New Orleans Increasingly it seems that we are going to have to decouple the issue of home ownership and affordable housing at least in the traditional sense of small footprints in the dirt with picket fences around them. Home ownership due to harder loan standards, tighter credit, and the Great Recession has now fallen to 63.9% at the end of 2014, lower than at any point in the last 20 years. A recent survey found that nine of the top eleven metro areas now have a majority of renters compared to homeowners led by Miami, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Houston, Washington, Dallas, and Chicago.
The trend towards “executive” cities like Seattle, Vancouver, London, and many others where housing costs are atmospheric has foreclosed any opportunity for regular working families to consider home ownership in the classic, outdated “American Dream” sense of the term, unless they are willing and able to purchase cooperative apartments or condominiums. Even while moving that dream off the shelf, the affordable housing crisis remains unabated unless we embrace some change.
How about manufactured housing? I’ve got to admit I like my time living in Airstreams, and I’ve become friendly towards trailers. The Economist had nice things to say about “system-built” housing recently which also caught my eye:
“…system-built housing does not have to be shoddy or impersonal. Huf Haus of Germany has been building high-end prefabricated housing since 1912. Adatahaus, a British firm specializes in homes that can be reconfigured as a family’s needs change. IKEA of Sweden sells flat-pack houses that can be customized. Furthermore, big companies can help people to self-build a personalized home while enjoying economies of scale: Cemex of Mexico provides self-builders with access to cheap fixtures and fittings, and cheap finance, as well as cement.”
Ok, maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but poking through Craigslist last night I saw a corrugated metal-sided and roofed structure on higher ground towards the Gulf of Mexico that looked beckoning. Just saying.
Where would you site such housing? Interestingly there is already a controversy breaking out in East New York on Mayor DeBlasio’s plan to protect affordable housing in that area, which many residents see as gentrification. We’ve talked about the double-edged sword of “market rates” before, when the inequality of wages and wealth has perverted the market. The deal that ACORN made in Brooklyn for over 2000 units of housing around the train tracks at Atlantic Yards has still not produced on that promise after more than a decade.
There’s vacant land though in many cities crying for company. Turkey assembled 1600 square miles equal to 4% of the country’s urban area when the national housing agency bought land from other state agencies. China puts the hurt on developers sitting on property to force the issue by imposing a 20% tax on the value of land parcels left undeveloped for more than a year.
Meanwhile rent levels of 30% or more of income and mass numbers of roommates has become the norm in many cities. One estimate has more than 20 million paying more than 30%.Looking at average rents in mid-south cities like Houston, New Orleans, Dallas, and Little Rock, we found the numbers on the average between $650 to $750 per month. To make that nut an individual would need to make between $12 and $16 per hour if they were going to live by themselves.
Affordable housing is possible, but not without living wages and a strategy that values citizen wealth and family security as more important than a picket fence.