The production paradox
Perhaps because government funding (and therefore government endorsement) is always required to create it, sustainable affordable housing suffers from what I’ve come to call the production paradox, to wit:
The production paradox
Whatever an affordable housing developer wants to do,
The neighbors will oppose it.
Sounds right to me.
If it’s change, the neighbors oppose it, regardless of whether the developer is non-profit or for-profit, local or outsider (although big outsiders are the most feared).
In my thirty-plus years of working with affordable housing finance, I’ve seen the neighbors oppose all of the following:
1. Build new affordable housing. NIMBYism got its start opposing affordable housing, and even today, local NIMBYism remains an implacable and omnipresent anti-development force. Hence we use levers like inclusionary zoning, linkage, and mandatory affordable set-asides.
2. Convert existing affordable housing to market. You’d think that, having opposed the property’s creation, locals would love nothing better than if it were to convert to market use, and become just like us.
If anything in a blue state can make a developer even more despised, it’s to propose a market conversion. I had this repeatedly proven during the late 1990’s when the LIHPRHA preservation program expired, and shortly thereafter as the first long-term Section 8 property-based contracts expired.
What’s the emotional difference between building and converting?
Before the property is built, the imagined residents are ‘those people,’ the faceless sub-humans whom we know are just panting for the chance to live next to us, drive down property values, turn our schools into war zones, and corrupt our children.
We’re here for the affordable housing
After the property is built, its occupants are everyone’s teacher, EMT, donut maker, house cleaner, car mechanic, grandmother, or shopkeeper. They have faces, and personalities, and they’re almost as good as we are!
3. Add subsidy in preservation. All right, neighbors, if we can’t develop it, and you don’t want us to convert it to market use, then surely you’ll be pleased when we preserve ongoing affordability by adding Section 8 assistance.
Won’t you?
“Yes, we do oppose that, and don’t call me Shirley.”
In 1995, my company Recap was completing the HUD processing of the LIHPRHA preservation of a high-rise elderly Section 236 property in
No, they sued in Federal court, seeking an injunction to stop the closing. (They failed, but it was a total wakeup call to me about the antipathy generated by Section 8’s deep income targeting, the Federal preferences, and ‘those people.’)
4. Make subsidy portable. Markets are about choice, and economists everywhere tend to make a case for vouchers and other portable assistance rather than place-basing the funding. So the locals, the same folks who don’t want ‘those people’ in the neighborhood, ought to endorse converting to vouchers.
Still, you give people choice and they … exercise it!
Not in ways we recommend …
– and often in ways that we think they should not. Moreover, some of them use their new economic empowerment to move into our neighborhood (HUD has a public-housing deconcentration demonstration program called Moving To Opportunity), and we can’t have that, can we?
Some years back, Congressman Jerry Weller, whose district is a near-suburb of
See that corner near
Fortunately, various folks observed that was illegal … and the proposal quietly died.
5 Renovate and reposition public housing. Okay, if we can’t develop it, convert it, add subsidy, remove subsidy, then surely no one will object if we comprehensively improve dilapidated public housing through demolition, rebuilding, and de-densification (via HUD’s HOPE VI program)?
I told you, don’t call me Shirley!
Actually, in HOPE VI redevelopment, the residents themselves are often the biggest defenders of the awful status quo.
Some of this is ignorance. Some is justifiable skepticism about the motives, commitment, credibility and follow-through of the elected officials who ask for action in exchange for political vaporware. Some of it, I am embarrassed to report, is small-scale political power paranoia by resident-council leaders who have become queens of their small empires, and like their perquisites and their patronage. But in many HOPE VI transactions, people go to extraordinary lengths, and substantially increased costs, to renovate with residents remaining on-site, relocating them from quadrant to quadrant of the redeveloped parcel so the residents can maintain connection to their land and their established tenancy.
Conclusion. The affordable housing production paradox is a special case of the more general development paradox, which may be simply summarized as, the locals want everything just the way it was when they moved to town.
In
The
As land lessor, Harvard proposed removing the gas station and building a stylish upscale hotel to serve the many professional visitors who come to
Yep, they formed a “Save the Gulf Station” committee, with predictable sturm und drang, eventually overcome (or outlasted), whereupon Harvard built this atrocity:
Isn’t it awful? Who would possibly want that in
(And I won’t tell you the histrionics the Harvard Square Defense Fund raised in defense of a disgusting greasy spoon known as the Tasty — the kind of place where, if you laid your coffee spoon on the counter, you had difficulty detaching it from the layers of grease.)
The next time you read a newspaper headline or lead that begins, “Neighbors oppose …,” you may safely global-search-and-replace that phrase with “Affordable housing developer proposes …“
Developer proposes
Neighbor opposes
