Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Previous months in review available here: Aug, Jul, Jun, May,  Apr, Mar, Feb, Jan-06, Dec-05.]

 

 

We’re off to school to get AHI’s latest insights!

 

Labor Day opened September with my look at the GSEs: ain’t misbehavin’?.  We then fed readers’ hunger for edification by opening what promises to an eighteen-month saga combining politics, policy, vast sums, a larger-than-life cast of characters, and the story of 25,000 people, in Stuyvesant Town. 

 

Stuyvesant Town: who’ll be living here ten years from now?

 

I opened by setting the stage in a three-part post, Billion dollar battle: Part 1, the starting gun, Part 2, the opening bets, and Part 3, what’s at stake:

 

A previous post calculated a post-conversion value for Stuyvesant Town in the range of $7.5 to $9.0 billion — what would possibly motivate MetLife, not exactly a doofus in finance, to offer it for 33% to 45% less than that?

 

“Ah, geeze, I dunno.”

 

The remainder of that post explains why. 

 

A week later, and followed with the first discordant notes of public response in Billion dollar battle: Part 4, paging the cavalry, and Part 5, must the public pay?

 

More juicy stuff to come!

 

I’ll have much, much more to say about Stuy Town as this unbelievably juicy and mesmerizing tussle plays out over the coming weeks and months.

 

Late in August Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post published a provocative essay that had enough meat it stimulated me to a four-part post on Today’s affordability gap: Part 1, where, Part 2, what, Part 3, why, finishing up with Part 4, how we can tackle the problem, with this conclusion:

 

As more fully discussed in Recap’s Web Update 58, housing consumption divides into four broad bands that we can summarize as follows:

 

 

Housing tenures are stratified but more mobile than this!

 

·         Poverty.  Those who cannot afford any housing.  They need an income subsidy.  1 in 4 who do, receive it.

·         Cheap rents.  Those who can afford housing with low costs of capital.  They need new affordable production.  We produce less than we should.

·         Market rental.  Those who are renters by social, personal, or economic imperative.  In most of the nation, rental housing is plentiful, high quality, and very affordable (by global standards).

·         Market homeownership.  Those on the ladder of long-term asset-building.

 

For the last forty years, these four bands have been in rough equilibrium, with gradual transitions between bands.  Today, throughout most of America, that still holds true.  But it fails in the supply-restricted areas, chiefly blue states and strong-economy coastal cities, where restrictions on development coupled with rising earning power are pushing up the real price of housing. 

 

That opens a gap:

 

Which is why, in Web Update 58, we propose a workforce housing tax credit.  [Illustrated later in the month in Catching with honey.]

 

I’d really like to see this idea gain traction.

 

New ideas always hurt.

 

All work and no play makes blog reader grumpy, so I indulged in some piscine tubular marksmanship teasing the Great Gray Lady’s shock, shock at finding that sex is being used to market apartments: Who put the bed in bedroom? Part 1 and Part 2:

 

It’s not how many you alienate, it’s how many you stimulate, as the actress might have said to the bishop.  Why on earth do most people get their own apartment?  Not for the pleasure of sleeping alone.

 

Apartments, particularly urban high-rises with their phallic mine’s-taller-than-yours competitiveness, have always been associated with assignations, such as the whole plot premise of The Apartment (1960).

 

Meanwhile, I took another well-deserved shot at rent control in Rent control: Fairness be damned, examined a technological advance in real estate tax assessment in Eye spy with my little eye, examined the revival of a Pittsburgh neighborhood in Formula for urban revitalization, redux, explored a potential sea change in long-term demand in Multi-housing families?, and took the pulse of the shift from ownership to renting in Now the other leg.

 

“The markets keep lurching forward … ehhhh.”

 

I applauded the integration of life activity into elderly housing in Home is where the mind is, and finished the month with the closest thing to a sermon on affordable housing you’re likely to hear from me, in ‘Those’ people:

 

Everywhere I have been, people want to work.  On a street corner in South Africa, I saw a man selling jokes, one Rand apiece.  He had to live somewhere — probably in a spontaneous community at best, a slum most likely, or a squatter camp at worst — and wherever that was, he got himself up in the morning and walked himself to work.  Sub-Saharan Africa is a land of walkers, and on any road you see people walking, walking from here to there, and on most rural roads in South Africa, some time in mid-afternoon, you see scenes like this:

 

South Africa, Mooi River township

 

Kids in uniforms, walking home from school.  The world’s future, learning about the world.

 

People tell me I’m passionate about affordable housing.  I hope so, and not just because of its intellectual and other challenges.  I cannot pass these school kids, cannot walk a slum, without seeing someone in whose eyes I see myself, someone who I could be but for grace and luck.  And at such moments I think that, If we are to do some good in the world and for its housing, we must see that however many bad things and individuals our world contains, it is brimming also full of people, and none of them are those people. 

 

They’re people.

 

 

 

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