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The Affordable Housing Crisis in 2023: Where Do We Stand, and What are the Solutions?

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The affordable housing crisis in the United States has plagued Americans across the country since the Great Recession—and is only getting worse. 2022 estimates indicate that the U.S. needs some four to five million more homes on the market than it has right now . Housing costs have become increasingly untenable for renters and buyers alike; over 40% of renters are cost-burdened (meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs), and housing prices are rising faster than wage growth in 80% of U.S. markets . Moreover, the situation has been exacerbated by the work-from-home boom and supply chain shortages that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Demand increased as Americans moved to the suburbs; at the same time, supply decreased due to shortages of labor and building materials.

We talk to Andra Ghent, Professor of Finance at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business , to discuss the problem of housing affordability, as well as what solutions might be possible for the public and private sectors.

How has the work-from-home boom changed housing affordability and migration patterns since the pandemic?

People need more space to be able to work remotely. We know this from pre-pandemic data showing that people that worked remotely spent a larger fraction of their income on housing and had more rooms in their home (see graph below from Stanton and Tiwari, 2021). Importantly, it’s not just dedicated home office space that people want more of when they work remotely. They also use the other parts of their home more intensively (bathrooms, kitchens, basement gyms) since they’re more likely to do all the ancillary activities they did at the office at home now. The increase in work-from-home thus lead to a big increase in housing demand that increased housing prices.

Working from home makes living in the suburbs less costly, since people only need to commute 2-3 days per week instead of 4-5. Subsequently, it shifted housing demand towards the suburbs, particularly in cities where people face long commutes, where suburban space is relatively cheap, and with high shares of white-collar workers.

In the long run, the increase in house prices will moderate a bit as home builders are able to add more space where people want to live. That said, municipalities have enacted increasingly onerous land use regulations that are making it harder for home builders to add supply—even in the long run—so some of the increase in home prices is permanent.

How are higher interest rates affecting renters as opposed to homeowners?

Unfortunately, any fall in home prices from the increase in interest rates is not due to either a short-run or long-run improvement in affordability for either renters or buyers. Home prices are just the capitalized value of the future expected stream of rents, and the rate at which they are being capitalized has risen. This is part of why you are seeing some moderation in home prices or even outright declines in some places. Mostly, the rise in rates means that some people who previously could have qualified for a mortgage can’t right now. As a result, there are fewer buyers bidding on any homes on the market.

The rise in interest rates also means that many would-be home sellers are effectively locked into their current home, since they can’t take their current mortgage rate with them if they buy a new house. This means the market for existing homes is especially thin.

Rents are not falling significantly, so it would be a mistake to think that affordability has improved because of the increase in interest rates. Nothing has improved for renters; in fact, new construction of housing is declining because homebuilders are having a harder time getting deals to pencil with the increase in interest rates. That means that the rise in rates will decrease affordability in the medium-term.

What solutions are most viable from the public and private sectors? Are there examples of successful policies that have increased the supply of affordable housing?

We need states to step in and preempt municipalities from enacting and enforcing land use restrictions that raise housing costs. Land use control is a police power that is constitutionally guaranteed to states, not cities. While states often delegate the power to municipalities, they can take it back when cities don’t use it for the public benefit. Because housing markets are regional, any individual city does not bear the full cost of making it hard to build.

The best chance we have to improve housing affordability in the long term is to reduce construction costs through automation of construction processes. There is a lot of innovation going on in housing construction – “modular” housing, 3D printing, and so forth – but right now there are problems getting these processes to scale and become affordable. We’ve seen little to no productivity growth in housing construction in 50 years, unlike what we’ve seen in the rest of the manufacturing sector, because we haven’t seen scale in manufactured housing.

So, we need manufactured housing built at scale. To make this possible, we need harmonization of land use law to make it possible to build the same type of housing in many cities and know it adheres to code. HUD can change its manufactured housing definition to allow home builders to remove the chassis and still have it count as manufactured housing. This needs to be accompanied by laws at the state level mandating that manufactured housing is a permitted housing type in any zoning code that allows single-family housing. Otherwise, manufactured housing will get relegated to parks.

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Andra Ghent

Professor of Finance , University of Utah

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As the United States has grown and the quality of the nation’s housing has improved, it has also become more expensive and less affordable to much of the nation’s population. Millions of Americans today find themselves spending so much for housing that they have difficulty meeting other necessities of life, while many others are thwarted in their dreams of homeownership.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis in housing affordability has been a recurrent theme in the media, while solutions have been put forward by organizations and people across the political spectrum. But much of what is written about the problem is often misleading, while the solutions being most widely promoted would have little or no effect on the families most severely affected. In this article, I will describe the elements that make up the affordability crisis, and why they have just recently become so much more severe. Then I discuss the current efforts to address the problem and suggest what may be needed if it is ever to be truly resolved.

1. Breaking Down America’s Affordability Problems

There is no one affordability problem. There are many affordability problems, depending on one’s income, where one lives, and whether one is an owner or tenant. The most important, though, in terms of the suffering it causes and its significance for housing policy, is rental affordability or cost burden. It affects people of different incomes differently and varies greatly across the United States. A second problem is homebuyer affordability, or the extent to which high housing costs prevent households from becoming homeowners, but which mostly affects families of higher incomes than those whose lives are most deeply blighted by high rental costs. Most of this article will focus on rental affordability.

Households spending more than 30% of their gross income for rental costs, including utilities, are considered cost burdened. Those spending more than 50% of their gross income for rental costs are considered severely cost burdened. In 2021, 21.6 million renter households, almost half of all American renter households or one in six American households, were cost burdened. More than half of those, or 11.6 million renters, were severely cost burdened. The great majority of these households were very low-income households. While the percentage of cost burdened renters dropped slightly between 2014 and 2019, it has risen sharply since then. Two distinct and separate affordability problems, however, are nested in this total. I call them systemic cost burden and strong-market cost burden. They are very different.

Systemic Cost Burden

Very low-income families face the most severe rental affordability problems. They must contend with a systemic imbalance in the nation’s economy between what low-level jobs pay and what it costs a private landlord to provide a modest but decent rental dwelling unit. For example, the 25th percentile hourly wage (25% earn less and 75% earn more) in the United States for retail workers in 2021 was $12.43/hour. A worker in such a job, working 35 hours/week for 50 weeks (if she’s lucky) will earn a total of $21,131 for the year. If she is the sole support of her family, she can afford to pay no more than $528/month for rent without being cost burdened.

Most rental properties in most American communities are either single family homes or a small multifamily buildings. When you add up the operating costs, including maintenance, reserves, property management, taxes, insurance, water and sewer fees, and allowances for vacancies and collections, they typically run between $400 and $600 per year. Assuming the landlord’s cost to acquire and upgrade the property is a modest $100,000 and she aims for a 6% annual return on her investment, or has to pay a mortgage at that interest rate, the lowest rent they can charge and still come out ahead is $900 to $1100 per month, almost double what the 25th percentile retail worker and her family can afford.

Severe cost burden is concentrated among America’s poorest families. Of these families, 87% of renter households earning under $10,000/year and 67% of those earning $10,000 to $19,999 spend 50% or more of their gross income for housing. The poorest 20% of renters account for 60% of all households with severe cost burden. These families live in chronic instability. They struggle to pay for food, transportation, and other essentials, while their ability to pay their rent can easily be derailed by unexpected medical expenses or a car breakdown. Cost-burdened households, particularly single mothers with children, are at greatest risk of eviction. They move more frequently than other families and often experience episodes of homelessness, undermining their family life, their children’s future, and their neighborhood’s stability.

Strong Market Cost Burden

Systemic affordability problems exist everywhere in the United States. But in high-demand housing market areas like coastal California, New York City, or Washington, DC, the pressure created by strong demand and limited supply leads affordability problems to migrate upward; that is, families at progressively higher income levels experience affordability problems. Renters earning between $30,000 and $74,999 (roughly 40 to 100% of the national median) are much more likely to be cost burdened in Los Angeles than, say, in Philadelphia or Cincinnati. These renters are hurting, but the amount of money a family earning $75,000 and paying 40% of their income for rent has left over for other necessities is far greater than that available to the family earning $20,000.

Strong-market affordability flows from two intersecting problems: the cost of housing has been bid up by demand from more affluent households and is made worse by the difficulty and high cost of building in these areas. Housing production in areas like Los Angeles or San Francisco is severely constrained not only by restrictive regulations but by many other factors, including natural and environmental constraints. Those constraints, along with extremely high land costs, the high cost of labor and materials, and the effects of rigorous building and safety codes, have led the cost of building to skyrocket. A 2022 report pegged average construction costs in San Francisco at $439 per square foot. Using this construction cost, adding modest land and soft costs, a small new two-bedroom apartment would cost over $750,000, and would have to rent for over $4,000/month to break even. While building enough of those apartments might lead older buildings to filter down in price to where some middle-income families could afford them, tight land supply means that building enough to make a major difference might be well beyond what is realistically possible in San Francisco and many other supply-constrained strong market areas.

Affordability and the Ability to Buy a Home

Most American families aspire to homeownership. While for many years house prices and household incomes tended to move in parallel, starting around 2000 (except for a dip during the Great Recession) house prices have been rising faster than incomes. In addition to the price of the home, though, a family’s ability to afford a home depends on the interest rate on the mortgage, as well as the size of the down payment and the annual cost of property taxes, insurance, and other fees, which vary widely from one part of the United States to another. To measure this, the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo have created a Housing Opportunity Index (HOI), which combines incomes, prices, and interest rates to estimate what percentage of the houses in any given housing market area are affordable to a family earning the median income for that area. The lower the HOI, the fewer homes that are affordable to such a family. See Figure 1.

The HOI goes up and down. Affordability dropped during the 2000–2007 housing bubble, rose sharply during the Great Recession, and stayed fairly stable between 2013 and 2020. Although house prices were rising during these years, their effect was mostly offset by dropping mortgage interest rates, which bottomed out in 2020. The steep drop in affordability since 2020 comes partly from rising prices and partly from rising interest rates. As with rental affordability, the affordability of homes for sale also varies widely across the country. There are areas where almost all homes are affordable to a median-income household (like Cumberland, Maryland or Elmira, New York) and those where hardly any are affordable (like Orange County, California). The 11 least affordable housing market areas are all in California, while of the 40 areas (out of 234) where a median-income family can afford 75% or more of the homes, 39 are in the Northeast or Midwest.

The ability of middle-class families to buy a home fluctuates widely over time and geography. Within 15 years, the HOI has yo-yoed from 40% to 80% and back to 40%. But there are still many places in the United States—although not necessarily those where most people want to buy homes—where homes are highly affordable. As we turn to the way the perception of affordability as a metastasizing crisis has grown seemingly overnight, it is important to maintain that perspective.

2. COVID and the Unexpected Crisis

While housing affordability has long been seen as a problem, it took on new urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon after the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, rentals and sales prices both began to rise much faster than ever before, even more than during the height of the bubble years. From the second quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2022, the median sales price for homes in the United States rose from $322,600 to $479,500, or nearly 50%. Although prices then began to tail off, the recent decline has been more than offset by rising mortgage interest rates. Rents also increased, by 13.5% in 2021 alone. While sales prices and rental growth are slowing down, they will likely never return to pre-pandemic levels. What can account for this increase, which was largely unpredicted by either researchers or industry professionals?

Change in median house sale price 2013 to 2023

Many different factors came together in 2020 to create the conditions for sharp price and rent increases, as shown in Figure 3. New housing production has lagged behind demand since the onset of the Great Recession, creating a cumulative shortfall in supply, while new household formation, the main driver of housing demand, which was sluggish for many years, increased significantly during the late 2010s. At the same time, mortgage interest rates, which had been gradually declining since the 1980s, bottomed out at 2.66% in December 2020.

Factors leading to house price and rent increases during COVID pandemic

On top of this, the pandemic triggered both even greater demand and even less available supply. Many affluent renters realized that low mortgage interest rates made homeownership more attractive than continuing to rent. With people working from home rather than commuting to an office, many began to look for larger quarters, while others chose to relocate to communities farther from their workplace. Cities two or three hours from Manhattan—like Kingston, New York, or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; or with strong natural amenities like Provo, Utah, or Sarasota, Florida—experienced sharp demand surges. The increase in demand was strongest among high-wage, upper-income households, disproportionately pushing prices upward.

At the same time, the number of homeowners putting their houses on the market dropped sharply. Many reasons have been suggested for this, including older owners’ reluctance to move or have strangers in their homes during the pandemic. As the market further tightened and mortgage interest rates began to rise, owners holding cheap mortgages realized that moving could mean much higher housing costs. Whatever the reasons, available housing inventory, which is highly seasonal, failed to rise as usual during the spring and summer of 2020, and then dropped precipitously during the second half of the year, just as demand was rising. By mid-2023, although the pandemic is no longer driving people’s behavior, inventory levels have remained far below pre-pandemic levels.

The increase in house prices and rents, however, has inserted the issue of affordability squarely into the American political mainstream. But what does that really mean for the millions of people impacted by high housing costs?

Available housing inventory for sale in the United States 2016 through 2023

3. Can We Solve the Affordability Problem?

Housing costs have been on the national agenda for a long time. In 1978, the federal government created a Task Force on Housing Costs, whose final report opens by noting, “The high cost of housing is now a major problem for millions of Americans.” In 1990, President George H. W. Bush convened an Advisory Commission on Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing, while in 2004, president George W. Bush announced the America’s Affordable Communities Initiative to “bring homes within reach of hard-working families through regulatory reform.”

In some ways, nothing is new. But what people are talking about today is different in important ways. For one thing, the focus is overwhelmingly on a single issue: underproduction of new housing. While an undersupply of new housing, particularly in high-demand areas like coastal California, certainly contributes to the affordability problem, it is far from the only contributor to the problem. The focus, moreover, is on one specific obstacle to building more housing: land use regulation. That is, reforming the zoning laws local governments use to regulate the use, density, height, and other features of development.

This focus has brought together an unusually broad coalition, including homebuilders, as well as so-called YIMBY (“Yes in My Back Yard”) pro-development voices from left to right, libertarian tech bros, and left-wing housing advocates. However, the voices of those who argue that other strategies are needed, particularly organizations serving very low-income families, are barely heard.

The strength of the coalition pushing for zoning reform has already led to major changes in many municipal zoning ordinances and in the laws of a number of state governments. The latter is most important, since under the American system of government, state law defines how towns and cities regulate land use. Any change to a state’s zoning laws, therefore, changes the ground rules for hundreds of separate municipal zoning ordinances.

The first notable state zoning change was in Oregon in 2019, when it amended the state zoning law to abolish exclusive single-family zoning in cities over 10,000 in population. All such cities must now allow two dwelling units where only one could be built before, while cities over 25,000 must allow at least four. Reforms have since been enacted in California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. Eight states now require municipalities to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs)—second dwelling units on the same single family lot, either within the existing house or as a smaller separate structure—in single family zoning districts.

Ending the historic practice of exclusive single-family zoning, meaning zones where only single-family detached houses are allowed, has been a major goal of the zoning reform movement. That restriction governs the great majority of residentially zoned land in the United States, including almost all suburban land and large parts of central cities, including 70% of the residentially zoned land in Minneapolis and 81% in Seattle. Indeed, many people point to the moment in 2019, when Minneapolis amended its zoning laws to eliminate single-family zoning districts and to permit up to three housing units to be built on each individual building lot as the first major victory of the zoning reform movement.

This turnabout on zoning, although still embryonic, must be recognized as a major achievement on an issue that until recently was seen as all but politically untouchable. Yet is it the “solution” to the affordable housing crisis, or even, as has been argued, to homelessness? While some of the reforms will help, usually in small ways, the answer is an unequivocal no. Although the much-heralded Minneapolis reform affects 70% of the city’s land area, after two and a half years it had resulted in only 100 new housing units; put differently, it increased housing production in the city over that time by only 1%.

