Subsidized and/or Affordable Housing

[WHS]

If it's incorporated, it's subject to state law, the Metropolitan Land Use Planning Act, and the Met Council's jurisdiction.

(For reference: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=473.121)

[xandrex]

There's certainly the concern that leading a car dependent life style leave you very vulnerable. If you've got a car and you're right on the edge financially, what do you do if you've got a $1000 repair bill?

What are the basics to surive in the world right now? At the top I'd say food, shelter, transportation, and healthcare. We provide SNAP for food. We've got Section 8 and Section 42 for shelter. Medicaid and MnSure for healthcare. And for transportation we have transit. So we (in theory) have safety nets for all the basics of life. Except if you go to the suburbs you've basically lost access to a transportation safety net. It's rather paternalistic, but is it morally "right" to put a person in a position where something could happen that results in a death spiral where they lose their job and then their home most likely (I'm guessing you'll lose Section 8 if you can't at least pay something). Even if they do have greater opportunity in that scenario? On the other hand if we spread housing around enough there should be enough low level job opportunities in the nearby areas that a worker isn't totally stranded.

I think ultimately we need more subsidized housing everywhere. Not just in the core, not just in the suburbs, but everywhere.

But one could also argue that where we're placing affordable housing right now - like in already poor, sometimes crime-filled neighborhoods - we're failing to truly provide safe housing.

A lot of poor families do have cars and won't get rid of them just because they have affordable housing near transit. Sometimes it's because they need it (a job in the suburbs), sometimes it's because it's just more convenient (a single mother needing to grocery shop, pick up kids, run errands, etc. can get it all done quicker in a car than a bus). Unless we're going to require people get rid of their cars, there doesn't seem to be a reason to not build affordable housing in the suburbs. We just need to also expand transit access where we can as well.

[WHS]

But one could also argue that where we're placing affordable housing right now - like in already poor, sometimes crime-filled neighborhoods - we're failing to truly provide safe housing.

A lot of poor families do have cars and won't get rid of them just because they have affordable housing near transit. Sometimes it's because they need it (a job in the suburbs), sometimes it's because it's just more convenient (a single mother needing to grocery shop, pick up kids, run errands, etc. can get it all done quicker in a car than a bus). Unless we're going to require people get rid of their cars, there doesn't seem to be a reason to not build affordable housing in the suburbs. We just need to also expand transit access where we can as well.

I just wrote a long comment saying almost exactly the same thing, and you beat me to the punch. If we're talking about where it's "morally right" to let poor people live, isn't a little weird to be okay with letting them go to neighborhoods with high crime, mostly terrible schools, and little opportunity, but to draw the line at letting them rely on a car like 90% of Americans? Is car ownership really the greatest geographic risk poor people face -- the one we should be stepping in to protect them from?

I'm always a little skeptical that urbanists arguing in favor of transit-oriented subsidized housing are driven more by generalized enthusiasm for transit and not necessarily a careful analysis of the needs of low-income individuals. I don't mean that in a bad way -- I'd be the first to admit I'm probably a little blinkered in the other direction; for me everything is about integration and affordable housing.

[mplsjaromir]

I am always skeptical about any idea about helping poor people that not is not directly giving them money. Subsidized housing and nutritional assistance is such a waste of time. Give people money, they know the best way to improve their lives.

[Anondson]

I wished I remembered more details, but it is maybe 20 years ago now, but I had a course taught by Prof. John Adams and he mentioned that more than a few decades ago (Great Depression?) there was a great outrage at the condition of slums, that people needed money to buy better housing so there was a program to give people a lump sum that would cover the additional costs of rent outside slums.

But few of the people living in nastiest slums used the money to find better housing. They stayed in the slums, didn't even buy better clothing or better food, they instead spent it on liquor, tobacco, gambling.

Maybe it is paternalistic to care that the people given the money kept themselves in the squalor and didn't using the public money to do what middle class people would do with the money.

