Affordable Housing

The first step of the three legged stool. The first step of enticing the middle classes (yes, plural), back into the cities.

While there are other issues that pertain to the quality of life aspects of living in an urban area, there is basically a three legged stool, the top of which holds everything together. That stool consists of: affordable housing; quality public infrastructure, which includes public schools, convenient and affordable public transportation, as well as things like trash pickup, police and fire departments, and the general bureaucracies that cities need to survive; and crime. Let’s start with affordable housing.

According to the federal government, affordable housing is housing that doesn’t exceed 30% of your take home income. At one time, it was 20%, but unless you are rich, finding housing that is only 20% of your take home pay is almost impossible in a major metropolitan area. So what does the government do? When they can’t get enough people to adhere to their guidelines, they change the guidelines. Hence, 30%. The problem is for a lot of people, 50% has become the norm, rather than 30% or even 40%. That is way too much. In fact, 30% in my opinion, is way too much. Life has regular expenses like food and clothing, and then there are the surprises, like a new transmission for your car, or a collapsed basement wall. I encountered that unpleasant surprise fairly recently, an expense that set me back over $40,000 in repair costs. Hello equity cash out mortgage refinance. However, living in a high cost area like Washington, DC, you really don’t have a choice, unless you want to live 40 to 50 miles away from the city. Then you can commute by train, bus or Metro, or drive and fight the traffic every day, going to and from work. I know quite a few people that pre-pandemic, made that trek from the outer ring suburbs or further, that made that minimum hour long commute into the city for their job. That is not my cup of tea, and I’m not in the tea business. I’m a firm believer, that if you work in the city, you should live in the city, or at least in an inner-ring suburb if living in the city is not a viable option.

If you read the World Economic Forum’s website, they talk about a Great Reset. The world is going to be “reset” into one of greater fairness and equality. One unknown of this Great Reset, is whether or not people are going to be required to return to the downtown office, now that a lot of the white collar workforce is working from home. If remote work becomes the norm, and I believe that a lot of it will, what will happen with all that empty office space in the city? Ever since the over a year long, “two weeks to flatten the curve,” lockdown, Washington, DC has become a ghost town. There are a lot of empty office buildings that could be converted to other uses. One of those uses, could be much needed housing.

Theoretically, the more of something that is available, the cheaper it gets. Theoretically. Tell that to the developers who build $800,000 and up townhouses, because there is no way that they are going to recoup their investments. There are land costs, construction costs, and permit and licensing fees. If they build moderately priced, moderately equipped housing units, rather than high end “luxury” units, they won’t be able to meet their overhead costs. Sometimes, the deal with the city licensing bureaucrats is that a certain percentage of the units have to be set aside for lower income people, but “certain” usually means few. People that spend three quarters of a million dollars on a townhouse, don’t want to live next door to the hoi polloi, unless the hoius polloius happen to be lower income members of the ruling class. Hence, social workers. Never mind the plumber, who makes $150,000 per year instead of someone in the “caring” industries, making $35,000 per year. That plumber just might be a Republican. He might have even committed the ultimate mortal sin of voting for Donald Trump.

There are a lot of people that love the idea of living in the city. The cost of living keeps them away. I’m one of them. That’s one of the reasons why they compromise and move to the suburbs. As the inner ring suburbs have filled up and gotten expensive, people keep moving farther and farther away from the downtown areas. This increases their commuting time and commuting costs. At what point does the commuting cost, both in time and money, finally reach the break even point of what you would pay for housing in the city? At what point does your commuting cost, along with your mortgage and utility costs, surpass what you would pay for urban or inner-ring suburb housing costs, along with the options of using public transportation, the occasional Uber, Lyft, or cab ride, or car share expenses? As a full time working musician, I need a privately owned vehicle (POV) for transporting my drums, PA system, and occasionally lighting and lighting trusses, to my musical jobs. Washington, DC’s music industry is not big enough to support cartage service, like New York or Nashville.

Back when I was a very busy freelance drummer, I had musical gigs averaging five to seven days per week. Some days I had two or even three gigs per day. Car Share like Car To Go or Zip Car, along with Uber and Lyft, wouldn’t have been financially justifiable. The expense of owning a car was justifiable. However, I do have a drummer colleague who lives in DC, who uses Uber or Lyft to transport his drums to his occasional musical jobs, averaging two or three per month, not two or three per week. Most of his work is teaching. All the equipment that he needs for his teaching, except for what he can transport in a backpack like his laptop, is provided at the school. He lives in a high rise less than a block from the Navy Yard Metro station. He can walk to the Metro, take it to the Bethesda Metro station, with one transfer from the Green Line train to the Red Line train at Gallery Place, and then walk less than half a mile to the school. He only needs a car two or three times per month. Why incur the monthly costs of owning a POV: car loan payment, fuel, maintenance costs, car insurance, depreciation, and the extra $500 per month, that it would cost him to rent a parking space at his apartment complex? Hence, car share.

