5 ms·

Affordable housing is the only type of housing that will ever be built. Builders aren't so stupid as to build products that their customers can't buy. Governm

Affordable housing is the only type of housing that will ever be built. Builders aren't so stupid as to build products that their customers can't buy. Government intervention is not needed.

ms_menardi 7mo ago
And yet, gentrification.
- triceratops 7mo ago
  God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
  - KPGv2 7mo ago
    That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave. They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros. Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
    - mmooss 7mo ago
      > good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
      - JuniperMesos 7mo ago
        Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it. But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
        FarmerPotato 7mo ago
        See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.
    - terminalshort 7mo ago
      My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county. Win/win, right?
    - triceratops 7mo ago
      My interpretation of your comment: The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty. The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished. We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
    - FarmerPotato 7mo ago
      Let's talk about the East Side. https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-has-done-to-east-austins-rich-culture/ https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-... I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere. The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve. Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
      - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
        You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land. Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
  - mmooss 7mo ago
    Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
    - triceratops 7mo ago
      Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in. Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
      - mmooss 7mo ago
        > increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out. > it's now a more pleasant area to live in. For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed. > Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too. These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.
        triceratops 7mo ago
        The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky. That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.
      - 7mo ago
  - 7speter 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - hunterpayne 7mo ago
      Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even. If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.
        triceratops 7mo ago
        Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree. Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on. Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good). The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.
        bombcar 7mo ago
        Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today. When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.
slg 7mo ago
I'm not sure if you're intentionally changing the definition of "affordable housing" in an attempt to make the desire for it seem silly or if you genuinely don't know how the term is typically used. But what you're describing is generally referred to as "market-rate housing" and not "affordable housing".
- cuuupid 7mo ago
  Affordable housing = housing that regular people can afford The only silly thing here is that "low income housing" got rebranded as "affordable housing" and absolutely everything else got rebranded as "luxury homes" for political reasons. "Market-rate housing" is even sillier given that it is literally the opposite of what "affordable housing" policies dictate
  - slg 7mo ago
    I'm not going to debate what the definitions should be, I'll just say I don't think it is productive to join an existing conversation using terms with different definitions than everyone else uses. Defining all housing as inherently "affordable" makes the term meaningless and even if you disagree with the motivations behind the desire for "affordable housing", at least the term has meaning in the way it's typically used.
    - cuuupid 7mo ago
      You are quite literally debating what the definition should be, because this is _not_ the existing definition of affordable housing, it is legally what OP is saying. "Affordable housing" is just when the household spends <= 30% of gross income on housing related costs. This is the definition used by the HUD and the same definition applied in policymaking. What >you< are referring to and what it is conflated with by progressive policymakers is "low income housing" which imposes an AMI based restriction on the resident's income. This in turn means that 30% of their income is much lower and restricts the sticker price of the home. In recent years, most 'affordable housing' policy has been advanced by progressives, who use that term for marketing purposes, whereas the actual policy primarily relates to 'low income housing' or even 'very low income housing.' This does not mean 'affordable housing' = 'low income housing', it just means the term 'affordable housing' is used in the title and the actual measures advanced are related to AMI and 'low income housing.'
jrflowers 7mo ago
I like this reasoning. If there exists a person or organization that can afford to buy a thing then it is an affordable thing. Now this might sound like a tautology but that’s only because it is
rootusrootus 7mo ago
Just up the street from me, a local builder is trying a tactic I have not seen before (in our area, at least). They are building out a new neighborhood, but it is quite diverse -- one end is dominated by duplexes in the 500K range and some smaller single family homes. The other end has larger, nicer homes priced at 2M or a little over. All in the span of a quarter mile or so. They think it will work. I will be interested to see how it plays out.

Affordable housing is the only type of housing that will ever be built. Builders aren't so stupid as to build products that their customers can't buy. Government intervention is not needed.

ms_menardi 7mo ago

And yet, gentrification.

triceratops 7mo ago
God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
- KPGv2 7mo ago
  That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave. They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros. Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
  - mmooss 7mo ago
    > good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
    - JuniperMesos 7mo ago
      Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it. But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
      - FarmerPotato 7mo ago
        See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.
  - terminalshort 7mo ago
    My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county. Win/win, right?
  - triceratops 7mo ago
    My interpretation of your comment: The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty. The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished. We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
  - FarmerPotato 7mo ago
    Let's talk about the East Side. https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-has-done-to-east-austins-rich-culture/ https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-... I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere. The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve. Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
    - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
      You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land. Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
- mmooss 7mo ago
  Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
  - triceratops 7mo ago
    Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in. Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
    - mmooss 7mo ago
      > increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out. > it's now a more pleasant area to live in. For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed. > Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too. These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.
      - triceratops 7mo ago
        The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky. That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.
    - 7mo ago
- 7speter 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even. If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.
      - triceratops 7mo ago
        Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree. Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on. Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good). The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.
        bombcar 7mo ago
        Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today. When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.

slg 7mo ago

I'm not sure if you're intentionally changing the definition of "affordable housing" in an attempt to make the desire for it seem silly or if you genuinely don't know how the term is typically used. But what you're describing is generally referred to as "market-rate housing" and not "affordable housing".

cuuupid 7mo ago
Affordable housing = housing that regular people can afford The only silly thing here is that "low income housing" got rebranded as "affordable housing" and absolutely everything else got rebranded as "luxury homes" for political reasons. "Market-rate housing" is even sillier given that it is literally the opposite of what "affordable housing" policies dictate
- slg 7mo ago
  I'm not going to debate what the definitions should be, I'll just say I don't think it is productive to join an existing conversation using terms with different definitions than everyone else uses. Defining all housing as inherently "affordable" makes the term meaningless and even if you disagree with the motivations behind the desire for "affordable housing", at least the term has meaning in the way it's typically used.
  - cuuupid 7mo ago
    You are quite literally debating what the definition should be, because this is _not_ the existing definition of affordable housing, it is legally what OP is saying. "Affordable housing" is just when the household spends <= 30% of gross income on housing related costs. This is the definition used by the HUD and the same definition applied in policymaking. What >you< are referring to and what it is conflated with by progressive policymakers is "low income housing" which imposes an AMI based restriction on the resident's income. This in turn means that 30% of their income is much lower and restricts the sticker price of the home. In recent years, most 'affordable housing' policy has been advanced by progressives, who use that term for marketing purposes, whereas the actual policy primarily relates to 'low income housing' or even 'very low income housing.' This does not mean 'affordable housing' = 'low income housing', it just means the term 'affordable housing' is used in the title and the actual measures advanced are related to AMI and 'low income housing.'

jrflowers 7mo ago

I like this reasoning. If there exists a person or organization that can afford to buy a thing then it is an affordable thing. Now this might sound like a tautology but that’s only because it is

rootusrootus 7mo ago

Just up the street from me, a local builder is trying a tactic I have not seen before (in our area, at least). They are building out a new neighborhood, but it is quite diverse -- one end is dominated by duplexes in the 500K range and some smaller single family homes. The other end has larger, nicer homes priced at 2M or a little over. All in the span of a quarter mile or so. They think it will work. I will be interested to see how it plays out.