Subject: Affordable Housing
Not long ago I was part of a conversation with a builder who wanted to put some tiny houses on some tiny lots. The lots had been in existence for some 50 years, never developed because their size made them…
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Recently, The Washington Post ran a series, Million-Dollar Wasteland, that waded through layers of project mismanagement and bureaucracy depicting the shortcomings of the HOME program, the federal government’s largest block grant made available to states and local governments for building,…
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Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division laud’s Montgomery County, Maryland’s inclusionary zoning policy, the largest inclusionary zoning policy in the nation. So much so, that it represents a quarter of the IZ affordable units…
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For four hours yesterday, New Jersey housers, advocates, and legislatures deliberated changes to the state’s affordable housing law, currently enforced by the Council on Affordable Housing, an entity Gov. Chris Christie vowed to “gut” throughout his 2009 campaign. What he…
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Big score for affordable housing Tuesday night in Massachusetts. One of the races that we watched closely Tuesday night was a vote on a ballot initiative in Massachusetts that would have repealed Chapter 40B — the state’s affordable housing law…
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As crucial elections take place around the country today, we’ll be watching the outcome of Massachusetts’s ballot question #2, which, if passed, would eliminate 40B, the state’s 41-year-old law designed to boost construction of low- and moderate-income housing. Specfically, the…
Earlier this week, The Washington Post featured an article by Jeffrey O’Connell headlined, “DC affordable housing policy has put up a goose egg.” The article casts a pall over the city’s new inclusionary zoning program, citing a city report to the effect that the law had created no new affordable homes in Washington between last August, when it went into effect, and March of this year.
A little quick to judge a policy designed to produce long-range effects, don’t you think, six months during a recession? The city’s Department of Housing and Community Development summarizes the policy’s requirements and objectives:
“Inclusionary Zoning requires that a certain percentage of units in a new development or a substantial rehabilitation that expands an existing building set aside affordable units in exchange for a bonus density. The goals of the program are to create mixed income neighborhoods; produce affordable housing for a diverse labor force; seek equitable growth of new residents; and increase homeownership opportunities for low and moderate income levels.”
Worthy goals, those. If one stays with the Post story, one eventually comes to the more promising facts: development proposals requesting zoning approvals for 4800 homes have been submitted to the city. If those projects are approved and built, at least 430 new affordable homes (offered at below-market rents to qualifying applicants) will be included as part of the projects under inclusionary zoning. Further, building permits have already been sought for another 92 homes, eleven of which will be affordable because of the new policy.
In other words, while the recession has dampened homebuilding since the rules took effect, over 400 affordable homes are in planning because of inclusionary zoning, representing nine percent of the new units coming on line. So which is the real story here?
No one has argued that inclusionary zoning is a panacea for assuring access to housing for working families and other low- to moderate-income households. As a market-dependent strategy, its impacts will be greater when more homes are being built. But it is a valuable tool, as experience in communities across the country is indicating.
For more commentary, go here. (Photo of mixed-income housing in Chicago by Payton Chung) more
The Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology has dramatically expanded its location efficiency mapping and analysis to 337 metropolitan areas across the country. This impressive resource details the housing and transportation costs associated with specific neighborhoods, along with neighborhood-based, per-capita driving rates and carbon emissions, for each region The work now covers basically every part of the US that is served by a metropolitan planning organization, or 80 percent of our country’s population.
At the same time, the organization released its new report Penny Wise Pound Fuelish, which may just be the most important document in the field of land use that you’ll read all year. Big-time congratulations to our friends at CNT for making this happen.
I have long been a fan of CNT’s great work, especially the GIS-based mapping that allows users to see at a glance the environmental and financial impacts of sprawl, and the benefits of smart locations in addressing both. Previously the analysis had been available for 55 metro areas — not bad, but imagine the work that went into the expansion.
CNT’s new report shows that only two in five neighborhoods in American communities are affordable for typical households when their transportation costs are considered along with housing costs. more
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Last week, the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey celebrated its 20th anniversary in New Brunswick, New Jersey’s humble urban area in the center of the the state. The mood was celebratory, at times raucous, at times reflective,…
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Everywhere we go we hear about transit-oriented development: bringing the home closer to the transit hub. Not only does TOD offer an opportunity to fix up areas near the rails, but it also provides a chance for localities to increase…
Yesterday NY1 tried to set up New York City’s mayoral race as an affordable housing vs. education spat, based on the candidates’ negative soundbites about each other. Although this is a bit of a stretch anyway (and not generally two…
It seems that opponents of Massachusetts’s “40B” affordable housing law, which lets developers build higher density housing in unaffordable communities if they set aside affordable units, are gearing up for another petition drive to repeal it. They say this time…
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Think all planning and community development should be local? Think again, said a judge on Monday when she told a New York State county to force dozens of towns and villages within its borders to get serious about fair housing.…
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Describing the problems facing the housing market today as “hard to overstate,” representatives from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies last week announced the release of the 2009 “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. The report, which acknowledges the depressed…
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It was often disappointing during the long housing boom to see the affordable housing stock continue to dwindle even as CDCs continued to build more supply. In a somewhat similar vein, one of the frustrations of the foreclosure crisis has…
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Affordable housing is being built in New Jersey’s urban centers, and why not? There, you have the low- and moderate-income demographic who qualify for affordable housing, and you have all of the transportation infrastructure needed to get folks around. Problem…
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As New Jersey’s Council on Affordable Housing, or COAH, continues to defend its plan to use a growth-share model to encourage towns to build working class and affordable housing, we’re reminded of one thing that became clear a long, long…
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The following was released Thursday by the MacArthur Foundation.
Seizing the opportunity to make needed long-term investments in the face of a weak economy, 12 states and cities are launching innovative projects to preserve more than 70,000 affordable rental homes.
The new projects will assist military families in Maryland, seniors in rural Iowa and Vermont, low-wage workers in Florida and Oregon, and people who have been homeless in Los Angeles. They will promote energy efficiency in Pennsylvania, save distressed buildings in Minnesota, improve management of rental housing in Washington State, and ensure that rental homes are available in gentrifying areas near public transit in Denver.
With the stock of affordable rental housing disappearing at an alarming rate, MacArthur’s $32.5 million investment — $9.5 million in grants and an additional $23 million in low-interest loans — will leverage more than $147 million in other funding. The news was welcomed today by federal, state, and local housing officials across the country. more
Where I grew up, a lot of people lived in mobile homes, as a way to enter the housing market at an affordable price. Still do. And now there is some fascinating new thinking about how to make such sites…
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I enjoyed looking at the examples of smart growth in NRDC’s new online feature, Picturing Smart Growth. Thanks to Kaid Benfield for bringing this great resource to everyone’s attention! I was pleased to see three of the examples, in Miami,…
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National Housing Institute
