That's a link to an RSS feed of all the "action" in a particular area of the site, including ideas and comments, etc. To learn more about what RSS is and how you can use it, Reconfigure guidelines for "affordable housing" so it's based on local household income, not AMI!
No federal plan to prevent or end homelessness will be successful without a comprehensive set of strategies to create housing that's truly affordable to low-income people. But "affordable housing," as it's currently configured, is out of reach for people living below the poverty line.
HUD guidelines mandate that state and local "affordable housing" programs target housing units at households making a certain percentage of Area Median Income (AMI) - the median income for a family of four measured across the metropolitan statistical area. AMI typically includes suburban areas that are far wealthier than the low-income neighborhoods where affordable housing is needed. In New York, AMI for a family of four is $70,900—a figure hopelessly skewed by the presence of extremely wealthy Manhattanites and residents of Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties. When “affordable” housing is created, it is priced based on the AMI, making it unaffordable for anyone with an income significantly lower than the median income.
“Affordable housing” constructed in East Harlem can be targeted at families making between $52,000 and $157,000 a year, although the median income for that neighborhood is actually only 27,000 dollars a year. These middle-class households are therefore in direct competition for scant housing resources with the working poor—a full-time minimum wage worker makes approximately $15,000 per year, or 21% of AMI... and the majority of homeless New Yorkers have incomes below.
The Interagency Council's Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness must, therefore, include a provision for HUD to abandon "Area Median Income" as the gauge of affordability, and adopt a national standard of measuring affordability against the average household income within the particular zip code where the housing units are physically located.
This kind of change cannot be enacted at the state or local level. And since re-configuring the way that "affordable housing" is computed would not itself create any housing, this measure would carry no significant cost.
Cities and states all over the country have invested resources into robust new plans for developing "affordable housing," such as NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace, which is set to create tens of thousands of units of “affordable housing.” However, this housing is not accessible to poor New Yorkers: it follows federal guidelines in targeting households with an annual income at 90% of Area Median Income.
The current funding structure relegates the working poor and those with extremely low incomes to seek housing assistance through the homeless service system or to live in overcrowded housing conditions; at the same time, it turns “affordable housing” into a Trojan Horse for gentrification of low-income neighborhoods. In any urban area, applying a uniform standard for determining “affordability” means that the very poor will never be able to access “affordable housing.”
Sam J. Miller
shared this idea
4 comments
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phenomina
commented
EXCELLENT insights. This must become a priority. I too have seen for years that low income and government funded housing no longer houses the poor. THE PROGRAMS HAVE BEEN HIJACKED, DIVERTED AND GENTRIFIED ! iT'S AS IF THE STAFFERS IN THE FEDERAL PROGRAMS HAVE ADJUSTED THE AMI GUIDELINES AND ELIGIBILITY CEILINGS SO THAT THEY WILL GET TO PARTICIPATE THEMSELVES. On their middle class salaries. Housing the middle class on the lower class's money is an absolute atrocity! A crime against humanity! Leaving the lower class homeless!!!!
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Fallopia Tuba commented
What the New York real estate industry considers "affordable" is actually "luxury." I was priced out of my own neighborhood and my own building years ago.
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Peter Marcuse
commented
A very modest request, made repeatedly and certainly eminently reasonable. If there's any justification for high definitions of affordability (besides reducing the cost of subsidies or permitting creaming of applicants), they don't apply to the homeless. Any household making $77,000 a year isn't homeless.
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margaret shafer
commented
This is terribly important. Currently in New York, all the affordable housing goes to people with incomes far above the money available to poor people.
