Words MEAN things.
 

This was going to be a post in another thread but it would have only indirectly been related to the topic at hand. And this particular topic is quickly becoming one that may have profound repercussions here in The Villages, what with ever-more service workers being needed in TV as it expands and more businesses sprout up.

Question: Just what IS “affordable housing”? Is there a sound, realistic definition for the term, or it it just another buzz phrase that sounds great when people rattle it off but has virtually no real meaning?

$650 per month for a one-bedroom apartment

$15/hour x 35 hours/week x 50 weeks = $26,250
$26,250 x 30 percent is about $650 per month

And, anyone who cannot make a 20 percent down payment, should not buy a house.

So many words are defined not by society but by the concept of the person using them. Shockingly stated by a friend. FAIR? Reality, life is not fair.

From my grandmother, born around 1898 and passed away long ago. It is far easier to move up than to move down. Property values, cost to live here. Everything is going up that is true wherever you/we lived previously.

Interesting to me is how numbers change over time. When we bought out first home, the only one before the villages, as I recall the guide for housing was not 30% but 25% one week take home pay-after taxes. We did not as many seem to do tell our parents they should give us money. We lived cheap. Where we lived it was common to hear of cars stolen from the street in front of our apartment. Strange even the thieves didn't want to take my car. I worked full time and had another job, source of income on weekends. I'm not sure but I think they required 10% down and interest was 8 point something.

Strange concept for many. Old book simple concept. You should save 10% of your income and live on the rest. The magic of compounding. Normal long term stock market return is 8% that means your money doubles every 9 years. You work, I worked 49 years.
your money will double 5.4 times. To quote another friend, I was an overnight success, it only took me 49 years.

It is housing that we can easily afford.

No.

No. The phrase has meaning to me and I already told you what it means to me.

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.

Affordable housing is usually only affordable to the first purchaser, after that 'market price' comes into effect, unless of course there is some restriction on resale price.

Except, "WE" is quite a broad spectrum

I think this post is thrown at me. Affordable housing means nothing to someone who can afford the rents and the down payments required to find a place to live, but it melans a a hell of a lot to people who are forced to livle in their cars because their circumstances do not allow the ability to pay rent or save for a down payment.

If you do not know what affordable housing means you need to get out of the bubble and see what is happening in the real world.

No. In my world, "we" means my wife and I.

The cost of "affordable housing" also changes according to the State where you live. My Granddaughter and her husband are paying over $2,000 per month for a one bedroom tiny apartment in NH. My other Granddaughter moved to N.Carolina and pays $2,2000 for a three bedroom apartment. Location, location, location.,

The federal government typically defines housing as affordable when it consumes no more than 30 percent of a household’s income.

So if you are making $30,000 a year, affordable housing would be $750 a month. If you are making $50,000, affordable housing would be $1,250.

The Villages were very affordable three to four years ago. The entry level patio villas were below 200k, the cottage series were low 200k, Courtyard villas were below 250k and designers were 500k with a pool on a golf course. My how things change in just a few years. Many homes in the Villages are second homes and they are giving way to rental properties as the value and affordability goes away. Six percent a year for 25 years was good, 50-100% in three years is not and must correct or I fear we fifty somethings will be forced to go elsewhere.

need some Section 8 housing. Seemed to work for Madison WI.

Generally, the US government characterizes "affordable housing", is housing that costs less than 30% of a households income.

HUD characterizes "affordable housing" in stages.

"Low Income Housing" is affordable (per HUD Guidelines) to folks earning no more than 80% of the Median Income, in the SMSA l(Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area) they live in.

"Very Low Income Housing" is affordable to to folks earning no more than 50% of the Median Income in their SMSA.

Many states have "Affordable Housing" Laws/Regulations, all of whom define Affordable Housing, differently.

