Thursday, October 20, 2022

Did Someone Say Affordable Housing?

Words have power… and no other word in this current environment has quite as much power as the word affordable. If you want to start a culture war, couple affordable with housing and use the two in a sentence together, and the imagery that is typically visualized are people, particularly people of color, living in subsidized housing. This image usually coalesces people both black and white to line up to voice their opposition about what it will do to their community, when in fact affordable housing means nothing more than safe, decent, and affordable. Furthermore, affordable, by definition as a standalone, means nothing more than not having a cost that is too high.

If we were to further examine how affordability income is defined, it is commonly accepted that a home is considered affordable when a household spends no more than 30% of its income on either rent or a mortgage. Here are the numbers for practical purposes:

  •  According to research provided by city sources, $50,282 is the average yearly salary for a worker in Duval County.  
  • That equates to roughly $24.17 an hour, $966 per week, or $3,867 per month.  
  • Therefore, a housing burden should not be more than $1,160 per month.

Obviously, these numbers fluctuate depending on where you are on the professional scalehowever, Duval County has entire communities in which earning $50,000 a year makes you the exception rather than the norm. Since the pandemic, the cost of housing has been commoditized at such a rate that housing is no longer seen as an essential need but is more of a luxury item! No matter if we like it or not, “safe, decent,” and “affordable” are all adjectives that are associated with ones capacity to pay. If we are not careful, the aforementioned will be replaced with affordable housing that means nothing more than a roof, walls, and a door– completely foregoing “safe” and “decent.”

Communities across the country have unconsciously stood by while increasing numbers of properties are concentrated in the hands of private investors, single-family housing supply is being squeezed, the number of single-family homes being converted to rental properties has more than tripled, monthly rental rates continue to rapidly rise, and a larger portion of the population is subject to potential eviction. This inaction has consequences in the form of teachers being homeless while teaching our most vulnerable citizens; or hospitals and nursing homes being understaffed because nurses are having to live an hour or more from work because adequate housing near hospitals is unavailable.

Our current housing crisis and the one that preceded it has shown us that if left to our own devices, institutional power, and its need to fill corporate coffers, will trump the average consumer every time. The mitigating factor we the people have is our capacity to leverage the government on our behalf. Therefore, now is the time for our elected officials to lean in and create sensible housing policies/solutions that work for we the people we the people before that brand new electric vehicle has to double as a mobile home in the parking lot of the local Walmart.