Opinion: Make Housing Bigger Priority In Pandemic-Relief Plan

I'd encourage the Independent when referencing endorsements, etc. to say something about the organization named, if it's not obvious. Who is the New Haven Housing Fund? A hyperlink or some information on who the leadership is would help inform the reader as to who is writing an op-ed or, in this case, endorsing an op-ed. If an organization is organized with a Board of Directors, etc. there is some accountability to some group of people. If it's just a guy who slaps a name on an endorsement it makes it seem like there's an organized group in support ... but it's just a guy.

There is a large gap between what landlords or developers must charge for housing and what many households in the city are willing and able to consistently pay for that housing. For several decades it has been the preferred public policy of government to cover that gap for a select few households. This has been enormously expensive and has helped only a fraction of qualifying households. This approach to affordable housing does not scale - it is too expensive to address housing problems this way. There are far more cost effective means of providing housing that could help many more people. We need to pursue those alternate ways, rather than doubling down on the overly costly and ineffective methods of the last several decades.

NHV has an income problem, not a housing problem. Housing costs a lot to build, maintain, and pay taxes on. Zero or poverty wages doesn't cover it.

It’s great to hear some new ideas but who are these organizations? And why do they get featured in the NHI? New Haven Housing Fund seems to have a gmail email address, no website, and some amorphous goals.

On the topic of a plan to address housing generally, if people are short $17000 to be able to afford appropriate housing, that seems like an attainable figure to get to through education, job training, and other means within the control of residents. Why would we rely on government to fill this gap in perpetuity? How about sending people back to school or job training programs? There is such a mismatch between skills and jobs. Well-paying jobs exist; a simple search of the internet shows about 6000 jobs paying $27.50+ within 10 miles of 06510.

All these government interventions in markets create complex and unintended consequences. And unfair outcomes for many who wait decades for their golden ticket. But it’s not a golden ticket is it? It’s a near guaranty that the recipient will never obtain the skills to make enough money to not qualify for the subsidy. I doubt this was what was envisioned originally.

The issue is poverty not housing. If we bring incomes up (and it really doesn’t take that much to do it) we create families that don’t need government intervention in housing.

(And if the city bought 550 units for lower income people, the houses would be destroyed in 5 years. The city would need a huge maintenance staff, millions for annual maintenance, and we would lose another 3-4 million of tax revenue). Unintended consequences of a plan that isn’t thought through.

Again, why is this newsworthy?

The city could spend the $62.5 million intelligently to make housing more affordable. It could do the same to address climate change, racial health disparities, and any number of important tasks. The hard part of governance, as distinct from advocacy, is making these choices.

New Haven Urbanism, your description of the current approach is right. If the problem of affordability was primarily about housing supply, I would agree with your remedy. (And we should be open to non-traditional responses in any case.) But the problem of affordability is primarily about a lack of income, not a lack of housing units. New Haven’s rental vacancy rate is comparable to the rest of the nation and the Federal Reserve Board characterizes the market for both rental and ownership as “balanced”. If a substantial increase in supply reduced the median rent by 10%, that would be a good thing. But given the low incomes common in the city, the resulting rents would still be unaffordable to many residents.

There are so many things wrong with this article I don’t even know where to start.
Government does not know how to be a landlord. Point blank. Period. Any time they try, it’s mismanaged and cost 7 times the price it would a private company. We the people end up with the bill.
I can help but feel like this was targeted at Mandy and Pike, like they are the only 2 companies in town who buy properties.
The notion that they would sell just because you guys want to buy them is preposterous, they don’t really sell, and if you are implying that the city should be able to force them to sell then this is not America, this is communist Russia.
I am sympathetic to the cause of immigrants and minorities that need proper housing, I feel like the city does do a lot for them in providing housing, but keep bringing them in by the bus load and sure we will have more issues housing them. I myself come from a family of immigrants, we were not handed a thing, we worked for everything we have and come from absolutely zero, off the boat with no money and no English. This is the American dream. Get real! If you want real socialism, do a quick google search on Venezuela

I think anyone can submit an opinion article to the Independent just like anyone can submit an opinion article to the Register.

Ben, $17,000 is the average. For some households, the gap is a lot less so job training and raising one's income slightly is probably achievable. For many other households, the gap is a lot more than $17,000 so raising one's household income through workforce development and educational attainment alone may not be as feasible.

Robn and KM, lack of income is a part of the problem, but not the fundamental issue. The way we frame the housing problem is all wrong. Imagine framing the food nutrition issue this way: There is a gap between what restaurants must charge for food and the amount that many households are willing and able to pay to eat at restaurants for every meal. Therefore, solutions must revolve around closing this gap by raising household incomes and government meal payment subsidies. This framing and approach to the issue would, correctly, be ridiculed. Why would we use the cost of food provided from restaurants as the benchmark? That is ridiculous. Similarly, using the cost of developer- and landlord-provided housing as the benchmark is ridiculous. This framing is what has produced programs like Section 8 and LIHTC because people are trying to close an enormous gap between the most expensive kinds of housing and the low household incomes. The issue needs to be framed in another way. Doing so will lead to more achievable and farther-reaching solutions.