[Anondson]

Needless to say, the program didn't last. It changed from direct money transfer into programs more like we have today.

[mulad]

I continue to be really frustrated that a number of you guys are so afraid of locating housing near transit lines. Can we please consult the map and remind ourselves of the extent of the system? The value of transit connections varies depending on which line and stop is chosen, but there's a pretty wide area available. Actually, I recommend getting a paper copy of the current system map, which uses different thickness and shades of purple/blue to indicate the service level. I never knew until looking at it that route 675 runs all the way out to Mound several times each day.

I would prefer that we try to have both regular housing and subsidized housing be constrained by similar rules. There has been far too much sprawl in our region. I'm not convinced that we need to put subsidized housing in unwalkable, unbikeable, untransitable areas in order to properly answer the equity question.

[WHS]

It's not that you're wrong about the importance of controlling sprawl, it's that you can't apply different rules to subsidized and unsubsidized housing without creating ghettos.

Also, in practice, locating housing on transit lines has meant prioritizing BRT, LRT, and the high frequency bus network. Here's the map: http://www.metrotransit.org/high-freque ... k-map.aspx. This isn't some conjectural issue, I can cite lots of examples of access to transit being used as an excuse to build in, literally, some of the poorest neighborhoods in the state of Minnesota. Which is why people are wary.

Obviously, there's a lot of middle ground between building on the central corridor and building out on the very fringe of seven-county area.

[xandrex]

I continue to be really frustrated that a number of you guys are so afraid of locating housing near transit lines.

Who on UrbanMSP is afraid of housing on transit lines?

When possible, housing should be located near frequent transit (you can't really force the private, unsubsidized market to do this, but that's neither here nor there). But that doesn't mean it should be ghettoized into certain areas, which is what forcing it only within the core does. And even in transitable areas, the poor still drive cars. Hell, even the subsidized housing apartment downtown has a parking lot that is always full. And it's along one of the busiest transit spines in the metro and a block away from light rail.

[mulad]

Well, it's certainly the odor I'm getting from the comments I'm seeing from WHS. I know a lot of this is coming from the studies that Myron Orfield has been putting out, which are suggesting that there should be a more equitable distribution of subsidized housing, but I think he's using a bad benchmark -- we have too much sprawl, and the Met Council has not been doing a good enough job of constraining development out near or at the urban boundary, and existing suburbs sprawl in haphazard ways within their own borders. Both housing and business districts are scattered all around.

Look, I don't know exactly where all of this subsidized housing is now or where people want it to go -- if someone has someone has some good maps, it would help shed light on things. But we have to acknowledge that the core cities are denser than the suburbs, and (at least if we were starting out with a level playing field) could handle a larger number of subsidized units because of that. Also, being centrally located isn't just for being able to be on a busy transit line -- it provides better access for jobs no matter whether you're driving, busing, or getting around some other way. It is closer to more jobs, period.

There are good parts of Minneapolis and there are bad parts of Minneapolis. There are good parts of Saint Paul and bad parts of Saint Paul. Suburbs can fluctuate too.

There is something of a "Build it and they will come" effect going on with current market-rate housing. Huge "slum" areas were bulldozed in the middle of the 20th century, which almost certainly accelerated white flight. The region needs to build thousands of market-rate units per year to keep up with population growth, so they get eaten up almost no matter where they get built. We've stopped deliberately poisoning our cities, and crime is falling. A lot of what remains is turning out to be from overzealous policing.

The future trajectory of our cities is changing. We have to be careful not to base decisions on what seemed like a good idea 10 or 20 years ago when cities seemed like hopeless lost causes.

Anyway, just because I want new development to go near transit doesn't mean that I expect absolutely everyone to use it. But we're talking about a demographic where it's more likely than normal. It's worth reiterating that transit service isn't just about getting to and from work -- it can also offload a parent from having to shuttle kids to/from school or other activities, and it can help connect friends and family by providing a way to get to the airport or intercity train/bus station.

