Quote:
Originally Posted by Kenmore
ugh it's libertarian clap trap
there is absolutely 100% an affordable housing crisis in halfway decent (no need for gold coast hyperbole) neighborhoods. it's the primary reason why middle class families continue to flee the city.
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No, middle class families continue to flee the city because it is illegal to build decent housing stock for them. If you know anything about Chicago's building and zoning code and permit system you know that affordable housing is currently ILLEGAL to build in this city. If you want to do an affordable renovation of a vacant property, good luck, it's going to cost you just as much as new construction.
If you want to build new construction then you are going to be paying no less than $150/SF to do it. Why? Because the city mandates that price through it's arcane set of building codes, zoning codes, city fees, and other nonsense.
The fact is that most of what we have known in the past as "affordable housing" is now illegal to build in Chicago or was originally built as luxury housing. All the wood frame worker's cottages: illegal. Two flats: defacto illegal. Bungalows: try building one of those under RS-3 zoning. SRO's: LOL, yeah right, but we are trying to "preserve" them right? Studio Courtyard buildings, have fun getting a PD approved from your alderman. Any building without excessive and costly parking: we all know how that works. I could go on and on.
All the current "affordable housing" system does is jack up the price of new construction even further by requiring high end developments to lug the dead weight of our "affordable housing" system around. I put it in quotes because we are NOT creating affordable housing. What the current system does is jack up the price of new construction (again making it even more difficult to build anything new that is even remotely affordable) so that we can pay for a tiny minority of the poor to live in luxury buildings in luxury locations. All it does is further accelerate the trend you are bemoaning by increasing the price of new construction. Think about it, if you build a 100 unit building with an average unit construction price of $250,000/Unit, then your costs are $25,000,000. But wait, you are required to contribute $100,000/Unit for 10% of your unit count which means your costs go up by $1,000,000 right there. That's a 4% increase in the cost of that housing just because of the "affordable housing" requirement. Under the new per unit contribution that would drive construction costs up 7% instead.
The numbers get significantly higher if you are trying to build cheaper, more affordable, units. Do the same math with a $200k or $150k per unit construction cost and the additional burden of this system grows ever larger. Say you wanted to build a privately developed affordable housing project which costs $150,000 per unit. That's $15,000,000 to build it at 100 units, now you are at a 6.67% increase in cost or a whopping 11.67% increase in cost under the proposed changes to the law. A few percent might not sound like much, but when you are talking construction costs on a project of this size it means a heck of a lot. The way the contribution law is written, the cheaper units you try to build, the more the city punishes you...
Think about that, just so we can accommodate 3 or 4 affordable units, we are making everyone else pay 4% more. And that's just the direct effect of this program on a conservative scale. Essentially what we have done is create a regulatory environment in which building homes for the middle class is illegal and renovating the old ones is cost prohibitive unless it is for luxury tenants/buyers. We have bifurcated the market such that only the ultra low end and ultra high end continues to exist. Either you are living in a slum/public housing or you are living in luxury. That's not because of some mysterious market force, that's because the CITY GOVERNMENT has mandated it.