Affordable Housing 2

Rather than government housing like the Left wants, how about changing the tax code so that companies can provide housing for their employees without it counting as income as a fringe benefit?

What is meant by “Affordable Housing”? There was a time when spending 20% or less of the monthly take-home income of your rent or mortgage, was considered affordable. Today, the powers that be say that it’s 30%. However, in a lot of locations, people are spending over 50% of their take-home pay on their shelter needs. That’s a lot of money. In my mind, it’s totally unacceptable. I learned that from experience. When my wife and I bought this house, my entire paycheck paid the mortgage, and we lived on her salary. We both made about the same take-home pay, so it was about 50%. We were house poor for about 15 years. We came out ahead in the long run. We are both retired, we live in the same house that we bought in 1982, we have sufficient retirement income, and we are comfortable. Not rich, but comfortable.

I live in College Park, Maryland, a middle-ring suburb of Washington, DC. I’m about five miles in a straight shot down Rhode Island Avenue to the DC line. All along Rhode Island Avenue, there is a building boom of mid-rise, 4-6 story mixed-use complexes. Studio efficiency apartments go for around $1,800 on average, and it goes up from there. There is a new townhouse development two blocks from my house. They start at $600,000. Even the small single-family home ramblers like I live in, go for well over $450,000. My wife and I paid $82,500 when we bought our house in 1982.

I’m imagining the high cost of housing is similar in most cities. Then you have commercial buildings that are sitting empty, due to the Covid pandemic. Some companies are ordering their employees back to the office. Others are letting their workers be 100% remote. Some are doing a combination of both. Even so, there are a lot of buildings in the downtown business district that are sitting empty.

You have this infrastructure of commercial real estate that is sitting empty. This is the aftermath destruction of the Covid-19 quarantines and lockdowns/lockouts; in my opinion, the dumbest thing this country has ever done. White-collar workers, especially those in management positions, are either working completely remotely or are on a hybrid work schedule. I’m sure many companies are choosing a hybrid work schedule because they still have leases on the downtown buildings; they don’t want to see those leases go to waste with an empty office building that they are paying for each month.

At the same time, you have a workforce that was used to commuting; many drove to work with one person in the car. Them. Some carpooled. Many of them parked at the various Metro stations and rode Metrorail into the city for their jobs. Now things are different. Much of the white-collar workforce is used to working remotely. They’re spoiled. Many of them are now used to working in their pajamas. You are going to have a hard time getting them to come back to the downtown office. At the moment, there are more jobs available than there are people looking for jobs. Right. If a company wants its employees to return to the office, they are finding out that many of their workers are leaving for greener (100% remote) pastures. If you can work remotely, why not purchase a house in another state, where you can get DC metro areas $700,000 house for less than $200,000?

Prospective and current employees can be very choosy as far as where they work. At the same time, however, many of them do miss the amenities of the city. Many of them would love to live downtown and have their office less than a 10-minute walk or a short bus/subway ride, from home. They miss the corner deli where they got their lunch and caught up with friends from other offices. They miss leaving their home at 6:45 PM for a sporting event that starts at 7. What is keeping them out of the city are the three legs of the stool: crime, affordable housing, and quality public service infrastructure that includes public transportation.

I am not a planner. I am not a developer or a contractor. I am not a credentialed social scientist either, and no, I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. However, I do see the cost, including the social cost, of what high housing prices can do to the economy. Here’s an example: My church, St. Anthony of Padua, in Washington, DC, has a great pre-K through 8th-grade school. The school can’t keep teachers. Why? Because of what the church can afford to pay them. The Catholic Church no longer has sufficient orders of nuns and brothers who specialize in education. For many of us who were on the receiving end of Sister’s ruler, it’s a blessing. A teacher can not live on that salary with the housing costs anywhere in the entire metro area. Some share a house with a bunch of other folks that are in the same working-class, lower-middle-class boat. Some of the women teachers rent rooms in the various convents in the area. However, living with a bunch of nuns doesn’t do a whole lot for your social life.

