The Biden administration is offering a bunch of money to people build affordable housing. It’s worth a try. But I doubt it will work everywhere. There are going to be lots of pockets of NIMBY resistance.
On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump warned that Joe Biden would “abolish the suburbs” by forcing them to change housing regulations. Instead, as part of his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, Biden is offering them cash to open their gates voluntarily.
“It’s purely carrot, no stick,” said a White House official who has worked on the policy.
More broadly, Biden’s proposal would inject $213 billion — more than three times the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual budget of about $60 billion — into developing, maintaining and retrofitting affordable units over the next eight years, including both public projects and lower-rent private residences. That spending would be for both new and existing homes in cities, suburbs and small towns.
Subsidies are necessary, Democrats say, because the demand for cheap housing far outstrips the available stock, federal rental-assistance coffers only support about a quarter of the eligible population and it’s not currently profitable for developers to build lower-cost units.
“We’re talking about expansions in the supply of housing that go beyond incremental increases,” said Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who represents North Carolina’s Research Triangle area and is chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD.
In 2018, about a quarter of renters spent most of their income on rent, according to a Harvard University study. That was before the pandemic put additional financial strain on millions of Americans.
I live in what has become an insanely expensive neighborhood in which there are a number of low income housing units. We manage to live together quite peacefully. The more acute problem than people paying too much for their housing is homelessness and I’m not sure this will make a dent in it. Not that this isn’t worth doing, of course. It might take some people off the streets who are currently living in their RVs and cars. But the homeless problem often also runs into the even bigger problems of drug dependence and mental illness and that’s going to take a holistic approach that includes housing but isn’t limited to just that.
It’s a huge issue and I haven’t seen anyone who has an answer. All I know is that it’s a grotesque embarrassment that in a country with so much wealth and so many resources our cities have people living in squalid encampments on the sidewalk. Something has to be done.