Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Maintaining affordability

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Dec 29, 2003, at 12:25 AM, David L. Mandel wrote:

> As I described the other day, we "built at less than market rate"
> by finding subsidies conditioned on having low income buyers. And as 
> great
> as that was initially, it has failed to maintain affordability in the 
> long
> term as long as sooner or later (and in our case, sooner than we 
> expected),
> resales are governed by the market. Even if people take all your good 
> ideas
> and others and build cheaply, resale prices will be a function of the 
> market
> unless kept from becoming so. For real affordability, housing needs to 
> be
> removed from the world of commodities. Achieving that on a large scale
> requires a major societal transformation. But there are some ways -- 
> limited
> equity co-ops, land trusts owned by nonprofits, in which it can 
> conceivably
> be done now as cohousing (or not). I'm not deluded to think it's easy, 
> but
> it is possible.

I understand that. My comment was that these things have been tried 
with little success. In Manhattan there are many housing projects where 
people are reviewed for the proper income levels -- low or middle -- 
and then they are guaranteed housing for the rest of their lives in 
housing projects that are very similar to surrounding housing in terms 
of quality. The middle income projects are very nice in terms of size 
of apartments, location, grounds, safety, and even in some cases 
outstanding architectural design.

BUT the people who live in them are trapped. They can never leave. The 
government agencies are forever in their faces about elevator 
regulations and what kind of repairs they can do to their apartments -- 
all designed to keep the buildings manageable and affordable. Yes, they 
live in Manhattan at half (or even less than half) the market rate and 
will always have a home as long as these apartments exist but they 
cannot move and have no control over their neighbors or their 
buildings.

The buildings feel very institutional for a host of reasons that have 
nothing to do with design. There are no little things in the halls or 
corridors that make them personal. They are not allowed to develop a 
personal character because they are not personally owned or maintained. 
This is what keeps them affordable.

Does it have to be that way? As long as one set of people is paying 
bills and another set of people is living there, yes.

Free markets were designed to allow maximum innovation and control. The 
"real" problem is that we do not  have free markets. They are 
controlled to benefit investors. Just like the AMA strictly limited the 
number of doctors in the 1950s so their incomes could remain 
prohibitively high, housing is limited to keep demand higher than 
availability. No owner wants empty apartments or abandoned buildings or 
prices to fall below those that one paid one's self.

One thing that would help is if people stopped considering a home an 
investment to sell and viewed it as an investment to live in forever, 
but the effect of our transient lifestyle on housing -- transient 
socio-economically, not just geographically --  means this is not 
likely to happen any time soon.

Sharon
-----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org

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