What the archdiocese should do is purchase the empty lot at Monroe Street NE and 9th Street NE where Colonel Brooks’ Tavern used to be, and build an apartment building with 1, 2, and 3, possibly 4 (they are Catholic after all) bedroom units for the teachers who teach at St. Anthony’s. If you don’t need to pay anything for housing, a parochial school teacher’s salary becomes quite livable. You might be able to make your living expenses without a roommate. In addition, St. Anthony’s School might keep an excellent, long-term, loyal teacher. Do you want to sweeten the deal even better? As part of the compensation package, the children of the teachers and staff at St. Anthony’s School, get free tuition.

When I was very young, up to about age 4, our family lived in provided teacher housing on the grounds of Farmington High School in Farmington, Connecticut. They were a series of row houses that were in the location of the current tennis courts. Provided housing was part of the teacher’s compensation package. My father taught History, Geography, and English at the junior high school level; back then junior high was 7th and 8th grades, and the junior high school was in the same set of connected buildings that are still the High School.

When the town built the new junior high school at the other end of town, my parents figured it was time to purchase a home. They purchased a nice 1200-square-foot Cape Cod-style house in a Levittown-style housing development called The Highlands. They paid $12,000 for the house in 1959. When my dad died in 2008, my mother sold the house for $315,000 and moved into a senior citizen community. With today’s interest rate, a $300,000 mortgage has a 30-year payment of over $2,000 per month. That’s not affordable housing.

When I first moved to DC in 1980, I dated for a short period of time, a lady that was a Prince George’s County public school music teacher. She shared a 2 bedroom apartment in Greenbelt, with 3 other women, who were also Prince George’s County public school teachers. That was how they could afford to live in the DC suburbs on a teacher’s salary. Four women in a two-bedroom apartment. Not good for your social life either. That was in 1980. It’s only gotten worse. Today we are heading in the direction where there would be 10 people chosen by the government using diversity quotas sharing a 1 BR/1BA apartment. This doesn’t sit well with me.

There is a lot of talk about converting downtown office space to mixed-use, or even residential units. There is a growing list of developers who are specializing in converting commercial office buildings into residential units. There needs to be more of them. Working from home can also mean working from home while you are living in affordable housing in a downtown area. The Covid-19 pandemic sent a lot of people home and had them work from home. That is unless you were one of the non-college-educated, service workers deemed “essential personnel.” That was part of the “culling of the herd,” deemed necessary as part of the Great Reset. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-political-hierarchy-of-infection/

The Professional Managerial Class works remotely, at least part of the time. Rather than bringing people back to the office how about bringing the office to them? If you have an office building in the city, I’ll use the area around L Street and 17th Street NW in Washington, DC as an example. How about converting it to mixed-use? Is it financially feasible? Would it be cheaper to knock the building down and build a mid-rise with retail on street level, offices on the second floor, and then residential units: studios, 1 BR, 2 BR, and 3 BR on the subsequent floors? DC codes allow up to 12 stories. These are all questions that need to be asked.

While I hear a lot of droning about how great it is living in a very outer-ring exurb or in a rural area, I would go stir crazy living around all that nature. For me, living in a small “city” (pop. 32,000, yes it’s incorporated), which is a middle-ring suburb of a major metropolitan area, is about as rural as I want it to get. I can also get my big city fix whenever I want one. Many people, myself included love big cities and would move into them if we had the comfortable financial means to do so. We don’t. We can’t afford to live in them. Not only that, there is too much street crime and your schools suck. You can’t create a strong middle class if they have to spend more than 20% of their income on housing costs, especially if they plan on sending “Junior” to private school. If they want to homeschool, they are going to have to figure out how they are going to live on one income, while the other spouse stays home and teaches the kids. Some families have one parent working during the day, and the other parent goes to work at night. It’s not an optimal arrangement. The family will be looking at better options.