Part of the problem is that, as I have written elsewhere, there are compelling economic reasons why increasing density in already-built-up single-family districts—which describes almost all urban single-family districts—not only fails to lead to large-scale housing production, but all but dictates that any new housing will be significantly more expensive than the homes it replaces. Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that—leaving aside ADUs, which are truly helpful—rezoning of built single-family areas is more about symbolism than about substance.

Although rezoning of urban commercial or industrial areas for higher-density residential use may be somewhat more productive, zoning reform in heavily developed central cities like Minneapolis or San Francisco is likely to have only a limited effect on housing supply, if only because of the inordinate cost and difficulty of site assembly and the disproportionately high cost of construction, as discussed earlier. If enough new housing gets built, it may have some effect on reducing existing rents through the filtering process, but in most cases the effect is likely to be quite modest.

Increasing housing production in the suburbs is easier and likely to have far more impact. Vacant or underutilized sites, such as low-density strip commercial areas along arterial roads, are widely available and considerably less expensive to develop than urban sites. Rezoning those areas, along with rezoning underutilized office parks to allow multifamily housing, while changing the zoning of as-yet-undeveloped land currently zoned for single family homes, could actually lead to significant increases in housing production.

But the shortfall in housing production is not just a matter of zoning. Many other factors stand in the way of significantly increasing housing production, including non-zoning regulations, the difficulty and cost of site assembly in largely built-up cities, shortages of skilled construction workers and qualified subcontractors, and high barriers to entry for start-up land developers. None of these issues have yet been seriously tackled, and some have hardly been discussed. It is important to remember, moreover, that many regulations, like limits on building in floodplains or wetlands, are there for good reason.

All of this, however, fails to address the most urgent question. At best, a program of extensive zoning reform, coupled with other measures to increase housing production, may help ameliorate the problems of some struggling middle-class households squeezed by high costs and limited supply in high-demand markets such as coastal California and New York City. Even those effects are likely to be limited because of the inordinately high cost of the new housing that will be built. It will not begin to meet the needs of low-income families, whose lives are far more devastated by housing cost burdens, because the systemic gap between housing costs and incomes makes it impossible, however many units we build, for costs to filter down to where those families can afford housing in the private market. Even less will it help meet the needs of homeless people, who (more or less by definition) have very low incomes and who are often further burdened by social, mental, or physical disabilities.

It is widely held that where the cost of an essential public good exceeds the ability of people who need that good to pay for it, the public sector should help bridge the gap. Thus we provide minimum levels of health care and food through Medicaid and SNAP as entitlements for people whose incomes are too low to pay for those goods. But that is not true for housing. Instead of being an entitlement, housing assistance is a lottery. The most widely cited estimate is that only 24% of eligible households in need are able to obtain housing assistance, in most cases through a housing choice voucher, which pays the difference between the full market rent and what a low-income family can afford, while paying 30% of their income for rent. Almost all the other 76% are cost-burdened.

The single most important thing we can do to solve the affordability crisis among low-income families is to provide a housing allowance—whether through the current voucher program or a redesigned and improved program—for every household whose income is too low for them to afford modest but decent housing in the private market.

In many communities, where supply is adequate and prices relatively low, a well-designed entitlement housing allowance program might in itself largely address the affordability problem. In higher-priced strong market areas, it would have to be combined with a program to subsidize construction of affordable or mixed-income housing to provide an adequate supply of moderately priced dwellings where people could use their allowance, including supportive housing for homeless people. This would be expensive, but well within the means of the federal government. It would be a small part of what we currently spend on Medicaid and might well reduce Medicaid costs by improving family health in the bargain. Even then, however, it would have to be a regional, not a local program. Given the cost and scarcity of building sites and the exorbitant construction costs, it is hard to see how some cities like San Francisco could ever create enough housing to meet the needs of their lower-income residents.

This is not an either-or proposition. Zoning reform is long overdue, and recent reforms are a good step forward. But they address only one small piece of what is a complex systemic problem. Treating it as the solution is not only dangerously misleading, but ignores the urgent needs of millions of low-income families for whom zoning reform by itself is little more than a cruel hoax.

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Made by History

America Needs a New Approach on Affordable Housing. History Offers a Guide

Kansas City Tenants Host Rally To End Evictions

T he U.S. has a housing crisis — one only growing more serious with each day. In the District of Columbia, a recent report by the Urban Institute found that 12% of the city’s population of more than 82,000 residents does not have stable housing. The majority of D.C. residents navigating housing insecurity are people of color, a reality reflected across the country.

The Biden Administration has recognized that housing insecurity is a problem that it can’t ignore, in part because it affects the confidence Americans have about the economy. On Thursday, the Administration announced a bold series of policy proposals , which deployed a public-private approach focused on changing exclusionary zoning, expanding the financing options for affordable housing, and promoting the conversion of empty office space into apartments. These followed up on ideas Biden had proposed in the State of the Union address.

While it is important that the Administration is taking the affordable housing crisis seriously, the long history of attempts to address housing problems in the U.S. reveals these types of public-private initiatives have repeatedly enriched the private sector and done little to help those who need government action the most.

This history suggests that it's time for the federal government to follow the lead of local and state housing activists and create programs that recognize housing is a right not a commodity. This means reconsidering an idea that is barely mentioned in the Administration’s 45-page proposal: public housing. In fact, on Thursday, the same day the Biden Administration announced its proposal, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders released their own plans to advocate for “Green New Deal for Public Housing” legislation — a sign that some legislators are starting to recognize the essential role that public housing will play if the Administration is to solve the housing crisis.

Public housing in the U.S had its origins in the New Deal. It began as an effort by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Administration to boost the construction industry and provide temporary housing support for struggling Americans. Until World War II, it remained a very small and highly segregated program that primarily benefited working-class whites.

Read More: Read President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address

After the war, that changed. The federal government allocated funds for a substantial increase in public housing units to address a national housing shortage and advance urban redevelopment. These funds fueled the construction of large-scale modernist developments like Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, which was the largest public housing project in the U.S. with over 4,000 units in 28 identical 16-story buildings.

Initially touted by city planners as “palaces for the poor,” these projects experienced problems of segregation and discrimination almost from the outset and increasingly fell into disrepair due to the limited funds allocated for their initial construction and ongoing maintenance. In the 1960s, many city housing agencies exacerbated the pre-existing problems. They changed their policies to allow occupancy by single-parent households and welfare recipients. Meanwhile, Congress passed a law raising the cap on rents to 30% of a household’s income, which substantially increased the rent for people who worked and drove many them into the private market. This exodus transformed public housing into the option of last resort, inhabited exclusively by the poorest of the poor.

Instead of trying to improve the situation in the 1970s, the federal government turned away from constructing, owning, and managing public housing, and instead adopted private market tools such as vouchers and subsidies in an effort to make housing affordable. They also contracted with private management companies to run preexisting public housing, while greatly reducing the capacity and power of public housing agencies. By the 1980s developments like the Robert Taylor Homes became the sites of major drug and gang activity, turning them into proxies for the problems of public housing and the “inner city.”

In response, Bill Clinton promised to “end public housing as we know it” and introduced the HOPE VI program . HOPE VI became a hallmark of the Clinton years and largely amounted to privatization of public services. The initiative encouraged tearing down many existing federal projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and replacing them with lower-density townhouse style developments that combined market rate housing designed to appeal to the middle class with subsidized units for poor families. To qualify for the houses, poor families had to meet a stringent set of requirements, including having no criminal record and having a job or being enrolled in an employment training program.

These projects benefited the private developers, who built the new housing and surrounding businesses, but only compounded the problems for tenants. The vast majority of former public housing residents found themselves displaced from their longtime homes. While many received Section 8 vouchers to rent homes, they confronted a highly discriminatory private rental market that left many former public housing residents with few options, most of them in racially-segregated, high-poverty areas. The end result was the exacerbation of housing segregation and economic inequality in many cities, while gentrification spread.

Despite this mixed record, in the early 21st century, public-private projects like HOPE VI remained virtually the only housing initiatives that seemed viable.

That’s changed in recent years. Policymakers from Los Angeles to Rhode Island have launched a range of innovative campaigns to consider alternative ways to increase affordable housing that go beyond simply changing single-family zoning laws and allowing for the construction of Auxiliary Dwelling Units (ADUs). Many of these projects have taken inspiration from longstanding social housing programs in Western Europe, most notably Vienna , where more than half a million residents, both low-income and middle class, live in well-constructed social housing units, spending less than 10% of their incomes on rent.

Read More: How More Cities Worldwide Can Attract Remote Workers

The shape of new programs vary significantly. On one end of the spectrum, Montgomery County, Md., has broken ground on several new mixed-income, government-owned projects. But the projects still rely on a public-private model and contain many echoes of HOPE VI, making them unlikely to eliminate fully the problems of the past.

On the other end of the spectrum, is the work being done by housing groups like Kansas City-based KC Tenants. The group has adopted a definition of “social housing” which points to a way of imagining housing outside the scope of the private market and unavailable for profit or speculation. In using the term “social,” KC Tenants seek to avoid the indelible stigma associated with public housing and to highlight that they envision something very different from the post-World War II massive housing projects or even the HOPE VI townhomes. They are crusading for construction of well-designed housing in desirable parts of the city that serves everyone but the most wealthy. KC Tenants co-founder Tara Raghuveer has deemed this form of “true public housing” the organization’s “north star.” The group is helping push Kansas City closer to that goal. In 2022, by a wide margin, the city passed a $50 million bond for long-term affordable housing.

Read more: Renters Are in Revolt. This Tenant Union Plans to Get Them Organized

This vision of social housing has a chance to undo the mistakes of the postwar era, which stigmatized public housing, and produced substandard and segregated residences for only the poorest of Americans. But for such programs to truly solve the affordable housing crisis, the federal government needs to be involved. The scope of the problem is simply too large for states and localities to tackle. Imaging and designing a federal initiative will take policymakers who can think big, while learning from the mistakes of the post-WWII housing projects. Crucially, they should follow the lead of local housing activists who see housing as a right, not a commodity.

To do so, officials must abandon the narrative that public housing has been a failed social experiment. Instead, they need to sell the public on viewing it as a critical way for the federal government to serve the public good and build a better functioning system of social welfare.

This approach will promote a just policy — one that addresses a problem that has festered for 75 years — and it could also provide a political boost for the Democrats in November and beyond. The poor, working, and middle-class Americans who would benefit most from this vision of public housing are some of the people most dissatisfied with the Biden Administration.

Fixing the housing crisis and creating a broad scale public housing program that makes these groups’ lives better promises to give these crucial constituencies a reason to turn out to vote.

Lily Geismer is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College where she focuses on political and urban history. She is the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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Regions & Countries

Key facts about housing affordability in the u.s..

A “For Rent” sign is posted near a home in Houston in February 2022.

A rising share of Americans say the availability of affordable housing is a major problem in their local community. In October 2021, about half of Americans (49%) said this was a major problem where they live, up 10 percentage points from early 2018. In the same 2021 survey, 70% of Americans said young adults today have a harder time buying a home than their parents’ generation did.

A variety of factors have set the stage for the financial challenges American homeowners and renters have been facing in the housing market, including incomes that haven’t kept pace with housing cost increases and a housing construction slowdown . A surge in homebuying spurred by record low mortgage interest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic has further strained the availability of homes.

Here are some of the key measures of the housing affordability crunch in the United States and the reasons behind it.

This Pew Research Center analysis about housing affordability in America draws from Center surveys designed to understand Americans’ views and preferences for where they live. It also uses outside data from sources including the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Everyone who took the Pew Research Center surveys cited is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Rising demand for housing meets limited supply

A line graph showing that home inventory is down, home prices are up

As home sales have boomed, active housing listings have dropped and the median home sale price has surged, according to data from the Federal Reserve. The number of active housing listings in the U.S. was at its lowest in at least five years in January 2022, with 408,922 active listings on the market. That’s a 60% drop from about 1 million listings in February 2020, just before the coronavirus recession hit the U.S. Around the same time, the national median sale price for a single-family home jumped 25% from $327,100 in the fourth quarter of 2019 (the last full quarter unaffected by the COVID-19 recession) to $408,100 in the fourth quarter of 2021, the most recent data available. The greatest increases were in the West, Midwest and Northeast. Housing vacancy rates, meanwhile, have dropped over the last decade. The vacancy rate for rental units fell from about 10% in 2010 to 5.6% at the end of 2021. The rate for homeowner units is down from about 2.6% in 2010 to 0.9% in 2021 (the most recent year with available data).
Housing availability has been squeezed by a near-record increase in the number of American homeowners in 2020, a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data found. There were an estimated 2.1 million more homeowners in the fourth quarter of 2020 than there were a year earlier, equal to the previous record increase in homeowners, which occurred during the housing boom between 2003 and 2004. During 2020, the U.S. homeownership rate also increased to 65.8%, up from 65.1% a year earlier – a large year-over-year change, but still below the historical peak of 69.2% in 2004. The homeownership rate in the fourth quarter of 2021 (65.5%) was not statistically different from the rates in the fourth quarter of 2020 (65.8%) and the third quarter of 2021 (65.4%). Homeownership among households headed by White Americans rose an estimated 0.8 points from 2019 to 2020 – the only racial or ethnic group to see a statistically significant increase during that time. (Homeownership rates did not significantly increase for any racial or ethnic group between 2020 and 2021). In the fourth quarter of 2021, 74% of White adults owned a home, compared with 43% of Black Americans and 48% of Hispanic Americans. These disparities in homeownership have persisted over decades.

Renters are feeling the strain

A bar chart showing how much of their incomes American renters spent on housing costs in 2020

In 2020, 46% of American renters spent 30% or more of their income on housing, including 23% who spent at least 50% of their income this way, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau . This meets the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of being “cost burdened.” Although spending 30% of income on housing has long been considered the most a household should spend in order to have money left over for essentials, some researchers have argued this housing affordability measure should be adjusted to reflect changes in the cost of other necessities, types of households and other factors.

A line graph showing that the average U.S. rent has risen 18% over the last five years

Renters across the U.S. have seen the average rent rise 18% over the last five years, outpacing inflation, according to consumer price index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . Between 2017 and 2022, the cost of all goods and services increased by 16% due to inflation. During that span, the growth in rent prices exceeded inflation in every region but the Northeast: The average rent rose 21% in the West, 20% in the South and 18% in the Midwest. Rents were up 12% in the Northeast during that time. From February 2020 to February 2022, rents were up 6%, compared with a 10% inflation rate amid loosening coronavirus restrictions.
Renters tend to skew toward the lower ends of the economic scale when it comes to income and wealth , according to data from the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances . That year, about six-in-ten Americans in the lowest income quartile (61%) rented their homes, as did 88% of people with net worths below the 25th percentile. People with lower incomes or net worths were more likely to be renters: Only 10.5% of people in the top income quartile, for example, were renters. Younger Americans and those who are Black or Hispanic are more likely to be renters, according to an August 2021 Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. Roughly a third of U.S. households (35%) were headed by renters in 2021, the last year for which the U.S. Census Bureau has reliable estimates. Households headed by Black or African American adults are more likely than the population overall to rent their homes (57% rent), along with 52% of Hispanic- or Latino-led households. Around a quarter of households led by non-Hispanic White adults (26%) rent. Americans younger than 35 are far more likely to rent than those in older age groups: 62% of this age group lives in rentals compared with 39% of those ages 35 to 44, and 30% of 45- to 54-year-olds.
Looking ahead, Americans anticipate continued rent increases in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations . Americans expect that rents will increase by 10% this year – that’s larger than the expected increase in price for any other commodity, including food (9.2%), college education (9.0%) and gas (8.8%).

