Affordable housing does not diminish value of nearby homes
Sixteen years ago, a nonprofit opened the Washington Courtyards, a development near downtown Houston that included market-rate apartments as well as subsidized units for low-income residents.
Since then, the surrounding Washington Avenue corridor has flourished with an influx of popular restaurants and bars, and owners of nearby residences are sitting pretty. In the past five years alone, median home prices in the Rice-Military/Washington Avenue area have jumped by about 36 percent, according to data from the Houston Association of Realtors.
Obviously, the presence of the Washington Courtyards, opened by the Avenue Community Development Corp., is not responsible for the rising home values. Nor, most likely, would it have been to blame had the values gone down.
Property values are driven by market forces, and numerous academic studies have shown that the presence of affordable housing, in and of itself, doesn’t diminish the value of homes nearby. This is particularly true in prosperous — or, in fair housing jargon, “high opportunity” — neighborhoods, many of which are in the suburbs.
“At the higher end, there really doesn’t seem to be disagreement that it has either a neutral or a positive effect,” said Elizabeth Mueller, an associate professor of community and regional planning at the University of Texas at Austin.
Yet fears related to affordable housing seem impervious to facts. The notion that years of hard-earned home equity suddenly vanish when poor people move into a middle-class neighborhood persists, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
I heard this argument regularly in the 10 years I spent covering housing issues as a reporter, so I wasn’t surprised when it surfaced recently in Tomball, a northwest Harris County town of about 11,000 people. Many residents and some of the politicians representing them used the property-value argument, among others, to persuade the Harris County Housing Authority to back down from plans for a 140unit apartment development for low-income families, and to opt for senior housing instead.
I asked area resident Kay Smith, who helped lead opposition to the Tomball development, what evidence she had that affordable housing lowered nearby property values.
“If you want me to give you statistics and numbers, I can’t do that,” Smith said. But in response to previously developed low-cost housing in the area, she said, “a whole lot of people are putting up their houses for sale and moving out.”
In response to the pushback from Smith and others, the housing authority decided to limit the project, the Retreat at Westlock, to people 62 and older.
This decision was not based on need. Housing authority spokeswoman Timika Simmons acknowledged that the county’s affordable housing shortage is greater for families than for seniors.
“Right now, everyone is being forced into senior housing because that’s more acceptable,” Simmons told my colleague Mihir Zaveri.
It’s nice to know that senior citizens, a fraternity I’ll be joining all too soon, are regarded as non-threatening. Obviously we all want them to be accommodated.
But the housing authority’s acquiescence to the resistance of neighbors and politicians with unusual clout on such matters flies in the face of federal housing policy, grounded in decades of social-science research and reinforced by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Dallas case. The bottom line: Concentrating poor people in certain neighborhoods more or less ensures that they and their descendants will remain poor.
To break this cycle, fair-housing laws require that low-income families have access to neighborhoods with the same amenities that middle-class families enjoy. Often, these neighborhoods are in the suburbs, where resistance tends to be strongest.
“The point of putting developments in suburbs with good schools is to provide children with access to better education,” Mueller said. “To exclude them is really to undermine that.”
Obviously, property values are not the only issue in this discussion. Kay Smith called me back to impress on me that the most compelling concern for her and her neighbors was crime.
“We no longer feel secure in our homes,” she said.
The relationship between subsidized housing and crime is questionable as well. That’ll have to be another column.