Is affordable housing government or public issue?
Posted by Terra Houstonia on May 9, 2007
City of Austin believed that affordable housing should become public concern and decided to shift affordable housing from a regulatory to incentive-based development model.
In April 2000, Austin city council passed a resolution called S.M.A.R.T. Housing™ in order to moderate the trends that made much of the local real estate unaffordable for low and medium income families. What this initiative proved is that in order to succeed it required active participation from private sector (in this case developers and builders).
Seven years later, resolution is proving to be not just smart, but successful, too.
Yes it’s slow. Yes, the demand is much higher than originally anticipated, and yes, it creates whole new set of challenges and issues such as possible increase of poverty in already low-income neighborhoods.
But, this initiative created more than 8,200 units (3,000 single-family and 5,220 multifamily units), and is currently building another 1,750 units, and preparing to build additional 1,750.
Lets do some math: 8,200 + 1,750 + 1,750 = 11,700 If the average household size in Austin is 2.34 – that’s 27,378 people with home.
Now, my question is: If it works in Austin, what prevents other Texas major cities to do the same? As a matter of fact, what prevents other US major cities to do the same?
It is quite obvious that we can not rely on authorities to do everything for us, and that private sector should not exist, merely, to write a check for donation, but to actively participate in creating sustainable programs to empower the community at large.
And it is also clear that our authorities should have the ability to create a platform that will support such initiatives, and not undermine them with tedious rules, regulations, and truck-load of paperwork.
With all due respect to our politicians, I have more fate in successful businesspeople creating a program that will produce benefit (profit) for the community. They already proved to know what they’re doing, with their businesses.
