Post

Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.

While this system does pretty effectively maximize the percentage of new apartments that are set aside as below market housing for low income people in new buildings, it does so at TREMENDOUS cost to broad housing affordability. cayimby.org/blog/califor...

Because the rents that poor people can afford are too low to pay off the cost of building new homes for them, these requirements act as a stealth tax on new housing. Taxing new homes means that only the highest-end projects get built and each subsidized unit costs tenants $800,000 in excess rent.

So, how do we fix runaway housing build costs? Do we have to go modular? Are there other strategies? From a policy standpoint this problem is hella difficult to tease out.