Why is it so difficult to build social and affordable housing?
We build houses all the time...surely this should be easy...
Building social and affordable housing is always an imperative and a challenge. Many cities struggle to bring even the smallest volume to market, all while demand seems to tick steadily upwards. With each passing year, population growth and price inflation mean that fewer people have the potential to own their own home, or even keep up with regular rent rises.
Some would benefit from access to affordable housing; housing that is priced based on a household’s ability to pay (determined by the household’s income), or as a housing rent or price that is lower than the prevailing local market rate. For others, social housing is what they need: government subsidised short and long-term rental housing.
Despite significant need for both social and affordable housing, many cities fail to provide sufficient stock. Here are a few of the reasons for that:
Nimbyism: NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard”. The term signifies one’s opposition to the locating of something considered undesirable in their neighbourhood. NIMBYs are often at their most energetic it comes to opposing social and affordable housing, especially in wealthier areas. Certainly, YIMBYs also exist (“yes in…”), but they are often in the minority and not well resourced, especially in circumstances where expensive lawyers trump social virtue.
Land availability: All cities are tight on land. Some don’t even have enough space to bury their dead. So, it is no surprise that land prices are a core part of property economics. When it comes to social and affordable housing, land prices are the majority cost of the project. This is made worse when infill development is prioritised, because not only is infill land more expensive, but infill construction costs significantly more too. The alternative is to build the houses on the urban fringe, where land is cheaper, but that can entrench car dependency, long commutes, poor health and limited opportunities.
Infill public housing, Brisbane. Politics and Planning are different languages: Politicians love to remind us that they are aware and concerned about housing access, especially for those in need of social and affordable options. In turn, they occasionally make big promises and commitments to remedy the shortfalls, like the Australian federal government’s efforts to build 30,000 new social and affordable homes in the next five years. Planners, on the other hand, are expected to facilitate these targets being met. In reality, it’s a whole lot easier to say you’ll build 30,000 units as a political statement that it is to find the land, design and build the units, before populating, managing and maintaining them.
Bad track records: Previous exercises in social and affordable housing that did not work well can make governments hesitant to try again. It can also make some communities hesitant about being involved again, while emboldening others to resist all attempts. There are some notable social and affordable housing trends that have not worked well historically. The common thread in all is the practice of clustering tenants together in large residential areas. These were often spatially isolated, with limited social infrastructure, employment opportunities, or public transport. Crime, despair, hopelessness and alienation all followed. You might think this would have seemed self-evident to the planners and designers of the time, yet it seemingly did not. Those operating today are wiser to this, preferring to distribute social and affordable stock around all parts of a city. This approach means a preference for infill development, which in turn creates some of the limitations and challenges discussed above.
No doubt there are many more reasons at play and dimensions to this problem, but these are some of the key ones which prevent many cities from delivering sufficient social and affordable housing stock. If you have some thoughts, suggestions or insights of your own, please feel free to put them in the comments.
Thanks for your thoughtful piece Tony with some valuable insights on the intersection of planning and housing.
Another issue is that because we now don’t build nearly enough social housing in Australia, it has to be prioritised in favour of people with multiple social disadvantages, which exacerbates Nimbyism. If we built in the quantities (and proportions ) that we did in the 1950s and 1960s when it was available to a wide section of working people and then sold at discounted rates, the nervousness that some households feel at living on close proximity to public housing would be reduced IMO.
As well as infill social housing, we should also be building social housing in every new community, again aimed at a wide section of people, say, the bottom 2 or 3 deciles. This could include shared equity arrangements so that government can capture some of the price escalation over time and reinvest it in housing.