AFFORDABLE HOUSING & SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
INFORMATION & RESOURCES
A list of informational resources about the need for affordable housing and the link between housing and important outcomes including health, education, community and economic development.
Across California, efforts to address the homelessness crisis by building more affordable housing with government money have been plagued by sky-high costs. SDS, an investment firm, is financing construction of its L.A. building, scheduled to open in June, with a $190 million fund it raised to build an estimated 2,000 units for formerly homeless people in the city with mental-health and other medical needs. It is one of several such efforts venturing into an affordable-housing market that for decades has been dominated by developers and nonprofits that cobble together public funding and typically move at a snail’s pace. “We believe there’s a different way than using government money, which really becomes slow and arduous and increases cost,” said Deborah La Franchi, chief executive of SDS.
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For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals. But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.
Taking stock of the housing crisis in D.C. and across the country, it’s not difficult to see that something has to change: As housing and living costs rise, more people than ever are spending at least half of their income on rent. More than one in ten D.C. residents face housing insecurity, and demand for housing programs, like emergency rental assistance, remains sky-high.
In the heart of New York City's housing crisis lies a challenge: how to provide adequate homes for its growing population without compromising the city's unique character. The solution may not be as daunting as it seems. My architecture firm, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, collaborated with Times Opinion to envision a future that accommodates the city's need for housing while preserving its iconic skyline and neighborhood integrity.
Structures like tenements on the Lower East Side, brownstones in Brooklyn Heights, and quaint buildings in Astoria not only tell a story of my ancestry but also reflect a broader narrative of the city's evolution. Yet, this preservation of the physical city comes at a cost. The same buildings that connect us to New York's rich history are also part of a complex web of laws and regulations that hinder new construction, contributing to the city's acute housing shortage.
The pandemic forced American cities to make such transformations, temporarily. They turned sidewalks into restaurants, parks into hospitals, streets into open spaces. Now on a lasting and larger scale, they will need to convert offices into apartments, hotels into affordable housing, curb parking into bike lanes, roadways into transit routes, office parks into real neighborhoods.
“If these last few years have taught us anything,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at N.Y.U., “it’s the need for flexibility, the need to be open to surprise in the way we’re going to use space.”
Los Angeles is hardly the only American city to struggle with homelessness, but its homeless population is disproportionately large, and about 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population lives in California. As a result, Los Angeles is a kind of large-scale test case for which solutions work and which don’t.
For years, local leaders and advocates working on homelessness solutions have bemoaned a lack of urgency and coordination across Los Angeles, where the city and county have separate but overlapping governments.
San Antonio, the most impoverished major city in the country, according to census data, has enacted policies to help low-income renters, including a $150 million bond issue to support affordable housing construction and a Strategic Housing Implementation Plan. Before the pandemic, the wait list for public housing in San Antonio was roughly 35,000 families, earning an average of $11,000 annually, said Ed Hinojosa Jr., president and chief executive of Opportunity Home, the city’s housing authority. Today, it’s 95,000.
“The need has never been as high as it is now,” Mr. Hinojosa said. “And with the trends we’re seeing, it’s just going to keep growing.”
Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it? Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor.
In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.
The U.S. shortage of affordable housing, bad enough before the pandemic, has only gotten worse since 2020, according to a new report by Moody's Analytics. Since then, a combination of factors have conspired to eliminate 500,000 units for extremely low-income renters nationwide, or about 8% of the total stock.
Many affordable housing properties for that income group, which were funded via Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, or LIHTCs, have reached the end of their 30-year compliance period in the last few years. At the end of that period, the property owners have the option of converting their units to market rate.
Homelessness surged across the Washington region by 18 percent in the past year, with the greatest increases in the suburbs, according to data released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
The D.C. region joins a growing list of cities that are seeing similar spikes, which coincided with the end of pandemic relief programs and stubbornly high inflation.
“We are seeing these increases all over the country,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “What we are also seeing is a real criminalization and villainizing of the homeless, which is something I haven’t seen in my 30 years in this field.”
