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Thursday, May 23, 2013
Why We Can't Turn Affordable Housing Into Expendable Housing
by Elaine Johnson, published on May 4, 2012 at 1:03 PM
Storyline: "I'm lost...I'm really lost." -Diana
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Historically, landlords of multi-unit housing rental properties have been required to include 15% of “affordable” units for low and very low-income tenants. That is changing, in part due to a 2009 landmark court decision in Los Angeles (Palmer/Sixth Street Properties, L.P. v. City of Los Angeles). The court found that forcing landlords to provide low-income units without subsidies violated the Costa-Hawkins Act, which allows landlords to raise rents after tenants move out, effectively eliminating rent control.
Why is a lack of Affordable Housing important?
Consider…
The jobless rate in Sacramento rose slightly last week to 11.4%.*
About 93,000 jobless workers were recently notified that their final round of benefits would end early. Another 100,000 workers who likely would have been eligible for the final 20-week extension of benefits also won’t get help.*
The hourly wage that a household working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, needs to make to afford the Fair Market Rent on a two-bedroom apartment at the traditional 30% of income in California is $26 an hour. $54,000 and change.
California is second only to Washington, DC.
The average minimum wage worker earns $16,640.
The maximum annual unemployment benefit is $23,400.
The average income for someone living on SSI is $12,804.
Public assistance pays $3,000 annually.
Affordable Housing has been one way that people with low to extremely low income—including, but not exclusively seniors and persons with disabilities—have been able to stretch those annual dollars to be able to include things such as food, medicine, and utilities in their budgets.
Even with the benefit of Affordable Housing, more than half of California’s low-income households pay more than 50% for housing.
On May 2, 2012, Tyrone Buckley, Housing and Environmental Justice Policy Director for the Sacramento Housing Alliance, hosted a discussion at SHA’s 21st Street office in an effort to raise awareness and support around what they consider the crisis in Affordable Housing in the City of Sacramento.
In the room were representatives from Volunteers of America, Cottage Housing, Sacramento Self-Help Housing, Sacramento Mutual Housing, and other agencies whose clients are in some way affected by the changes.
The meeting included an overview of the current state of housing, what’s in the pipeline—nothing—and a discussion of what related issues the agencies felt needed to be addressed.
Primarily it was a call to action. An acknowledgement that it would require team work, and in many cases a willingness to “suit up and show up” at rallies, hearing or council meetings if they hoped to have an impact.
When I spoke with Beckley later, he admitted, he was preaching to the choir. To affect change, the community at large will need to get involved.
“Individuals and organizations can tell their elected officials to ensure that public policy preserves a place for everyone to live, through comments to the housing element, showing up to public hearings or community public participation opportunities, or speaking directly to elected leadership.”
He suggested contacting representatives through letters and email.
“We also encourage those concerned to organize an impacted community to come speak for themselves.”
If you subscribe to the Broken Window theory, you may believe that when you speak up for your community, you are helping yourself, and vice versa.
In an economy where unemployment continues to rise and benefits are running out, it may not be realistic to expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps until they can afford boots.
Broken windows, broken spirits; it is for each community to decide.
Excerpted from “Broken Windows”
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars. (James Q. Wilson, George L. Kelling, Atlantic Monthly, March 1982)
For more information got to www.sachousingalliance.org or www.equitycoalition.org
*Sacramento Business Journal, Daily Update, May 3, 2012
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"The hourly wage that a household working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, needs to make to afford the Fair Market Rent on a two-bedroom apartment at the traditional 30% of income in California is $26 an hour. $54,000 and change."
What a sad truth
Supply and demand delivered your family to Sacramento several generations ago, why do you think you should be immune?
Also, don't you think that's easier said than done? I thought about it and, even if I wanted to move anywhere at this point in my life, I couldn't even afford the moving expenses! What about the costs of traveling there first to line up a job, search for housing, etc. among a ton of other expenses.
