Affordable housing development requires time, cooperation and openness to change
More and more Americans surveyed each year acknowledge their communities are in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, according to Pew Research Center. Fewer understand why that crisis exists or, more importantly, how it can be addressed.
Taos Housing Partnership was formed in 2020 with the sole purpose of tackling this challenge for Taos County. Our newsroom recently sat down with the organization’s executive director, Lisa O’Brien, to discuss Taos Housing Partnership’s recent attainment of nonprofit status and plan to develop a strategy to create more affordable housing, which the federal government defines as costing no more than 30 percent of a household’s income.
O’Brien acknowledges that one of the main barriers to addressing this problem is grappling with its dizzying level of complexity.
The U.S. was in the midst of an affordable housing crisis long before the COVID19 pandemic, driven by stagnant wages and an insufficient supply of housing stock needed to meet increasing demand, particularly among millennials, who have reached a stage in life where home ownership is desired for greater long-term financial security and to accommodate raising a family. The economic upheaval caused by the pandemic only deepened the crisis, increasing housing prices by 40 percent, even beyond the housing costs of the 2006 housing bubble, according to J.P. Morgan.
O’Brien acknowledges that she doesn’t have all of the answers as to how this problem will be solved in Taos County, at least not yet. However, we came away from our conversation with O’Brien understanding that three basic elements will be required if our community is to succeed in increasing the availability of affordable housing: Time, cooperation and an openness to change — on the part of all stakeholders, from residents, to business owners, to elected officials, to developers.
Many successful affordable housing solutions have centered on the creation of non-market housing, or housing governments create to maintain affordable rents. This is in contrast to market housing, for which property owners charge the maximum amount the market will bear. In Vienna, Austria, for example, 60 percent of residents live in non-market, public housing, regardless of income level. A New York Times article published last week found that 25 percent of Parisians live in affordable, non-market housing. Conversely, U.S. spending on non-market housing began falling precipitously in the mid-1990s and has remained stagnant ever since. The Biden administration has promised to change this in the lead up to this year’s presidential election.
Since land is needed to develop housing, our elected officials in Taos County may need to reassess zoning and density restrictions, which will both require the cooperation of local residents and business owners.
O’Brien also noted that some communities, such as Denver, Colorado, have passed laws to charge developers a small fee per square foot to feed into an affordable housing development fund. Other cities, such as Vancouver, British Columbia, allow developers the opportunity to build at higher density in exchange for funding affordable housing development on land they own.
It will be interesting to see what solutions Taos Housing Partnership can generate in collaboration with our local and county government.
The nonprofit’s goal won’t be to expand housing indefinitely to accommodate everyone who might want to live here. Rather, the intention is, and should be, to ensure that our community’s working population — the people who drive our ambulances, teach our children, run our hospital and doctors offices, and police our streets — are able to afford housing without having to sacrifice other basic necessities.
Taos County residents are fortunate to have a new nonprofit dedicated to chipping away at this complex challenge. Now it’s time to give it our full support to ensure it can succeed.