And that’s the kid thing - that isn’t the value of my house. For most people, their house is going to be the most valuable asset they have, outside of their 401k (and for a lot of people, including their 401k). They need their home to retain value because that is how they are going to supplement social security. My house, in a less economically diverse neighborhood, would be worth 30% more than it is here. Granted, we got a bargain on the lot we put it on compared to the cost of land in a more affluent area.
Where I am, business owners usually do need to get permission from the town or county zoning authority before they can open a new facility. These aren’t usually contested, and if they are it’s usually more like ‘they need to build an extra lane on the road’ than outright blocking, but it’s definitely possible for concerned locals to interfere if they are motivated to do so.
I see both sides of the discussion.
On one side, we’ve got folks who care about their property values, the quality of their schools, and the quality of their next-door neighbors. People flock to “high status” zip codes because they are exclusive, and they are willing to pay a premium for it.
On the other side, you’ve got folks who are tired of being excluded. They want to enjoy the privilege of an hour long commute instead of a two-hour one. They want their kids to have an excellent education where they don’t have to worry about catching a bullet or having their gifts ignored. They don’t think it’s fair that just because they went into teaching, social work, nursing, or lower management, they can’t buy a home in a neighborhood with positive equity. They don’t think it’s fair that just because their skillset or aptitude qualifies them for minimum wage, they have to live in a slum for the rest of their life.
From a big picture view, it is clear to me that setting aside some affordable housing is one way to mitigate the effects of income inequality. Is it the best way? No. But it can be used in conjunction with other practices–like open enrollment (whereby a certain number students can enroll in schools outside of their neighborhoods) or programs such as HUD’s Good Neighbor Program, which tries to make impoverished communities more mixed income-wise. And then there’s mixed income housing developments created out of wholecloth. The research is pretty clear that poor people do better when they aren’t all warehoused together. Poor people doing better translates into everyone, as a group, doing better.
I do wonder how trends will move in the future. The optimistic part of me thinks that affordable housing will be more accepted as the struggle of Millennials and their younger siblings to acquire the American Dream grows more frustrating. Eventually the words “low-income people” will no longer (just) connote ghetto dwellers, but also the products of surburbia who are loaded down with six-figure loan debt and dead-end wages. Maybe upper-middle class parents don’t want their less successful children to boomerang, but they do want them to have a shot at buying a home in a safe neighborhood, with good schools. I can see a lot of Boomers and Gen X’ers imagining their grandchildren going to “bad” public schools and thus forever branding themselves as “poor”…and suddenly deciding that it wouldn’t be THAT awful if some condos were put up in their backyard.
A glut of new houses will reduce the prices existing homeowners can charge when they decide to sell.
Plus as others have said, low cost housing tends to attract more dysfunctional people.
I will add another benefit to affordable housing.
WARNING: The above article is eye-roll inducing if you are like me and can’t understand some of the self-induced first world problems the author talks about, like paying for his daughter’s wedding by emptying his 401(k). Also, I kinda feel sorry for his daughters since he expects them to be his retirement plan, having invested so much in their education that he and his wife have little saved up. I can admire his desire to want only the “best” for his kids. But I’m guessing, based on the other decisions he talks about making, that he chose “best” when he could only afford “better than most”. Since his kids probably didn’t have any choice in the matter, it seems unfair to have them deal with the ramifications. But I also bet they are happy to help (or at least they will claim to be, now that the whole world knows about their parents’ financial woes).
We’ll take everyone except the Irish. Ah, prairie shit ------- OK. We’ll take the Irish too.
(Sorry. Another thread got me started on Blazing Saddles and now I just can’t stop.)
Joe Lieberman had a policy idea involving public school vouchers. School vouchers in theory sound like a good idea, but in practice I think they’d be used by the right to push religious schools and break down anything public (since public = bad). But a public school voucher system seems like it would let people go to better schools.
Of course, I have no idea how the taxation funding works. Plus the people in the good schools may not want their kids going to school with those from the wrong side of the tracks.