While it's a creative and fulfilling solution that seems completely unrealistic (for most).
Mark Bean is presenting a grossly absurd and inhumane 'solution' to the high cost of housing. The 'Love It or Leave It' mentally is typical of many self-centered, anti-social people. The importance of friends, family and community doesn't dawn on such people.
Rent control/stability was one of the best things to happen to cities. It provided cleaver people of all different incomes the ability to live side-by-side and it fostered genuine creativity and talent. Maybe that's something that people like Mark Bean is afraid of? Most people would not want to live in a hollow city filled with only higher income people. And in reality, no such city has ever existed.
Secondly, that's not back pedaling it's a joke.
Although we live in a society where my generation thinks it's acceptable to lean on everyone around them for financial assistance, I wasn't raised that way. My family struggles to pay their own bills so I don't think they would be willing to further extend themselves to send me to another state or country because I can't afford to live in ours.
The point I was trying to make is that, like I said, it's a great solution but it's far from realistic. Like many I know, I'm employed full-time and live (very) far from lavishly but I still scrape by to pay my $580 rent each month.
Everyone's situation is different, I was just sharing mine as an alternative point of view.
You are employed by the government as a consultant but don't you see yourself as earning a living from the taxpayers. Wow. Your 'logic' is amazing. Sorry I couldn't smoke enough to make sense of that.
Mark, you have a child in your photograph and I don't know if he or she is yours, but if you're a parent you have almost certainly received benefits at the federal, state, or local level, including schools, largely funded by others or you have paid less in taxes than others who don't have children. One inherent outcome of our tax code is that it efficiently funnels money from high earning single people to people with children and in so doing it rewards parenthood. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but I doubt that it's true that you haven't benefited from tax dollars or the tax code in some form.
"California is second only to Washington, DC." in lack of affordable housing? It is second only to the District of Columbia territory in taxation, bureaucracy, and obstructions to developers, too.
As for "sprawl", some of us call that "affordable single family starter homes". Many people don’t like living in dense urban cores, hipster fashion notwithstanding. It seems they like to have a yard for their kids to play in. And that’s why they are willing to endure endless traffic delays to provide that room for their kids. We can either recognize that and accommodate their needs, or refuse to recognize it and ruin of our standard of living and our quality of life.
Here is the economic reality of "affordable housing" mandates:
1. They render many proposed market rate developments unaffordable to build since the rent subsidies for the low income units are borne by the developer, making projects that would other "pencil" no longer financially viable.
2. They reduce the overall housing stock (see 1 above).
3. They increase the price of market rate housing by suppressing the supply of new housing, increasing rents and new home costs for the vast majority of people who are not fortunate enough to land a subsidized unit.
4. They hamper economic growth and job creation by reducing investment returns on new housing, suppressing new housing construction.
5. They aggravate economic unfairness by imposing different rents on people living side-by-side in identical rental units.
6. In practice, they lead to the construction of apartment communities of 100% low-income housing as developers of market-rate subdivisions meet their affordable housing mandates by building 100% low-income apartment complexes, which results in increases in crime, juvenile delinquency and a host of other social maladies (see parts of North Natomas).
7. The presence of such 100% low-income apartment complexes renders entire communities less attractive to home buyers and new businesses, suppressing economic growth and job creation.
The efficient way to help the poor secure housing is not to continue to subsidize this vast, costly, job-suppressing bureaucracy of "nonprofit" low-income housing developers and $100K+/year housing "specialists" at SHRA, but to eliminate the mandates and foster real economic growth, housing construction and job creation.
For the extremely poor, take the cut now taken by the affordable housing bureaucrats and give the poor more cash and the freedom to rent wherever they want. We spend over $1 trillion per year in transfer payments to the poor in this country and much of it is wasted in the cost of operating countless welfare bureaucracies. Adopt a negative income tax and give the poor the dignity to spend the cash as adults, not children.