I'd propose something like keeping these developments within certain radii of stops/stations depending on the quality of service. We might use Northstar's six daily round-trips as a benchmark -- be within 1/4 mile of a bus line that only has a handful of daily round-trips, and 1/2 mile of a high-frequency line. In certain cases, no transit service is fine too, but I'd say the place would need to have essential services within about a mile (grocery, school, restaurants, some retail, USPS or some other government services). I don't have the right tools to measure that potential area right now, but I'd have to guess it would be around 150-250 square miles across the metro. If we can't find good places to target across that much space, then I'm not sure what to do -- it would mean that our sprawl is even worse than I thought.

There are some cases where the transit and housing improvements should probably go hand-in-hand. Large chunks of Edina and Eden Prairie are only served by rush-hour express lines, if they have anything at all. There are lots of jobs in those areas, but existing services may not go in the right directions at the right times to make it work for anyone, regardless of whether they're existing residents in market-rate housing or someone new in a subsidized unit. Demographics are also shifting, and we still have to worry about the "gray wave" and the types of services they need. There are dial-a-ride services around, but they are far more expensive to operate per customer than fixed-route buses.

There's a big framework of existing stuff to build on, and a lot of the conversation here has been sounding like people want to toss that out the window for the sake of geographic distribution. No, transit isn't a cure-all, but it's one element that should be available for the people who need it.

[WHS]

What you're missing is that heavily focusing subsidized housing on transit doesn't reduce sprawl -- it CREATES it. You can't directly control the private market, and if middle- and upper-income homebuyers believe they can escape lower incomes by fleeing to the outer rings, that's exactly what they'll do. This is the mechanism that created sprawl in the first place!

Sprawl is deeply interwoven with racial and economic concentration. You fight one by fighting the other. This site, which is fantastic, beautifully illustrates the process in Saint Louis: http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/

If you want to contain sprawl, the best way is to address it directly with an urban growth boundary or an equivalent. Barring that, a fair geographic distribution of affordable housing helps too, by short-circuiting the segregatory mechanics that drive outward growth. The appeal of the burbs is largely their ability to provide enclaves away from the poor, and the state has the power to reduce that appeal considerably through fair share housing policies.

But what you absolutely don't want to do is say, "Well, we can't control the private market, but let's just place the housing we CAN control in the urban core." It's a purely symbolic gesture -- a few thousand units of low-income housing aren't going to meaningfully reduce the expansion of the urbanized metro. But it does intensify the very inner-city dysfunction that has led to the endless growth of American cities, and worse still, punishes poor families with concentrated poverty and segregation in order to (ineffectively) pursue a completely unrelated set of policy priorities.

[WHS]

Look, I don't know exactly where all of this subsidized housing is now or where people want it to go -- if someone has someone has some good maps, it would help shed light on things.

Also, I actually do have maps! Yes, it comes from Myron Orfield.

[WHS]

And while we're at it, check out these charts, showing the increased racial concentration in schools and housing near transit stops:

[mulad]

Thanks for the map and graphs. I'm still seeing something different, though. For Minneapolis in particular, the highest concentration correlates well with areas that had been dense before zoning regulations were implemented in the early 20th century plus areas that have had a lot of "urban renewal". It seems much more likely to me that land freed up by bulldozing "substandard" or empty structures became cheaply available for new public housing in the wake of white flight, but I'm sure there was some cyclic behavior happening there too.

I'm not quite sure what to think of the graphs, though -- Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul are more than 30% minority on average anyway, so it's actually surprising that the first graph isn't 100% across all transit types (and explains why the elementary school numbers are so high). Also, bus routes in the central cities go along historic commercial corridors. When zoning was first implemented, those narrow channels tended to be the only new places that allowed multi-unit housing.

