How to create truly affordable housing
Let's not talk about affordable housing. At a million dollars a “unit,” all told, that term is an oxymoron at best, a pretext at worst. It's what we distract ourselves with to justify denying people the adequate shelter they need and deserve. We've come to take pride in the very tokenism we once marched against, housing a select few at someone else's expense, denying the many and then patting ourselves on the back for striking a blow against capitalism.
But what if we stopped passing the buck and, as citizens of this city, took responsibility for housing ourselves, just as we once did. We'd probably start by figuring out how to get the biggest bang for our buck – housing the most people at the least cost. No one asks those questions anymore, but let's walk through them now.
Let's start with the dirt. Land costs can amount to a third of a new home's sticker price. The cheaper the land, the cheaper the housing. Free is the best by far, and with the enactment of new state legislation, every residential lot in the city now has free land on which to build one, two or three new dwellings. That's a good start. Our village could have done that on its own, but sometimes it takes a state.
Second, consider infrastructure. If the roads, sewer, water, gas and power lines are already in place, you've got a huge leg up. That stuff isn't cheap. If it's already there in our existing neighborhoods, who needs sprawl?
Third, getting zoning approval may sound like a simple formality, but you'd be surprised what a money pit it can be. It often costs more to get through the planning process, and its trumped-up “impact” fees, than to complete all the technical drawings for a building permit. Those up-front, out-of-pocket expenses, paid out on faith before the project can even qualify for a construction loan, discourage a lot of people from even trying.
And then there's building permits. Using over-wrought codes nitpicked by over-bearing, third-party contractors happy to over-compensate for their own lack of handson construction knowledge, building departments have become a detached and redundant money pit in the war against efficient housing. Don't let all the high-and-mighty talk about “safety” and “green” fool you. It's about exclusion. Every day, new hurdles are manufactured to make housing more expensive and more difficult.
Nobody wants to admit that all of these factors are to a large extent variable, discretionary, political and quite local, but they are.
When we ignore the opportunities while accepting any or all of these encumbrances to housing, we reveal our complacency or collusion within a housing crisis of our own making. We become part of a problem that only deepens when we brand actual housing providers as greedy developers and tar dedicated city staffers as their willing handmaidens.
And now the mayor wants to make home ownership a bit more expensive by pushing a property tax that would perpetuate this entropic treadmill while ignoring all these very real factors. I looked for the logic in that and found none.
There is much free land available in the city for housing. The infrastructure is already there and, given technological improvements in energy and water conservation, it's mostly adequate to the task. If the will were there, zoning approvals and building permits could be, as they once were, over-the-counter or even free, paid for through that bond. And the silver lining of a housing shortage is that many residential property owners now have enough equity to fund construction on their properties for their children, parents, friends, coworkers and neighbors. No developer, not even “nonprofits” with both their hands deep in the public trough, can compete with that for economy, efficiency and scale. Grass-roots housing is by far the cheapest, the most inclusive and democratic of all housing. And if a bond measure is not tailored to supporting citizen-sponsored housing and undertaking the necessary governmental reforms to encourage and support that, then the bond itself is probably not worth our support.