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The hardships and dreams of asian americans living in poverty, majority of americans prefer a community with big houses, even if local amenities are farther away, single women own more homes than single men in the u.s., but that edge is narrowing, young adults in the u.s. are less likely than those in most of europe to live in their parents’ home, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Strategies for increasing affordable housing amid the COVID-19 economic crisis

Subscribe to the brookings metro update, ingrid ellen , ingrid ellen paulette goddard professor of urban policy and planning, director for furman center for real estate and urban policy - new york university @furmancenternyu erin graves , erin graves senior policy analyst, policy advisor regional & community outreach - federal reserve bank of boston katherine o’regan , and katherine o’regan professor of public policy and planning; director of master of science in public policy program - new york university jenny schuetz jenny schuetz senior fellow - brookings metro @jenny_schuetz.

June 8, 2020

13 min read

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans lacked stable, affordable housing . Now, the crisis has highlighted the social and economic costs of this crucial gap in the safety net. People living in poor-quality, overcrowded, or unstable housing —or without any home at all—cannot follow public health directives to safely “shelter in place.” As a result, they are at far greater risk of contracting the virus , along with other chronic illness .

Many people in this population also face risks of instability. Housing costs are a major financial stressor for low-income households, who typically devote between a third and a half of their incomes to housing. Cost-burdened households are at risk of losing their homes to eviction or foreclosure, especially during economic downturns. These households are also unable to accumulate savings that could help them weather temporary income losses like so many have seen during the pandemic.

Stable, decent-quality, and affordable housing is also critical for communities and the overall economy. Housing instability can impede workers’ ability to secure and maintain employment. As the Great Recession showed, concentrations of foreclosed and vacant homes create negative spillovers across entire neighborhoods. The housing sector creates multiplier effects throughout the economy, so contractions in construction, upgrades, and sales can translate into reduced employment and consumer spending, deepening the recession. Financial pressure on low-income renters also harms small landlords , who are disproportionately people of color and account for a large share of unsubsidized affordable housing.

Local governments and nonprofit service providers are scrambling to put in place temporary measures to help those who lack stable housing, such as purchasing motels to shelter unhoused families, placing hand-washing stations in homeless encampments, and providing emergency rental assistance . This puts additional strain on the staff and budgets of local governments and nonprofits at a time when resources are especially scarce and long-term planning is hardest.

Future pandemics and natural disasters will put similar strains on housing systems. Once the current public health crisis has been contained, policymakers should make more serious efforts to reduce the number of households who lack affordable, stable, decent-quality housing, and focus on three goals:

Increase the amount of long-term affordable rental housing, especially in high-opportunity communities.
Protect existing affordable rental housing from physical deterioration and financial insecurity.
Support affordable housing projects currently in the pipeline that face financial obstacles due to the pandemic.

In this piece, we explain why each of these goals is critical to supporting affordable housing infrastructure across the U.S. We then explore strategies aimed at achieving the first goal, specifically through the acquisition of existing housing. Several policies used in recent decades offer lessons for the design of similar programs moving forward, providing both examples to emulate and pitfalls to avoid. Future work will explore policy models that support the second and third goals. Finally, we pose a series of policy design questions to help stakeholders tailor policies to local needs and capacities.

Protecting and expanding affordable housing

Successful housing interventions need to reflect local housing market conditions as well as the resources of local governments and other stakeholders. The importance of preserving existing affordable housing versus expanding the inventory will differ across communities, as will the feasibility of acquisition versus new construction. Policymakers need a toolkit of flexible strategies to draw upon to meet the three goals outlined above.

Goal #1: Increase the supply of long-term affordable rental housing

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, housing affordability and instability were serious problems. That’s especially true in high-cost coastal markets and high-opportunity neighborhoods everywhere. The immediate recovery period after the pandemic subsides may offer a rare opportunity: If housing asset prices drop (as widely anticipated), affordable housing providers could purchase existing low-cost units and add them to the stock of long-term affordable housing.

Some (but not all) of these properties may require rehabilitation and maintenance. A program to make this happen would require an initial subsidy allocation from the federal government, philanthropy, or both, in addition to low-cost loans (conveniently, at a time of very low interest rates). State and local governments are anticipating substantial revenue losses due to the economic crisis, so they will likely have limited ability to dedicate additional resources toward affordable housing. Targeting “high-opportunity” neighborhoods—communities with well-paying jobs, access to public transit, and good schools—may be of particular value. Successfully pursuing acquisition takes particular skills—staff capacity as well as resources—so this may not be a universally useful or successful strategy.

Goal #2: Preserve the physical and financial viability of existing affordable rental housing

The economic crisis may also accelerate the deterioration of the affordable housing stock or other elements with limited capital reserves and/or net operating income. Some affordable properties could also be lost if they are sold to market-rate investors who plan to raise rents.

To guard against this, policymakers should protect and preserve existing affordable housing from physical deterioration and financial instability. One strategy would be to offer grants or subsidized loans to current owners in exchange for accepting or extending existing affordability requirements. This may be particularly useful for smaller landlords, who in many markets are disproportionately Black and Latino or Hispanic.

Goal #3: Shore up affordable housing deals in the pipeline

The COVID-19 crisis also threatens the financial viability of housing deals—particularly subsidized housing projects—that are currently in the development pipeline but not yet completed. Shoring up future projects may not be as high a priority for some localities as protecting existing properties, but may be an area for partnerships with private capital sources.

How to expand affordable housing through acquisition

In recent decades, several local and national policies have been used to expand the affordable housing inventory through acquisition of existing buildings. Below, we discuss three local examples—one from King County, Wash., and two from New York City—as well as one federally funded national program.

The King County Housing Authority’s multifamily housing acquisition program

The King County Housing Authority (KCHA) has taken advantage of the flexibility granted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Moving to Work (MTW) program to pursue multifamily housing acquisitions in high-opportunity neighborhoods . MTW exempts participating public housing authorities from many existing public housing and housing choice voucher rules, and provides them with flexibility in how they use their federal funds.

In 2016, King County agreed to provide KCHA with access to the county’s triple-A credit rating to assist in developing or acquiring as many as 2,200 additional units over the next six years. By providing the housing authority with access to lines of credit from lenders, this financing support allows KCHA to act quickly when the opportunity arises to acquire a strategically located property. By securing additional units, KCHA can preserve long-term affordability and provide housing for Section 8 voucher holders in high-opportunity neighborhoods.

MTW’s flexibility has allowed King County to acquire mixed-income properties in high-opportunity areas through bond financing and other private financing tools . Since 2016, KCHA has acquired more than 1,500 units of housing along the region’s emerging mass transit corridors. The acquisition program is possible for two reasons : flexibility in spending federal money and strong credit ratings for both KCHA and King County.

New York City’s 10-year plan

Like many U.S. cities, New York City suffered substantial population losses during the 1970s. By the end of the decade, it had taken ownership of more than 100,000 vacant and occupied apartments as well as large tracts of vacant land through tax foreclosure. The city struggled to manage this vast stock of housing and land, and in 1985, Mayor Ed Koch announced an ambitious 10-year program , expanding it a few years later to commit $5.1 billion of city capital to create or preserve 252,000 housing units for low-, moderate-, and middle-income households. By 2000, the plan had created 66,000 new housing units through construction or gut rehabilitation of vacant properties, and the renovation of another 116,000 occupied units.

The 10-year plan comprised a wide range of programs which provided subsidies to both nonprofit and for-profit developers. Generally, the city transferred land or buildings to developers at little or no cost and also provided capital subsidies in the form of below-market interest rate loans. Research shows that this effort was successful in not only providing about 200,000 homes, but it also aided in revitalizing neighborhoods that had been devastated by abandonment and arson.

While the 10-year plan wasn’t technically an acquisition program, there are lessons to be gleaned. First, with control of land, the city was able to lock in affordability before markets later recovered. One can argue about whether the affordability restrictions lasted long enough, but the program clearly boosted the supply of affordable homes. Second, the struggles the city faced in managing this large housing stock raise a cautionary note, and underscore the importance of quickly transferring ownership to capable and responsible nonprofit and for-profit owners. Third, while the scale of this program cannot be replicated, there was clearly value in creating off-the-shelf programs that multiple developers could use. Fourth, the city aimed at revitalizing neighborhoods, and as such, clustered its property transfers on particular blocks, aiming to create housing that could serve a mix of low-, moderate-, and in some cases, middle-income households.

New York City Acquisition Fund

Launched in 2006, the New York City Acquisition Fund aimed to provide flexible funds to mission-driven developers to acquire and preserve affordable buildings which might otherwise be sold to speculative investors. The aim was to fill the need for flexible predevelopment loans that would allow affordable housing developers to act nimbly and buy available properties.

The Fund, which was started with initial seed capital from several philanthropic organizations, provides capital for acquisition and predevelopment costs more quickly than other government programs. Foundation and city funds take first losses, while private lenders provide additional capital. Each dollar the city has invested in the Fund has leveraged $7 additional private dollars . The Fund is managed through a revolving credit facility. Three community development financial institutions (CDFIs) serve as originating lenders, and an asset management fund manages the Fund.

Over its first 10 years, the Fund provided $336 million in financing to create over 10,000 affordable homes, with 75% reserved for low-income residents. As successful as the program has been, one limiting factor has been that the city has to negotiate and underwrite each deal separately. There could be substantial advantages to structuring subsidies as part of an as-of-right financing package with affordability restrictions that would not require project-by-project negotiations.

Neighborhood Stabilization Program

The federal government created the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) to mitigate the impact of concentrated foreclosures in low-income neighborhoods during the 2007-2009 housing crisis. HUD allocated nearly $7 billion over three rounds of funding to local and state governments and nonprofit organizations. Funds could be spent on various activities intended to reclaim and reutilize vacant properties; in practice, most grantees used NSP funds either to acquire and rehabilitate properties or demolish vacant structures. The program initially targeted single-family homes, which accounted for most foreclosures. However, grantees in strong real estate markets—including New York City, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C.—used NSP funding to acquire and rehab multifamily rental properties, adding them to the long-term affordable inventory.

The primary focus on acquiring existing properties, rather than new construction, makes NSP quite different from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and most other affordable housing programs. Acquisition offers two primary advantages over new construction, especially in high-cost housing markets. First, the per-unit cost of creating long-term affordable housing is much lower (even when properties require some rehab), which allows limited subsidy dollars to stretch farther. Second, in housing markets with highly restrictive local land use regulations , developing a new apartment building can take a decade or more . Acquiring existing buildings in relatively good physical condition can make affordable units available to low-income households much faster.

NSP grantees encountered some implementation difficulties that offer lessons for future programs. Most importantly, many organizations had limited prior experience in acquiring and rehabilitating vacant homes, while grantees with existing expertise were able to deploy resources more quickly and effectively. Some local governments had to work around institutional barriers such as procurement rules that hindered their ability to make strategic acquisitions .

The program’s rules also posed some challenges. The short timeline for committing funds (typical for stimulus spending programs) pushed some grantees to pursue acquisitions that did not meet their larger strategic goals. A requirement to purchase properties at discounted prices hindered grantees’ ability to compete with private investors.

One tension within the NSP was conflict among multiple goals. As part of the larger economic stimulus package, NSP grantees wanted program funding to support residential construction jobs through the rehabilitation work. But properties that needed extensive rehab had substantially higher per-unit costs, resulting in fewer units being acquired. The COVID-19 crisis is likely to create similar dilemmas for local organizations; developing a clear strategy and priorities early would help guide consistent actions later.

While NSP was explicitly meant to support hard-hit neighborhoods through geographically concentrated activity, distressed properties may be more dispersed in the current crisis. This suggests that the recovery period following COVID-19 could offer an unusual opportunity to increase the availability of affordable housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods—a different strategy than mitigating blight.

Tailoring policy toward local goals, resources, and market conditions

As policymakers develop strategies to address critical needs in their communities, there is a range of policy design questions that can help them tailor their programs.

What are the highest priorities for the community? Policymakers in high-cost markets may place greater weight on ensuring long-term affordability for properties in appreciating neighborhoods. Communities with an older housing stock will have more properties in poor physical condition that could otherwise become uninhabitable.
What kinds of entities should be eligible to participate? The ecosystem of affordable housing providers varies substantially across communities, including public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit firms. With appropriate affordability guidelines, any of these entities could be useful partners.
Are local governments prepared to be long-term owners and/or property managers, or is the goal to transfer ownership to non-public-sector owners (either nonprofit or for-profit)? With the exception of local housing authorities, most local governments have little experience with property management and limited staff capacity to take this on.
Are there opportunities to utilize alternative ownership models, such as community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives? These structures can secure long-term affordability and provide greater community voice.
How can public funds be structured to leverage philanthropic or private funds without adding unnecessary complexity? The New York City Acquisition Fund and the Washington Housing Conservancy offer two models for flexible investment vehicles.
How should long-term affordability provisions be designed and implemented? Without deep subsidies, it is difficult to make housing affordable to low-income households. Income-mixing at the project level can increase financial stability, while mixed-income neighborhoods offer residents greater economic opportunity.

Don’t let a crisis go to waste

The COVID-19 crisis has drawn widespread attention to the existing inequalities in American society, including disparate racial health impacts and the financial fragility of low-wage workers . As policymakers and voters become more aware of the social costs created by housing instability, there is an opportunity to address long-standing gaps in the safety net. Achieving meaningful reductions in housing insecurity will require more resources—and more thoughtful strategies—from public agencies, philanthropy , and private capital .

Thanks to Sarah Crump for excellent research assistance.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

Addressing the Housing Affordability Crisis as COVID-19’s Impact Continues

This post is the fourth in a six-part series titled “ The State of Economic Equity .” This series examines the challenges facing vulnerable workers this year and possible ways to improve their economic security and resiliency in an economy reshaped by the pandemic.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, low-wage workers have struggled to pay for housing. The pandemic exacerbated this existing rental affordability crisis, as job losses and reduced hours forced many households to fall back on savings, credit cards and loans from friends and family.

Widespread job losses in the early pandemic—the most severe experienced in postwar America—heightened the housing challenge for millions of renters, especially for low-income households (households with incomes below 50% of an area’s median income).

This point was highlighted in America’s Rental Housing 2022 (PDF) , a recent report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. In the third quarter of 2021, nearly a quarter of renters (23%) reported that they had experienced a loss of employment income in the previous four weeks, which led many to miss rental payments, according to the report. The impact of job losses and wage cuts hit low-income renters hard, with the report noting that:

23% of renter households with incomes under $25,000 fell behind on their rent payments.
15% of renter households with incomes between $25,000 and $49,999 were in arrears.

Cost-Burdened Renters

While wages have been stagnant, rents continue to rise, which is increasing the cost burden on families. Cost burdens are a direct outcome of a lack of adequate supply and availability of rental homes and low wages. A household is considered cost burdened when it spends more than 30% of its income on rent and utilities.

The cost-burden problem is particularly acute for households with extremely low incomes; that is, their incomes are at or below poverty level or 30% of the area’s median income, whichever is higher. The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s March 2021 report The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes (PDF) found that of 44 million renter households in the U.S., 10.8 million have extremely low incomes; of these 10.8 million households, 70% are severely cost burdened, spending more than half of their income on rent and utilities. The report also noted that 48% of extremely low-income renters are seniors or have a householder with a disability.

Low-income renters struggle to find decent affordable housing. In fact, for those making minimum wage, there is no place, as the coalition’s 2021 report Out of Reach (PDF) pointed out: “In no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home at fair market rent by working a standard 40-hour work week.”

