Affordable Housing Not Affordable
23rd August 2023
The news media is discovering something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: so-called affordable housing isn’t affordable. The federal, state, and local governments spend tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing supposedly affordable housing, yet few people who need such housing get into the projects and many of those who do can’t afford the rents that are charged.
As a recent article in the LAist points out, more than 450,000 households in Los Angeles have incomes low enough to qualify for affordable housing, yet fewer than 50,000 such units have been built. One project that opened in 2022 received 7,500 applications for just 65 apartments.
Moreover, developers that receive subsidies to build affordable housing are only required to provide that housing at affordable rates for 30 to 40 years, depending on the subsidy program. Since these programs began in the 1980s, many of the new housing projects that are built are simply replacing older projects that are now being rented for market rates, thus not increasing the supply.