For the last several years something has really gotten under my skin: the way we talk about housing and affordability. I don’t like the way we measure it.
The first time I found myself getting unhappy about the discussion about housing affordability was a few years ago when I watched the debate over legislation to create incentive zoning in Seattle. By using a formula based on Area Median Income and the normative “rule of thumb” for housing costs, the Council decided that a hypothetical worker in Seattle making $45,000 should pay about $1,000 a month for rent. Developers who wanted to build extra housing should have to build more housing at that price.
That just didn’t seem to make sense to me at the time and it still doesn’t. My question is: can’t we find a better way to define affordability? I’m not the only one asking this question. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has developed a new measure and the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center is trying to do the same thing. There must be better ways to talk about what affordability means in an urban context.