Making Housing Less Affordable

The Colorado legislature is considering a bill to allow cities to require developers to provide “affordable housing” in their developments. This is called “inclusionary zoning.” Such requirements have three effects.

This five-story building is typical of the new housing being built in Denver. It has 871-square-foot one-bedroom apartments for rent for $2,400 to $3,600 a month. Someone would need an income of nearly $100,000 a year to afford one. Inclusionary zoning would make it even more expensive. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

First, developers respond to the higher costs by building fewer units of housing. Second, to pay for the units they have to sell or rent at below-market rates, they raise prices on the market-rate units. Third, existing home sellers or landlords, seeing that new units are going for higher prices, raise their prices as well. Voila! Inclusionary zoning makes housing less affordable. But don’t believe me: here’s a paper that proves it using real-world data.

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In other words, Denver didn’t try growth (which would have meant eliminating the region’s urban-growth boundary). It tried compact development. The numbers show that denser development is less affordable development just as the numbers show that inclusionary zoning makes development less affordable.

Politicians want to look like they are doing something even if they are doing the wrong thing. As a result, they take policies that make housing less affordable and couch them in affordability language so they can sucker people into supporting such policies. I have no idea whether Colorado politicians even know they are doing this, but someone must know.

The real goal is compact, i.e., higher-density development, not affordability. The two are incompatible. It is time for people to realize this.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

12 Responses to Making Housing Less Affordable

  1. metrosucks says:

    You left out another effect. This moves next door to your $2000 a month apartment, sponging off his sugar momma’s section 8 voucher, and he gets free passes on the light rail:

    https://sheboyganpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Eric-T-Williams-Jr.png

  2. prk166 says:

    There’s an apartment in a a 1960s high rise – originally built as a nursing home + converted to apts – that is 470 sq ft and costs $1500 / month. it’s 1 ba 1 bd. 1 mile south of capital.

  3. Geodyssey says:

    For most of the people involved in these schemes those neighbors are a feature, not a bug.

  4. metrosucks says:

    “For most of the people involved in these schemes those neighbors are a feature, not a bug.”

    I did forget to mention that important part, my apologies.

  5. ARThomas says:

    The big question I have is what will it take for legislatures and the general public to acknowledge that this approach to planning and development simply does not work. Here in MT the legislature just voted down a similar bill to force inclusionary zoning. Although the bigger challenge seems to be getting politicians, the left leaning public and ultimately the planners themselves to admit that these approaches don’t work and that new more logical approached based on empirical evidence as well as proven experience will work. Until then I suspect we will be exposed to planning fad after fad until things are completely dysfunctional.

  6. ARThomas,

    The problem is the only advocates for affordable housing are the developers, some of them non-profits, who make money from it. Hardly anyone cares about the people who can’t find decent housing due to growth management.

  7. metrosucks says:

    This is true. Developers and non-profits make a lot of money off of it.

    Non-profits (sic) are usually the very public mouthpieces for these efforts, with the developers doing less prominent interviews about how they want to “give back to the community” or some other bullshit. The nonprofits play the “pity the poor people down on their luck” angle, the developer plays the “just giving back to the community” angle. It’s a cynical play that results in tons of money for both developers and non-profits, and social headaches for the “community”.

    In a similar vein, so-called non-profits are also the ones flooding our country with third world refuse, gorging themselves on Federal grants while unloading welfare-dependent 70IQ bulb-heads in your community.

    But money isn’t the only reason these organizations are doing what they’re doing. There is a all-out war going on considering the right of white, European people to actually survive and exist at all. It was started by, and is headed by a multitude of Jewish organizations and individuals, and also has portions of the actions delegated out to traitors like the various non-profits pushing this. Many of the non-profits and developers are headed by Jews, or controlled by them at some executive level.

    The idea is that white people will no longer be allowed to simply flee the problems of the city by running to the suburbs, or even the exurbs. The plan, extraordinarily successful so far, is to ensure there is a Section 8 apartment complex full of 70IQ Somali’s or Afghani’s, and a mosque in every city from Troy MT to New York.

    When you consider this additional information, the WHY planners are doing this becomes a lot more clear. If you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers.

  8. metrosucks says:

    I understand what I just said may make many people uncomfortable. Understand that society has been reflexively trained to recoil in horror whenever Jews are implicated in anything at all, which is why we exist in the schizophrenic equation of Jews being both the richest, most powerful ethnic group in the entire world, and also, somehow, the most oppressed ethnic group in the entire world.

