What to know about affordable housing
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2022
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Following up on our recent deep dive into the housing crisis, today we’re taking a deeper look at affordable housing. There’s not enough of it in this economy, but getting more built is a hard nut to crack.
But what exactly is affordable housing? And, what’s considered affordable these days?
Experts say there are generally two large buckets. Big “A” affordable housing is publicly subsidized units that are intended for low-income households. Small “a” affordable housing is generally considered housing priced at no more than 30% of a household’s budget.
Either way, there’s a shortage.
“Part of the issue is that after the last recession, we had more higher-income renters who were stuck in the rental market or who chose to stay in the rental market longer. So then we just see rents continue to rise,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which just released a report on the state of the nation’s housing.
On today’s show, Airgood-Obrycki makes us smart about the realities of America’s affordable-housing crisis and its impact on the broader economy.
In the News Fix, we’ll discuss a new report that may offer clues about where all the affordable homes may have gone. Plus, the Federal Reserve takes consumers’ attitudes about inflation seriously. But it turns out that measuring those attitudes isn’t exactly a hard science. We’ll explain.
Then, we hear from listeners about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, mortgage rates and old school typing rules.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2022” from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University
- “Biden administration creates plan to increase affordable housing” from Marketplace
- “Where Have All The Houses Gone?” from the House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations
- “The Strange Art of Asking People How Much Inflation They Expect” from The Wall Street Journal
- “At least 50 people found dead in abandoned 18-wheeler in San Antonio” from The Texas Tribune
- “Two Spaces After a Period or Just One? Please Get It Right!” from Patrick’s Place blog
Do you use two spaces after a period? Let us know. Email us at [email protected]. You can also leave us a voice message at (508) 827-6278 or (508) U-B-SMART.
Your donation powers the journalism you rely on. Give today to support Make Me Smart.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kim Ridley Adams. Welcome to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm Karah Rizdol, it's Tuesday. It's Deep Dive Time. Today's topic, our single topic of the day, |
| 0:17.6 | is affordable housing of which there is not enough in this economy, but it's a really, really hard nut to crack. |
| 0:23.8 | So that's why we're going to talk about it. |
| 0:25.8 | Indeed, and we also kind of were wondering what even is considered affordable housing these days, |
| 0:32.6 | because a lot of people toss out that phrase, and depending on who you're talking to, it might mean different things. |
| 0:38.8 | So here to Make Us Smart about this is Whitney Ergood Obrichy, who is a senior research associate at Harvard's |
| 0:45.8 | Joint Center for Housing Studies, which just released a new report on the state of the nation's housing. |
| 0:52.2 | Whitney, welcome to the show. |
| 0:54.2 | Thanks so much for having me. |
| 0:56.6 | So let's get the definition down first. |
| 0:58.6 | What do people generally mean when they talk about affordable housing? Is there like a standard definition? |
| 1:05.3 | There's not. There's generally two buckets of kind of what we're talking about. |
| 1:09.3 | The first is we sort of call it big A affordable housing, and those are units that are publicly subsidized and typically intended for low income households. |
| 1:18.6 | And you think, you know, the federal government is a large provider of this type of housing, |
| 1:22.6 | so you might have in your mind something like public housing, there are the low income housing tax credits, housing vouchers, |
| 1:28.8 | and then other project-based subsidies that fall under this sort of big A affordable housing umbrella. |
| 1:34.5 | And then there's everything else. There's other affordable housing, and it can have different definitions. |
| 1:39.3 | As a general concept, it's just housing that's priced within a household's means. |
| 1:43.8 | And then when we think of housing that's affordable at the lower end of the market, we sometimes refer to that as naturally occurring affordable housing. |
| 1:52.2 | So who, back to the capital A thing? Who builds those capital A affordable housing units? |
| 1:58.2 | Are those government-built private, I mean, I don't get it. |
... |
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