Another Way Of Creating More Affordable Housing: Employer Provided Housing As Part Of Your Employment Contract.

So if we are not going to build more affordable housing, what's next?

I’ve been working on this post for a quite a while. I keep starting and stopping. I erase everything, and start all over again. I ramble in one directions, and then another, and then erase everything again. I’m glad I’m not a professional writer. If I were getting paid to write, I would have starved to death a long time ago. For now, I’ll consider writing to be a hobby. Here’s the latest ramble:

I don’t think about housing most of the time, because I bought my house back in 1982. I’ve refinanced a few times, and have a very affordable mortgage payment in my retirement. It wasn’t always that way. My wife and I were quite house poor the first 10 years we lived here. I was reminded of my house payment every time I looked in my empty wallet. After 13 years, we finally could afford to take a vacation. Before that, they were all staycations. It’s become even harder for subsequent generations.

I live in a middle-ring suburb of Washington, DC, College Park, MD, home of one of the 14 members of the Big-10 Conference (somebody with a college degree couldn’t count), the University of Maryland. Here in the Washington, DC area, housing prices have gone from expensive to unaffordable. For the working and lower middle classes, the days of home ownership are pretty much gone. You can’t even afford an apartment without a roommate. It’s not just the working classes either. If you have a college degree and a student loan, that entry level job doesn’t quite pay enough for you to be able to afford your own place. I guess you won’t mind living in a group house like you did in college. You should be used to it by now. What’s next, multi-family group houses? We are becoming a 1960s hippie commune.

In my previous post, I said that one way to solve the affordable housing crisis, is to build more affordable housing. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like it’s on the horizon any time before Captain Kirk assumes command of the starship, Enterprise. That pretty much leaves two other options: government-owned public housing for the middle class as well as the poor, or employer-provided housing for the company’s staff, like the US Military provides for its members. I’m a conservative, I’ll go with employer-provided. When I think about government-owned public housing, my first thoughts go to Pruitt-Igoe, and Cabrini-Green. See how well they worked out. Yes, I know, “but in Europe…”

I had a housing discussion with an urbanist friend at a Greater Greater Washington (GGW) happy hour event a couple of years ago. His position was that all housing should come from the government. Nobody should own a house. In Europe you have government-owned, public housing for both the poor and the middle classes. In Great Britain, you have council housing. We should become more like Europe. Fine. Then, let’s increase our home ownership to European Union levels of an average of 70%, except in Germany and Switzerland, where over half the population of those two countries rents, from the US level of 65%. Look it up. I did. I see that happening after Captain Kirk retires.

My GGW friend is a die-hard socialist. Most people in the urbanist/planner communities are. Socialism is their capitalism. Many of them are full-blown Marxists. When you work as a town or city planner, or for advocacy groups and non-profits, you rely on government grants for your survival. The more stuff comes from the government, the more job security you have. Therefore, you want big government, and the bigger the better. The thought of employer-provided housing made him sick to his stomach. You would become a slave to your employer.

Here’s where I’ll agree with him: If your employer is the government, then you should live in government-owned housing. Your housing is being provided by your employer, the government. Will you then become a slave to the government? Would it be the same for state, county, or municipal government workers too, like public school teachers?

My father was a public school social studies teacher in Farmington, CT, a bedroom community of Hartford, CT. Yes, I’m a Boomer child of suburbia. From the time I was five, my family lived in a Levittown-style suburban development of tract houses, called the Highlands. Before that, we lived in housing on the high school/junior high school grounds, that was provided to the school’s staff as part of their compensation package.

I do have some memories of living there, even though I was quite young. Living in provided housing, allowed my parents to save up enough money for a 20% down payment on that suburban Levittown-style house, while my mom remained a stay-at-home mom. The housing was located across the parking lot from the high school/junior high, where the tennis courts are now located. My dad’s commute? A two-minute walk from one side of the parking lot to the other, regardless of traffic.

