Category Archives: Housing

Taxpayers spend billions of dollars a year subsidizing so-called affordable housing, but much of that money is wasted, says a new report from the Cascade Policy Institute. Affordable housing being built today actually costs much more than market-rate housing, and most of the benefits from building such expensive housing are captured by the developers, not low-income families who need housing.

Click image to download a 3.0-MB PDF of this report.

The report, which was written by the Antiplanner, reviews hundreds of housing projects built in the last 35 years to show that the nature of the typical project has changed from inexpensive low-rise apartment buildings to mid-rise and high-rise apartments that cost several times as much to build per square foot. The result — as noted in an Antiplanner post last December — is that the number of housing units built has declined despite a doubling of money spent subsidizing affordable housing. This has effectively cheated both taxpayers and people dependent on affordable housing. Continue reading →

In what could be considered an April Fool’s joke, the Montana state legislature passed several laws mandating densification of cities. Apparently, the legislature believed the nation’s fourth-largest state, with the third-lowest population density, was running out of land and could only accommodate growth by building high-density apartment buildings in all major cities.

In a failed effort to make housing more affordable, Bozeman has subsidized the construction of four-story apartment buildings such as this one. Similar buildings would be mandated in other Montana cities if the laws challenged by this lawsuit go into effect.

These laws were passed in response to a “housing crisis” that resulted when Bozeman (Gallatin County), Kalispell (Flathead County), and Missoula (Missoula County) passed the functional equivalent of urban-growth boundaries, making housing in those counties unaffordable (value-to-income ratios greater than 5 in 2022). Billings (Yellowstone County), Great Falls (Cascade County), and Helena (Lewis & Clark County) have not, and housing in those counties remains affordable (value-to-income ratios below 5 and mostly below 4). Continue reading →

In December, I pointed out that Silicon Valley’s transit system was designed for the 1910s and suggested a way to redesign it so that it would serve a 2020s urban area. Last month, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) announced that is attempting the exact opposite strategy: it wants to turn Silicon Valley into a 1910s urban area.

Planned high-density developments aim to turn San Jose into a Greenwich Village lookalike. Source: Republic Urban Properties.

Last week, a Silicon Valley group called Opportunity Now published my assessment of why this strategy is bound to fail. Instead, it will waste a lot of tax dollars and enrich a few property developers without making the region’s housing more affordable or helping regional mobility.

The Divided We Fall web site has posted a debate over the housing crisis between the Antiplanner and former U.S. Ambassador Charles Ray. The debate covers some important issues, but I had hoped that my opponent would be a card-carrying member of the Affordable Housing Industrial Complex. Instead, Ray and I ended up agreeing on more issues that we disagreed about.

Affordable housing project in Salt Lake City. Source: Google street view.

I wanted to make the debate about the billions of tax dollars being spent building not very much housing. But it turned into a debate over housing affordability in general, which is both a completely different issue and too broad to cover in 1,000 words. Continue reading →

More than 650,000 Americans, nearly 2 out of every 1,000, were homeless in January 2023, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homeless Assessment Report, which was released last week. This is a 15 percent increase since 2019 — but less than a 1 percent increase since 2007, when HUD first attempted to count the homeless.

Homeless in Denver. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

New York state has the highest rate of homelessness at 5.2 per 1,000 residents, followed by Oregon at 4.7 (using 2022 population estimates). At the other end of the scale, Mississippi has only 0.3 homeless per 1,000 residents. Continue reading →

Much of Seoul is a sea of high-rises. And not just Seoul: Busan and other cities in South Korea have lots of high rises. More than half of all South Korean households live in high rises, and well over 60 percent live in some kind of multifamily housing.

Seoul: High rises as far as the eye can see. Photo by Francesco Anzola.

South Korea also has the lowest birthrate of any country in the world. The latest numbers say the average woman has just 0.70 children in her lifetime. Birthrates need to be 2.1 per woman for a population to remain constant; at 0.70, South Korea will be almost totally depopulated in just three generations. Seoul’s birthrate is 0.64 and, due to an aging population, it will likely fall to 0.30 in the next ten years. Continue reading →

Taxpayers are spending more to subsidize low-income housing and yet getting less. Since 1987, the biggest source of funds for affordable housing has been low-income housing tax credits, which offer billions of dollars in reduced taxes if they dedicate some of the housing they build to households earning less than 60 percent of the median incomes in their regions. These tax credits are given to state housing agencies based on each state’s population and the housing agencies grant them to developers through a competitive application process.

Source: LIHTC Database, Department of Housing and Urban Development, https://lihtc.huduser.gov.

As the above chart shows, the numbers of housing units built with such funds roughly kept pace with the annual subsidies until 2004. Then subsidies dramatically increased while the number of housing units built declined. Between the 2000s and 2010s, the average inflation-adjusted subsidy per housing unit grew by 125 percent. Since 1987, 30 states have created their own affordable housing tax credit programs as well as other housing subsidies, so when they are all added together it is likely that the subsidies per housing unit have grown even faster than shown in the chart. Continue reading →

A new report on housing decries the fact that many unaffordable housing markets have gotten even less affordable in the last few years. The report’s solution is in the name of the organization that published it: Up for Growth, as in “grow up, not out.”

Click image to download a 24.0-MB PDF of this report.

The reports calls for cities to identify what neighborhoods to build in, “the appropriate increase in density for each location,” and the “optimal housing mix,” in other words, the mix of single-family vs. multifamily housing, for each neighborhood. Where people actually want to live and whether they prefer to live in single- or multifamily housing are not to be considered. Continue reading →