    This is a “free your mind” moment. The entire point of everything you see happening is to ENSURE you do not have any kids, or you have one kid at age 45 and that kid has Downs Syndrome, or similar. It all comes back to ensuring Europeans do NOT breed.

  9. metrosucks,

    Just leave race out of your discussions. Today’s issues are class issues, not race issues. Upper-middle-class people are actually more uncomfortable being around working-class whites than they are by being around blacks or Jews.

  10. ARThomas says:

    @ Antiplanner: You are very correct. The level of public understanding of this topic is abysmal. Its also obscured by a sympathetic media who do not critically evaluate the efficacy of growth management policies. I really do wonder how far it will go before people are forced to confront how bad of a set of policies this approach is.

  11. metrosucks says:

    Today’s issues are class issues, not race issues. Upper-middle-class people are actually more uncomfortable being around working-class whites than they are by being around blacks or Jews.

    Mr. O’Toole, I barely even know where to start in replying to this.

    Today’s issues are class issues, not race issues.

    Except for ignorant white people who believe the “there are no racial differences” propaganda, every other race on the planet functions, to some degree or another, in terms of their own racial agenda, and racial differences very much limit the ability of anyone to enter that fabled middle to upper middle class cohort. If you’d like to dispute that, let’s have a discussion on why there are NO middle class pure-bred Aboriginals or Pygmies, or engineers or doctors or heck, even people who can write, for example.

    Upper-middle-class people are actually more uncomfortable being around working-class whites than they are by being around blacks or Jews.

    Without intending to offend you, I find this statement particularly ironic, coming from your domicile at Camp Sherman. There are certainly no blacks there, and likely very few Jews. Of course, when I say “Jews”, I mean non-Hasidic or Orthodox Jews, for example. In other words, Jews that the average person will certainly identify as white.

    As for upper-middle class people being more “uncomfortable” around working class whites than around Jews and blacks, sure. Upper middle class people are uncomfortable around anyone who isn’t lilly-white and upper middle class like themselves.

    HOWEVER, In today’s falsehood-suffused society, It’s OK to say you’re not comfortable around the working-class whites who build your roads, maintain your sewer lines, or say, fight the fires encroaching on your exurban house.

    It’s NOT OK to say anything similar about the black thugs gunning down children, killing each other over “being dissed”, or dealing drugs to your elementary schools.

    So upper-middle class individuals, who are likely the single group most obsessed about their image and obsessed with “virtue signaling”, will certainly indicate they are perfectly fine around REAL or typical blacks, from a location where they never have to be around any blacks, with the possible exception of a rare upper middle class black.

    As for Jews, they aren’t going to be able to spot a regular, non-Hasidic or Orthodox Jew from two inches away. If they do become aware of a Jew’s ethnicity, they will gush over with love for everything Judaism or Israel related. Remember, there are lots of secret Rapture cultists among the upper middle class.

    If you want to talk about being comfortable around Orthodox Jews, news alert, no one, not even other non-Orthodox Jews, are comfortable around this group. East coast newspapers are openly filled with articles about the distasteful habits of Orthodox Jews, and how they take over entire cities and essentially chase the original residents out. If you will recall, last year there were several black shootings of Orthodox communities over anger that the blacks were being displaced by the Orthodox Jews.

    I’ll leave you with one last rather surprising and interesting bit of information. Do you know what the largest group of Israel, and Jewish supporters in general is? You probably do: so-called evangelicals Christians. These people will sell their own mother if it benefits Israel.

    Do you know the single group that is most despised and held in contempt by Jews, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox? Evangelical Christians!!!

    Why is this, you ask? Well, Jews aren’t stupid. They know Evangelicals’ true goal: to preserve Israel’s physical state until the mythical Rapture happens, the select Evangelicals are swept up in a cloud to heaven, and everyone else, including Jews, are left behind to suffer the damnation of the Apocalypse. So Jews will use Evangelicals politically, but they despise them, because they know what their true motives are.

    Frankly, I don’t blame them. Baby Boomers, and Evangelicals in general (these two groups intersect almost perfectly) are the single group of white people that burned the futures of the generations after them down to the ground due to their own selfishness. They did drugs and partied in the 60’s and 70’s, and then cruised through school and placed themselves in sinecures from which they commanded the rest of us to tighten our belts and pay for their retirement and medical benefits. Who could have any respect for this group?

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