Historical inequities in education and the labor markets continue to contribute to the lower earnings of households of color. In turn, these lower earnings widen racial and ethnic disparities in housing. The coalition’s The Gap report found that 54% of Black renter households are cost burdened, followed by 52% of Hispanic renter households; the rate for white renter households was much lower at 42%

Without an affordable place to live, low-income and severely housing cost-burdened renters may have to make trade-offs that threaten their health, safety, and well-being. The Gap report also noted that before the pandemic, extremely low-income renters faced a shortage of nearly 7 million affordable rental homes, which means there were only 37 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income households.

Long-Term Needs

The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the importance of housing stability for a household’s health and well-being. While a pandemic-related housing safety net including eviction moratoriums and emergency rental relief helped to keep millions of renters housed safely, these programs were temporary. Moreover, the country’s lack of a sufficient affordable housing supply persists. Public and private research and investments in new affordable housing and preserving public housing can help increase housing stability, decrease homelessness, help reverse the trend of longstanding inequities in the housing sector and remove barriers to safe and decent housing for all Americans.

Faith Weekly is a community development advisor for the St. Louis Fed's Louisville Zone. Read more about Faith's work .

States With Most Affordable Housing

Suburban wooden row houses and American flag in Brooklyn, New York City

But the largest hurdle to overcome continues to be the stigma and prejudice surrounding affordable housing and low-income housing tax credit projects. NIMBY-ism, or Not-In-My-Backyard bias, now spans race, wealth status and geography.

Simply put, whether you are poor or rich, you don't want "them" in your backyard.

In Dallas , for example, this conversation looms around the phrase "low-income housing tax credit," which refers to a federal affordable housing program administered via state and local officials. In other neighborhoods, it's perhaps just "affordable housing" that lights the trigger. But this is a national conversation.

In New York , investments in needed rent subsidies and tenant protections did not occur prior to the coronavirus pandemic , leaving housing providers with few solutions in the midst of an economic crisis.

In California , proposed state legislation calls for zoning changes allowing increased housing density, reductions in environmental regulatory hurdles, and the use of bond funding for affordable housing, with the hope of clearing prior roadblocks given today's economic climate.

In Chicago , Mayor Lori Lightfoot is attempting to change the city's affordable housing ordinance and address a 116,000-unit shortage by creating more family units and increasing the required share of affordable units developers must create as part of projects in certain neighborhoods.

Dallas' challenges became most evident in a recent lively debate among City Council members and constituents within and outside of a community that would be the proposed site of a low-income housing tax credit-funded development with mixed-income units. The Lake Highlands area itself is perceived as more affluent, yet has more naturally occurring affordable housing – meaning it has residential rental properties that are affordable and are not income-restricted or subsidized by government programs.

A central tenet of the debate: Those in other communities support spreading such projects across the city, while existing neighborhood residents said they felt overwhelmed by poorer residents already. Yet whether they be an elected official, longtime resident or social media troll, many people are drawing conclusions based on an incomplete understanding of what it takes to truly address the increasing need for housing affordability.

As the managing partner and founder of Innovan Neighborhoods in Dallas, I believe the nuances of the terminology surrounding these issues need clarification, which could help build consensus and form agreement on needed housing projects. The low-income housing tax credit, for example, is a financial tool that provides additional capital to fill in the gap and make a project affordable for new tenants. The type of housing, range of unit affordability (meaning the mix between market and restricted units in a project) and location of the housing all can vary.

Similarly, "workforce housing" encompasses housing that meets a need for residents with a range of incomes, yet provides clarity about who is living there – specifically, people who are working. But this is also slightly redundant: Unless someone is living in transitional housing for those temporarily experiencing homelessness, residents in affordable housing developments are spending some percentage of their income on this type of housing, and that income is often earned.

" Attainable housing " is a slightly more inclusive term that can help expand the conversation about housing needs to encompass moderate-income households. But it has yet to be commonly used.

Overall, truly addressing the need for housing affordability means creating housing that is affordable at many levels of income, because everyone deserves affordable housing options. Though an imperfect measure , affordability is based on not spending approximately 30% or more of your income on housing costs. By that rule, a person making $250,000, for example, shouldn't be spending upwards of $75,000 a year ($6,250 per month) on housing costs. The same is true for a person making $75,000, who shouldn't be spending $22,500 or more a year (or $1,875 per month).

To be sure, the policy discussion about affordable housing can remain as is, centering around a term and phrase that everyone understands and can immediately grasp.

Yet language is also a form of advocacy, and presents an opportunity to educate about the need to bring safe, quality and affordable housing to all communities. By changing our language, we can broaden the conversation to include the need to increase financial resources for the renter, landlord and developer – all while looking to preserve and create housing that helps grow and sustain our economy.

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Tags: housing , housing market , inequality , Coronavirus

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FACT SHEET: Biden- ⁠ Harris Administration Announces Immediate Steps to Increase Affordable Housing Supply

Immediate Steps Supplement the Biden-Harris Administration’s Push for Historic, Long-Term Investments in New Housing as Part of the Build Back Better Agenda

Since President Biden took office, the economy has created more than 4 million jobs, with an average of more than 830,000 new jobs over the last three months. In the first half of the year, the economy grew at the fastest rate seen in nearly 40 years.

This economic progress has enabled millions of American homeowners and renters to get back on track. In the second quarter of 2021, the mortgage delinquency rate on single-family mortgages fell to below 5.5 percent – from a pandemic high of more than 8 percent. The percentage of renter households behind on rent has also fallen from 19.4 percent to 15.4 since the beginning of this year.

While the Administration continues to do everything in its power to stabilize families who are at risk of losing their homes because of the economic impact of the pandemic, we still have more work to do. President Biden and Vice President Harris believe we need to do more than build back to the way things were before. We need to build back better.

While Congress works toward passing the Build Back Better Agenda, which includes an historic investment in building new homes and making existing housing safer, healthier, and more energy efficient, the President knows that we can’t wait to take action. The large and long-standing gap between the supply and demand of affordable homes for both renters and homeowners makes it harder for families to buy their first home and drives up the cost of rent. Higher housing costs also crowd out other investments families can and should make to improve their lives, such as investments in education.

As supply constraints have intensified, large investors have stepped up their real estate purchases, including of single-family homes in urban and suburban areas. One out of every six homes purchased in the second quarter of 2021 was acquired by investors, and reports indicate that in some markets, that number is one in four. Within investor purchases, typically more than 35 percent of purchases are made by investors that own more than ten properties. Large investor purchases of single-family homes and conversion into rental properties speeds the transition of neighborhoods from homeownership to rental and drives up home prices for lower cost homes, making it harder for aspiring first-time and first-generation home buyers, among others, to buy a home. At the same, these purchases are unlikely to meaningfully boost supply in the lower-cost portions of the rental market, as investors charge more for rent to recoup higher purchase costs.

President Biden is committed to using every tool available in government to produce more affordable housing supply as quickly as possible, and to make supply available to families in need of affordable, quality housing – rather than to large investors. That’s why today the Administration is announcing a number of steps that will create, preserve, and sell to homeowners and non-profits nearly 100,000 additional affordable homes for homeowners and renters over the next three years, with an emphasis on the lower and middle segments of the market.

Specifically, federal agencies will:

Boost the supply of quality, affordable rental units by relaunching the partnership between the Department of Treasury’s (Treasury) Federal Financing Bank and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Risk Sharing Program in order to enable eligible state housing finance agencies (HFAs) to provide low-cost capital for affordable housing development; raising Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s (the Enterprises) equity cap for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the largest federal program for the construction and rehabilitation of affordable rental housing; and making more funding available to Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) and non-profit housing groups for affordable housing production under the Capital Magnet Fund.
Boost the supply of manufactured housing and 2-4 unit properties by expanding financing through Freddie Mac. Along with Fannie Mae’s and the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) existing policies, these steps will enable more Americans to purchase homes, and increase the availability of rental units throughout the country.
Make more single-family homes available to individuals, families, and non-profit organizations – rather than large investors – by prioritizing homeownership and limiting the sale to large investors of certain FHA-insured and HUD-owned properties, in addition to expanding and creating exclusivity periods in which only governmental entities, owner occupants, and qualified non-profit organizations are able to bid on certain FHA-insured and government-owned properties.
Work with state and local governments to boost housing supply by leveraging existing federal funds to spur local action, exploring federal levers to help states and local governments reduce exclusionary zoning, and launching learning and listening sessions with local leaders.

Boosting the Supply of Quality, Affordable Rental Units Even before the pandemic, 11 million families – or nearly a quarter of renters – paid more than half of their income on rent. President Biden believes this is unacceptable. Rent should be affordable for working families. That’s why the President’s Build Back Better Agenda calls for the historic investments that will enable the construction and rehabilitation of more than a million affordable housing units, reducing the burden of rent on American families. From the expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) to major investments in the HOME Investment Partnerships program, the Housing Trust Fund, and the Capital Magnet Fund, the Build Back Better Agenda will make it easier for more Americans to find quality, affordable places to live.

But even before Congress passes the Build Back Better Agenda, agencies across the federal government are taking action to boost the supply of quality, affordable homes in a manner that will make rental homes more available and more affordable over the next three years. Specifically, agencies are announcing today that they are:

Relaunching the Federal Financing Bank and HUD Risk Sharing Program : To expand the supply of affordable multifamily rental housing, Treasury and HUD have finalized an agreement to restart the Federal Financing Bank’s support of HUD’s Risk Sharing program, which was suspended in 2019. The agreement will provide low-cost Ginnie Mae-comparable rates to HFAs that finance affordable housing development, enabling the development of new quality and affordable housing.
Increasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Investment Cap: LIHTC is the nation’s largest federal program for the construction and rehabilitation of affordable rental housing. Currently, the Enterprises are permitted to invest up to $1 billion per year (or $500 million each) in affordable housing development and preservation supported by these tax credits. This targeted investment further reduces financing costs associated with affordable housing and spurs additional development. Today, FHFA is announcing that it is raising the Enterprises’ LIHTC cap to $1.7 billion (or $850 million each). FHFA is also announcing that it will increase the Duty to Serve (DTS) rural/targeted investment requirement from 40% to 50% of each Enterprise’s total LIHTC investment capacity, or $425 million in targeted investment and $425 million in unrestricted investment. By both raising the caps and targeting the investments at affordable rental housing, today’s actions will support the development and preservation of affordable units in areas most in need.
Making Funding Available for Affordable Housing Production Under the Capital Magnet Fund: The Treasury Department is preparing to issue a notice of funding availability for the Capital Magnet Fund (CMF), including changes to strongly encourage affordable housing production. The CMF is a competitive grant program for Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and non-profit housing groups funded by allocations made each year from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Funds must be used to leverage housing and economic development investments at least ten times the size of the award amount. This year’s historic pool of $383 million in available funding will facilitate the production of affordable housing units throughout the country.

Boosting the Supply of Manufactured Homes and 2-4 Unit Properties Across the country, hundreds of thousands of families rely on manufactured housing and 2-4 unit properties to afford homeownership. Manufactured housing is constructed in factories and installed on site without the additional costs associated with traditional homebuilding, providing a vital affordable housing option. Owner-occupied 2-4-unit properties, where the owner occupies one of the units and rents the other units, are another source of additional rental housing, particularly in low-to-moderate income communities and communities of color. Limited financing for manufactured housing and 2-4-unit properties—as well as other barriers—have restricted access to these alternatives.

Today, the Administration is calling on state and local governments to reduce zoning and financing barriers to these kinds of housing – housing that allows families to achieve homeownership and build wealth. In addition, federal agencies are taking the following steps to increase financing options and boost availability, supply, and affordability for these types of properties:

Making Financing More Available for Manufactured Housing: In 2020, FHFA authorized Fannie Mae to accept loan delivery on single-wide manufactured housing. An eligible single-wide, or single-section manufactured housing unit, is a factory-built rectangular structure placed on a permanent foundation and equivalent in quality and amenities to entry level stick-built housing. FHFA recently authorized Freddie Mac to accept eligible single-wide manufactured housing loan deliveries as well, which will make more financing available for such properties and facilitate the delivery of more manufactured homes. The Enterprises will continue performing industry-wide outreach and education about the eligibility of manufactured housing, modular, and factory-built homes. FHA also insures mortgages for single-wide manufactured homes that meet its programmatic requirements.
Making Financing More Available for 2-4 Unit Properties: FHFA has authorized Freddie Mac to revisit certain mortgage eligibility requirements for 2-4 unit properties made in 2020 that reduced financing available by Freddie Mac for these kinds of properties, which are disproportionately held by Black and Brown homeowners. The updates to the 2-4 unit mortgage eligibility requirements will add to the availability of rental units in these properties. They will also provide additional wealth-building opportunities for new owners of 2-4 unit properties who benefit from the rental income associated with these units. FHA also insures mortgages for 2-4 unit properties that meet its programmatic requirements.

Making More Single-Family Homes Available to Individuals, Families, and Non-Profits Organizations – Rather Than Large Investors The effect of investor purchases is felt across the country, even in smaller and less expensive cities where the influx of investor cash has resulted in fierce competition for starter homes and pushed many qualified potential homebuyers towards rentals. As the economy continues to recover, it is critical that owner occupants and non-profit organizations are not priced out of single-family housing markets by large investors.

That’s why President Biden calls on state and local governments to take steps to make it easier for owner occupants and non-profit organizations to purchase single-family homes, rather than large investors. It’s also why today, federal agencies are taking steps to encourage the owner occupant and non-profit purchase of government-insured and government-owned properties. When combined with the new federal tax credit that President Biden has proposed, based on the innovative, bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, these actions will lead to the rehabilitation of more distressed properties, and boost homeownership and wealth-building possibilities for more middle-class families throughout the country. Specifically, federal agencies are announcing today that they are:

Prioritizing Homeownership in the Sale of FHA-Insured Properties : Through Second Chance Claims Without Conveyance of Title (CWCOT) sales, servicers can sell their FHA-insured foreclosed properties directly to third parties – without conveying them to HUD – and still get their claim paid by FHA. These sales are a part of the CWCOT claim method, which is now the predominant way that FHA-insured foreclosed properties are sold. This sales method reduces costs for taxpayers but too often, properties are sold to large investors, who either flip them for profit or rent them out. Owner occupants and non-profits, who are more likely to need financing and are less aware of the CWCOT program, often don’t have a fair shot to purchase these properties. Consistent with the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, HUD will develop guidelines over the next year that provides an exclusive listing period during which only governmental entities, non-profits, and owner occupant buyers may submit bids for these properties in the Second Chance sales. In addition, and also within a year, HUD is exploring setting a target of at least 50 percent of these properties each year being conveyed to governmental entities, non-profits, and owner occupant buyers.
Promoting the Sale of Distressed HUD Properties to Non-Profits: The direct sale of defaulted FHA-insured mortgage notes allows HUD to make bulk sales to purchasers with affordable housing and community revitalization goals in specific geographic areas. HUD is planning a sale of distressed single family notes this fall. This upcoming sale is currently projected to include mortgage notes for more than 1,700 single family properties. For this sale, HUD is exploring offering 50% of those notes to non-profit and community organizations that commit to rehabilitating, and then selling, the related properties to owner occupants or creating other positive outcomes for the communities. This is a significant increase over previous sales, which had offered 10% of all auctioned notes to non-profit and community organizations. Earmarking half of these properties exclusively for resale to owner occupying borrowers, non-profits, and community organizations will expand the housing inventory available to potential homebuyers who otherwise would not have the opportunity to place a competitive offer on these homes.
Expanding the Exclusivity Period for HUD and the Enterprise’s Real Estate Owned (REO) Sales: Currently, HUD and the Enterprises have a total of more than 12,000 single-family homes as part of their respective Real Estate Owned (REO) inventory. These homes were backed by FHA-insured mortgages, or Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac mortgages, and have since been foreclosed upon and were not sold at auction. Just like with the CWCOT program, larger investors, often experienced and without the need for financing, can execute transactions quickly. As a result, potential owner occupants don’t get a fair shot at purchasing the properties. In order to help more potential owner occupants purchase these properties, FHA, in addition to the Enterprises at the direction of FHFA, will extend their existing “first look” periods to 30 days for the sale of all available REO properties. Currently, these “first look” periods generally range from 10-20 days. During the “first look” periods, only potential owner occupants and qualified non-profit buyers will be permitted to make a purchase offer.
Improving Outreach to Non-Profits for Real Estate Owned Sales: HUD will announce efforts to expand outreach to non-profit entities, local governments, and other interested community organizations to further educate them on the note sales process for distressed properties. This will include a virtual note sales educational seminar around HUD’s upcoming fall single family note sale. The Enterprises will continue to advance existing partnerships they have in place with non-profits focused on owner occupancy and neighborhood stabilization to complement the retail disposition of their REO properties.

