Acceptable-Poem-6219 t1_j0gblt1 wrote
Reply to comment by outb0undflight in The potential locations included the Denholm building, the RMV on Main Street, Becker College buildings, the Salvation Army, a former Gentleman’s club ... by jpm01609
The housing market is interrelated. The same rules that make it difficult and expensive to build market rate housing make it even more difficult and expensive to build affordable housing. More affordable housing creates spaces for people who are currently on the streets. But if we don’t build new market rate housing to keep up with population, then more people become homeless as rents go up and the growing number of renters fight over the same amount of housing.
Relevant quote “In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.”
outb0undflight t1_j0gnyl9 wrote
Really not sure why you decided to use that quote. The article isn't about that dude. He's mentioned twice, and it's never in the context of building more market rate housing. Hell, it's not even really an article that specifically says "more market rate housing will fix everything." In fact, large swaths of the article are about how cities are failing to build affordable housing, and several parts of the article specifically undercut what you're trying to say here.
>If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.
Also from the article:
>When we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless.
And what does Worcester have? A shortage of affordable housing. As the WRB's report specifically points out (emphasis mine):
>Worcester may simply need more housing for all to mitigate rising costs. And both the City and private developers are on track to create that housing. For example, according to the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce , there are about 24 proposed or under-way housing projects in Worcester lined up for the next few years, creating hundreds of units. Most of these units may be market-rate, however, which may not immediately help to alleviate some of the cost-burden.
While yes, part of the problem is that Worcester doesn't have enough housing, the other half of the equation is that Worcester's residents are increasingly cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. This is happening because incomes in the area are static, while the housing costs keep going up. While building market rate apartments might alleviate some of this problem, it's a big maybe, and the majority of the homeless are people who can't afford to live in that new housing anyway. Building more market rate housing also drives up rents on nearby properties, potentially forcing those residents into homelessness, creating a vicious cycle.
>The housing market is interrelated. The same rules that make it difficult and expensive to build market rate housing make it even more difficult and expensive to build affordable housing.
Except developers are not struggling to build market rate housing in Worcester. As I said, there are 24 housing projects in development in this city and most of them are going to be market rate. Seems like it's actually pretty easy to build market rate apartments in Worcester. Almost like city government is encouraging it. The city could have, y'know, chosen to not greenlight some of those market rate apartments in and offered incentives to build affordable ones, or forced developers to include a less expensive units in those developments, but it didn't, because it was worried that it might scare away developers because that's not as profitable for them. (The horror!) It's only now, after greenlighting nearly two dozen market rate housing projects, that they're considering inclusionary zoning.
>But if we don’t build new market rate housing to keep up with population, then more people become homeless as rents go up and the growing number of renters fight over the same amount of housing.
Except building more market rate apartments increases the rents on nearby properties, causing the very same problem you're claiming it helps avoid. If people are being forced out of their $800 apartments because now the landlord can charge $1500, a glut of $1750/mo apartments is not the solution. This is literally already happening. If 1500+ people are competing for 42 affordable housing units in Main South, chances are those people cannot afford to live in this new housing. Even if building them slightly brings down the rents, and that's a big if.
Build 'em all, let the market sort 'em out is wankery.
Acceptable-Poem-6219 t1_j0gvoum wrote
So if we built no market rate housing to accommodate the 20,000 people who moved here in the last 10 years rents would go down? I totally agree the rising cost of living is the #1 problem in Worcester and I’m well aware of the market rate developments going in the city. I also totally agree we need more affordable housing to reduce the number of people that are cost burdened, but there is no city in the world that can afford to publicly build the scale that’s needed.
My point is that if Los Angeles can spend over a billion dollars on see the problem get worse, we need to learn from that and see that there’s more going on than a lack of political will to spend on affordable housing. I used to live in Houston which is one of the fastest growing and most diverse cities in the country and it has managed to cut its homelessness rate by 60% over the last 10 years by improving city/nonprofit services and making it easy to build housing of all kinds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html
AceOfTheSwords t1_j0h6wgt wrote
Yes, we do need more housing. On top of the 20,000 people who have already arrived here, the exodus from more expensive Boston area towns shows no sign of slowing. Worcester is projected to still be one of the hottest real estate markets in the country in 2023, and that's what's driving these new market rate residential buildings being built. Not some sort of sympathy for the people already here.
There's no real incentive for developers to build so much housing that rents and property values go down even a little. That's the real problem with relying on the market to fix things. These market rate housing developments will slow things getting worse, so I'm not really complaining about them existing. But to really tackle the housing crisis requires more. Even in your Houston example "build more housing" was such a small part of what was actually successful.
outb0undflight t1_j0hej2w wrote
It's very funny that, again, multiple points of the article they link undercuts their suggestion that market rate housing is, in any way, a solution to the problem. It literally points the finger at market-rate developments for exacerbating the homeless problem:
>Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.
>The stage was set with the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals in the wake of abuse scandals and the introduction of new psychotropic medications. Then cities started offering tax incentives to owners of flop houses, or single-room-occupancy hotels, to convert their properties into market-rate rentals, condos and co-ops. In New York City alone, more than 100,000 S.R.O. units that had housed substance abusers, elderly singles, former inmates and the mentally ill were lost.
And nowhere does it imply that building more of them was the solution to Houston's problems.
>Encampments like the one in the underpass lay bare decades of calamitous decisions by planners, politicians and health and housing authorities. One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is disproportionately Black. Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes.
Or here:
>The Houston that Ms. Rausch grew up in has changed. A once-abundant inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic.
>“Meanwhile, housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city, “And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”
Hmm, now why does that sound familiar!?
>Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.
OP seems to read this part and conclude that "housing first" means just building more housing, except what "Housing First" really means is:
>an intervention for homeless people with severe disabling conditions that combines four elements: “(1) program philo- sophy and practice values emphasizing consumer choice; (2) commu- nity based mobile support services; and (3) permanent scatter-site housing... Because [Housing First] does not require psychiatric treat- ment or sobriety as a precondition for attaining housing, the model includes a fourth component, harm reduction, so that support services can help reduce the risks associated with psychiatric or addiction-re- lated behavior”
guybehindawall t1_j0hbi9u wrote
Yeah the long and short of it is we need to address the missing middle, and there's no incentive for private developers to do that. Doing things like changing zoning regs that require more affordable housing and allow for more housing types to be built might be somewhat helpful, but there's really no solution to the housing crisis that doesn't involve building more public housing.
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