I'm not sure you're using "affordable" the way it's used in California these days, though.
Affordable housing doesn't exclusively mean "the projects". It's also used to mean a certain percentage of units in a market-rate building will be designated as affordable. I believe in CA that means that renting/owning it can cost no more than 30% of household income for a renter/buyer that meets certain income requirements. It has nothing to do with the "used market". In many municipalities, there's a minimum affordable percent required by law for new development.
> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing.
This comparison is kinda weird, since nearly all cars depreciate in value, and quickly, while traditionally property values generally trend upward, modulo financial crises and large recessions.
> Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing.
That's a thing in CA as well; it's called a Below Market Rate Ownership Program. If you poke around on Redfin or Zillow, you can often see listings that seem exceptionally low for the property and location, but when you read the description, they'll always mention "BMR" and "meeting income requirements".
> Advocating for "affordable housing" is really just an excuse to oppose housing as you can always claim that a project isn't sufficiently "affordable". This is basically how most residential projects end up getting stonewalled.
The developer and municipality negotiating the final count of affordable units sometimes does slow things down, but that is by no means the dominant cause of stonewalling here.
> How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop.
That would help, certainly, but while studies have shown that just building market-rate housing does help relieve pressure off older & less-desirable housing stock, building both market-rate and affordable housing helps house lower-income folks a lot more, and faster. Consider that an affordable/BMR unit is available to a low-income household immediately after it goes on the market, while building solely market-rate units won't cause older homes to drop in price for some time, especially if the new market-rate housing doesn't cause all demand to be satisfied. (Consider that in places like SF it will take years [decades?] at the current new-building rate to satisfy even mid-pandemic demand.)
To summarize: we need to build a lot more, and we need to build it yesterday. Some of it should be designated "affordable" in order to add some equity to the equation while demand continues to outstrip supply. Existing property values will drop, but I (as a homeowner) will gladly take that hit if it means more people of all income levels can live here and feel secure in their housing.
Affordable housing doesn't exclusively mean "the projects". It's also used to mean a certain percentage of units in a market-rate building will be designated as affordable. I believe in CA that means that renting/owning it can cost no more than 30% of household income for a renter/buyer that meets certain income requirements. It has nothing to do with the "used market". In many municipalities, there's a minimum affordable percent required by law for new development.
> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing.
This comparison is kinda weird, since nearly all cars depreciate in value, and quickly, while traditionally property values generally trend upward, modulo financial crises and large recessions.
> Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing.
That's a thing in CA as well; it's called a Below Market Rate Ownership Program. If you poke around on Redfin or Zillow, you can often see listings that seem exceptionally low for the property and location, but when you read the description, they'll always mention "BMR" and "meeting income requirements".
> Advocating for "affordable housing" is really just an excuse to oppose housing as you can always claim that a project isn't sufficiently "affordable". This is basically how most residential projects end up getting stonewalled.
The developer and municipality negotiating the final count of affordable units sometimes does slow things down, but that is by no means the dominant cause of stonewalling here.
> How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop.
That would help, certainly, but while studies have shown that just building market-rate housing does help relieve pressure off older & less-desirable housing stock, building both market-rate and affordable housing helps house lower-income folks a lot more, and faster. Consider that an affordable/BMR unit is available to a low-income household immediately after it goes on the market, while building solely market-rate units won't cause older homes to drop in price for some time, especially if the new market-rate housing doesn't cause all demand to be satisfied. (Consider that in places like SF it will take years [decades?] at the current new-building rate to satisfy even mid-pandemic demand.)
To summarize: we need to build a lot more, and we need to build it yesterday. Some of it should be designated "affordable" in order to add some equity to the equation while demand continues to outstrip supply. Existing property values will drop, but I (as a homeowner) will gladly take that hit if it means more people of all income levels can live here and feel secure in their housing.