Working with State and Local Governments to Boost Housing Supply While the federal government has a critical role to play in boosting the supply of affordable homes, state and local governments often play the primary role in setting policies that encourage – or in some cases, discourage – boosting housing supply. One of the most persistent factors depressing the supply of housing, especially entry-level and rental units, is exclusionary zoning laws and practices, like minimum lot size requirements, minimum square footage requirements, unnecessary parking requirements, prohibitions on or differing treatment for multi-family homes, accessory dwelling units, and manufactured housing, and limits on the height of buildings.

That’s why today, in addition to the zoning reform incentives included in the Build Back Better Agenda, the Administration is calling on state and local governments to take action to address zoning policies that have historically locked families out of communities and continue to limit housing supply.

In order to partner with state and local governments in this critical work, the Administration today is announcing the following actions:

Leveraging Federal Funding to Spur State and Local Action : To support state and local governments that receive flexible HUD block grant funding, HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development will create a Housing Supply Toolkit that provides easy-to-implement strategies to deploy existing block grants and other resources to address supply and affordability challenges that have been deepened by the pandemic. In addition, HUD will form and support a cohort of communities working to address supply issues, helping accelerate their efforts to find solutions. In addition, the Interim Final Rule governing the American Rescue Plan’s $350 billion State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds explicitly allows recipients (states, territories, Tribal governments, and localities, including cities and counties) to invest these funds in development and preservation of affordable housing, as part of the response to the public health emergency and its disparate impacts on certain populations and geographies. Already, at least 42 cities and 33 states have publicly proposed deploying resources on affordable housing investments of some type. Treasury will continue to engage with mayors, governors, and county executives to highlight this use, and encourage additional affordable housing production targeted to the households and communities struggling the most.
Exploring Federal Levers to Partner with States and Local Governments to Reduce Exclusionary Zoning: FHFA is announcing that it will conduct a study on the degree to which the Enterprises’ mortgage activity is concentrated in jurisdictions with exclusionary policies. The report will provide data on the demographic characteristics of homeowners whose loans are purchased by the Enterprises and the overall effect of these purchases in allowing localities to sustain restrictive zoning measures or helping to support localities enacting inclusionary zoning policies.

In addition, and in anticipation of the Build Back Better Agenda’s community engagement and investment grants that will empower communities to reach collective decisions on how to meet their housing needs, next week HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research will release its latest research on actions that state and local governments have taken to increase housing supply, providing useful examples for others to follow. Lessons learned will be incorporated into HUD’s Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse, a searchable electronic database that contains over 4,800 barriers and solutions spanning all 50 states and over 460 cities and counties. Launching Learning and Listening Sessions with Local Leaders : The persistent imbalances in the U.S. housing market have formed over many decades and it will take concerted effort and iterative policymaking to correct them. To this end, the White House, HUD, and FHFA will convene state and local officials and stakeholders for a series of peer learning and listening sessions. These sessions will allow for the exchange of best practices on locally led zoning reform to address supply and affordability challenges, including a virtual session on accessory dwelling units hosted by FHFA in September. The sessions will also identify the obstacles to implementation that remain, which the President’s Build Back Better Agenda and potentially federal administrative action, can help address.

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'Housing the Nation': New book dissects America's affordable housing crisis

A pr. 3—STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — America's "housing crisis" has become a familiar term over the past decade, as millions of families struggle to find an affordable space to live. But just how well-known are the crisis' root causes and devastating effects? And more importantly, what are the potential solutions?

A new book aims to answer these questions, exploring topics like economic policy, income inequality, gentrification and more.

"Just as there was no single cause of the crisis, there is no single cure," noted a press release detailing "Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing."

The book, which was edited by Alexander Gorlin and Victoria Newhouse — an architectural historian who has written several books on the study of structural design — features a series of essays penned by economists, scholars, architects, planners and community organizers. Each discusses the history and extent of the U.S. housing crisis and suggests various strategies to rectify it.

In order to better understand the book's topic and scope, the Advance/ SILive.com asked the authors to break down some of the content. Here's what they had to say:

Let's get to the basics. What is affordable housing?

"As of December 2022, more than 40% of the U.S. population was considered rent burdened, that is, spending more than 30% of income on rent," noted Newhouse, co-editor of Housing the Nation. "Rents have doubled and tripled in cities such as Miami and Nashville, areas that until recently have been affordable places to live. Homelessness, the most dire result of the affordability crisis, has become more prevalent in many cities, such as Austin and Portland, Oregon. This disruption to the housing market gives rise to social dislocation, pain, and economic instability in people who cannot afford to live reasonably close to their jobs.

"Simply put, there is not enough affordable housing either existing, under construction, or planned for the future, and what is under construction is not built fast enough to make a dent in the enormous demand. The insufficiency of affordable housing, combined with long-standing income inequality coinciding with race, means that this wealthy country, built on principles of equality and fundamental rights, has become unjust and dysfunctional. A nation that denies fair housing to its people, especially its people of color, is on the road to a breakdown. This calamitous state of affairs was our catalyst for creation of this book."

Are New York City's public housing developments considered affordable housing?

"Yes, NYC public housing is considered a form of affordable housing," noted Gorlin, the book's co-editor. "Public housing in New York City is managed by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and it provides housing for low- and moderate-income residents at rents they can afford up to 30% of their income. Affordable housing encompasses a range of housing options, including public housing, rent-subsidized housing, and other programs that offer low-cost rental or purchase options to individuals and families with limited income."

Rent control, which helps create affordable housing, seems universally despised by landlords. Is there any validity to their complaints?

"Of course, developers are not going to like rent control," said Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University's Heller School, who contributed a chapter to the book. "Landlords hate it by definition alone, because they know they can make more money without it. [But] in New York we don't have old fashioned rent control, we have rent stabilization, which does allow for an increase. I think it's actually a pretty good balance between what landlords and tenants need. In a city filled with mostly renters where a good portion of the stock has turned into condos and so much new construction is insanely luxe, rent control keeps at least some housing affordable. And it certainly has stopped developers from making a ton of money."

We know there is not enough affordable housing in NYC. The governor proposed building 800,000 affordable units across the state last year, but the state legislature did not agree. Was 800,000 a realistic goal?

"First, bear in mind that only 400,000 new units proposed by the State are new, the remainder being renovation of existing units," said book contributor David Burney who serves as academic director of the Urban Placemaking and Management program at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture.

"The short answer is yes, we could build 400,000 units over the five-year period, IF all the conditions the State calls for are met. But the goal is certainly aspirational rather than real, and the failure of the State to enact the legislation is an indication of some of the challenges.

"Even at its peak period of production, the New York City Housing Authority built no more than around 20,000 units per year, and that was at a time when direct federal funding was provided and the land was made readily available. I would estimate that 400,000 units of housing would cost around $120 billion (including land cost and soft costs), so the $5.7 billion over five years proposed from State funding would certainly have to be supplemented by private, federal, or other sources.

"If they are to be affordable to the residents in the parts of the State where they are proposed, significant subsidy would be required. It is not clear if the increase in Low Income Tax Credit and other forms of subsidy would materialize the level needed. Then there is the political problem of the required changes in zoning, which are often resisted by the communities in which they are proposed. Even in the best case, litigation could extend the program well beyond the five-year goal.

"So, I would say that the odds are weighed rather heavily against the State plan, certainly with the five-year timeframe proposed.

"On the other hand, credit should be given for the State's ambition. The housing crisis is such that it requires the type of initiative that we seldom see outside of wartime. To me, the housing crisis needs a wartime mentality. The corrosive effects of housing insecurity on society are significant and lasting. And in the end, more costly than doing nothing to address the crisis."

Post-pandemic, there is said to be a significant amount of vacant office space in NYC. Do you see creating affordable apartments in that space a realistic solution, or at least part of a solution?

"It is difficult to transform office space into residential space. Among other problems, not all office buildings have the windows required by city regulations for residential to ensure light and air, and they do not have the toilet availability needed for residential," Newhouse said. "Despite these problems, a number of older office buildings in NYC's financial area have been successfully turned into residential. So yes, this could be part of a solution."

A New York tax incentive program — it was called 421a — that encouraged developers to build affordable housing through tax breaks, expired in 2022. Some said it was a money giveaway to developers. Was it? Is that kind of incentive needed to encourage developers to build?

"421a was a program to help lower the operating costs of buildings that included affordable units (through property tax exemptions) so that the rents on those affordable units could be set lower," said Jon McMillan, senior vice president and director of planning at real estate development firm TF Cornerstone in New York City. "The requirements and rules of the program always need to be adjusted to ensure that the value of the tax exemption is more or less equal to the public 'benefit' of the affordable units.

Since 421a expired, have we seen a decrease in affordable housing projects in NYC?

"The construction of rental housing has completely halted in New York City for projects that do not have 421a exemption," McMillan continued. "Developers can't build rental housing (even with no affordable units) without the tax exemption. This is because un-exempted real estate taxes are so high on rental buildings (double the rate on condominiums) that even fully market rate buildings can't afford these taxes."

The book covers how conditions are approached on different sides of the United States. Is Los Angeles handling affordable housing differently than NYC?

"The approach in Los Angeles to building affordable housing has historically been quite different from that of New York City — although you could argue that policies in the two cities of late, have grown more similar," said Christopher Hawthorne, senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and lecturer in English, Yale College.

"New York has a strong history of public housing, in the form of the New York City Housing Authority, which at its peak housed more than a half of million residents," Hawthorne continued. "Though NYCHA has had and continues to have its shortcomings, for decades it has provided a significant backstop in terms of housing affordability. Los Angeles never developed this kind of public-housing infrastructure, in part because the city's 20th-century political elites—starting with the Chandler family, owners of the Los Angeles Times—opposed it aggressively and consistently. They even recruited and helped elect a Republican mayor in 1953, Norris Paulson, specifically because he could be relied on to oppose what those elites saw as the creeping socialism of the city's housing policies.

"In terms of addressing homelessness, strategies in the two cities have similarly diverged. New York City since the early 1980s has been subject to the Calahan Consent Decree, which requires New York to build enough shelter beds each year to house its unsheltered population. Los Angeles has no such obligation.

"In recent years, though, the affordable-housing politics of the two cities have grown more similar. The affordable-housing system in New York has shown increasing strains, calling into question how much longer the city can accurately describe itself as one that supports truly public housing. In L.A., meanwhile, a growing minority of progressive City Council members, frustrated by the limitations of an approach that prioritizes philanthropic and private-sector financing, or policies that try to spur market development of new housing in lieu of the city paying for it directly, have begun to push for a more muscular public role."

"Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing" is available for purchase on Amazon.

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Op-ed: A radical solution to make US affordable housing healthy and community-driven

“the way we as a nation approach affordable housing should begin with centering the people in the homes.”.

Oregon winters are not for the faint of heart.

The sound of droplets hitting concrete goes on for months. I see many of the same unhoused people riding public transit all day. In the morning, one direction, and in the evening, the opposite – still in the same seat where I saw them hours earlier.

They sit out of the way, quiet. People around them pull cords, press buttons. All the while, they’re sleeping, existing, surviving. Sometimes, I find myself projecting my busy day onto them, often joking with some of them,“damn, you still here?!” But once the brief laughter subsides, I see them as the humans they are and understand: it’s warm and safe here. For some, the winter holidays are not about family and friends. Rather, it’s hours, days and months of survival.

Whenever I think of the unhoused people in Oregon and the rest of the country, I reflect that they are half a million in number , and are emblematic of a broken affordable housing system. A history driven by discrimination and racism, bloated state housing institutions and a lack of understanding of what equitable housing looks like has shaped the inhospitable landscape of affordable housing in the U.S. The most marginalized are pitted against each other fighting for shelter in underfunded, unhealthy and dilapidated developments with the promise of a better future. A solution may exist, but America will need to look outside itself and ask the deeper questions: who builds affordable homes, how they are built, where they are placed, and what is their end goal? And answering them will require a radical solution.

Manufacturing the affordable housing crisis

A NYC housing protest in 2016.

Credit: Informed Images/flickr

To understand how we got to this bleak landscape, we need to examine the history of affordable housing in the U.S. The first affordable housing efforts came in 1937, when the federal government created the United Housing Act, which greenlit loans to public housing groups that were focused on low-rent housing construction. World War II railroaded early public housing developments in cities due to the need for immediate single-family veteran housing. The 1940s saw an influx of affluent suburban residents who had the financial flexibility to move out of the city. This diffusion of people quickly became more than just the relocation of peoples, but ultimately the redistribution of wealth, race and adequate housing.

This essay is also available in Spanish

At the end of the 1940s segregationist policies took root. Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949, which aimed at developing affordable housing in cities . But things didn’t go as planned. Mostly Black Americans moved into the low-income housing , staunchly different from the white-picket-fence homes of white people in suburbia. Black Americans found themselves round up like cattle with few choices to improve their housing situation – they could only move to similarly crumbling neighborhoods.

In 1973, President Nixon placed an 18-month moratorium on public housing spending. This decision prevented progress of urban affordable projects, effectively stopping development projects, which led to the proliferation of what we know today as the derogatory phrase “housing projects.” When no longer supported federally, various states soon followed Nixon’s steps; city communities soon faltered, trapping low-income Black Americans in decaying, underfunded buildings.

Many Black Americans in low-income urban housing developments had mounting housing needs — such as building maintenance and toxic material removal.

And to see how this still manifests today, look no further than the largest housing authority in the U.S.

Bloated state institutions

James Weldon Johnson Houses in East Harlem, NYC.

Credit: Zach Korb/flickr

Disinvestment affects even the largest public housing authority in the U.S., the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). NYCHA serves just more than half a million residents , yet the U.S. and New York state have steadily moved away from funding NYCHA since 1998, according to the agency’s 2022 fact sheet. The result is more than $40 billion – yes with a “b” – in major pending damages and only about 12,500 NYCHA employees supporting residents and maintaining the backlog of pending repairs.

The systemic disinvestment in the NYCHA prevents residents from prioritizing healthier materials for their homes. Moving away from toxic materials — such as lead-based paint and moldy building interiors — is mired in construction bureaucracy. Residents’ only option is often renovating their homes when NYCHA is planning to renovate a large number of apartments, “often as part of an even larger upgrade that includes building systems nearing the ends of their useful lives,” according to NYCHA’s most recent design guidelines. This means residents have no reassurance to timely upgrades to improve their health and well-being. Whether it’s mold, lead paint or rat infestations, affordable housing residents continue to get piecemeal solutions to unhealthy — sometimes toxic — problems in their homes.