They will keep moving further and further out, into the exurbs and the ex-exurbs. Who would have thought that Leesburg, VA, or Fredrick, MD, would become outer-ring suburbs of Washington, DC? How do we get them to come into the city, but leave their car at home or at the Metro station? How do we make the cities attractive again? It can be done.

People have traditionally moved out of the city, and into the suburbs for a variety of reasons: the high cost of living, substandard infrastructure including schools, and now semi-post-Covid, a huge increase in crime. As they move out of the city they also move their cars. If they don’t have one, or two, they are going to have a difficult time getting to work, or even going to the grocery store. They buy one, or two, or three… Then comes the traffic and the need for a lot more public transportation; yes I’m a conservative, and I’m also a common sense, non-ideological conservative urbanist. I believe in smart growth, but it needs to be smart. I could care less about the Left’s mantra of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, while they live in a mostly white neighborhood. Stop the virtue-signaling bullshit. If you do smart growth with a few grains of common sense, those things will take care of themselves. I’m not holding my breath.

Many years ago my dream was to move to New York City, make a good living as a working freelance musician, and live in an old converted loft in the garment district. I had some musician friends that did just that. They were able to secure some performing artist grants, that allowed them to have the money to convert those old sweatshop factory floors into live/work spaces. I don’t know the details of how that worked, but being New York City, you don’t ask any questions. If you can convert a former garment district sweatshop floor into a very livable living space, couldn’t that be done to other office buildings?

Creating New Urbanism planned communities downtown shouldn’t be that difficult, but it is. There are too many agencies trying to out-regulate each other in order to justify their existence, and in the process create a bureaucratic nightmare for any developer. All the regulation increases the cost to the developer, who then produces luxury units in order to recoup the development costs, and make a profit. It’s the Luxury City concept. Cities are supposed to be the playpens of the upper middle classes and the wealthy. Send the riffraff to the outer fringe, so they can have a two-hour commute each way. After all, you don’t want them stinking up your lily-white neighborhood after sundown (are the urbanist Left trying to re-create Jim Crow, but with a different demographic?).

We created town centers in the suburbs: Start with Greenbelt, Maryland, one of three Roosevelt Administration planned communities, then the modern versions: King Farm, the Rio, and Kentlands come to mind, why not create them in the city too? We used to have them in our cities. They were called neighborhoods. You had your Black neighborhoods, your Irish neighborhoods, your Jewish neighborhoods, your Italian neighborhoods, your Puerto Rican neighborhoods, and your Every Thing Else neighborhoods. Oh, and you had your WASP, old-money Beacon Hill-type neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were all basically urban town centers connected by a vast network of buses, subways, and streetcars. Look at Manhattan. Look at Baltimore. Look at Boston. Of course in the city, neighborhoods, I mean town centers, can be separated by a cross street. In the suburban town centers, there are a lot more spaces between them. Sometimes miles. Basically, that is the only difference. There is a big push going on right now to advance Transit Oriented Communities as the sequel to Transit Oriented Development. Again, more neighborhoods. This is a good thing. I’m sure the plan is to connect those developments with reliable public transportation options. Let’s hope that is the case.

Neighborhoods had their own grocery stores, butcher shops, doctors, dentists, barbers, hairdressers, lawyers, and in the end: the funeral director. There wasn’t a lot of interaction between the residents of different neighborhoods, unless it was unavailable in your neighborhood, at least initially. Over time, many things changed. Interaction slowly became the norm. Sometimes that interaction became rival gang violence. However, there was a plus side. There were inter-marriages between various ethnic groups; inter-marriages like the marriage between an Italian man and an Irish woman that would have had their ethnic grandparents spinning in their graves.

Today inter-marriages between the races are becoming a lot more commonplace too. Not just among military families either. Years ago, a Black/White couple walking hand in hand, would have been a scandal. Same with a gay or lesbian couple. Today, nobody I know would give it a second thought, myself included.

