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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think you could more effectively improve people's lives by deregulating the housing market - it is ridiculous that the majority of apartment that cost less than 2k+/month in safe neighborhoods in DC are "affordable housing" which means that only people making minimum wage and supporting several dependents are eligible to live there. What about the entry-level secretary with a child? Where is she supposed to live? If you freed up the housing market, maybe she could afford a home for her & her kid. [/quote]

I think that's an interesting idea. But since land is a limited thing, won't highly desirable areas necessarily have higher housing costs? How do you prevent the pressures of "5 people want to rent this apartment, and person A will keep bidding up the cost?" beyond, say, requiring decent documentation about ability for repayment for anyone borrowing money for real estate?[/quote]

A few factors that would make all housing more affordable in DC if you deregulated:
-there are a lot of vacancies in the officially designated "affordable housing" units. not enough people meet the requirements to fill those units. if you opened those units up to the free market, many families would happily fill in. this alone with increase the supply of housing in DC, and decrease housing prices.
-the shortage of free market apartments in DC marks up the price. when you free up those vacant units currently designated as 'affordable', then you loosen some of the demand on these free market apartments and their inflated prices will come down.
-affordable housing attempts to desegregate neighborhoods but does so ineffectively, in my opinion, by creating mini-ghettos within neighborhoods, which is not real integration. if you had a truly free, open housing market, then the currently designated "affordable" apartments in desirable neighborhoods would increase in price but the overall rate for the neighborhood would decline because of the increased supply - so you could have upper middle class people move into otherwise exclusively high income neighborhoods, with the displacement of some lower income people. in the lower demand neighborhoods, truly middle class families would find the nicely maintained, formally 'affordable' units somewhat desirable and they would move in - so you would get a mix of lower & middle income families. In the long term, the borders of these neighborhoods blends and there's less and less of stark line between which areas are livable and those that are not.

In my opinion, the livability problems with DC are not the wages. It's primarily the housing and secondarily the crime. You can reduce the crime with better housing policy, which would lead to true integration and safer neighborhoods. [/quote]

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