Affordable Housing Institute : US

Fresh off the Wharton/ Harvard study the Economist cited and I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we have another example of the linkage between development restrictions and housing costs, a new HUD study, Why Not In Our Community?, a 31-page report (free, Adobe, 600 kb) that updates HUD’s original 1991 study (170 pages, Adobe, warning, very large file).  It finds that:

 

[The 1991 report’s] basic finding remains true today: exclusionary, discriminatory, or unnecessary regulations constitute formidable barriers to affordable housing.

 

Now, of course, while we here at AHI are staunchly against exclusionary, discriminatory, or unnecessary regulations — bring me the head of anyone for such regulations! — even the report recognizes that one person’s exclusionary regulation is another smart-growth zoning:

 

No clear “bright line” definition can delineate when a state or local policy is a regulatory barrier –

 

As opposed to a Federal policy, I presume?

 

– each policy or rule must be assessed on its own merits. Many policies and regulations that restrict housing are implemented or promulgated with other worthy goals. A policy, rule, process, or procedure is considered a barrier when it prohibits, discourages, or excessively increases the cost of new or rehabilitated affordable housing without sound compensating public benefits.

 

Underlying HUD’s efforts, as indeed those of many of us housers, is the knowledge that regulations such as ’snob zoning’ can be subconsciously used to make NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) respectable.  In this we are no different from our forebears, who frequently would site affordable housing

 

 

next to the prison, the workhouse, the mental institution, or the dump

 

 

– making it into an isolated enclave

 

 

where ’those people’ could live, out of sight and out of mind. 

 

In
my company’s conference room hang 1855 and 1867 maps of Boston with, on an isolated point of land …

 

 

 

… four building clusters: the House of Industry, House of Correction, House of Instruction, and Lunatic Asylum.  (They’re clearer in the 1867 map but I can’t find a link.)  Almost precisely a hundred years later, a very similar site was used to build Columbia Point, which in the 1960’s and 1970’s was synonymous with public housing ghetto, and today — through the miracle of public-private partnership and vast swathes of money, is now a thriving mixed-income community, Harbor Point. 

 

Finally, for those who find NIMBYism too weak tea, we in the US are increasingly encountering BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.  Those so advocating have been known, from time to time, to dress this beast up in more presentable clothing, with phrases like “smart growth”, as crisply summarized by long-time housing sage Tony Downs:

 

Resistance to reducing local autonomy over housing is intense because it involves the social nature of who is going to live near me and who is going to attend school with my children. Most people accept regional approaches to infrastructures, such as sewage and transportation systems. But they reject regionalism regarding social aspects, such as schools and who lives where. Almost all attempts to create suburban affordable housing have been thwarted by such local NIMBYism.

 

Even in the one state that has adopted a statewide affordable housing policy –New Jersey -– resistance to affordability in suburbs has been fierce. And when such units were built there, occupants have been mostly white households already residing in the suburbs. This is also true in Massachusetts. So there has been very little movement of any households out of central cities into suburban affordable housing -– one of the basic purposes of locating affordable housing in the suburbs.

 

Thus, a key reason why many proponents of smart growth have not emphasized creating affordable housing is that doing so would arouse strong opposition from suburban residents. Getting smart growth accepted by itself is hard enough –why take on the even more controversial burden of promoting affordable housing too?

 

Yet without affordable housing, the other main smart growth policies restrict the supply of land usable for development. That normally places upward pressure on prices of both new and existing units, making housing less affordable that it would otherwise be. If land-restricting policies are adopted only locally, housing prices are very likely to rise.  Only if such policies are adopted regionally, along with other policies that raise densities, can smart growth avoid making housing less affordable.

 

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