In another life, I was Director of the Housing Opportunities Program for the Commonwealth of MA. I can tell you from experience, the "affordable housing" industry is joke of gargantuan proportions and seldom do "affordable housing programs" serve the folks they were meant to serve. It's an industry rife with abuse, fraud, manipulation and typical government incompetency.

18 yrs ago, when we moved to TV, a beautiful patio villa cost $130,000. My girlfriend had one. Her husband passed and she sold the villa for over $200,000. They were a great buy in those days. I have been told that before I moved to TV they sold for under $100,00,

Maybe this will help: What is affordable housing?


Partial clip from that article:

What Is Affordable Housing?
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines affordable housing as housing where the occupant is paying 30% or less of the(ir) gross income on total housing, including utilities.

The phrase “affordable housing” is also colloquially used as a general term to refer to housing assistance for low-income individuals, including housing vouchers or housing designated for residents below a certain income for the area.

While 30% of gross income may be considered the baseline to determine whether housing is affordable, many households are forced to spend much more than that for their home and utilities, and they may or may not be receiving housing assistance to cover the high costs. Very low affordability is considered 60%, says Arica Young, associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

In some cases, affordability is even worse. “There are families that spend 80% of their income on housing. … It’s really shocking,” Young says.

In Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, Humpty Dumpty says: “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

didn't we all leave the " real world 🌎 " for the cocoon of the bubble

Great answer. Means that you would need to have a roommate making that same amount to meet rent each month.

Definition of Affordable Housing: The Villages.

Selling new homes as fast as they can build them....................must be affordable.

:posting:

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.

You are so right, it is affordable if you have a home to sell, if you are old enough to have a pension, if you are collecting SS or if you have reached the age where your investments are showing promise.

When you are a young person starting out in life affordable housing is a dream.

Second quote first-----More Robin Hood/Nanny State/Income redistribution crap. Taxpayers paying rent for others in sec 8 housing. Other tenants subsidizing the people in the next apartment. Double minimum wages so everybody subsidizes them through higher prices. "People don’t want to live like that?"----well if that's all they can afford, then that is what they should get. When "welfare", aka "the dole", was started by FDR in the 30's, you got a subsistence living, nothing more. A cold water flat with shared bathrooms, no amenities, and a ticket to the government surplus bread and cheese line. People would take any, yes ANY job to get off "the dole". It was a social stigma and people back then had personal pride. Now, it has become a generational way of life, and we bend over backwards to give handouts that often exceed the income of hard working people. We hand out EBT cards so the recipients aren't "embarrassed" at the supermarket by handing in those food stamps. My father remembers having exactly 3 cents in the cupboard on a Monday that had to last until Friday---and my grandmother wouldn't even think about taking a handout.

I see the problem as a strict cut off in transfer payments once a certain income is reached. Instead, I would institute a sliding scale, starting with that subsistence living of the 30's for doing nothing. As you work and earn money, phase out the handouts, but always make the total much better than sitting on your butt doing nothing. Give equal credits for education. At least make an attempt to end the "welfare state" and turn at least some of the people into productive net taxpayers. And for those bleeding hearts out there, I'm not talking about the disabled or developmentally challenged. But I do not consider alcoholism or drug addiction a "disability"----I'd find a job for those people, but I doubt they'd like it.

For the first quote, yes it always will get the "NIMBY" treatment. Why? Easy, look at them crime rate and the appearance of such housing. Nobody who worked and paid for their home wants to be next to that.

End of rant

Yes, as it was in my generation, and the generation before. Young people just starting out don't get to live at the top of the food chain, today's generation seems to want to start out where their grandparents worked 40 years to get. I wasn't able buy a house until I was 28, and didn't buy a new house until I was 55. And Mommy and Daddy weren't likely to subsidize me. So I'll pass on tears for today's youth.

