Don't Build More Homes: Just Stop Pricing People Out of Current Ones

BEphilly: Housing advocates & politicians alike in places like Philadelphia make a good living off of pretending that building a few units here and a few homes there is enough to confront the crisis

Dr. G.S. Potter | Senior Editor

If you get locked out of your home, you don’t throw your hands in the air and say, “Oh well, guess I’ve got to build a new house.”  Yet somehow, cities like Philadelphia have allowed real estate developers to convince them that the solution to lower income residents being locked out of the housing market is to build - you guessed it - more unaffordable housing. 

In the case of Philadelphia, developers have made a lot of money hand-in-hand with city councilmembers and “affordable housing” advocates, while the housing crisis has only become more severe for low and no income Black residents and others.

More gentrification is not the solution to the housing crisis.  Building new housing units for what will amount to Whiter and wealthier outsiders isn’t going to stop homelessness or skyrocketing rent and mortgages.  The solution is to ensure the existing housing stock is made open, accessible, and environmentally secure according to the needs of Philadelphians at every income level.

In order to do that, though, we must first dismantle the myth of affordable housing.

Performative Housing Heroes

Housing advocates and politicians in Philadelphia alike make a good living off of pretending that building a few units here and a few homes there is enough to confront the crisis. They pat themselves on the back and have a self-congratulatory press conference or two for making sure a few token upper working class and lower middle class families are allowed to share the air in their otherwise overpriced and under-cultured buildings.

But most of these self-proclaimed housing heroes aren’t even able to articulate the scope of the problem, let alone compare their paltry efforts to actual need. If they could, they might be able to acknowledge that the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough housing units for people that need them. The problem is that people can’t afford them. 

Homeless count statistics have found that there are approximately 6,000 people living without homes in Philadelphia, and this number is probably a gross underestimate. Nevertheless, there are over 63,000 vacant units in Philadelphia.  Supply is not the problem. It never was.

The problem is that no and low income renters and homebuyers have been priced out of the market completely. Fake housing advocates either know and ignore that or they really just are that detached. These struggling renters and homebuyers can’t afford to stay in the homes they are in.  And the powers that be are pretending that handing real estate developers bags of money to build more housing that residents can’t afford is going to somehow magically fix this problem.

It won’t.

Saying that funding developers will bring down the cost of housing is like saying we should give shooters more guns to bring the homicide rates down. It’s amazing developers and City Hall each have gotten away with it for so long. I’m sure the help from the  affordable housing industrial complex doesn’t hurt.

Across the nation, there are only 37 affordable and available homes available for every 100 extremely low income (ELI) households. In some states, however, that number can drop to as low as 20.  No state has an adequate supply of housing for extremely low-income households.  Wyoming has the narrowest ELI housing gap in the nation with 61 units for every 100 households. 

And of course, this burden falls hardest upon communities of color.  According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition …

Twenty percent of Black households, 18% of American Indian or Alaska Native households, 14% of Latino households, and 10% of Asian households are extremely low-income renters. By comparison, 6% of white non-Latino households are extremely low-income renters. Unsurprisingly, renters of color are much more likely to be housing cost-burdened. While 42% of white renters are cost-burdened, 52% of Latino renters and 54% of Black renters are cost-burdened.

But sure, let’s give the same people that are pricing people into homelessness a ton of money to (*checks notes*) build more housing for middle and upper income people. 

Take, for example, Philadelphia’s Turn the Key project.  This plan purports to build 1,000 new units of “affordable” housing for qualifying homebuyers.  The home loans will be made available to households that are below 80 percent Area Median Income (or AMI), which is $94,000 for a family of four. A household must earn at least 60 percent AMI to qualify.

Take a look at Turn The Key income requirements …

Image Income Requirements

About 41 percent of households in Philadelphia earn less than $35,000 per year.  Nearly 70 percent earn less than $75,000. So you have to wonder: Who exactly is this hosing “affordable” for? 

More housing isn’t going to create an adequate housing stock for people living at 0-60 percent AMI.  It’s not going to repair the existing housing stock, or ensure that rents don’t skyrocket once those investments are made.  Building more unaffordable housing isn’t going to close the gap between the minimum wage and the cost of living and it definitely isn’t going to stop developers from gentrifying Black families and communities out of Philadelphia altogether.  In fact, building more unaffordable housing does quite the opposite. 

The affordable housing movement is a front for gentrification.  It is a payout for real estate developers and a paycheck for affordable housing advocates.  The scam that is affordable housing is a photo op for City Council and an open invite to wealthier, whiter outsiders to replace Black Philadelphians. And it needs to stop.

We need to realign the cost of living with the actual incomes of people in the city.  We need to close the gap between wages and cost of living. We need to utilize and repair our existing housing stock.  And we need to stop pretending handing money to developers will get any of that done. Well, that’s what we need to do if we actually want to ensure every person is safely and securely housed. If we want to give cover to Councilmembers, real estate developers, and YIMBY advocates to lead Philadelphia into a new era of gentrification, we can just support the movement to build more “affordable” housing.