If there’s a building in America, a local government has decided the number of parking spaces it needs. But these rules not only overestimated the amount of parking that was needed, they created a society that virtually demanded a car to conduct daily life. America has a parking problem. We’ve built millions of parking spaces we don’t need. Each one costs us.
Parking minimums shape your entire life even if you don’t realize it, from the size of your rent check to the length of your commute to how many friends live nearby. Requiring businesses to include copious parking spots raises the cost of construction and the amount of land needed, codifying sprawl.
Zoning codes established roughly a century ago were meant to protect residents from the impacts of industrial and commercial developments, but they were also used to enforce segregation. Those regulations have contributed in large part to the current housing shortage, and experts argue that it’s time for reforms.
As the nation confronts a severe housing crisis, the Biden administration is calling on local governments to revisit outdated zoning policies that slow development. A recent report from the Urban Land Institute highlights the zoning strategies cities are using to bolster housing development equitably and sustainably, including complete overhauls of single-family regulations and reductions of lot size minimums.
The housing crisis in New York State has locked out middle-class families and young people from homeownership, left hundreds of thousands burdened with high rents, and sent tens of thousands of working people into public shelters. Of 3.43 million renters in the state, more than half, roughly 1.7 million, spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Yet instead of strengthening Ms. Hochul’s housing plan, the State Senate and Assembly last week offered proposals that would gut it.
As homelessness overwhelms downtown Phoenix, a small business wonders how long it can hang on. In recent years, the city has been hit by a housing crisis, a mental health crisis, and an opioid epidemic, resulting in one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with over 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. Read about the experiences of Joe and Debbie Faillace, owners of Old Station Subs in Phoenix, Arizona. With a rising homeless population and a lack of affordable housing, the Faillaces have been struggling to keep their business running amidst the chaos and suffering caused by this humanitarian crisis.
DC is 70% of the way towards meeting Mayor Muriel Bowser's goal of producing 36,000 new housing units by 2025. Approximately 25,000 units delivered between January 2019 and September 2022, per the latest data available on the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) dashboard. This represents 69% of the desired total. A report released in 2019 further specified affordable housing production goals for each of the city's ten planning areas. The graphic above details where those areas are with progress towards housing production.
Los Angeles currently has about 42,000 homeless residents, with 28,000 unsheltered. In 2016 the people of Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed Proposition HHH, a ballot measure that raised $1.2 billion through a higher property tax to create 10,000 new apartments for the homeless. Six years later, neither the mandate the money has proved to be nearly enough. This is the paradox of housing development in Los Angeles and so many other cities. The politics of the affordable housing crisis are terrible. The politics of what you’d need to do to solve it are even worse.
The pace of growth in U.S. home rents slowed in September to its lowest rate in 16 months — but the hugely elevated post-pandemic cost of renting a home is not likely to subside anytime soon. A recent sharp rise in inflation and interest rates has made homeownership less viable. Coupled with limited new supply, it means that even as rents become less affordable for the average American, they are unlikely to drop significantly.
One big reason for the chronic housing shortage in America’s most prosperous regions is that state governments have ceded control to local governments that behave like private clubs. In California, the heartland of the housing crisis, the state is starting to take power back. The state’s political leaders are clearing the way for housing construction by restricting local interference, prioritizing the needs of all Californians — and those who might like to be.
More than 8 million people were behind on their rent at the end of August, and nearly half of those residents say they are somewhat or very likely to be forced out of their homes in the next two months, according to new Census Bureau figures reported by Yahoo News.
At the same time, evictions are on the rise as assistance doled out by the federal government during the pandemic begins to dry up. Data from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University found evictions were 52% higher than average in Tampa, 90% above average in Houston and 94% above average in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Throughout Fairfield County, Conn., local residents and elected officials are seeking to block large housing projects that include units affordable to low- and moderate-income households, warning that the increased density could change the character of their towns. The 32-year-old law that enables such projects has always generated some pushback, but the opposition has grown more fierce as the number of proposals has increased in recent years.
The fervent campaigns against housing applications reflect a battle that has engulfed the state, town by town. Last week, a group led by the Open Communities Alliance announced that it would file a civil rights lawsuit against the town of Woodbridge, saying that the town’s zoning regulations, which sharply restrict multifamily housing, violated the state Fair Housing Act, state zoning laws and the state Constitution.