Found these statistics for Sumter Co on census.gov site, referring to either 2020 or the period 2017-2021 (go to their website for further details):
Population as of 04/01/2020: 129,752
Number of households: 61,441
Persons/household: 1.93
Persons 65+: 58.2%
Persons 16+ in civilian labor: 24.2%
Total employment: 27,829
Mean travel time to work: 27.4 minutes
Per capita income (2021 $s): $63,323
Income in past 12 months 2017-2021): $39,922
Persons in poverty: 9.5%
Housing units (07/01/2021): 79,678
Median gross rent: $1,055
Median select monthly owner costs with a mortgage: $1,374

In Sumter County, the housing supply appears to have roughly balanced out and was fairly affordable just a few years ago. This is no longer the case. The recent & ongoing rapid growth in & around The Villages is going to require the support of even more workers, who presumably do not want a lengthy commute. As much as I hate to see our lovely rural surroundings bulldozed to build more apartment buildings, where else are people going to live? Better to embrace the change, make sure building standards are high, and pay attention that associated services like healthcare, schools & transportation don't fail due the increased strain. Now more than ever Villagers need to pay attention to who we elect to local offices, as well as the decisions they are making which will affect us all.

When was the standard workweek shortened to 35 hours? Also you're not accounting for taxes. The $26,250 ($2187 per month) that is quoted is not take home pay.

And when was the standard of the percentage of wages that should go toward a mortgage go from 25% to 30%.

My first few jobs had pain vacation to I was paid for 52 weeks. I also often worked a second part time job to be able to afford things that I wanted.

Words often don't mean anything. In this case affordable can be translated to lower priced, but that doesn't mean that the homes are affordable to everyone.

It's an absurd or at least a very loose term really.

Housing in the villages is pretty cheap compared to other places. We sure don’t need section 8 housing anywhere close to the villages. You would think that people would be happy who bought here years ago that their property values have gone way up. Property values have gone way up in other parts of the country too so if you would have to sell here to move somewhere else, you sure hope your gains will match the gains other states have seen.

“Affordable Housing” does seem to be open to interpretation.

The government(s) do have numbers, which may or may not be somewhat reasonable depending on location, but it seems as if people use the term to describe a life style, not just four walls and a roof. Risking the wrath of the Thought Police—the term has become too political to have a lot of real meaning.

In large part it comes down to how responsible people are with their money. For some people, I imagine that an income of, say, $50,000 per year is not enough to support their imagined affordable housing coupled with what they spend above and beyond. For others, half that much is more than sufficient. I know a young woman who not only has her own apartment (cute one-bedroom) for which she pays market-rate rent, has subsidized health insurance through her work, is in her junior year in college (via online, University of Phoenix), receives no assistance of any kind, has a credit score of 814, and just recently bought a two-year-old Ford Escape—all on about $30,0000 per year.

Bottom line: people, in my opinion, might be able to afford housing that is totally adequate if they are disciplined and frugal in their spending habits.

Affordable housing today is a far cry from what many of us faced when we purchased our first homes
Home prices to median household income ratio.
In 1970 a home was 4.5 years x median household income
1970 : 4.5 in years
1980 : 4.6
1990 : 4.62
2000 : 4.34
2010 : 5.3
2020 : 5.71
2023 : 7.58

In a one bedroom apartment. Hope they get along.
Let us not forget inflation. The real inflation, including food and fuel. The system is broken. Sidenote, those few 20 somethings able to buy a home may not be able to get a mortgage these days. The local and regional banks are looking at a tough road ahead after Janet Yellen outright admitted that the U.S. government and Federal Reserve will readily protect and bailout any bank that are in their good graces and/or to protect their own interests, whiles the smaller community and regional banks will be allowed to fail with no support coming. It is difficult not to come across as a conspiracy theorist with so many real conspiracies out there.

