I'm spending more and more time thinking about housing affordability these days. CityLab's article (and paper on which it is based) effectively destroyed my naive belief that 'filtering' can ever provide affordable housing. In a nutshell, filtering only works if the population is stagnant or declining. (Or if the rich are your only immigrants, ha ha ha). One of the things that gets proposed is subsidized housing. Which is troubling, because the American history of public housing is generally one of grotesque failure (Cabrini-Green), and/or regulatory capture (Section 8, aka 'landlord support'). Affordable housing tax credits are also designed with a critical flaw: You can only take them to 'top up' the project to viability, destroying any profitability, and making them (mostly) only useful for specialty not-for-profit developers.
I'm enough of a libertarian to ask "Is there a way we could do this using market methods?" The immediate answer being 'of course not', as the problem is that the market can't provide enough affordable housing, because it isn't profitable enough. Still--do we need government construction of housing? Might not government subsidy of affordable housing be enough? (It's certainly worked well enough for single family detached). Hearsay has it that in the past ('70's?) the Feds managed to generate more multifamily by making it more profitable, by altering the tax laws on depreciation.
I can already hear the baying hounds of 'Thatcherism', about how the British built, and then sold off all of their social housing ('council houses'). And guess what? A generation later, and they have a cataclysmic housing crisis. None of the public housing that was sold off was replaced, and now Britain get to enjoy another round of the housing crisis which engendered the public support to create the public housing in the first place!
Which suggests that public housing has a generational issue as well: To be sustainable, it must be sustainable against the interference of the feckless short-termism later politicians. (Plundering the commonwealth by under-pricing public assets and selling them to select people wins votes--who knew?) Which in turn suggests that Federal ownership of homes represents a clear and present danger to sustainable public housing.
I've suggested elsewhere that China may have the right model for urban land: 99 year leases. Long enough for any structure to depreciate (financially), and so setting no limitation on their development potential. Yet the land, the portion which benefits from location, and appreciates accordingly, remains in the public hands. (That public investment is the primary creator of location value has been argued elsewhere).
Tangentially, private cemeteries are obscene: The developer makes money selling lots (3'x6'). At some point, the land runs out, the maintenance stops, the developer goes bankrupt, and the public is left with the cost of maintaining the land or moving the graves). Any jurisdiction that fails to provide cemeteries is abrogating a public trust, dodging responsibility. The solution is practically biblical: : Pick the worst piece of land in the jurisdiction (ie, a potters field) and make that the cemetary.
I'm enough of a libertarian to ask "Is there a way we could do this using market methods?" The immediate answer being 'of course not', as the problem is that the market can't provide enough affordable housing, because it isn't profitable enough. Still--do we need government construction of housing? Might not government subsidy of affordable housing be enough? (It's certainly worked well enough for single family detached). Hearsay has it that in the past ('70's?) the Feds managed to generate more multifamily by making it more profitable, by altering the tax laws on depreciation.
I can already hear the baying hounds of 'Thatcherism', about how the British built, and then sold off all of their social housing ('council houses'). And guess what? A generation later, and they have a cataclysmic housing crisis. None of the public housing that was sold off was replaced, and now Britain get to enjoy another round of the housing crisis which engendered the public support to create the public housing in the first place!
Which suggests that public housing has a generational issue as well: To be sustainable, it must be sustainable against the interference of the feckless short-termism later politicians. (Plundering the commonwealth by under-pricing public assets and selling them to select people wins votes--who knew?) Which in turn suggests that Federal ownership of homes represents a clear and present danger to sustainable public housing.
I've suggested elsewhere that China may have the right model for urban land: 99 year leases. Long enough for any structure to depreciate (financially), and so setting no limitation on their development potential. Yet the land, the portion which benefits from location, and appreciates accordingly, remains in the public hands. (That public investment is the primary creator of location value has been argued elsewhere).
Tangentially, private cemeteries are obscene: The developer makes money selling lots (3'x6'). At some point, the land runs out, the maintenance stops, the developer goes bankrupt, and the public is left with the cost of maintaining the land or moving the graves). Any jurisdiction that fails to provide cemeteries is abrogating a public trust, dodging responsibility. The solution is practically biblical: : Pick the worst piece of land in the jurisdiction (ie, a potters field) and make that the cemetary.
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