As far as I can tell, the affordable housing movement has been broadly co-opted by developers who leverage grants and incentives to expand their portfolios of rent generating assets.
Regulations which include language like "X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI" appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects which exacerbate bifurcation in the housing market and drive even more stock towards the rental/high-HOA model, bundled with big-box retail and other commercial real estate nearby.
There is a genuine affordable (and equitable) housing movement, largely built on urban equity-cooperatives and community land trusts, but those promising efforts have been very effectively redirected into boosting opportunities for "master planned" real estate corporations.
> "Regulations which include language like 'X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI' appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects..."
yes, regulatory capture at work. any time a stipulation is prescriptive rather than (largely) descriptive, it's quite likely a mistargeted regulation. being numerical makes it seem objective, but despite that, it doesn't lead to the implied/explicit intent, which is more equitable housing. it's a token gesture meant to veil the true intent of benefiting, and concentrating power among, cronies. oftentimes, the rationale behind writing regulations this way is to create a clear delineation of what's acceptable and not, but the line is nearly always drawn in the wrong place and is hopelessly incomplete in scope relative to objective.
it's the same class of deception as citing selective (i.e., incomplete) statistics.
what we need is to explicitly encourage human-scale ownership and development everywhere, through every means available, including zoning reform and tax policy.
> what we need is to explicitly encourage human-scale ownership and development everywhere, through every means available, including zoning reform and tax policy.
People focus on the zoning a lot, but it really is the tax policy.
Look around Vancouver and you'll see little three story walk up apartments all over. They stopped making them in 1993 because the incoming Liberal government adopted an incredible deficit slaying austerity approach which was in vogue at the time. The federal government completely got out of participating in housing at all. Beneficial tax policy that encouraged small apartment development was ended and since '93 pretty much the only thing that was built after was condos.
Effectively the current housing affordability crisis in Canada can be traced back to this early 90s austerity decision. Nothing filled the void left by the government pulling away from housing development.
The relatively much more spendy contemporary Liberal government has made lots of noises about housing investment, but they really haven't done much at all to undo the damage of the '93 Liberals.
>>They stopped making them in 1993 because the incoming Liberal government adopted an incredible deficit slaying austerity approach which was in vogue at the time.
What was "in vogue" at the time was a Conservative (sic) Mulroney government routinely outspending revenues resulting in Canada's federal debt crisis in the early 90s[1][2] which helped usher in the Cretian government and Paul Martin's austerity measures. I think the austerity measures helped put Canada back on track.
If you want to avoid rent seeking, then you should advocate for affordable housing that people can afford to buy.
In California, only 1/3rd of the population has enough income to afford a house. San Francisco is much, much worse.
Subsidizing developers to build (likely high-crime) housing so they can extract income from people with < 80% AMI doesn’t sound like a sustainable path to improving income disparity.
Instead, they should subsidize (or at least stop actively blocking) construction of new homes that the average person can afford to purchase, and then put them up for sale, not rent.
> Regulations which include language like "X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI" appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects which exacerbate bifurcation in the housing market and drive even more stock towards the rental/high-HOA model, bundled with big-box retail and other commercial real estate nearby.
I get that this model favor large-scale, high-capital projects, but, given that it explicitly set's aside X% for the <80% AMI, I don't see how it is also increasing inaffordability?
Doesn't more density + some X% set aside for affordable units generally positive? Maybe we need to play around with that X% better, but what's the alternative?
Inclusive zoning (the X% of a building must be affordable) is good because it's important to mix different economic classes in the same area. It makes the poor people richer and it makes commutes shorter.
When it gets high it's not a giveaway to developers. It's actually a backdoor way to ban housing construction; NIMBYs love to claim they want "real affordable housing" and then set the IZ requirement so high nobody can afford to actually create any.
Regulations which include language like "X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI" appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects which exacerbate bifurcation in the housing market and drive even more stock towards the rental/high-HOA model, bundled with big-box retail and other commercial real estate nearby.
There is a genuine affordable (and equitable) housing movement, largely built on urban equity-cooperatives and community land trusts, but those promising efforts have been very effectively redirected into boosting opportunities for "master planned" real estate corporations.