How to make expensive cities affordable for everyone again (xpost from CA group)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/19/how-to-make-expensive-cities-affordable-for-everyone-again/
This question — how do we make room in highly desirable cities for everyone — gets at a defining problem of our times. And even experts (economists, sociologists and land-use scholars) don't agree on the best answer. So we asked several of them to hash out the debate further for us here: What happens to housing affordability when we build more housing that's not subsidized? Do the laws of supply and demand really apply here?...
Most importantly, the report claims that constructing market rate units will protect low-income communities against displacement. But it relies upon a single imperfect definition of displacement and doesn’t distinguish between parts of the Bay Area that are growing rapidly and where land is cheap from the tight housing markets in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. These three cities account for about a third of new market-rate units in areas the report focuses on. But other top producers include cities on the urban fringe as well as unincorporated areas where displacement pressures are minimal. Grouping together these very different places can make it appear as though new market-rate units prevent displacement, when in fact the opposite might be true....
SPUR agrees: To address this crisis, San Francisco and cities like it must plan for dense growth in the right places, dedicate significant funding to subsidized housing for those with the most need, pursue innovations that could address the needs of the middle class as well as lower-income households and allow robust production of nonsubsidized, market-rate housing....
“Filtering,” where older housing units trickle down to lower-income families as they age, can happen in the broader metropolitan context. But it can take decades for filtering do deliver truly affordable units to lower-income households. As apartments age, the rent of a typical unit – not in a hot area - declines an average of 0.31 percent per year so even after 30 years, the rent will have fallen by only 9 percent. Moreover, as apartment buildings get old – if they are not in hot neighborhoods – they can deteriorate to the point of becoming substandard units, as owners see little return in reinvesting in the properties. The result, eventually, is low-quality housing and neighborhood decline.