So much to blog about and so little time — I’m still catching up from vacation. Well, here goes…
Reader Tobias Jodter recommends to our attention an Aug. 27 article in the Washington Post describing the housing crisis in the suburbs. Writer Michael Grunwald gets straight to the point in the first paragraph:
In the past five years, housing prices in Fairfax County have grown 12 times as fast as household incomes. Today, the county’s median family would have to spend 54 percent of its income to afford the county’s median home; in 2000, the figure was 26 percent. The situation is so dire that Fairfax recently began offering housing subsidies to families earning $90,000 a year; soon, that figure may go as high as $110,000 a year.
Grunwald clearly understands that the problem isn’t simply a lack of affordable housing — it’s the location of the affordable housing.
The root of the problem is the striking mismatch between the demand for and the supply of affordable housing — or, more accurately, affordable housing near jobs. … when Fairfax housing officials gave me a tour recently, they told me many of their employees now drive a full hour from Warrenton in Fauquier County. The media officer interjected that she drives nearly two hours each way from Winchester in Frederick County. The driver said he lives in Winchester, too.
In other words, housing that is “affordable” to blue-collar and pink-collar families is not “accessible” to their jobs. What homeowners save in mortgage payments, they bleed in the cost (more than $.50 per mile) and time associated with commuting. Grunwald even understands the root causes of the problem:
Minimum lot requirements, minimum parking requirements, density restrictions and other controls go well beyond the traditional mission of the building code and end up artificially reducing the development of safe, affordable housing. The unfashionable but accurate term for these restrictions is “snob zoning.” Suburbanites use them to boost property values by keeping out riffraff — even the riffraff who teach their kids, police their streets and extinguish their fires.
Paraphrasing economist Christopher Thornberg, Grunwald concludes: “The best thing local officials can do to promote affordable housing is to get out of the way — stop requiring one-acre lots and two-car garages, and stop blocking low-income and high-density projects.”
First question: Wow, where did the Post find this guy? He’s good.
Second question: Will any of the Post‘s editorial writers absorb what Grunwald has to say?
