One of the many items we hear, read, and talk about and yet see minimal long-term resolution is affordable housing. “Affordable housing” is a term based around one’s economic situation, often defined as when one’s housing costs are at or below 30% of one’s total household income. Add in many people’s second biggest cost- transportation- and you start running into even more reasons why so many here struggle to find and maintain a living space and still have funds available for food, clothing, utilities, medical and household emergencies, plus retirement funds.
Builders put up million dollar condos in Kakaako because they can- the financial rewards are obviously greater than building $400,000 units. And oh, yeh, government smiles- the taxes are higher. Where’s the incentive to build units for less when there’s a ready market (even if it’s non-residents) who’ll pay more? Homeowners and apartment owners don’t want cheaper properties built in their neighborhood as those units would undermine their ever-increasing property values, and they make sure that their locally elected representatives know it. “Sure, build ‘em, just not in my back yard (NIMBY).”
Busy builders and construction laborers go from job to job as demand for their services exceeds their available work time. Gotta get it while the going is good. Our overall construction costs are the America’s highest. Our houselessness rate (a real term) is tops in the nation. These are not areas that warrant chanting “we’re #1!”
We need more public/private creativity and action now. We need more unused or under-utilized land to be re-zoned to create affordable units. That’s reality, 2020. We need greater builder tax incentives for affordable units, more pre-fabricated units shipped in to keep costs down, and better oversight and planning for under-utilized, city- or state-held properties that might be retro-fitted or rebuilt into housing properties. Let’s move some city and state entities together into reconfigured city/state buildings to free up the vacated buildings for reconstruction. Yes, city and state working together…
We need to retrofit older schools into vertical, more efficient structures to allow for more housing unit options around them… very carefully. We need to identify best practices used in congested metropolitan and suburban areas (or islands) worldwide to help us mitigate houselessness and our lack of affordable living units. And we need to do it now, before more 25-45 year olds move out and our population ages ungracefully.
Think about it…