If you want to rent a place for whatever reason, you're more likely to land along a busier corridor. God forbid someone (aka me) wants to rent a place that's a block or two off the main drag, just to have less traffic noise yet still not have to worry about shoveling the sidewalk or mowing the lawn. But if someone is new to the area, starting to strike out on their own, or just can't afford the down payment on a house, they'd gravitate toward areas where multi-unit housing is actually legal. A lot of that has still been substandard compared to new housing going up in the suburbs.

I've noticed that a lot of development in Minneapolis has been concentrated in areas subject to the Pedestrian Oriented zoning overlay, which lessens requirements for parking, among other things. A big problem for the core cities has been the red tape put in front of anyone who wanted to build new stuff, and it's still pretty difficult for most of the area within them. As much as I can appreciate the character of many older homes and other buildings, they often have bad internal designs. How many unnecessarily cramped kitchens have you been in around Minneapolis?

It's not possible to fix the income/racial imbalance just by shoving subsidized housing outwards -- The more well-off population has to be enticed back to the city. But given how quickly new apartments/condos are being filled up, there are a lot of people who would like to move into the core cities. I think a lot of them are still unable to find housing of the right quality in the right places. I happily moved into a new market-rate complex in Saint Paul last year, and it has filled up really quickly. The demographics of the complex have probably nudged the average income of the neighborhood upward a significant amount.

I'd really like to see the Pedestrian Oriented zoning expand through most of Minneapolis and see the city's regulations synchronized with Saint Paul and inner suburbs. If there are additional things to change about zoning to make it easier/cheaper to build while maintaining proper safety, quality, and density, that would help with some of the affordability problems we've been having.

Zoning has tended to lock cities and suburbs into stasis, so when new housing amenities come along and problems of the past get resolved (central air, better interior design, non-leaded paint, non-asbestos insulation), people will gravitate to where newer buildings have gotten those things sorted out. Sometimes that leaves cheap places that can be easily rehabbed, but sometimes funding wasn't there because of historical issues with redlining, or "non-conforming use" violations whenever zoning was too restrictive. There has to be a proper churn to the buildings in a city, otherwise people may just leave the old stuff to rot.

[RailBaronYarr]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/nyreg ... .html?_r=0

[xandrex]

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/06/05/mpls-section8

Minneapolis considering making income discrimination illegal for housing. So it seems like Section 8 could be accepted anywhere?

I'm wondering if this would have an impact on people that are perhaps renting out an upper level or whatever. Might the paperwork associated with it flip the economics at all? I don't know enough about affordable housing policy to form an opinion.

[Anondson]

That could have huge spill over effects. A co-worker of mine tried to rent one half of an owner-occupied duplex. The owner insisted he see proof of my co-worker's stated income.

[acs]

I'll support this as soon as Eden Prairie and Minnetonka introduce something similar. Also, this flies in the face of state law. You can't force a landlord to participate in section 8.

[FISHMANPET]

That could have huge spill over effects. A co-worker of mine tried to rent one half of an owner-occupied duplex. The owner insisted he see proof of my co-worker's stated income.

Proof of income is pretty standard for renting though. And even if it wasn't, this wouldn't effect him, unless he's a Section 8 renter.

[WHS]

I'll support this as soon as Eden Prairie and Minnetonka introduce something similar. Also, this flies in the face of state law. You can't force a landlord to participate in section 8.

I believe this is correct -- you'd need a change in state law. But there could be something I'm missing.

Your first point is even more important. Changing this rule in Minneapolis alone will make finding a unit a lot easier for voucherholders but might ultimately concentrate poverty, because most Minneapolitan housing that meets Section 8 affordability requirements is in struggling neighborhoods. If anything, this means you could see an even greater percentage of regional voucherholders concentrated in Minneapolis's worst areas.

EDIT: I think I'm wrong about state law -- it seems the court only declared that vouchers aren't a source of income for the purpose of the state human rights act, which would not prevent municipalities from imposing heightened requirements.