It’s not just a New Haven problem.
All around our country the percentage of income that people spend on housing has gone up.
Income has not kept up with the rate of inflation.
Housing is becoming considered an line item in a wealthy person or corporations portfolio, the buying, selling, financing and building of real estate is about the profits to be made, and not about housing people.
The top 1% has 3,4 or more houses, while the number of folks who are homeless or housing insecure are surging, along with eviction rates and foreclosure rates.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnonprofitcouncil/2021/09/07/there-is-no-easy-fix-for-the-affordable-housing-crisis/?sh=7b59a8ea73b7
Also the divide between the very rich and everybody else is growing, while the middle class is shrinking.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/12/07/business/global-wealth-income-gap/index.html
And
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/03/18/the-pandemic-stalls-growth-in-the-global-middle-class-pushes-poverty-up-sharply/
So the richest among us are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle classes are shrinking and struggling.
When the differences between the very rich and the poor become unbearable, and the middle classes start to struggle, that’s when you see revolutions happen.
We have to start treating housing as a human right, and not as investment, or a tax generator unless the property is income producing through tenants or through the sale of a property.
We have to start treating access to healthcare, including vision, hearing, dental, mental healthcare, medicine, and medical devices as a human right.
We have to treat access to food as a human right.
We have to treat education as a human right.
We have to provide a pathway to employment that doesn’t require an academic college degree but instead train people with skills.
We have to treat childcare as a human right, to enable parents to work and also educating and enriching our children.

There is no scalable solution for people earning $800 per month on disability. They will always need rental assistance. And there should be programs for the disabled.

But there is no scalable solution to get an additional 500 or 5000 “affordable” units for people at or Below 50 percent AMI. it doesn’t exist. And it would be a bad/stupid investment for government to make. Some people would say it’s perpetuating segregation. Others would say it’s not enough until no one pays more than the magic 30 percent.

I don’t think we need to reframe anything around housing. I think we need some experienced people to start to drive the conversation and expectations and not the Yale law clinic activists and the united socialists of America. Why are all opinions now equal?

Please keep printing these opinion pieces; I need to end my day with some easy reading. And a few laughs. As my city disintegrates and reinvents itself around me. Go NHVN!!!

New Haven Urbanism, that is in fact how SNAP, the primary food security program, works, There is a difference between what groceries cost and what low income households can afford to spend on groceries. SNAP makes up part (not all) of the difference. No one other than right wing ideologues (you are not one) ridicules the program.

The solution you propose conceivably might work in a rapidly growing housing market, But the vast majority of housing units in the NH market were built 20+ years ago. And the vast majority of housing units that will exist 20 years from now are already here. The city would have add units at something like 5-10 times its current rate for this not to be the case. (There are about 50,000 housing units in the city. If you assume a 1% annual loss rate (probably high), about 40,000 of them will still be around in 20 years. Between 2010 and 2020, the city added about 2,500 units.)

Landlords of existing housing are undoubtedly make a profit in the aggregate. Let’s say a landlord makes a 20% profit on a $1,500 rent. Most NH renters could not afford the rent even if there was no profit.

I’m in favor of developing alternative housing finance models, such as community housing land banks. But in the near to mid term they will have a negligible impact on rents.

@ben @robn have you considered that to solve the income problem, we first have to provide affordable housing? Exiting poverty is not as easy as “looking up a job on the internet” or “attending a job training program”. In fact, this proposal was developed in large part by women that have been attending job training and educational programs for years. In order to move from a minimum wage job to a living wage job, people need time, childcare, and a home. If your solution is for people to work on increasing their wages, and they are spending all their time working the 90 hours at minimum wage per week that it currently takes to afford a 2-bedroom apartment in new haven, how are they supposed to go back to school?! Housing is a human right, and providing affordable housing units for the most low income families would be one of the most effective measures to increase wages. (And this is all ignoring the fact that even with education and job training, black and brown people in this country get denied jobs and paid lower wages)

From the National Low Income Housing Coalition: Housing is the key to reducing intergenerational poverty and increasing economic mobility. Research shows that increasing access to affordable housing is the most cost-effective strategy for reducing childhood poverty and increasing economic mobility in the US.

Research shows that the shortage of affordable housing costs the American economy about $2 trillion a year in lower wages and productivity. Without affordable housing, families have constrained opportunities to increase earnings, causing slower GDP growth. In fact, researchers estimate that the growth in GDP between 1964 and 2009 would have been 13.5% higher if families had better access to affordable housing. This would have led to a $1.7 trillion increase in income, or $8,775 in additional wages per worker.

"There is no scalable solution for people earning $800 per month on disability." Yes there is.
"They will always need rental assistance." No they won't.
"And there should be programs for the disabled." Agreed.

"But there is no scalable solution to get an additional 500 or 5000 “affordable” units for people at or Below 50 percent AMI." Not through conventional housing market methods.
"And it would be a bad/stupid investment for government to make." Agreed.

"I think we need some experienced people to start to drive the conversation and expectations and not the Yale law clinic activists and the united socialists of America." Agreed.

KM, not quite. SNAP is able to be fully funded precisely because it is not similar to Housing Choice Vouchers. The nutrition equivalent to HCV would be something like Meal Choice Vouchers that covered the gap between what a household can afford to pay for food and the Fair Market Cost of 3 meals a day at a sit-down restaurant. A program like that shouldn't be fully funded, just like HCV shouldn't be fully funded - it's not the right model for universal housing assistance.

"Most NH renters could not afford the rent even if there was no profit." Agreed. Construction and maintenance costs have to be addressed to achieve true affordability.