Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash
September 13, 2020
by Steve Stofka
In popular urban areas, affordable housing has been a persistent problem. Housing costs can consume 50% or more of a working person’s pay. Urban residents have become refugees in their own city, living in tents on downtown sidewalks.
Homeless tent “cities” in urban areas were already a problem, and the Covid crisis has exacerbated the situation. The tent areas are a breeding ground for 19th century diseases like cholera and typhus (Gorman, 2019).
The free market has not been able to solve this problem. Wanting to maximize his return on a property investment, a developer has more incentive to build luxury units than lower cost condos or apartments. Are they greedy and rapacious? Let’s take the developer out of the equation. Imagine telling a farmer that they must dedicate part of their land to growing more affordable wheat when rye is twice the price. In front of capitol buildings in mid-west states, there would be tractor protests by farmers. So why should it be different with a developer? They have an asset, an input, and want to get the most out of that asset.
Cities have tried several solutions with poor results. Santa Monica, a destination city in California, passed a rule that 30% of new multi-family housing had to be affordable units. Residential building has come to a halt (SCAG, 2019).
The city and state of California have passed funding laws to support affordable housing, but it is expensive (Camner, 2020). In popular coastal states where taxes are already high, a proposal of affordable housing subsidies to developers arouses ugly passions.
Affordable housing is a negative externality, a cost not borne by the developer or the buyer of a upclass condo or townhome. Perhaps there should be a fee on each unit? The cost of the externality is so expensive that the high per unit fee would limit sales of new units and raise little revenue to build affordable housing.
Let’s suppose that a couple buys a new condo from a developer. The couple has paid in the 75th percentile of housing prices in that area, but they enjoy ocean views and the cultural and social amenities of the neighborhood. In front of their new condo complex, several homeless people pitch tents on the public sidewalks. The couple is outraged. For the price they have paid, they reason that they should not have to endure the sights and behaviors of the homeless. The couple complains to the developer and the city. An urban economist would understand that the couple shares some tiny responsibility for the homeless problem but they, and their fellow residents, are bearing the costs out of proportion to their responsibility.
If there were a way to cut up and distribute the homeless problem among all the residents of an area, the problem might not be so noticeable. Fortunately, we live in a society that does not dismember human beings to achieve a perfectly equitable distribution of society’s costs. There will always be what biologists call a “clustered” distribution of homeless people.
Planned refugee camps have better health conditions than tents thrown up on a sidewalk. Should a city like Santa Monica accept the clustering problem and house their homeless in urban refugee camps? The city could provide better sanitary conditions and perhaps build a clinic at the refugee camp that would relieve downtown emergency rooms of attending to the many medical needs of the homeless.
In want of a perfect solution, our society has created an ever worsening problem. If the homeless can abide living clustered together with little privacy and no sanitation on a public sidewalk, then they would certainly abide a tented refugee camp with a bit more order, sanitation and medical facilities nearby.
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Notes:
Camner, L. (2020, February 10). Santa Monica’s affordable housing policies have failed -. Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.smdp.com/housing-policies-have-failed/185877
Gorman, A. (2019, March 11). Medieval Diseases Are Infecting California’s Homeless. Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/typhus-tuberculosis-medieval-diseases-spreading-homeless/584380/
Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). (2019). Profile of the City of Santa Monica, p. 12. Retrieved from https://www.scag.ca.gov/Documents/SantaMonica.pdf
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