As of this date, no one knows what sort of white collar workforce will be returning to the city. The service industries and other essential personnel are still making the schlep, but the public transportation options have become greatly reduced. Many have had to give up their jobs, because they no longer have a way to get there on public transportation due to service cutbacks. Plus, they can’t afford their own car. Welcome to the unemployment roles. Welcome to the Great Reset.

As we are slowly opening up from the pandemic lockdowns, none of us know how many government agencies, non-profits, and private sector businesses are going to require their personnel to return to in person work. A rumor I heard was that each government agency will have their own remote work guidelines. Right now in DC, there are a lot of vacant office buildings. Can keeping those buildings empty, or converting them into much needed housing be justified? I do know one person who works for an association, who works 100% remote, and will continue to work 100% remote. This person, remaining unnamed, does everything by either Zoom or cell phone, from the back of an RV, while travelling the country. This week’s office is Yellowstone. Next week’s office is Glacier National Park. However, I’m sure this is the exception to the rule for most of us. The compromise is being able to telecommute from home, at least a couple of days per week. I have an idea that just might help revitalize our cities: How about working from home, but the home happens to be in the city, rather than the outlying exurbs? Step one, create more affordable housing for those who are urbanists at heart. There are ways. You could work from home, but home is a nice employer provided apartment on the 7th floor, and your company’s offices are on the 2nd floor. Have an 8:00 am meeting, and then take the elevator back to your home office. When you are done for the day, you are done. Go for a bike ride, go jogging, take care of appointments, go hang out in a park, etc.. The opportunities are endless. As we continue to transition from an industrial based economy to an information age economy, urban living no longer means living in cramped tenements and sweltering away in factories.

Cities at one time, had large middle classes, yes plural. They had large working classes, yes plural. You didn’t just have wealthy people at one end, and the poor at the other—the upstairs/downstairs coalition. The working classes, and the middle classes, are the glue that hold cities together. You had a huge middle of all races. It wasn’t just a mostly white, college degreed, upper middle class. No one talks about it. Many of them fled to the suburbs, starting in the late 1950s. When were most of the single family homes in the suburbs built? Most of the home construction was in the late 1950s and early to middle 1960s. My current 4 BR, 2.5 BA, SFH in a middle ring suburb of Washington, DC, was built in 1964.

I grew up in a middle ring suburb of Hartford, CT. My parents had their house built in a development called The Highlands. It was Farmington, Connecticut’s answer to Levittown. My father was a school teacher, and until my parents had their house built in 1959, we lived on the grounds of Farmington High School, where my father was a junior high school history teacher. I can remember that housing. The teachers referred to it as “The Barracks.” Provided housing was part of the teacher salary and compensation package. He walked out the door at 7:25 am for a 7:30 am report time, and he still had time to go to the teachers’ lounge for a cup of coffee. He also came home every day for lunch.

You could lure a lot of the suburban “urbanists at heart,” back into the cities, if you offered housing as part of a compensation package. While the federal government would be offering government housing, for very obvious reasons, the private sector could be doing the same. You could even model it after the military, with different degrees of housing, depending on your need and your rank. A single clerk would not get the same housing as a married middle manager, who would not get the same housing as a single vice president, etc.. Many of the independent, high end boarding schools, do provide housing as part of their compensation package. The headmaster gets a nice big house, and the teachers get decent size, typical middle class style housing. Think how much money you would save every year, if you didn’t have to pay for housing. You just might be able to save up enough money, so that your children wouldn’t have to take out student loans in order to afford college. That, and you just might be able to save up enough over a 35 year career, that you could finally purchase your dream house after you retired.

As someone who grew up very middle-middle class, I love the culture of the city, with its restaurants, museums, music, and sporting events. I would love to be able to walk across the street, go down the escalator to the train platform, and take the Metrorail and/or a Metrobus, to wherever I needed to go. I would love to have a cartage service store, deliver and then pick up my equipment when I had music jobs. That being said, I’m sure there are a lot more conservative urbanists out there. I doubt that I am alone.