Those ethnic blue-collar neighborhoods crashed and burned from the late 1980s to the middle 1990s. The causes? Offshoring of many of the manufacturing jobs that had given many blue-collar workers a comfortable lower-middle-class lifestyle was one. The other was the crack cocaine epidemic, which created an inner-city crime wave, from about the middle-late 1980s, to the early-middle 1990s. Clinton’s 1993 crime legislation (not Reagan’s), put a lot of inner-city gang bangers in prison for life. That was a sneaky way of reducing the unemployment rate. Prisoners aren’t counted as unemployed.

Let’s say I’m a developer, which I’m not; and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night again either. I’ve been contracted to convert office space into work/residential spaces. You don’t need to go high-end on the amenities and appliances. Most of the folks who are the worker bees in our offices, come from middle-class backgrounds. Most of them didn’t grow up with high-end, stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. Maybe those that came from the upper middle class did, but the rest of us chumps are just typical products of basic middle-class suburbia, complete with basic white Sears Kenmore appliances. Didn’t everyone have Formica countertops and linoleum floors?

We the Suburban Spawned Boomer children of the Greatest Generation, grew up quite Spartan by today’s standards. My mother didn’t have a dishwasher until we renovated part of the house, and had a contractor build a family room/2-car garage addition; just like most of the other houses in the neighborhood. She didn’t have a dryer until she was well into her 70s. She liked hanging things outside in the sunshine. If it was going to rain, she hung the wash in the basement. Why 2-car garages? Because like everyone else in the neighborhood, you had 2 cars. Why? Because there were no public transportation options available for those of us who grew up in “those ticky tacky and they all look the same.” Thank you, Pete Seeger.

There are all sorts of debates about parking minimums with the new mixed-use developments. Easy. Sell or rent the parking spaces separately. If you own a car and want a parking space, you pay more. Yes, you do provide parking spaces for guests as well as the plumber who fixes your exploding toilet, but if you live there and park in one of those spaces, you get towed. If you don’t need a POV as part of your work, you don’t need a car if there are sufficient public transportation options. The key word is “sufficient.” Where I live, the transit options need a lot of improvement. They are not even close to being sufficient. My idea of sufficient is 24/7/365 transit options that come every 15 minutes. Of course, the current options where I live, are still better than they were in the Highlands, which were basically none unless you wanted to walk about a mile to the bus stop.

I know among urbanists, there are some that are vehemently anti-car and would like to see cars outlawed. I’ve got news for you: Cars are here to stay. However, I think that anyone living in a city and owning a car, unless you are a tradesman like a plumber or an electrician who needs a work truck, is nuts! Most of the people going to work downtown today are young, office-working Millennials and now the older members of the Zoomers are joining the fun called adulthood. If you live in the city and work in an office, or from your city residence, you don’t need a car. If you really need a car, there are carsharing cars available. You can rent them by the day, hour, or even some by the minute. Car 2 Go comes to mind. Of course, there are always taxis, Lyft and Uber too. Ok, so there are the reasons why you don’t need a car in the city. Think of the money you will save if you don’t own one. However, that doesn’t do anything about the cost of housing in the city, suburbs, or even now the exurbs.

There is only one way to bring down the price of housing. Create more of it. Notice I said create and not build. However, building is part of the equation. The other is converting. At the same time, you have families who want a single-family home too. That was my choice, and not because I love suburbia, which I don’t. I’m a drummer. That’s what I do for a living. I have to have a place to practice where I won’t bother the neighbors. Do you want to get musicians out of their single-family homes and into denser housing? Build multi-family units exclusively for musicians. I’m sure there are some grants that would be willing to fund it. Musicians don’t care if they hear other people practicing. That’s what musicians do. Quality electronic drums were not available when I bought my house. Today, I could get used to using electronic drums for practicing and then either the electronic or acoustic drums on the gigs. I could live in one of those town center-type mixed-use buildings, and still be able to practice.