Many California towns, particularly ones with rich people, have fought higher-density housing plans in recent years, a trend that has become known as NIMBYism for “not in my backyard.” But Atherton’s situation stands out because of the extreme wealth of its denizens — the average home sale in 2020 was $7.9 million — and because tech leaders who live there have championed housing causes.
The companies that made Atherton’s residents rich have donated huge sums to nonprofits to offset their impact on the local economy, including driving housing costs up. Some of the letter writers have even sat on the boards of charities aimed at addressing the region’s poverty and housing problems.
There’s long been a popular narrative about land use: New development, particularly of market-rate housing, gives rise to gentrification. That translates to lower-income residents, particularly those of color, getting squeezed out. Sound familiar?
It’s “explicitly or implicitly at the core of almost any discussion about housing in the D.C. region,” said Casey Anderson, chair of the Montgomery County Planning Board. The specter of displacement is a formidable fear for some and harrowing reality for others. But it’s also too monolithic an account.
The study does highlight a factor that’s hard to ignore: the positive effect of more housing production in the D.C. region.
San Francisco's homegrown hostility to new development has made it the epicenter of California's housing crisis. It will now become a testing ground for a newly empowered state government's ability to force liberalizing reforms on a city that repeatedly refuses to build.
On Tuesday, the state's Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) announced that it would be launching an unprecedented review of San Francisco's housing policies and practices "aimed at identifying and removing barriers to approval and construction of new housing there."
Santa Fe is home to New Mexico’s first net-zero energy multi-family unit project.
The recently opened Siler Yard caters to the members of the art and creative community who make under 60-percent of the Area Mean Income.
The 65-unit, $17.4 million project was made possible through a $10.4 million competitive Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and a $5.2 million, 40-year, Section 221(d)(4) mortgage — both U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development programs for affordable housing.
The project also received $600,000 in permit and fee waivers from the city of Santa Fe, which also contributed $400,000 in infrastructure funding and the 4.3 acres of land it was built on.
The U.S. needs 4.3 million new apartments over the next 13 years just to meet projected demand, a total that includes the current shortfall of 600,000 units, according to a new report published by the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association.
The shortfall is largely a legacy of the late 2000s financial crisis and deep recession, when U.S. development ground almost to a halt, the report said.
The five states in the U.S. with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. Some of the bluest states in the country, not one red state on that list.
And at the core of that failure is the failure to build enough homes, full stop. Housing is fundamental. When you fail to provide it, that failure reverberates throughout society, it lays waste to all your other carefully laid policy plans and ideals. Few understand the ins and outs of America’s housing system or systems like Jenny Schuetz.
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By 2026, all new buildings and substantial renovations in D.C. will have to be net-zero construction, meaning they produce as much energy as they consume, under legislation passed unanimously by the D.C. Council Tuesday. The legislation, which also bans most natural gas use in new buildings, now heads to Mayor Muriel Bowser.
The net-zero building codes will cover all commercial buildings, condo and apartment buildings, as well as single family homes taller than three stories.
The bill also requires audits every three years, starting in 2029, to report what percentage of new buildings are complying with the net-zero requirements.
The state of the nationwide housing crisis shifted significantly in the mid 2000’s, moving from primarily a coastal issue to one dispersed throughout the U.S., according to a new report. The report from Up For Growth shows the U.S. fell short of meeting housing needs across the country by more than three million homes in 2019 – up from 1.6 million in 2012. During this seven-year period, forty-seven states and the nation’s capital saw an increase in underproduction, and another six states moved into the underproduction category.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Washington have long failed to build enough housing to keep up with everyone trying to live there. And for nearly as long, other parts of the country have mostly been able to shrug off the housing shortage as a condition particular to big coastal cities.
But in the years leading up to the pandemic, that condition advanced around the country. What once seemed a blue-state coastal problem has increasingly become a national one, with consequences for the quality of life of American families, the health of the national economy and the politics of housing construction.
“It’s like the cancer was limited to certain parts of our economic body,” said Sam Khater, the chief economist at Freddie Mac. “And now it’s spreading.”