Unfortunately, a lot of urban housing is based on the Bootleggers and Baptists model. That’s why you have zoning regulations. What that means, is that the Bootleggers vote for the Baptists, who keep the county a “dry” county, which benefits the Bootleggers. The mostly White, Wealthy and Upper Middle Classes, vote for the members of the city or county councils, that will keep single family home, residential only zoning laws in place. These laws benefit the Wealthy and the mostly White, Upper Middle Classes. The laws restrict the amount of land and supply of housing stock, so that the cost stays high enough that it keeps the “riff raff” out. They can’t afford to live there. You discriminate by creating an economically gated community. The cost of housing also drives the quality of the schools, and vice-versa. It’s the education version of Bootleggers and Baptists, honoring a discussion at a later date.

The amount of money that you have, is which side of B and B you are on; or are you caught in the middle? When you are caught in the middle, you make too much money to qualify for any sort of government relief program, and you get taxed to death in the process. What do you do? You pick up stakes and you head for the suburbs—and more and more frequently today, those suburbs just might be in an entirely different state.

When I met my wife, I was living in a 1 BR, 1 BA apartment, in a mixed use neighborhood in Washington, DC. There were single family homes, row houses, and apartment buildings. My wife was living in a 2 BR, 1 BA apartment, in an apartment complex, in Silver Spring, MD. She was a single parent with a 9 year old daughter. We couldn’t live in my place, because my lease said, “no kids and no pets.” We tried living in a rural area and commuting into the city. I was with the Air Force Band at the time. Commuting time could run up to two hours in each direction for either of us. It wasn’t going to work. We decided to buy a house, that was within reasonable commuting distance from the city. We currently live in College Park, MD. We’ve been here for almost 40 years. Our mortgage was a stretch for about 10 years, but it’s now right in that 20% range of our respective retirements. We aren’t going anywhere, unless the cost of housing in DC becomes a better deal. For now, we are aging in place.

There have been a lot of changes demographically, in the time that we have lived in College Park. Those changes have been for the better. When we bought our house, our neighborhood was about 95% White. We just shake our heads and chuckle about Bethesda’s reaction to the idea of putting low income housing in the suburbs. The claim is that it’s for equality or what’s the new word of the day, equity? It’s bullshit. It’s Liberal Democrat voting, Professional Class Bethesda, not wanting to practice what they preach. They are all for diversity as long as that diversity ends up somewhere else. One lady spilled the beans at a zoning meeting. She got into it with one of the zoning board members. She said, “What you are trying to do is punish us for being White and successful.” Diversity is for thee, but not for me. It’s NIMBYism on steroids.

I hear talk radio hosts railing about the evils of diversifying the suburbs. Guess what? Here in good old College Park, we are about as diverse as you can get. My Working Class/Lower Middle to Middle Middle Class neighborhood, about a 10 block radius inclusive, is probably 20% White, 30% Black, 40% Hispanic, and 10% Asian and various combinations of mixed races. We have contractors, tradesmen (or it tradespersons in this PC era), college professors, school teachers, mechanics, lawyers, police officers, etc., etc.. In another words, we are quite diverse; a lot more diverse than 95% White, Professional Class Bethesda.

Recently, there were some zoning change meetings in Bethesda, about the government’s plan to put low income housing in the suburbs, in order to balance things out racially. It’s amazing how when it affects them, those compassion for all mankind Liberals, suddenly want nothing to do with what they preach. One lady stood up in one of the meetings, and actually said, “What you are doing is trying to punish us for being White and successful.” Knowing where she was from, I’m quite certain that she didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

I brought up the idea of employer provided housing in the comment section of an article in Greater Greater Washington. The people that support GGW are mostly Socialist urbanists. They wanted to advance the idea of the government providing more housing. However, my idea did get some traction. Having the private sector provide housing, did at least perk their interest.

There would be a lot of things to work out regarding issues like: Would the employer be required to still provide housing for someone who was laid off? If they then found employment with a different company, because they were laid off and not fired for cause, would the losing company be required to pay for the move into housing provided by the gaining company? Would there still be enough private sector housing stock for retirees and those that lost their jobs for cause? There are a lot of things that we would need to address, but I do think that employer provided housing would be a move in the right direction. It just might swell the ranks of the middle classes in the cities, which would stabilize them. Cities need large middle classes of all races and occupations, in order to become the apexes of societies, that should be their birthright.