Affordable housing is good for you!
Along the continuum of objections to affordable housing, from the legitimately rational to the blatantly racist, lies the middle ground where economics and prejudice collide, as expressed in statements such as, “this will hurt property values.”
Heaven forfend that this come to your town …
Many other forms of development help property values, and homeowners happily pocket the appreciation thus arising, but if it could be shown to be the case that letting “those people” live next door did undermine local property values, then in practical political terms, affordable housing would be blocked in many places.
Would you want these people moving in next door???
Well, to judge by a recent MIT study, affordable housing is good for communities:
Despite sometimes-fierce [NIMBY -- Ed.] opposition to mixed-income housing developments by officials and residents in Boston’s suburbs, a new study found that such developments have no impact on home values in the communities where they are built.
The Center for Real Estate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined seven rental developments, dating to the mid-1980s, in
”These neighborhoods around the developments neither suffered nor gained as a result of the development,” said Henry Pollakowski, a senior researcher at the center and co-author of the study being released today.
In Massachusetts, where affordable housing is scarce and precious, developers use a state-level inclusionary-zoning law known as Chapter 40B to wedge affordable housing into suburbs that, left to their own devices, would use ’snob zoning’ and similar tactics to price housing affordability out.
The developments examined were all permitted under Chapter 40B, which allows builders to construct condominiums or apartments in any city where less than 10% of the housing is considered affordable by state standards. Under the law, 25% of the units must be affordable and targeted for individuals who earn 80% or less of median income in that area.
(The income limit is important. In ‘
The law remains contentious, because it is a blunt instrument. Indeed, in the hands of unscrupulous developers (rare though such be J ), it can be used to threaten communities with 40B housing “unless you let me build this nice shopping center,” so there have been repeated efforts to ‘reform’ it:
Governor Mitt Romney in the past has supported legislation that would make 40B more palatable to cities and towns by limiting builders’ powers if a town can demonstrate that they are slowly raising the number of units [up to a threshold of 10% of the town's stock -- ed.].
Though the MIT study looked high and low, it could find no harm done by any of these mixed-income developments, including a very large one, Kimball Court in
The study found that the multi-phased project’s impact on house prices was minimal: Between 1984 and 2003, the average annual increase in house prices surrounding Kimball Court rose 8.1%, compared with 7.9% for
The proper appetite for affordable housing is Epicurean — too much is harmful, but some is just right. Over-concentration, isolation, excessive deep targeting, overly dense or clearly substandard enclaves, all can create ghettos where ‘those people’ live. But if the affordable housing is mixed in — the British call this pepper-potting — then it does no harm to property values, and provides tenure diversity, homes for lower-income workers, and a stepping-stone within the neighborhood for starter families or those rising the income ladder. Done right, not only does affordable housing not hurt property values, it strengthens healthy communities.
