I suppose that I shouldn’t find it surprising that last night’s Common Council meeting debate on off-site affordable housing meandered over concepts that had basically nothing to do with the nitty gritty of affordable housing. A helpful guide.
Affordable Housing (definition 1): Housing that is, you know, affordable. Meaning that people pay a reasonable sum for a mortgage payment or rent. Nothing that is ever newly built meets this criteria unless its….
Affordable Housing (definition 2): From a zoning perspective (workforce housing), housing that meets the states requirement of being counted as affordable housing by either a) being deed restricted to be sold at below market rates to someone who fills out lots of paperwork that shows that they can purchase a unit which will never appreciate much because it can only be sold to someone else who fills out lots of paperwork etc. Or b) a rental unit that income qualifies its renters so that they make a % less than 100% of the median average income for whatever size family unit they are.
Norwalk, like every town in Connecticut, has to meet a goal of having at least 10% of its housing stock as being affordable (definition 2) otherwise Developers can build condos in any zone because local zoning is subverted to the “greater good” of building affordable units. The number of affordable (definition 2) is calculated every 10 years. Everyone makes guesses in the interim as new projects get built.
With these handy definitions now in place, we examine the Council’s “debate” about affordable housing. Matt “Mad Max” Breslow reports:
The council voted 8-4 to approve Tarragon Development Corp.’s “workforce housing” plan for its project at the former Norwalk Co. site in South Norwalk after a lengthy discussion and two failed attempts to send the proposal back to the council’s Planning Committee.
A few council members said they do not like the Stratford-based developer using existing homes instead of building new ones to help satisfy a city workforce housing requirement to make 10 percent of the project’s residential units affordable.
Under the plan the council approved last night, Tarragon will provide 17 below-market-rate units, but 13 will be off-site. The 13 units will be pre-existing homes not now counted among the city’s official affordable housing stock. Tarragon will arrange deed restrictions requiring the units to remain affordable.
Council member William Krummel expressed concern that the 13 units will not be readily available to people meeting state affordable housing income requirements because they already are occupied by residents having leases.
“They’re not empty. They’re occupied,” said Krummel.
Yegads Krummel, don’t you do any math? Converting existing housing stock to affordable (definition 2) gets you more bang for the buck as it does not increase the total number of housing stock. Building new affordable (definition 2) units also raises the total units so unless you build more than 10% you are breaking even.
Other arguments swirled around the concept of off-site versus on-site. This is where politics reared its simplistic head, where certain people, chiefly Bruce Morris, who campaigned on doing something about affordable housing, inserted himself in the process by demanding that all affordable (definition 2) units be in South Norwalk. Of course, sticking all affordable units in South Norwalk doesn’t make much sense when the progressive idea about housing is for all affordable and market rate housing to be available throughout Norwalk. Perhaps Morris could better spend his time doing something about the dumb criteria used by the state in determining what counts as affordable housing in the first place, and create legislation on rewarding cities like Norwalk who actually have a zoning regulation that requires affordable housing to be built unlike the majority of towns in Connecticut.
Building affordable housing in Norwalk is really only about meeting the requirements of definition 2. Math skills are more important than political skills here since this is just a numbers game. For a political solution to affordable housing, people have to realize that the political solution to lowering housing prices is also an economic one. its the law of supply and demand. Keep building more and more units, and eventually you will have more units than people who want them and so prices will fall. There’s quite a few problems with building an unending supply of housing though, starting with you run out land and infrastructure pretty quickly and culminating with traffic.
source Advocate, Despite objections, plan for Norwalk Co. housing wins OK, by Matt Breslow, August 15 2007