Living there allowed him and my mother, to enjoy a nice, comfortable, low-frills lifestyle on one income. Of course back then, there weren’t many frills to begin with. The black and white TV set took forever to warm up, and there were 3 channels. From 1949 to 1959 (I was born in 1954), they were able to save up the 20% down payment needed to purchase a house.

Even though my memory of “the barracks,” as the teachers used to refer to them has faded over time, I do remember some things about living there. I don’t remember it ever being bad. Yes, my mother had to defrost the refrigerator once a week, and hang the laundry on the clothesline to dry, but then again, so did everyone else.

The housing units were two L-shaped wooden single-story buildings, of back to back row houses. I think there was a total of 30 units. I do remember they were painted a dark blue/green color. There were a lot of young teacher and other school employee families living there. Mrs. Szchek, the head cook at Union School, one of the town’s two elementary schools, lived there with her teenage daughter. Her husband had been killed in action during World War II. Her spaghetti sauce was legendary. On spaghetti days, few students or teachers at Union School, brought their lunches from home. There were usually leftovers the next day too.

There were a lot of kids living in “the barracks.” We all played together. The older kids quasi-supervised the younger kids. The various moms would watch us out the windows, and occasionally come out to make sure everything was ok. Most of the time, it was. We didn’t have organized play dates, facilitated by a caring adult, with an ideological agenda. We made up our own ideological agenda. It was called having fun. Somehow we survived without the internet, cell phones, air conditioning, or a dishwasher. Our telephone service was a party line. Private lines were too expensive.

The housing units were still occupied until the middle 1960s. When I got to high school in 1969, they were gone. I’m sure that if they had been available, some of the teachers would have lived there for their entire careers. Tennis anyone?

I live in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. I moved here for an Air Force Band assignment in 1980, and stayed after I retired. The DC area is now expensive. Very expensive! There was a time when you could find cheap rentals in decent neighborhoods, but those days are long gone. You can’t find cheap rentals in bad neighborhoods either.

After I retired from the Air Force in 2003, I taught at a private school in Montgomery County, MD. The headmaster, facilities manager, and one of the technology gurus had homes on the school’s campus. Some of the very prestigious private boarding schools in New England provide housing on their campuses, for their faculty and staff. I understand that some of the tech companies on the West Coast provide some housing for their employees on their campuses. Are they slaves to their employer? How about H1B visa holding indentured servants from India?

Here in the Washington, DC area, how many people can say that their housing costs don’t exceed 20% of their income? That used to be the benchmark. The new benchmark is 30%. Some families pay 50% or more. Sorry, it should be 20% or less. I’m old school. That way after paying your rent or mortgage, you can still afford to pay the utilities, fix the car, put some money in the bank for emergencies, put some money in the bank for emergencies, put some money in the bank for emergencies (hint!!!, hint!!!!!!), be able to afford a two-week vacation in the mountains or the sea coast, and still have enough money for groceries.

I’m going to float a hypothetical situation: My GGW friend said that all housing should come from the government. Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s start from the top down with our elected officials. The president lives in the White House. That’s government-owned housing. Check. The vice president lives in a mansion at the Naval Observatory. That’s also government-owned housing. Check. High-ranking officers, and other key personnel in the military, are required to live on base for readiness and/or security purposes. Check. Ok, the precedent has been set. Let’s move on to our distinguished elected officials in the House and Senate. Checkmate. Here’s an excellent article by Ben Krauss on the Slow Boring Substack page:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/members-of-congress-should-actuall

Members of Congress should actually live in DC

I agree that the Members of Congress should actually live in DC, and he has a lot of reasons that make common sense. He says that they should be given relocation packages based on the cost of housing in the DC area. This is one “area” (no pun intended) where I respectfully disagree. I say Members of Congress should be required to live in Washington, DC, on Capitol Hill. Each congressional district should purchase a Capitol Hill town house for their representative and their family. That is their residence while they are in office. They can walk to work, or take the bus. For senators, each state should purchase two Capitol Hill townhouses; one for each of their two senators and their families. They can walk to work, or take the bus too. What a great passive-aggressive way to get more bus only lanes, that benefit the rest of us. You have to get the right people sitting in a traffic jam every day. It just might increase funding for public transportation. Representatives, senators, and their families would remain residents of their respective homes of record, their domiciles, for voting and tax purposes, just like members of the armed forces. And…drumroll please…they should be required to send their kids to DC public schools. Poof! Our urban public education disasters suddenly get fixed.

