“Affordable” Housing in the District

A few commenters are arguing that there is affordable housing in the District, it’s just not in the right neighborhoods. File this under true but unhelpful.

Much of the cheap housing in the city is in very bad shape. Properties in neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment for decades typically have major structural problems, plumbling and electrical issues, mold, infestations of various sorts, and are unsafe and otherwise undesirable to all but those who have no other housing options. This is part of the negative feedback associated with neighborhood decline. Properties in poorer conditions are cheaper and attract lower-income tenants, who are less able to maintain the property, which declines further, and so on.

The other thing to note is that homes are often cheap because urban amenities or disamenities are capitalized into the price of the land. Have a look at neighborhoods east of the Anacostia, for instance. Metro station density there is far less than that on the other side of the river, which means that connectivity to employment concentrations is lower. Crime rates are much higher. The two wards east of the river have perhaps 15% of the city’s population and 50% of the city’s 2009 homicides. The area is notoriously underserved by retailers of basic necessities — the lack of grocery options east of the river has been associated with malnutrition. Entertainment options are almost entirely lacking. There are almost no sitdown restaurants, there are no movie theaters, and so on. Schools in the wards east of the Anacostia are the worst performing in the city. And so on.

There is a reason, in other words, that prices in some neighborhoods depart so significantly from the metropolitan norm. And of course, as these shortcomings in public services and amenities are rectified, prices converge toward those in better neighborhoods, which makes them less affordable. The goal is to provide quality affordable housing in neighborhoods with good public services and amenities. Any idiot can make homes cheap by running the city into the ground, but that’s not really what we’re aiming to do.

Comments

Christopher says:

August 18, 2009 at 12:08 pm

As someone that lived in the full spectrum of “quality” in DC — never great, but never over a $1000 a month for a one-bedroom (that’s my threshold due to just general cheapness but also economic necessity — from Columbia Heights to North Columbia Heights to Petworth, I think where the city has opportunity for low-income housing (before other programs like rent subsidies or through foundational support of housing corporations — one way that the Bay Area through orgs like Bridge Housing are dealing with it) is for the city to get a lot tougher about abandoned buildings.

There are whole apartment buildings in Mt. Pleasant that sit vacant. There are similar in Petworth near highly accessible transit corridors.

I’m fairly left about property rights, I know, but the city needs to be taxing the hell out of these. And have a program in place for acquiring these buildings and converting them to rental units. Some, like former neighbors in Petworth, were remodeled buildings that actually were in good shape — better than buildings that people actually lived in, like mine — but were empty. It was frustrating to see.
Reid says:

August 18, 2009 at 12:39 pm

Wait, so is the aim to increase the quality of affordable housing, or the quantity?

In other words, do you want to improve the quality of the neighborhoods and their housing east of the river? Or do you want to increase the number of affordable units in “better” neighborhoods?

I don’t think it’s an either or question, but I’m just curious which you’d prioritize, and how. It seems like two separate enterprises.
OGT says:

August 18, 2009 at 3:40 pm

My comment, posted last night, seems to have either failed or not been accepted. In any case, I meant to be one of the commenters making this point; there are vast swaths of DC and Philly where the housing prices suggest a land value of near zero.

In your previous post you argued that prices in the ‘good’ parts of the District indicated that there was a relative lack of ‘walkable urbanism’ in the US. And I took your argument to be that this was significantly a function of zoning restrictions, ie lack of basement level studios. However, my point is that the largest supply constraint in urban space is not zoning, but the large areas underutilized due the very problems you outline here.

Any discussion of affordable housing should, in my view, include the idea that those areas need to be better served. And yes, redeveloped, with both current residents and potential new residents in mind. This would do more increase the effective supply of walkable urban housing than shoe horning in a couple of wall facing units with low ceilings.
monkeyrotica says:

August 19, 2009 at 8:28 am

Um, you also have absentee landlord churches who sit on vacant properties for DECADES and do nothing but pay lip service to the community. And when the Council passes a 10% nuisance property tax that actually gets them to refurb the properties, they churches lobby to get it cut back to 5% so they can sit vacant for another couple of decades. All this in the heart of Shaw with full access to retail on U Street, walking distance from TWO Metro stops, historically low crime rates, and surrounded by $800k+ rowhouses. Until the Council grows a spine and stops being the paid lickspittle of special interests (churches and developers in particular), you will continue to get housing policy that encourages speculation, ghetto-fication, and lower-income marginalization.

The Ward 8 retail problem is chicken-and-egg. You’re not going to get retailers investing in a crimeridden area until the crime gets under control, and crime isn’t going to get under control until there are career alternatives to being a criminal. The groceries and larger retail shops all folded because of rampant shoplifting as well as employee theft.