An eye-opening piece from citylab.com explains the greatest challenge to creating more affordable housing — cost. Author Joe Cortright flatly states, “It’s a problem that isn’t going away: the so-called “affordable” housing we’re building in many cities—by which we mean publicly subsidized housing that’s dedicated to low- and moderate-income households—is so expensive to build that we’ll never be able to build.”
Cartright goes on to describe a recent affordable housing development in Emeryville, CA that created 84 new apartments for a whopping $64 million. Granted, this is an unusual case and the development was located in the extremely high priced Bay Area but the conclusions that Cortright reaches are universally applicable: local governments will never have enough in their budget’s to subsidize enough housing to meet demand, building costs are high and rising and finally, that there is a continuous problem of scale whether related to availability of housing vouchers or construction costs. New solutions such as prefabricated building techniques or unique developer-government relationships will need to be found to overcome a problem that affects the entire nation.
Although Southern Arizona is a very different market than San Francisco, the challenges to affordable housing are the same. SALT is doing it’s part to find new solutions and fulfill its mission to provide our community with Safe Affordable Living in Tucson. If you are in need of affordable housing or would like more information, please click on the Contact tab above.
Read the entire citylab.com article here.