Also location matters but it varies city to city. Housing in the best suburbs in the midwest is probably cheaper than the ghetto in a large city on the coast. The median home value in Carmel Indiana (the rich part of Indianapolis) is about 300k. You can’t get a studio apartment in the ghetto in San Francisco for 300k.
Because people prefer the company of liberals, thus driving up rents and real estate in blue urban centers?
I was bussed to schools on the good side of the tracks, having a residence that put me squarely on the wrong side. There were plenty of parents who didn’t want their kids to rub shoulders with ruffians like me, particularly in high school, so they flocked to elite private schools. And yet there were many others who weren’t so chicken and stuck it out.
It doesn’t matter what you do. Any attempts to social engineer for the greater good is going to make SOMEONE upset, because the greater good always infringes on someone’s idea of personal freedom. But I think by using multiple approaches in moderate amounts (charter/magnet schools, mixed income developments, housing vouchers), we can reduce the problems that come with racial and economic segregation without stepping on too many people’s toes. I dunno. Maybe I’m too idealistic.
Busing pretty much killed Louisville’s public school system for that very reason. The people who can afford it send their kids to private schools. Then, because they don’t need the public schools, the schools can’t get levies passed and politicians are elected who don’t fund schools.
And vouchers are not a good solution - we have open enrollment in Minnesota in theory. In practice, the good public schools are at capacity with kids who live in the school’s service area - who get first priority, then the people who live in the same district but go to a different school, who get second priority. If you live in another district, you might be able to send your kids to the worst schools in the better district - which turn out to be not much better than your own district, but now you have to drive your kids to school and pick them up from school - unless you have decent public transportation in your city - the the 'burbs around here don’t - hard to do for working parents.
A line the censors cut out:
“It’s twue! It’s weally twue!”
“That’s my knee, Ma’m.”
I believe I made the correct decision not to father children. People go apeshit about their kids. They are the brightest, most handsome, perfect friends of G-d.
Statistically, your kids will be average people. Don’t kill the math teacher.
I wish him good luck with his retirement plan.
:dubious:
But I digress.
You have to understand something about white people. Everything scares us. Except mayonnaise, we love that stuff. Everything else is perceived as a threat though, including busing in students from poor communities.
All right, I lived in a very dense neighborhood, clogged with cars. It was an interesting neighborhood, but it had traffic, traffic fumes, lots of people. Some good people, some bad people.
Now I live in a neighborhood that’s much less dense, and more expensive. Not so much traffic, not so many people. In general, we neighbors recognize each other and know who “belongs.” It’s not about any kind of people. Nobody wants a six-story high rise blocking their view and enabling its denizens to look out over their back yards. Nobody wants more traffic, and the resulting fumes and difficulty crossing streets and traffic jams.
The people who are putting these things in don’t live here, and they will only make money on them. The people who do live here will see their property values go down and will reap no benefit whatsoever. The people making the money will not have to deal with the issues created by the density. And there will be issues, even if the people who end up moving into these places are angelic beings.
People don’t complain about all kinds of affordable housing. There’s a lot of affordable housing being built in NYC now, and I don’t hear people complaining about it. But there are a couple of reasons for that.
- It’s not giant buildings going up in a area of single family houses- they’re are going up mainly in areas where there already large apartment buildings.
- It’s affordable housing, not low income housing. Which means the income limits can go up pretty high - sure , there are studios with income limits of $18-24K, but there are also one bedrooms where the limit for a single person is $65-75K or the limit for a two person household is over $100K
3)Most of the buildings are not solely affordable units- the developers get something ( a tax break or a zoning variance) in return for setting aside a certain number of affordable units , but half or more of the building is market rate.
I think the accusations of personal animosity are outweighing the real financial factors like these. You might be the most open-hearted person in the world. But when you’re looking at a housing program that’s going to cost you a few hundred thousand in home value, suddenly it’s a different matter.
In my neck of the woods towns get around the mandated “X percentage of affordable housing” by making that affordable housing for seniors only. My town has three such developments because,* god forbid, we can’t have THEM sullying our pristine neighborhoods!*