How will we know when we have enough affordable housing

Visitor Question:I'm an elected city councilperson in a smallish suburb; I'm in my first term in office. We have some people complaining about "not enough affordable housing."

This is true in spite of the fact that when we have a chance to approve some actual affordable housing, the council chambers are full of people complaining about "low-income housing," even though we haven't had an application for truly low-income housing in the last two decades.

Instead, we have upscale housing, at least compared to the current housing stock, and once in a great while, we hear from someone wanting to develop or rehab relatively modest housing.

My question is how would we know if we have "enough" affordable housing. Are there benchmarks that every town should meet? Is this entirely subjective, as in "affordable" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm certainly a supporter of social justice in the abstract, but how will I know if we are doing our part?

Secondly, since we are in a market economy here in the U.S., how can we inspire developers to provide more affordable housing?

Editors Reply: You ask great questions. First, providing "enough" affordable housing ultimately is a political question. As you point out in the second part of your question, we have a market economy, but you elected officials have to arbitrate what the market is telling you and what values you as a community want to maximize.

To get some clues, ask your regional planning commission (which could be masquerading as a council of governments, or a metropolitan planning organization for transportation) for any available research about affordability and housing in your entire region. Then compare the demand for affordable housing as a percentage of all available housing in the region with your own local share of housing that is affordable.

Now there are a lot of practical problems in taking our advice. First, what does "affordability" really mean? Are you going to buy into the federal notion that has been around for decades, which is that households are "cost burdened" if they have to pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing? Does your regional planning agency or state government have a definition you can use?

Alternatively, are you going to look at how much rental housing is available in your community and at what rates? Are those rents affordable by the 30 percent criterion for most lower-income folks in your region?

You see that the questions become complex really quickly, so we will move on.

Secondly, we recommend that you listen to your community's stated aspirations. If they say that in the abstract, they want a good amount of affordable housing, poke around on what percentage they think that is. Present any facts and figures you can gather from your regional organizations and metro real estate groups, but then let the debate begin about what that percentage is.

The purpose is that if the community can agree roughly on a percentage of affordable housing--whatever that might mean--then you can build support for that idea, again in the abstract.

If your community, in some ideal world, would agree that they want 25% affordable housing, and they have an objective criterion about what that means (such as the 30% of income or maybe 35% of income), then you could work to build political support for that idea and publicize it broadly.

The purpose of all of that would be that when a specific instance related to affordable housing comes up, maybe you could fight some of the tendency toward NIMBY (not in my back yard). Just maybe, your council could resist resident pressure when a specific proposal is made.

This answer is becoming a bit lengthy, so the best way to wrap up will be to point you to some excellent resources already on this website. For a general discussion of housing affordability, see our overview.

Then make sure that you have a good grasp on infill housing, which sometimes if more acceptable to neighborhoods than building entire affordable complexes.

Another halfway measure that often finds acceptance is making sure that your zoning ordinance permits accessory dwelling units, which already might be known as ADUs in your community, or might have other names such as granny flats, guest houses, casitas, garage apartments, and many more. We call this halfway because it will only ease the situation a bit, and if the gap between where you are and where you want to be is large, this isn't a complete solution.

Other ideas possibly helpful to your community situation might be cluster housing or mixed-income housing. In general, just look around on the housing issues for communities gateway page to see what might work.

Unfortunately, we see we have never written directly about an answer to your second question, how to entice developers to bring you more proposals for affordable housing. We are going to put that on our "to do" list, and when it happens, we will come back and amend this page. Thanks for bringing that to our attention. In the meantime, there might be some ideas for you in our economic development section of the website.

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