To be clear: the people who make up the various state housing institutions are not solely to blame – it’s a system problem. A system that, among other unreasonable behaviors, encourages NYCHA superintendents to falsely record fixes. Continuing to operate in a system that does not have the consistent state or federal backing is a waste of time.

The situation is so dire that a solution might seem impossible. A part of me even feels disillusioned. I’m stubborn, though, and I searched for examples of possible solutions in Europe. I realized I might have found the radical solution I was looking for.

A radical affordable housing solution

In the 1980s, the city of Vienna, Austria, collaborated with private housing developers by buying land and enabling the housing developers to build on this government-owned property. Fast-forward, Vienna populated the nearly 200,000 units in its social housing market with primarily low-income residents. Opting to move away from owning residential developments (like what we see in the United States), Vienna is pushing that ownership to private developers, who have the financial muscle to repair, maintain and upgrade buildings.

Privatization does not mean that developers act with impunity. Vienna evaluates proposals based on architectural quality, environmental performance, social sustainability and cost. Additionally, private developers who choose to collaborate with the Viennese government must rent half of the new apartments to low-income residents (low income in Vienna is defined as paying no more than 20% to 25% of their household income for housing) in exchange for low-interest loans. Unlike the U.S., where affordable housing developments are stigmatized as “public housing,” Vienna uses the term “social housing,” which centers people and their community irrespective of how much money they make. The developments never become “that place where only poor people live.”

A great example: Vienna’s 12th district, Kabelwerk . Comprising about 1,000 or so subsidized residential units, the Kabelwerk community also has a local metro station and various communal shops – amenities that are a direct result in the country's investment in social housing communities, not away from them. Kabelwerk’s residential units also serve as an indirect intersection between various groups of people including homeowners, renters, refugees, students and individuals who may require assisted living. The intersection of these groups is designed to get people together of various backgrounds, dismantling barriers, in lieu of erecting them. Austria’s approach to social housing is a great example of how systematic investment into affordable housing contributes to positive living conditions for low-income residents.

As American state-led agencies like NYCHA and others look for answers within the same decrepit system, the need for a completely revamped affordable housing system becomes painfully evident. The way we as a nation approach affordable housing should begin with centering the people in the homes, staying away from social stigmas and empowering decision-makers to build healthy communities. We need projects that are completed, and are maintained during their lifespan.

A strong person, home or community begins with its foundation. It’s time to rebuild ours.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

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A New York Housing Deal Could Be Close. What’s Holding It Up?

The deal could clear the way for the construction of new homes and make it more difficult for landlords to evict renters, if lawmakers in Albany can find a compromise.

Protesters wearing orange vests march in front of an office building.

By Mihir Zaveri and Grace Ashford

Everyone — landlords, tenants, builders and their various allies — seems to agree that a deal is desperately needed to address the worsening housing crisis in New York State.

What is holding it up?

There are three main factions fighting over a few key priorities, including tough new restrictions on evictions and significant tax breaks for developers. The groups are still at odds but appear to be moving closer as the urgency to pass something passed rises, ahead of a spring break in April.

“We feel we’re in the homestretch,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in an interview on Thursday.

But Ms. Hochul, who tried and failed to enact a housing plan last year, said that negotiations remained delicate, like a game of Jenga: “If we pull out one block, it may keep the building or it may collapse the building.”

“Few will walk away and say they’re thrilled,” she added. “My objective is to say we’re getting housing built.”

An eviction clause that could slow rent increases

The left wing of the Democratic Party, which has influence in the State Senate, is aggressively pushing a “good cause eviction” bill that would limits landlords’ abilities to remove renters from their properties and is effectively a deterrent to sharp rent increases.

The measure would also ensure that any tenants of a property subject to the law are offered automatic renewal leases. Which properties would those be? That’s still up for debate.

New York City’s landlord lobby — which has been backed by Ms. Hochul in some instances — opposes good cause. But it also wants to make a deal on new tax breaks so that landlords can build rental housing and still make a profit.

A tax break to spur more building

Many landlords say that because of high taxes , rising insurance rates and other expenses, constructing new buildings often doesn’t make financial sense.

Their lobby is also pushing to allow landlords to increase rents in some rent-stabilized apartments, to allow for upgrades between tenants. Landlords say they are keeping many units vacant because the low rents don’t allow them to cover the cost of repairs.

Labor unions who represent construction workers and other trades are also in the mix, fighting for better wages tied to any new tax break. And advocates for low-income renters want to ensure that any tax break will come with a mandate for developers to build affordable housing.

Will it work?

The affordability crisis has been especially acute in the city, and both Ms. Hochul and the administration of Mayor Eric Adams are trying to push a package through that includes some or all of those elements.

Taken together, the measures could address many of the major components of the housing crisis.

A new tax break would help spur the construction of new apartments to plug the state’s housing shortage, which is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of homes. Development has slowed considerably since the last tax break, known as 421a, expired in 2022 .

And the good cause eviction measure could provide a feeling of stability for low-income renters, particularly as the rate of evictions is rising again and the availability of new apartments is effectively zero . The bill would restrict a landlord’s ability to evict a tenant for not paying rent if that rent has been increased beyond a certain threshold.

A package could also include other consequential measures. One would remove density limits on new housing in Manhattan. Another would provide developers with incentives to convert vacant offices to apartments.

Another priority for upstate lawmakers would help renters in cities like Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester avoid eviction if they are struggling to pay rent. Their proposal would expand an existing program, known colloquially as the “one shot deal,” to allow renters to more easily access a government subsidy that is widely used downstate to cover back rent.

Will it pass?

It did not always seem likely that state leaders would act. They failed to find a compromise last year and many Democrats worried that it would be politically unwise to make big moves ahead of this year’s elections.

Earlier in the week, Carl E. Heastie, the speaker of the Assembly, described the delicate deal-making process, and the way that a lack of agreement in one area could stall talks more broadly.

“It’s more complicated than to say, ‘That’s the one thing that’s holding up,’” Mr. Heastie said. While landlords and tenants are often seen as the main adversaries, lawmakers including Mr. Heastie have said a fight between landlords and workers over wages has also been a big sticking point.

He added: “It’s like a circle of dominoes, they all kind of affect each other.”

Gary LaBarbera, the president of the New York State Building and Construction Trades Council, which is negotiating pieces of the housing package, declined to comment through a spokeswoman on Thursday.

Jim Whelan, the president of the city’s landlord lobby, the Real Estate Board of New York, said Thursday that the group was “focused on advancing policies that create much more rental housing and help maintain the city’s housing stock.”

Cea Weaver, the campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All, which lobbies on behalf of tenants, said she was “really concerned with what REBNY is pushing on rent-stabilization rollbacks in exchange for good cause.”

“It’s a total no go for many in the Legislature and reads as trying to blow the whole deal up,” she said.

Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times. More about Mihir Zaveri

Grace Ashford covers New York government and politics for The Times. More about Grace Ashford

Politics in the New York Region

A Jail Project: The demolition of a Manhattan jail complex in Chinatown to make way for a bigger one has damaged a neighboring building and raised concerns about years of dust and disruption.

Adultery as Crime: An antiquated but seldom-enforced state law categorizes adultery as a crime, and past efforts to repeal it have gone nowhere . But that seems poised to change.

Limiting Social Media’s Hold: New York’s governor and attorney general joined forces to pass a law trying to restrict social media companies’ ability to use algorithms to shape content for children. Big Tech is putting up a battle with a high-stakes lobbying effort.

Targeting Trans Athletes: A proposed ban on transgender women playing on women’s sports teams has turned a Long Island county into the latest battleground for conservatives who have put cultural issues at the center of a nationwide political strategy.

Illegal Donations: A Chinese business titan pleaded guilty to federal charges that he made more than $10,000 in straw donor contributions to political candidates — including, a person familiar with the case said, to a New York congressman and Mayor Eric Adams.

A Cannabis Mess: Gov. Kathy Hochul has ordered officials to come up with a fix for the way New York licenses cannabis businesses amid widespread frustration over the plodding pace of the state’s legal cannabis rollout.

San Diego's housing crisis: How we got here, where we're going

A sign advertises a one bedroom apartment for rent in front of a building in Golden Hill. Jan. 27, 2021.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a suite of bills last month that are aimed at alleviating the state's affordable housing crisis.

Among the bills that became laws was Senate Bill 9, or SB9, which eliminates traditional single-family zoning and allows lot owners to build duplexes and subdivide single-family lots. It remains to be seen how much the new legislation will affect housing availability and affordability in San Diego County.

As local house prices remain at near-historic highs, homeownership remains out of reach for many San Diegans. In this latest special, KPBS Midday Edition takes a deeper look into how San Diego got to this point with housing, and how recent changes may impact local housing into the future.

How we got here

Longtime San Diego journalist Roger Showley said today's housing crisis is nothing new and is a recurring part of San Diego's history.

"(At) many points in our history, we had too many people and too few houses, skyrocketing prices, lots of speculation," he said. "So there's nothing new under the sun."

He said San Diego County was designed around its freeways.

Showley also said the single-family home's dominance in San Diego goes back centuries.

"From 1769 until the present, single-family homes have been the go-to kind of housing type in San Diego," he said. "We were never a tenement type of a city like New York City."

How we got here: Discriminatory practices

Another important piece of San Diego's history when it comes to housing is its history of discriminatory housing practices.

KPBS' Racial Justice and Social Equity Reporter Christina Kim explained how racial covenants, redlining, and other housing laws have been used to exclude non-white San Diegans from living in certain areas of the city, or from homeownership altogether.

Racial covenants are legal documents that detail who can and cannot live on a piece of land.

" One study that I found showed that from a sample of deeds from 1910 through 1950, every single one of these deeds had a racially restrictive covenant," she said.

Kim also brought to light the connection between Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final visit to San Diego and California's housing policies in the 1960s.

Where we are now: Wages not keeping up with housing prices

Home prices have risen exponentially faster than wages in San Diego County.

Economist and University of San Diego associate professor Ryan Ratcliff said this disparity threatens to price out many San Diegans.

As is the case in many lucrative housing markets, high demand and low supply of available properties has driven up median home prices far past what might be considered affordable for middle- to lower-income earners.

This has caused some to rethink how viable living and working in San Diego is and will be for the foreseeable future. For others, it has made the goal of homeownership seem like an unobtainable goal.

Where we are now

San Diego could be on track to build 10,000 new homes this year, the biggest increase in 15 years. But even that burst of construction would not solve our ongoing housing crisis, nor substantially decrease the cost of new homes.

Most of the new construction is on multifamily units, condos and apartments. That’s in keeping with San Diego’s climate-action goal to increase density and decrease reliance on automobiles. The construction of single-family homes is lagging behind, causing some real estate experts to predict the cost of those homes will continue to skyrocket.

KPBS metro reporter Andrew Bowen discussed the efforts to address the area's housing crisis.

10 ways cities are tackling the global affordable housing crisis

Sydney Harbor. Photo by Dan Freeman on Unsplash.

Sydney is one of many cities around the globe struggling with the issue of affordable housing.

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Stay up to date:, cities and urbanization.

The unprecedented rate of urbanization across the world has led to increased demand for good, affordable housing. A recent survey revealed that of 200 cities polled around the globe, 90% were considered unaffordable when applying the widely-used standard of average house prices being more than three-times median income.

Affordability is not just about the ability to buy or rent a home, but also about being able to afford to live in it. This definition of affordability goes beyond meeting expenses related to operations and maintenance, taking into consideration transport, infrastructure and services. If a home is economical enough to buy and maintain but located too far from work or school, it cannot be said to be affordable.

The factors contributing to a lack of affordability vary from city-to-city, but broadly include housing costs rising faster than incomes, the supply of houses not keeping up with demand, scarcity of land, and demographic changes such as population growth, ageing and shifts in household composition.

To understand the challenge more holistically, the World Economic Forum on 6 June launched a new report, Making Affordable Housing a Reality for Cities . It provides a comprehensive overview of affordable housing challenges across the housing value chain. The report identifies factors that affect housing affordability beyond the direct costs of purchase and maintenance – including location, housing type, access to social infrastructure, the legal and regulatory environment and the state of financial markets.

The report recommends a systematic approach to addressing the affordable housing crisis, while highlighting how a range of cities are finding solutions. Here are ten ways that cities around the world are addressing the housing challenge:

1. Land Acquisition: Tradeable Land Quotas – Chengdu and Chongqing

In China, local governments have limited authority to expropriate rural land for new housing. Chongqing and Chengdu are experimenting with “tradable land quotas”, through which developers are permitted to construct new housing on the periphery of a city in return for opening up additional land for cultivation beyond city boundaries.

2. Land Use: Communities Plus Program – Sydney, New South Wales

The state government of New South Wales , Australia, is partnering with the private sector and non-governmental and community housing groups to develop or renovate 23,000 social housing units in neighborhoods that need renewal, along with 500 affordable- and 40,000 private dwellings. Proceeds are re-invested in social housing, community facilities and public space. Housing assistance is linked to participation in education, training or local employment. 3. Repurposing Vacant Property: Motel Conversion Ordinance – Los Angeles

Los Angeles recently passed a law allowing motels to be converted into “permanent supportive housing” for the homeless, regardless of current zoning requirements. This is typically quicker and cheaper than new construction, as it involves only adding small kitchens to the motel rooms.

4. Financing: Urban Wealth Fund – Hamburg and Copenhagen

Hamburg and Copenhagen have improved housing supply by pooling publicly owned assets into an “Urban Wealth Fund” that partners with the private sector to deliver projects. Sharing risks and benefits aligns the interests of these stakeholders and can streamline infrastructure development, planning and land-use regulations.

Have you read?

Six steps that can help us to tackle homelessness, this is the critical number that shows when housing breaks down, how finland is tackling homelessness.

5. Construction Productivity: Mayor’s Construction Academy – London

Shortages in construction skills can drive up labour costs and, in turn, housing construction costs. London has established the Mayor’s Construction Academy to accredit training providers, strengthen coordination between training providers and construction employers, and provide funding to upgrade training equipment and premises – making the city’s skills training more useful to the construction industry, and more attractive for young people.

6. Design: Green Roof Initiative – Denver

Denver’s “Green Roof initiative” requires buildings taller than 25,000 square feet to have green roofs or solar panels – including affordable housing projects. While upfront costs will increase, lower-income communities should benefit in the long term from lower levels of air- and water pollution, as well as cheaper energy bills.

7.Construction Material: Glass Fibre Reinforced Gypsum – India

After a decade of research, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras has proposed a building system using Glass Fibre Reinforced Gypsum (GFRG) panels – low-cost, prefabricated panels made using gypsum waste from fertilizer plants – using minimal concrete and steel, and no bricks. The Indian government has approved standards for structures of up to 10 storeys high. Thermal resistance reduces the need for air conditioning. GFRG has been dubbed a green material by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change.

8. Eligibility: Criteria for Social Housing – Dupnitsa, Bulgaria

Dupnitsa, Bulgaria , constructed 150 social housing units with eligibility restricted to those who own no property and earn an income under a specified limit. Applicants were ranked based on their employment status, education level, age and number of children.

9. Tenure Systems: Multiple tenures for housing – Bristol, UK

Bristol, UK, is constructing 161 homes on a former primary school site with six different types of tenure. A housing association, community investment company and private investor have worked together to create this model, in which some houses will be sold at market price and others made available through tenures, including shared-ownership and rent-to-buy. The scheme is aimed at vital workers who are being priced out of the city.