This is my layman’s understanding: Under current tax laws, fringe benefits are considered income, and taxed accordingly. Employer-provided housing is considered a fringe benefit. There are some exceptions. One of them is you must live in company housing as a condition of your employment. It can’t be an option. Also the company must actually own the housing. They can’t be renting the housing units themselves. And…it has to be in the company’s best interest, whatever that means.

There are concerns that if you live in employer-provided housing, and the company let you go, you could end up destitute and homeless. Yes, you could. There would need to be safeguards. Here’s how I would put them into place, so if you are let go, you are not on the street:

If you are laid off due to restructuring or downsizing, the company that let you go, would be required to allow you to live in their housing until you found a comparable job somewhere else. You would have to be actively seeking work, and you would have to accept the first comparable job offered. When you secured a new position with a different company, the company that let you go, would have to pay for the move to your new location.

If you leave a company voluntarily to take a better job somewhere else, you pay for the move. Alternatively if you have more than one brain cell, when you are negotiating your new employment contract, you have the receiving employer pay for the move as part of the agreement.

If you are fired for cause however, you’re on your own. You screwed up. There will still be plenty of expensive developer owned rentals. After all, there are a lot of people who screw up and get fired for cause. If you became indigent as a result, there would always be the option of government-owned public housing projects. They will always exist. We do not live in a perfect society, and never will.

My suburban single family home bedroom community, and university town, is starting to gentrify with lots of apartment buildings with light retail first floors. Some are student rentals. Some are public apartment complexes. A few are reserved for senior citizens. A new complex is being built in my neighborhood with 318 residential units. Several of my neighbors are up in arms. They are worried about the traffic. They are worried about crime. I’m hoping it will mean more frequent buses.

The residential units will be rentals, and will be limited to families making between 50% and 80% of the average median income for the area, $40,000ish to about $70,000ish; it’s more hard-working, working class families moving into a hard-working, working class neighborhood. I’m not worried about an increase in crime.

The NIMBYs in Montgomery County, MD, made sure “those people,” didn’t grace their neighborhoods, all in the name of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Starting about 20 years ago, “those people,” began moving into my neighborhood, as DC’s Columbia Heights and Shaw neighborhoods gentrified. It continues to this day. Guess what? They are all great neighbors. Some of them, have lots of kids. It’s nice seeing little kids running around the neighborhood, like we did. They don’t look like scheduled, agenda-driven play dates, like the kids have in Montgomery County. Gee, I wonder why?

Most of my neighbors are contractors or in the trades. Many of them are working on the conversion and redevelopment projects happening all along Route 1. What used to be light industrial, is being redeveloped into mixed-use housing and light retail. The city of College Park is starting to look like a city. The suburban to urban sprawl has arrived.

If you aren’t going to move to the city, the city will come to you. Like Montgomery County, MD, 30 years ago, Prince George’s County, MD, is finally starting to densify. I like density and all its conveniences. Density usually means more public transportation. Bring on the buses here in suburbia. This conservative urbanist uses buses and subways every chance he gets. The older I get, the less driving I want to do. Not only that, I really enjoy riding public transportation.

I would consider moving back into the city, if I could keep the same comfortable lower-middle class lifestyle, that I currently enjoy in my suburban retirement. If not, I’m going to let the city come to me. It’s starting with lots of mixed-use development projects. I’m staying put.

While I can appreciate rural areas, I have no desire to live in the countryside. It’s a nice place to visit. You can have all the bugs and the critters that go bump in the night. I’ll stick with my concrete and steel.

