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There's No Such Thing as Affordable Housing

Daniel Herriges · 4 Jan 2023

Others here said this too

Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

Their wordsAdding chairs to the game—any kind of chairs—will tend to make the competition less cutthroat for the chairs already in play.

Also said by Noah Smith, Samuel Hughes, Pieter Levels

Read the piece on strongtowns.org ↗

4 korrents from this piece ↓

Daniel Herriges did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Most affordable homes are not demolished, they are repriced: units move between price tiers without anything physical changing, and that dwarfs new construction.

    Their wordsThese shifts in price without any physical change to the housing stock are by far the biggest part of the affordability story. They dwarf the impact of actual new construction.

  2. Our reading

    Affordability will be decided by what happens to the price of the homes that already exist, not by how many new ones get built.

    Their wordsAffordability for the masses will live or die not by what we build this year or next, but by what happens to the price of homes that already exist, in which the vast majority of people live.

  3. Our reading

    Affordability is not a property of a building; it is a price set in a transaction, so there is no such thing as affordable housing, only affordable prices.

    Their wordsBecause affordability is not, and has never been, an intrinsic quality of a building.

  4. Our reading

    Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

    Their wordsAdding chairs to the game—any kind of chairs—will tend to make the competition less cutthroat for the chairs already in play.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.