[murph-almighty]

Anecdata, so please take with a grain of salt- in the past 5 years of my life I've spent significant time in Pittsburgh, DC, central NJ, and NYC. In each of these areas I've seen large luxury apartment projects, but not one project for affordable housing.

If you create high priced housing that no one (including students paying off massive ampunts of debt, where the min payment + rent = a mortgage payment) can afford, your high-priced housing will stay empty. Developers beware.

[lovich]

No one is ever going to make affordable housing on a scarce resources like land in a city. Developers will always build luxury housing.

When building was allowed, you got richer people moving into new luxury housing and as buildings aged, instead of fixing the luxury features, landlords would lower the rent and target a different market.

Now that many cities do not allow enough building you get richer people staying on those aging buildings or even moving into the city and competing for fairly run down housing.

If we don't allow building then two options are allocating housing by price or by lottery(like rent control), but either way people lose out because you can't put 110 families in 100 apartments. Unless more housing is allowed to be built there will be this frustration

[kingkawn]

They will build affordable housing if the government requires it as part of doing business. In NYC there are affordable housing tax incentives for developers that have resulted in small but meaningful additions to affordable housing. These programs are not at scale to impact the broad populace, but a stronger regulatory and incentive structure is possible.

[lovich]

That's still just a lottery based on who gets their application in first if it's not based on market pricing. If you command "affordable housing" be built and that's all that's available, then the people who would have paid for luxury housing will move into the "affordable housing" and drive up the price because that's all that's available. Additionally this will lower the efficiency of the market and makes less housing available as developers who would have built housing at X price drop out of the market when the price is mandated to be X-Y.

I am all for getting people help to get housing, but everything societies have tried to do to fix housing shortages for lower income people has failed other than building more housing. It's all just trying to paper around the fact that at the end of the day there are more people who want to live in the cities than there are apartments/condos/houses.

If you built like crazy and added 50% more housing in a year to a city, you'll find that suddenly a lot more housing is available

[kingkawn]

The lottery system has income limits to ensure it is for people who need it. The rich can find their own way quite painlessly.

Also market efficiency is not the God that government need worship

[lovich]

A lottery still drops people, it's just based on luck in the lottery and not how much you can pay. If that's what you want, then that's a position to hold. It does not, however, change the fact that there will still be the same number of people unable to get housing

[kingkawn]

No, the number of people unable to get housing will be reduced by the number of people who win the lottery and get housing. Leverage the market or direct government sponsorship or by whatever means people create, if enough housing is built then the lottery starts to make a more noticeable dent in the out of housing population.

[Nasrudith]

Technically affordability is peripheral to profit margins - although they are very related right now. If they could make more money and get through building tenements they would because that is where the money is and that is what they can get approved.

In order for cheaper housing to win for new construction it requires both acceptance and greater profit margins.

Granted one doesn't need /new/ affordable housing if the new luxury leaves enough vacancies that the older high end becomes the new low end. The persistent historical lack of high density housing does make things worse because of the lack of dense housing to wind up relatively downgraded creates a bottleneck in density growth for affordable housing. If they were building only new luxury high density for 70 years there would be effectively a relative affordable housing from degradation and shifting designs.

[leetcrew]

> If you create high priced housing that no one (including students paying off massive ampunts of debt, where the min payment + rent = a mortgage payment) can afford, your high-priced housing will stay empty.

if too many developers do this, that high-priced housing will have to become low-priced housing if they actually want to clear the market.

[lxmorj]

One of the best ways to profitably build affordable housing is to build luxury housing 25 years ago.