Here’s a nice city itinerary: How about spending a day in several museums, having dinner in a nice, downtown restaurant, and then a concert at the Kennedy Center, a show at the National Theater, or a professional sports game at a downtown arena? You don’t need a car for any of those activities either. There is Metro, 24-hour bus service, and a reasonable amount of walking. My cardiologist told me, “walking is good for you.” He must be an urbanist.

For all the non-profits, foundations, think tanks, and other occupations adjacent to the government, how about converting old downtown office buildings that have lots of windows, into live/work employer provided housing for your employees? You could telecommute from home on the 7th floor, and come down to the 2nd floor once a week for a meeting. Your carbon footprint would be amazing.

The buildings with lots of working windows were built long before central air-conditioning became the norm. They are much easier to convert into residential units than more modern buildings. There are specialized contractor companies, who specialize in converting commercial buildings into residential and/or mixed use buildings. However, in a lot of instances, it’s cheaper to tear down buildings, and build new mixed-use buildings from scratch.

As far as the government is concerned, how about converting the federal office buildings in DC, that were built to accommodate those bloated alphabet agencies that were forced upon us during the New Deal, as well as the new government office buildings, into live/work New Urbanism-style living? This would be in keeping with deferential reverence to the ideological spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Why should that HUD GS-13 live in Bethesda? That HUD building on 7th St. SW is huge. I’m sure with the right contractor, it could become a nice live/work environment. That GS-13 could get a nice, 3,500 square foot residential/office unit on the 5th floor. As an added bonus, there is a Metro station right there, and there are 24/7 bus lines right outside of the front door too. That GS-13 wouldn’t need a car.

Ideally, if you work in DC, you should live in DC. Isn’t Washington, DC, supposed to be the ultimate company town anyway? Wasn’t that its original purpose? You even get paid in, and get to pay for everything using company script, the US Dollar. However, with high housing prices, high crime, incompetent government, and bad schools, DC doesn’t fall under, “ideally.”

There is an emerging housing trend called co-living. It’s still emerging and going through some fits and starts growing pains. Basically, it’s a boarding house without the board. It’s a fancy name for group house. It’s part of the We-Work network, called We-Live. I found the link to the story on the Greater Greater Washington website https://ggwash.org/view/93897/breakfast-links-co-living-property-in-arlington-shuts-its-doors

Here’s a link to the article in Arlington Now: https://www.arlnow.com/2024/06/06/company-managing-former-welive-apartments-in-crystal-city-office-building-files-for-bankruptcy/

The We-Work concept of renting office space only when you need it, is a good idea. It seems to be catching on, with a large percentage of the white-collar workforce now working remote. The We-Live variation seemed to be what the area needed for housing. You could move into your fully furnished, group house with just a suitcase. With Amazon moving into National Landing, there would be initially, a lot of turnover for several years. We-Live was perfect for those hopping from job to job, as well as digital nomads, with its 3-month leases. Work from home and walk to the office when needed. You’d get a private room with shared common areas, just like the group house you lived in during your senior year in college. It’s completely furnished, down to the last teaspoon. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” What’s not to like?

We-Work filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November, 2023. Now We-Live has done the same. Here’s the problem: Once you reach a certain age, you are no longer interested in paying over $1000 a month, for the privilege of living in a group house. You want a place of your own. You can’t afford one in the city or the inner-ring suburb, so you head for the exurbs, or if you are working 100% remote, to a state without a state income tax.

Now if the company hiring you, offered you a salary of $50,000 a year to start, and required you to live in provided housing as part of your compensation package, instead of having to pay over $1000 a month for a place to live, would you take the job? I would. Without a mortgage/rent payment, plus utilities payment, you can live a fairly comfortable/medium-frills lifestyle, on $50,000 a year, especially if you don’t own a car. If I were single, and in the beginning stages of my work life, I would definitely take the job. If I stayed single, I just might stay there for my entire work life. If I got married and started a family, the company or agency I work for, would provide me with a two, three, or four bedroom, two bath apartment. You make it worth their while for your employees to remain your employees, and love the conveniences of living in the city. The upside to the Left’s dismay, is you will get more conservative urbanists. In the meantime, I’m also hoping for more conservative suburbanists.