Category Archives: Housing

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 →

Affordable housing projects aren’t making housing more affordable. In fact, says a new study by an MIT economist, construction of new subsidized housing displaces new unsubsidized housing for little net gain in the housing supply. Specifically, the study found, ten new subsidized housing units resulted in eight fewer unsubsidized units.

This is supposed to be an affordable housing project, yet it is already unaffordable because it is six stories high, which costs at least twice as much to build, per square foot, as two-story construction.

Between 1950 and 1986, most subsidized housing was built by government agencies. In 1986, a Republican Congress sought to “privatize” the construction of subsidized housing by giving developers tax credits if they promised to rent their housing at below-market prices for 30 years. Today, low-income housing tax credits worth around $10 billion a year are given to the states to hand out to developers. To see how well this program is working, economist Evan Soltas looked at hundreds of projects built with tax credits. Continue reading →

Early this week, Grassroot Institute executive director Keli’i Akina interviewed the Antiplanner about affordable housing, why it costs more than regular housing, and why the Hawaii Housing Finance & Development agency refuses to release records that would help the public understand where their money is going. The interview was posted on YouTube late Wednesday evening.

Affordable housing is a nationwide scam and Hawaii is far from the worst offender. As the state with the second-least-affordable housing in the nation, however, local politicians are prone to promoting affordable housing subsidies as the solution to housing affordability problems, which doesn’t work as they are two different issues. The Antiplanner suggests that affordable housing subsidies should solely be in the form of vouchers directly to low-income people, not subsidies to developers who build costly projects at taxpayers’ expense.

“After a decade of building 8,000 apartments in Oakland, market rate 1-bedroom units are now affordable to low income people,” says a Bay Area writer named Joshua Davis. The implication is that the 8,000 apartments had something to do with Oakland become more affordable. It didn’t.

Cities all over the country are building apartments, many of them subsidized with so-called affordable housing funds. The mid-rise and high-rise apartments that aren’t subsidized aren’t going to rent for affordable prices because they are far more expensive to build than single-family homes. Continue reading →