Thank god the VA mortgage is available with zero down. Has help many families to homer ownership and in some cases cost of monthly payments less then renting

The terminology here is getting mixed up . Affordable housing is a definition by the federal Gov't that allows people making a certain amount of household income based on the number of adults and children living in the space that are under 18. If they meet the requirements then they may be eligible for a subsidy. Not all low income housing qualifies for all subsidies. One major problem is that if a familly or living group increases their combined income above the maximum the owner or non profit that owns the building has to evict the family or the unit will not be eligible to receive a subsidy in the future. This forces people to not report income or just not try to improve themselves and it maintains family groups in a system of poverty.

Workforce housing is derived from the median household income in a defined area. Workforce housing would be considered what that group of people could afford if they used 30% of their take home to pay for housing. Many resort communities have a problem with workforce housing.

I was Mayor of a resort community in Washington State for 12 years. We transitioned from a logging, summer resort area to an aerospace tecnology community and faced a horrific housing shortage for most people not working in the aerospce industry. We watched large productive orchards in the county split up into mini ranches. The urban areas were mandated by the state to void all zoning requirments in regards to minimum lot size, and Auxilary dwelling units were allowed where ever they could be built.

From what I see here in the Villages, the developer is addressing the problem head on and is developing housing for the work force directly relating to the Villages. It would be nice to see companies like Microsoft and Boeing take the same interest in their repective areas of influence.

Wouldn't square foot price to build determine affordability. The profit margin desired by the builder? Then take that square foot price and draw a circle outward around an zip code area, account for competion driving proce per square foot?

First time buyer is paying profit margin PLUS impact fees (known as bond in TV). Market impacting build price right? Not sure if first buyer really gets a great deal unless affordable housing caps pricing?

That is not always the case. It depends on whether you're talking about "affordable rentals" or "affordable homes" for purchase. What happens if a resident's income at some point, exceeds the eligibility window, is dependent on exactly what "program" is providing the subsidy and/or, whether it's a state or federal program.

Well to begin with, most people (probably?) realize that language, words, and meanings are changing more rapidly than most can keep up with, and not just limited to us (seniors). Orwell termed this "new speak", and we've always had changes, but can't think of a period in my lifetime where it has accelerated to this extent, and been so connected to a political regime. Example, for most of history two sexes were recognized. Many others may have existed, but not recognized. Now, with recent discoveries, and the medical and surgical technology so advanced, a whole new vocabulary is necessary. Same with "affordable housing, it's a fluid term, so there is no "sound" definition IF by "sound", you mean a definitive meaning ! And then there is "affordable" to whom ? To a minimum wage worker, (?$800 a month is (probably) not affordable, to a retiree (?) perhaps $1200 would be affordable, and perhaps (?) to a computer software engineer, $3000 is quite affordable. In other words, the definition is a VERY fluid one.... as you probably already knew....LOL ! ;);)

I would define affordable housing as low-cost housing that can be purchased or rented by 2 family members both making the local area minimum wage. Hopefully, one or both would also be expecting a raise in the near future to a point above minimum wage. And they will have good job security in the future.
The problems arise when the better jobs and more numerous good jobs are in a "high-end" area that does not want its real estate value decreased by smaller cheaper homes WITHIN that area. The usual solution is to provide good inexpensive mass transportation capacity from the low-cost housing areas INTO the higher-cost areas.
.......There are ALSO often what I would call "lip service" solutions where within the higher-cost real estate areas the town provides an inadequate number of small "affordable" houses for the town's workers. This allows the people in the higher-cost areas to continue to feel good about themselves while pretending that they solved the worker's problems by reaching downward with a helping hand.

Today as it was for prior generations, the QUICKEST way for a young person to achieve a middle-class economic life is through MILITARY SERVICE. For those that can't make the military service standards, it might be nice to create a civilian version that could provide a future for those that have the ambition and determination needed to succeed. Plus the US has a lot of highways and bridges that need to be repaired. And maybe even farm jobs, some people do well with animals. Or veterinarian assistants
One problem is the US has gotten away from VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Young children in school are faced with 2 alternatives.....one - go to college OR two........(there is none, except go hang out on a corner and get indoctrinated into a gang)