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Originally Posted by Bill14564
I understand the math but when I look online to see what rent is in the area, I don't see anything starting at even twice that much. While I didn't spend a lot of time looking, $1,500/month seems to be the minimum.
The problem seems to be that the housing that gets built isn't "affordable" and housing that would be "affordable" gets the NIMBY treatment. Maybe that will change with all the new developments being approved.
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You are right. The link below to the Housing and Urban Development web site explains how Section 8 housing works. If a landlord agrees to having “low income housing,” the low-income family pays 30% of their income (up to $650 a month) for the residence, even if it is brand new and normally rents for $1,500 a month or more, and we the people pay the rest through what we give to HUD. Probably the other people in the apartment house are also eating part of the cost. People need places to live, and we shouldn’t knock hard-working folks who work for minimum wage and can’t help it that rents are so much higher. It’s not easy to build new houses or apartments that meet the building code but can rent for $650 a month. If we doubled the minimum wage, more people could pay more for rent, but then we’d have to pay far more for what we buy. There was a time when the housing for people doing “service jobs” was an attic room or a little cabin out back or a sharecropper’s cabin. Today, that might be an old trailer. But if you buy an old trailer for $30,000 these days, a place to put it might cost you $650 a month. But people don’t want to live like that. They want a nice new place for that amount. It’s not an easy situation.