10. Home ownership: Melbourne Apartment Project – Melbourne, Australia

The Melbourne Apartment Project - The Barnett Model Development in North Melbourne is a privately-funded development supported by the University of Melbourne, Melbourne City Mission, Resilient Melbourne and the City of Melbourne. As part of the scheme, six of 34 apartments are being sold at market rate to subsidize the sale of the other 28 to social housing tenants through a “deferred second mortgage” model that reduces the necessary deposit and repayments. A similar project in Toronto, “Options for Homes”, has delivered over 6,000 affordable homes in 20 years.

Addressing the housing affordability challenge requires systematic changes. City governments must streamline their regulatory landscapes and enable transparent land acquisition, emphasize property rights over title, develop a rental regulatory framework to protect tenants as well as landlords, encourage mixed-income and mixed-use housing developments, enable more innovative financing models in developing new homes or upgrading existing homes and encourage skill-building in the construction industry.

The private sector must embrace innovative mechanisms to finance development and help establish the creditworthiness of those looking to improve their housing situation. Employers need to work with communities to provide affordable housing for employees, or help with housing costs through loans, subsidies or mortgage deals. Private developers need to invest in sustainable design concepts to create energy-efficient housing, and improve productivity by mainstreaming 3D Printing, prefabricating components, and using alternative materials and advanced automated equipment.

The non-profit sector also has a key role to play in working with housing providers to implement alternative tenure models, while supporting advocacy efforts, formulating policy and providing technical support, information and know-how to developers and homeowners.

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License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The East End still needs more housing that is affordable

A rendering of Concern Housing’s Liberty Garden’s community in Southampton. Credit: Concern Housing

You might think mindless NIMBYism would be declining in the face of the well-documented housing shortage crisis. Young people have become refugees from Long Island’s East End — not because they want to, but because they must find a community that has places they can afford to live. Many schools are seeing a reduction in students. East End businesses are starving for staff and finding it harder to maintain profitability without raising prices, resulting in more inflation. East End food pantries are still busy because after paying rent, gas, heating, and other necessities, there’s not enough left over for food.

Interest rates are up more than 100% since 2019, home prices have risen 30-to-50%, and year-round rental prices spiked as much as 200%. Local residents make up most of our human infrastructure jobs on the East End: teachers, firefighters, EMTs, hospital and health care workers, town and village employees, farmers, fishers, artists, and those who work in the tourism industry.

Those who have been priced out and want to keep their jobs here have created a trade parade, bringing traffic that clogs our major east/west arteries from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. While $5-million, 5,000-square-foot homes continue to pop up like daisies, workforce apartments remain illegal to build. We know how to create sustainable, environmentally sound, attractive multifamily properties, from duplexes and fourplexes to 16 and 32-apartment developments.

Now that the Community Housing Fund, passed by referendum in November 2022, is starting to collect funds in Southold, Shelter Island, East Hampton, and Southampton towns, advisory boards and town boards are searching for effective ways to use the money. But the stubborn issue of restrictive, single-family-only zoning and a loud and vocal minority of opponents continue to be obstacles to many of the best solutions.

This guest essay reflects the views of Michael Daly, founder of East End YIMBY.

As I’ve heard at local meetings for years, local developers and business people are eager to create workforce housing to attract and maintain staff, but the time and money required to overcome the zoning blockade are simply too great. So development is the province of deeper-pocketed developers.

From our Editorial Board, get inside the local, city and state political scenes.

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Consider Concern Housing's Liberty Gardens on County Road 39 in Southampton, now six years into the permitting process for a proposed workforce and veteran-supportive housing development. One of the most highly respected affordable and supportive housing nonprofits in New York has incurred expenses of over $2 million, hardly a price tag a local developer could afford. The proposal has been reduced from 60 to 50 apartments, environmental review is complete, and still opponents are on fire. Things that have been said at public meetings are astounding. The false narrative, race and class-baiting, fearmongering, and lies are shocking.

In 1988, Congress passed the Fair Housing Amendments Act to prohibit discriminatory housing practices based on disability and familial status.

Economically, morally, ethically, and legally, how can anyone not support these apartments? This “east of the canal” development is within walking distance of local businesses and public transportation and likely will reduce traffic because workers will now live closer to their jobs and not be part of the trade parade.

Officials in villages, towns, counties, and many states are figuring out that the loud and vocal minority is just that. Studies on Long Island and nationwide consistently show that 60-75% of community members see the need for more housing and support zoning changes to accomplish that. Most Southampton Town residents are counting on our town board to recognize that, too, so Concern Housing can move forward with the construction of Liberty Gardens.

This guest essay reflects the views of Michael Daly, founder of East End YIMBY.

23 The Affordable Housing Crisis: In Amherst and America

Christmaelle Vernet

Click to listen to this essay

In the essay “The Affordable Housing Crisis: In Amherst and America,” Christmaelle Vernet works with an array of sources to draw our attention to the crisis of housing that exists in the United States. Vernet provides important historical context before skillfully localizing this national issue to focus on current circumstances in Amherst and the UMass community. Vernet closes with a reminder of how the American dream of homeownership has become less attainable, calling on UMass to work toward a solution.

ENGLWRIT 112: College Writing

Day Month Year

The Affordable Housing Crisis: In Amherst and America

Earlier this month, it was announced that the town of Amherst will be funding a 27 million dollar affordable housing project in East Amherst. According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, two sites in East Amherst’s center, as well as a vacated school building, will be turned into 70 apartment-style affordable housing areas. The apartments will be located near Amherst Center, which allows for easier access to bus routes as stated by Springfield News & Weather. The new construction project may seem minuscule but in actuality is a part of a large-scale issue: the lack of affordable housing in America. Apparent in cities and towns across the nation, many have begun referring to the undersupply as an affordable housing crisis. Many Amherst residents and fellow students view this issue as removed from their day-to-day life but in actuality, Amherst is one of many towns experiencing a housing crisis.

It is no surprise to anyone that America is undergoing a massive deprivation of affordable housing for its citizens. The shortage of affordable housing has become even more of an issue over the years with the costs of housing rising significantly during the pandemic. Harvard Researchers at the Joint Center for Housing Studies reported that in 2016, more than half of renters were cost-burdened. Being cost-burdened can be defined as dedicating 30% or more of your income to affording housing. Spending nearly half your income on rent can lead to issues such as not being able to afford necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care among other needs.

The housing crisis mostly affects young first-time homeowners as well as people of color. As reported by Janneke Ratcliffe in a CNN op-ed, the US requires anywhere between 3.8 to 5.5 million housing units. Ratcliffe, who writes for CNN ’s Business Perspectives, mentions the issue of housing has been around since as early as the Great Recession when homeownership rates faced a consequential drop, leaving many to wonder what has caused the housing crisis in the first place. One of the main factors is that many Americans simply cannot afford the cost of housing in many areas of the United States. In Vox ’s “ How the US made affordable homes illegal”, reporter Jerusalem Demsas details the skyrocketing prices of affordable housing in cities like Washington DC and San Francisco. Millennials are now the largest generational group in all of American history and according to Vox , many are aging into their “prime homeownership years”. Despite mortgage rates beginning at a historically low rate, there is not enough supply to meet that demand. Between the years 2010 and 2019 there were fewer homes built than in any other decade since the 1960s (Demsas). Housing costs will continue to rise year after year.

This issue is as prevalent in Amherst, Massachusetts as it is nationwide. Residents are often forced to compete with UMass students who are in search of places to live off-campus. In particular, UMass’s housing selection recently concluded days earlier than usual due to the high demand for on-campus living next semester. Every single on-campus housing spot was filled, leaving some students no choice but to look into off-campus housing which is already a scarcity in Amherst and its surrounding towns. The East Amherst project is a small fix to a long-term and widespread problem.

In UMass’ very own on-campus publication, The Daily Collegian , stories on university housing scarcity have been published several times throughout the year. In “Students are worried about the on-campus housing crisis,” student reporters Gonzalez and Caprioritti describe how UMass simply does not have enough housing to be able to accommodate its large student population and as a result, there are shortages in available dorms, and the available ones need maintenance. They report: “The difference between the incoming class of 2012 and the incoming class of 2021 showcases a total increase of 6,338 new students.” This begs the question: Where do these students live? The campus’ housing issues are causing a ripple effect where people attempting to move to Amherst and staff who have to work in the area are encountering severe difficulties finding housing in the region.

The uptick in housing costs is apparent all over the Commonwealth. According to The Patriot Ledger , in Massachusetts alone, the median cost for a single-family home in the Bay State has grown by 17% between the years 2020 and 2021. According to Boston Indicators , despite Massachusetts being one of the most wealthy states in the country, it has a poverty rate higher than 24 other states. Wealth disparities are most evident in places like Boston where the average white family living in the city has a median net worth of over 200k while black families have a net worth of just 8 dollars according to The Boston Globe . Housing issues are more prevalent in the suburbs of Boston, where evictions and foreclosure rates are high in cities like Lowell and Lawrence ( Boston Real Estate Times ).

Once a staple of American economic success, homeownership has become less attainable for many Americans. There are many steps we can take to end the housing crisis but there is no easy solution. Everyone should have the option of buying or renting a home. It is a human right to have shelter but with the rising costs, it has become more of a luxury. As a member of the Amherst community, it is imperative that UMass takes action to resolve the housing crisis, not only on campus but in the town we call home.

Works Cited

Andrews, Jeff, et al. “Affordable housing crisis: Why are US cities struggling?” Curbed , 2 March 2020, https://archive.curbed.com/2019/5/15/18617763/affordable-housing-policy-rent-real-esta te-apartment. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Capriotti, Olivia, and Ariana Gonzalez. “Students are worried about the on-campus housing crisis.” Massachusetts Daily Collegian , 21 April 2022, https://dailycollegian.com/2022/04/students-are-worried-about-the-on-campus-housing-c risis/. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Carr, Aubree. “Amherst brings affordable housing to Belchertown Road.” WWLP , 22 March 2022, https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/hampshire-county/amherst-brings-affordable-h ousing-to-belchertown-road/. Accessed 27 March 2022.

Cowperthwaite, Wheeler. “Massachusetts housing crisis born from decades-long urban flight.” The Patriot Ledger , 9 August 2021, https://www.patriotledger.com/story/news/2021/08/09/massachusetts-housing-crisis-born -decades-long-urban-flight/5459486001/. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Harvard Researchers at Joint Center of Housing Studies. How Many Americans are Cost burdened? Archive Curved.

Johnson, Akilah. “That was no typo: The median net worth of black Bostonians really is $8.” The Boston Globe , 11 December 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/11/that-was-typo-the-median-net-worth-bl ack-bostonians-really/ze5kxC1jJelx24M3pugFFN/story.html. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Merzbach, Scott. “East Gables housing project in Amherst set to break ground in March.” Gazette Net , 18 March 2022, https://www.gazettenet.com/Projects-at-two-sites-to-bring-up-to-70-affordable-apartmen ts-to-AAmherst-45552893.

Ratcliffe, Janneke. “How we can solve the nation’s affordable housing crisis.” CNN , 16 February 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/16/perspectives/affordable-housing-crisis/index.html. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Schuster, Luc, and Peter Ciurczak. “Poverty in Massachusetts Higher Than 24 Other States.” Boston Indicators , 11 September 2019, https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2019/september/supplementary-poverty- measure. Accessed 27 April 2022.

Wallau, Ruby. “How bad is the housing crisis in Massachusetts?” Boston Real Estate Times , 31 July 2019, https://bostonrealestatetimes.com/how-bad-is-the-housing-crisis-in-massachusetts/. Accessed 27 April 2022.

UMass Amherst Writing Program Student Writing Anthology by Christmaelle Vernet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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As homeless crisis grows, states and cities are turning to voters for affordable housing

As the country's homeless crisis worsens , cities and states are trying to build more affordable housing to prevent their residents from ending up on the streets or in shelters.

But more money is needed to turn construction plans into a reality − and in many cases residents must approve tax revenue increases to foot the bill.

This month, voters in Chicago and California were given the choice: Raise taxes to fund housing and homeless services? Or keep things status quo?

Results were mixed. California's Proposition 1 , which would provide more mental health services for people experiencing homelessness passed by razor-thin margins after weeks of ballot counting. In Chicago, ballot question 1, dubbed Bring Chicago Home, which would have raised taxes on the sales of million-dollar real estate, failed with 52% voting against it.

State lawmakers in Iowa and New Hampshire also are debating legislation that would allow more real estate transfer tax revenues to fund affordable housing. Last year, Delaware passed a law to put more transfer taxes toward affordable housing funds in three counties, and New York did the same for part of Long Island in 2021. Similar efforts in recent years failed in Colorado, Illinois and Maine, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

More elected officials throughout the country are running on promises to reduce homelessness. But the problem is growing even as leaders try to solve it. Last year, the U.S. homeless population reached a high of more than 650,000 , according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, and housing experts warn rent increases and evictions will push more people into homelessness until cities build cheaper housing. When funding for affordable housing fails to get approved, the time frame for reducing homelessness gets pushed further, advocates warn.

But cities face an uphill battle passing new funding measures to support brand-new housing initiatives, especially when voters are invested in keeping real estate taxes flat.

In Chicago, one of the main groups opposing the Bring Chicago Home campaign said raising taxes could also raise housing costs, hurting homeowners and renters alike.

"Tax increases hurt affordability, they are actually drivers of housing instability," said Jeff Baker, CEO of Illinois Realtors.

Bring Chicago Home fails to pass after years of organizing

After first launching in 2018, the Bring Chicago Home measure failed to pass last week, leaving longtime grassroots homeless advocates disappointed and frustrated with the results.

"The number of people experiencing homelessness grows every year, it is a matter of life and death," said Hannah Gelder, the organizing director for ONE Northside in Chicago, a social justice group on the referendum's steering committee.

Gelder said advocates for the homeless in years past fought at the state level to increase taxes to fund affordable housing, but state lawmakers said they didn't want to consider legislation on the issue. That meant Chicago, where homeless people number more than 60,000, had to go directly to voters in this year's election.

Bring Chicago Home would have increased the real estate transfer tax to 2% for properties sold for $1 million or more, while lowering them for more than 92% of buyers purchasing property worth less than $1 million, according to the proposed policy . The plan would have raised about $900 million for new construction over 10 years, the campaign said. Proponents first started organizing around the cause back when Rahm Emanuel was mayor.

"It was an uphill battle to persuade voters to vote on a tax referendum," Gelder said.

Illinois Realtors, a real estate lobbying group, said it had $1 million to spend on its opposition campaign, which argued the new sales tax would hurt Chicago's residential, commercial and rental real estate markets.

"This proposal was actually going to hurt the ability of the city to address homelessness," Baker said.

But, the Bring Chicago Home campaign said their proposed tax would not hurt renters, citing recent studies from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago that found landlords wanting to maintain their return on investment for multifamily buildings worth more than $1 million could do so by raising monthly rents by less than $5.

While grassroots homeless advocates were on the ground talking to their neighbors about Bring Chicago Home and trying to "win hearts and minds," Gelder said, ads led some voters to believe the new tax would be like writing the city government a "blank check."

"It played to voters' distrust of government," Gelder said.

Baker told USA TODAY he agreed cities across the U.S. need to increase their supply of below market rental units. But, he said zoning restrictions and costly development requirements make "building these homes way too expensive" for real estate owners.

To make the case for the funding, some experts point to growing evidence showing paying for affordable housing saves money long-term because having a large homeless population is costly for cities, said Sarah Gillespie, a housing researcher at the Urban Institute focusing on city budgets.

"It is a choice. You may choose to pay for housing, and if you don't, then you're choosing to pay for arrests, jail stays and emergency department visits," she said.

FLORIDA: State bans homeless people from camping in public spaces

California Prop 1 barely passes

California is home to nearly a third of the country's unhoused population, and data released last year shows the vast majority of unhoused people there said they had a period in their lifetime when they experienced a serious mental health condition. About 27% of California's more than 170,000 homeless residents have been hospitalized for a mental health condition before, according to the report from Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.

