Another example of the need for social housing organizations to construct social housing at scale

Yesterday's Washington Post has a disturbing story ("Homeless, living in a tent and employed") about the plight of a homeless couple who are living in a tent on 1st Street NE near Union Station.

They are employed, although in low wage jobs.

When you make little income, you take any housing you can get at a rent you can afford.

They'd been paying rent on an apartment in a substandard building in Prince George's County, but the building was condemned with residents forced to find other housing.

The problem is, a $900 per month apartment is hard to find, especially when 100+ households are thrown back onto the market for housing in a situation like this.

Operating and maintaining low income housing isn't easy. The problem with managing and operating low cost housing is that it isn't cheap either, and after awhile, the properties deteriorate and eventually close after the cost for upgrade or maintenance exceeds the financial capacity of the owner.

I wrote about this a few years ago, suggesting that cities and counties create anticipatory programs to help ward off housing closure:

-- "Tower renewal: The Watergate and Southwest DC, and Toronto," 2011
-- "Deeper thinking/programming on weak residential housing markets is required: DC example, Anacostia," 2012
-- "Receivership is an underutilized tool: Lynhill Condominiums in Prince George's County, Maryland," 2014
-- "The long term potentially negative aspects of condominium buildings as a dominant housing form in cities," 2016

The Toronto Globe and Mail has a related article about how to make "tower communities" more livable, by adding social infrastructure, retail, and other amenities, "Tower Ambitions: how advocates and planners are rethinking high rise tower neighborhoods."

And Vancouver, BC still has a lot of SRO housing, although much of it is substandard and run by property owners who are more interested in milking profits from it ("For low-income residents in Vancouver, a different kind of real estate," Toronto Globe & Mail).

In line with my recommendations for government intervention, the City of Vancouver has produced an SRO Revitalization Action Plan.

Lack of enough housing is a problem. But having enough housing and different types of housing, in particular small apartments, is another issue. The private sector housing production industry is focused on producing the most profitable types of housing. That excludes low income housing, which is why it is subsidized.

But rather than rely on the private sector, it would be better for the social housing sector to be the prime mover in this segment.

And rather than having people live on the street, why not produce more of this type of housing, at scale, in well located places?

At a conference in Portland Oregon in 2005, I was surprised to see existing lower rent SRO housing that was well located, pretty near to Downtown.

I've written a couple pieces about the need for larger scale production of "single room occupancy" apartments, although the Post article demonstrates the need for housing that can accommodate more than one person.

-- "One of the "solutions" to the crisis of homelessness is a lot more SRO housing," 2017

There are related articles from places like Hong Kong ("Hong Kong rents leave some in coffin homes," AP) and London ("London housing crisis: £480 a month for a bed, in a shed" and "The great London property squeeze," Guardian) about lack of housing options leading people to rent spaces in "coffin hotels" etc.

Again, I think this coverage of affordable housing shortages in high cost markets illustrates the need for significantly more and a greater variety of SRO type housing.

Not just microhousing for higher income segments such as WeLiving ("What Life Is Like Inside WeWork's Communal Housing Project," Bloomberg), shared apartments for $2,000+/room ("Inside Common's Newest Co-Living Space In Chinatown, On A Fast Track To Opening," Bisnow), microapartments ("Historic DC mansion gets luxury apartment makeover," WTOP; "Life in a 375-square-foot apartment," Washington Post; "NYC micro-apartments: Success of Kips Bay's tiny studios could to more, developer says," AM New York), etc.

Note that the Kips Bay project referenced in the AM New York article includes affordable units.  From the article:

Billed as an experiment, the city relaxed its rules on minimum apartment-size at Carmel Place to see if micro-apartments could help house the growing singles population and drive down rents. Above nearly 5,000 square feet of donated city land, Monadnock Development constructed 55 micro-units, including eight set aside for homeless veterans and 14 affordable units renting for between $949 and $1,490 a month.

Still expensive for people living on the edge, but it adds more options.  (Although I argue for more SRO housing that is even cheaper to rent, because it's "cheaper" to have people housed than to deal with the social and economic costs of homelessness for the people stuck in that situation and for the cities and counties that have to deal with it.

Why aren't we integrating social housing into new large scale, grayfield developments?  Imagine if the future development over the Union Station railyard included a couple SRO buildings.-

Yes, there are requirements for a percentage of units to be allocated as affordable housing within the new construction of multiunit housing.  This is called "inclusionary zoning."  But usually this produces something like 15% of total units for lower income tranches, when far more than 15% of the population can't afford top priced housing.

But it would have even more effect if entire buildings were planned around a social housing agenda within these kinds of developments, rather than a few units, begrudgingly provided ("'Poor doors' are still creating wealth divide in new housing," Guardian).

Including social housing producers and operators as part of master planning for such large scale redevelopments would be a major change to the paradigm.