“I keep hearing this term affordable housing. What does that even mean??”
In my town we have an ‘affordable housing’ project that works like this:
The city had some land, turned some of it into a park then made about 30 studio, 1 & 2 bedroom homes — that’s the simple part.
Now If I want to purchase one the city looks at my income, If I earn too much a 2 bedroom (attached) home is $750,000, however if I ‘tick’ all the correct boxes (dependents & income) I can have the same home for $600,000.
The above is true and currently there are only 6 units left.
Of course the entire development sits on land that used to have a 125 home trailer park with truly affordable homes upon it. The owner of the park sold it to a developer and the city approved of the developer evicting 125 families so he could build a 90 unit townhome complex. The developer went bankrupt during the 2008 downturn so the city got the property...and now we have 30 new units.
Affordable...
You make a good point. Truly affordable housing (which taxpayers so not pay for) has been outlawed in many, many places.
SROs, boarding houses, trailer parks, all outlawed.
In between that and destroying to concept of a two-parent family, we need need to subsidize housing so it will be “affordable.”
Please tell me that they didn't peddle that as being for the benefit of poor people.
I got a big house and land for a little more than half of that.