California's Proposition 1 scraped by with barely more than 50% of the vote in a heavily Democratic state.

Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed hard for the measure, which will fund thousands more mental health and substance use treatment slots and housing units.

"Now it's time to get to work − repairing the damage caused by decades of broken promises and neglect to those suffering from severe mental illness," Newsom wrote on X, formerly Twitter, celebrating the election results.

Proposition 1 authorizes the state to shift $6.38 million in bonds against county mental health budgets, redirecting most of the money toward new affordable housing.

The money would be borrowed against income taxes already imposed on people who earn over $1 million annually.

Individual cities in California, and elsewhere in the West , have voted by wider margins to raise taxes to fund homeless services, like last year, when Seattle renewed its housing levy for another seven years.

Seattle voters support property taxes for affordable housing

In the Seattle region, another area on the West Coast struggling with a large homeless population, a majority of voters have for years approved a levy on property taxes to fund affordable housing.

In an off-year election, 69% of Seattle voters in 2023 approved a housing tax that will fund the creation of more than 3,100 affordable rentals and homes for purchase, and rental assistance to prevent evictions for an estimated 9,000 low-income families, according to the city .

Homeless advocates in Seattle see more support from voters because the housing tax has been in place for decades, and residents have seen positive results, said Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute in Seattle. Affordable housing complexes are spread evenly throughout the city, and "you can't tell that it's low-income," she said.

"They look market rate, they're well maintained and there isn't a stigma," Lee said.

It could be harder to rally voters to approve increased funding for similar projects in America's older cities, where the phrase "affordable housing" calls to mind "buildings that are falling apart or vacant," she said.

Atlanta mayor, City Council approve millions of dollars for affordable housing

Instead of turning to voters, last year the Atlanta City Council was able to approve hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing, through a bond spread out over the better part of a decade.

The city, which grew by 66,000 residents from April 2022 to April 2023, also is benefitting from more property tax revenue without having to raise or pass new measures, the mayor's office said.

Philanthropic groups also worked with the city to allocate millions as part of the plan.

There's still broad public support for it less than a year later, said Joshua Humphries, policy advisor to Atlanta's mayor. Atlanta residents saw firsthand that the bond was working in a matter of months, he said. In 2023, 14 stalled affordable housing projects − representing 1,238 affordable units − got off the ground because of the money .

In 2023, Atlanta had an unhoused population of 2,679 , according to that year's annual count.

The funds will continue to be used for more new construction, as well as preserving existing housing and developing underutilized public land, Humphries said.

"Affordable housing is the most pressing public policy issue in the country right now, and every city is going to have to grapple with the question of how do they want to be part of making sure that their city has adequate housing stock," he said. "You need to have the political will and financial investment."

Contributing: Terry Collins, USA TODAY; Kathryn Palmer, Desert Sun

There is a solution to N.J.’s affordable housing crisis. This new law isn’t it | Opinion

Updated: Mar. 28, 2024, 11:47 a.m. |
Published: Mar. 28, 2024, 7:00 a.m.

Star-Ledger Guest Columnist

By Robert H. Conley

One of the greatest challenges facing New Jersey is housing affordability -- homes for frontline workers, laborers, starting teachers, and many others who we count on.

For at least five years, mayors, including myself, have been asking the state Legislature to take action to remove the process from the courts. The good news is that they proposed legislation to replace the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH), but the bad news is that a seriously flawed bill ( S50/A4 ) signed last week by Gov. Murphy was crafted without significant municipal input.

As the Mayor of Madison and the incoming President of the NJ Conference of Mayors, I serve one of the few small towns in the state with a housing authority. We cut the ribbon on our first affordable housing units when Mt. Laurel was only a suburban town, and not a judicial doctrine. We have always approached affordable housing as a moral obligation -- not a legal one -- yet this legislation has me very worried.

New Jersey, with its 564 municipalities, doesn’t make it easy to do anything, and affordable housing is no exception. To be successful, we need a program that considers regional needs while meeting the diverse makeup of each community, certainly a major undertaking. No professional would ever suggest that it makes sense to create plans in areas as small as two square miles (or even smaller), but that is exactly what we have to do in the home rule capital of the world.

During the time that COAH was functioning, there were “bad actors,” municipalities that did everything possible to avoid doing their fair share. But for the most part, towns stepped up and met their obligation. In the post-COAH years -- spanning almost a decade -- towns across the state collectively spent millions of dollars in legal and court fees defending their housing plans. Those were millions that didn’t build a single affordable housing unit. Reinstatement of COAH or alternate legislative action was necessary.

There is no doubt that we need a structure to address the housing challenge and a system that works. But let’s be clear, it will be the 564 municipalities that will answer the need for housing, and it will be the 564 municipalities that will feel the impact if we get it wrong.

There is no doubt that it is the municipalities, not the state, that will bear the cost in direct dollars and impact. It was the state that appropriated $16 million for the NJ Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency (NJHMFA) and our Department of Community Affairs for implementation, but not a penny for municipalities. This unfunded mandate will result in property tax increases throughout the state for years to come.

Worse, the law signed last week makes it difficult to correct mistakes after implementation.

Only after it is in place – after the money is spent, the aquifer recharge land lost, the infrastructure pushed beyond capacity, and the poorly planned developments are permanent – will we recognize that there was a better way to provide affordable housing.

One of the issues of this bill is that it moved too fast. Amendments marginally improved the original bill, but we need a full analysis of its impact on our municipalities.

In that light, we should also be asking the question: Why is the only way to solve the housing crisis through “ build baby, build” ?

There aren’t enough financial resources to meet the full need through 100% affordable projects, and the most densely populated state in the US cannot fill that need by building four market-rate units to get one affordable unit.

Moments ago, @GovMurphy signed monumental affordable housing legislation into law! This new law ensures that New Jersey will have one of the strongest affordable housing frameworks in the US. Learn more in our press release: https://t.co/Bxrpjh9GAq pic.twitter.com/UTM9JaIGWl — Fair Share Housing Center (@FairShareNJ) March 20, 2024

There are other creative solutions that should be considered. For example: recognizing towns whose housing stock is affordable (yes, they do exist), or giving credits for communities who have strong rental voucher (section 8) programs.

It is the involvement of partners -- such as the state, nonprofit affordable housing advocates, and yes, developers -- that will have a supporting role in answering the call for affordable housing. But it will be the commitment from the municipalities that will actually turn that need into quality homes. When there is development, there must be affordable housing, but forced overdevelopment and poor planning practices is no way to answer this crisis.

I have seen mayors on both sides of the aisle united in their messaging. There is a universal understanding that we cannot turn our back on the need for affordable housing. But as the saying goes, if you’re not at the table, you’ll be on the menu. Let’s get the municipalities to the table.

If we are to be successful, we need to work together on better solutions. I ask that we take the time to get this right.

Let’s bring the municipalities and legislators together to review the impact of the bill at the local level. We can then propose new legislation to improve S50/A4. There are families across this state waiting for affordable, quality homes and there are 9 million residents expecting us to be good stewards of our great state.

Robert H. Conley has been Mayor of Madison since 2012.

Municipal leaders in one of New Jersey’s richest towns are personally risking severe sanctions for pulling out of a plan to build dozens of affordable-housing rental units — just as the state tries to ramp up development. https://t.co/2vHv7autyq — WNYC 🎙 (@WNYC) March 24, 2024

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Illustration of a standalone house and a various sizes of apartment blocks

Living with density: will Australia’s housing crisis finally change the way its cities work?

Experts agree medium – and high-density development in established suburbs is an essential part of making housing more affordable. But the opposition from existing home owners is fierce

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For many Australians it must seem as though the housing crisis cannot get any worse.

Rents have skyrocketed with record low vacancy rates, while assistance to lower-income families is being wound back , young people face often insurmountable obstacles to buying a property and some who have obtained a mortgage are struggling to stay above water after repeated interest rate rises.

But there is likely more bad news to come, thanks to long-term lifestyle trends set in train by the pandemic and the inability of the construction sector to meet the demand of a huge national infrastructure build.

What can be done to ease the crisis?

Experts point to a range of measures, but there is broad agreement that significantly increasing medium-density housing in existing suburbs that are well served by public infrastructure is crucial.

Yet despite planners’ calls over decades for more townhouses and low-rise apartment blocks in the so-called “missing middle ring”, a common pattern has emerged across Australian cities: fierce opposition to new development from local residents.

As a result, developers and governments have leaned on the easier and more profitable options, notably high-rise apartments in inner-cities such as Sydney’s Barangaroo and Melbourne’s Docklands, or greenfield development of new estates on the ever expanding fringes .

Enthusiastic curbing of development

This week, the new housing minister in New South Wales, Rose Jackson, signalled she would take on the nimbyism – the acronym for “not in my back yard” – blamed for stalling medium and high-density housing projects in Sydney’s north shore and eastern suburbs.

“If they can’t get behind it, well, get out of the way because we desperately need it,” she said, citing the social housing waitlist of 52,000 people in her state.

Established residents have similarly rallied against development in Sydney’s inner west , as well as across Melbourne and other cities. Critics say the proliferation of heritage listings and restrictive zoning rules are also limiting infill development.

Given that these are some of the wealthiest postcodes in the country, it might be thought that political opposition to development comes mostly from the conservative end of the spectrum, but that is by no means always the case.

This week there were reports that Max Chandler-Mather, the federal Greens’ housing spokesperson, had opposed the development of about 1,300 homes in his inner-Brisbane electorate. Chandler-Mather wants the site bought by the federal government for community facilities, parkland and “a small portion of affordable housing”, the Financial Review reported .

At the recent NSW state election, several teal and Labor candidates campaigned on curbing development in their electorates.

But while many Australians may still want a detached home – whether in an established suburb or a new development further out – preferences of others are changing. Housing analysts say their views have not been given sufficient weight.

Last month, Infrastructure Victoria stressed the need to encourage more Melburnians to live in established suburbs with existing infrastructure and transport.

The advisory body surveyed 6,000 households in Melbourne , Geelong and Ballarat and identified a three- or four-bedroom detached house in an established suburb, close to family and friends, as the “notional ideal home”.

But it also found that ideal was financially out of reach for most moderate-income households and that almost one in five of those surveyed would trade off house and land size to live in an apartment or townhouse in an established suburb if prices were more comparable.

The imperative for governments to incentivise such a preference is significant. Building infrastructure such as roads, electrical grids and communications for fringe suburbs is up to four times more expensive than adapting infrastructure in established suburbs with growth capacity, according to Infrastructure Victoria.

In the past 10 years, the seven local councils home to Melbourne’s greenfield suburbs accounted for 50% of Victoria’s population growth. In many cases residents have moved in before key infrastructure has been built.

Some residents now queue in traffic jams for an hour and a half each day to exit their housing estates , while in others they are still waiting for schools and shops that were promised .

Will migration make things worse – or better?

Australia is set to receive 650,000 migrants across this financial year and next, and while this will add more demand to the rental sector, especially in larger cities – 87% of migrants live in capital cities according to the Bureau of Statistics – experts say this will not necessarily fuel the rental crisis.

The managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham, says increases in net migration could actually help, by supplying more workers for the housing industry.

“If we want to build our way out of this problem, which we need to do, we need to address workforce shortages in residential construction, and migration is one of the faster ways to do that.”

He says many migrant workers returned home as a result of the pandemic, leaving Australia with a construction worker shortage.

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“It’s futile to blame migrants for our housing market. They are also part of the solution,” he says.

Fotheringham says migrants also tend to be more open than long-term residents to small apartments and multigenerational living.

Since the start of the pandemic, the average number of people per Australian household has decreased from about 2.6 residents a household to a bit below 2.55 . That may not sound like much, but it means an additional 140,000 houses and apartments are now needed to house the existing population.

“We have unusually large houses that are not the historical or global norm,” Fotheringham says. “And we’ve had a growth in single-person households – lockdowns led to relationship breakdowns and that meant many families living in one house now take up two, with the kids bouncing between.”

Fotheringham says there was also a shift away from share housing due to pandemic restrictions. This trend is now beginning to reverse due to financial pressures.

“We’ve been talking about the missing middle for a while, long before Covid. We’ve just not delivered suitable housing for people there that is affordable for most, and density will help bring that affordability.”

Fotheringham believes the tide of opposition to medium-density housing may be turning.

“Many of the older generation who have been in that nimby camp are now watching their adult children flounder, and are realising they might need to change their tune,” he says.

“And for empty nesters wanting to downsize but remain in their local area, close to friends and services such as GPs, it’s often problematic because we don’t tend to have smaller housing in their suburbs,” Fotheringham says.

A shift in strategy?

Peter Newton, an emeritus professor at Swinburne University’s Centre for Urban Transitions, has researched how to infill the missing middle for decades and believes the current strategy must shift.

Many people are instinctively opposed to the idea of introducing medium-density housing into their leafy suburbs out of fear it will change their neighbourhood’s character and that an influx of new residents will overburden infrastructure.

“People have seen suboptimal design, they’ve seen defective high rises in bad places, they’ve seen McMansions crammed on to blocks in the middle of suburbs,” he says.

Newton says that to build high-quality, medium-density housing that fits in, the approach should shift from knock-down rebuilds of single plots of land and towards councils identifying a cluster of several properties and building either townhouses or apartment blocks of no more than three storeys. By developing a large plot, shared space and other amenities can be planned sensibly, he says.

Aerial view of a sprawling housing estate

“It requires a whole lot of collaboration to get it through, everyone needs to be happy with it,” Newton says.

But what happens without local appetite for such development?

The Grattan Institute’s economic policy deputy director, Trent Wiltshire, says it is difficult to obtain exact figures for medium-density development in the middle ring because these housing types are muddied across house and apartment statistics, but it’s clear not much has been built.

“The locals have the power, and the councillors are obviously swayed by that. It’s the people who want to move there that don’t have that power,” he says.

Wiltshire points to a number of policy options for state and federal government to help bring about medium-density development in existing suburbs if council opposition remains stubborn.

He says the federal government is limited in what it can do, but it could offer money to states specifically to build this housing type and fund infrastructure around it. This in turn could influence state government planning laws.

State governments can directly affect things, Wiltshire says, by developing a code for medium-density development that means projects can go ahead without having to go through drawn-out council approvals, as long as they satisfy design criteria.

Wiltshire says while developers can focus on more profitable projects such as greenfield development and high-density projects, a code that streamlined approvals for medium-density developments could appeal to them. “If they know they can build it in 18 months instead of 36 months, that can make a difference.”

But even if Australia’s appetite for medium-density housing improves overnight, it won’t solve the crisis facing renters and first home buyers, Fotheringham says.

“Even if we start building one million homes today, they take 18 months to finish and besides, we don’t even have capacity to build one million homes at once,” he says.

“We’re just not going to find a silver bullet to fix all of this.”

Additional reporting: Mostafa Rachwani and AAP

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There is a solution to N.J.'s affordable housing crisis. This new law
This new law ensures that New Jersey will have one of the strongest affordable housing frameworks in the US. There are other creative solutions that should be considered. For example: recognizing ...
Living with density: will Australia's housing crisis finally change the
Experts agree medium - and high-density development in established suburbs is an essential part of making housing more affordable. But the opposition from existing home owners is fierce
Full article: Urban Governance in Russia: The Case of Moscow
This essay considers how the tensions inherent to authoritarian politics structure urban governance in the city of Moscow. The focus here is on urban development policy and the housing renovation programme introduced in 2017. ... Earlier measures included the 2007 'Affordable Housing' National Project (Khmelnitskaya Citation 2015, pp. 113 ...