Affordable housing is a phrase that has slipped into the vernacular; it was all over Radio 4 this morning. It makes sense doesn’t it? We should be providing housing that is affordable, that people can buy or that people can rent.
But all housing is affordable as long as it is occupied. As long as a house has people living in it and they are managing to pay the bills then it is affordable, whether it is one bedroom flat, a four bedroom detached or a twenty bedroom mansion it makes no real difference in terms of affordability. The occupants can afford to pay. Most people are free to choose the level of investment they wish to make in their homes and to set their own level of affordability but not everyone is.
What would be the alternative, would we want to build unaffordable housing? No, this just wouldn’t make sense either economically or socially. Of course the builder wants to make a profit and maximise the return on the investment that they have made and so there is an inbuilt incentive to build properties at prices that the market can bear. If the market can bear higher prices then prices will go up, if it can’t then prices will go down.
But this is not what is meant by the phrase affordable housing. What is really meant is low cost housing that is available for those people who cannot keep up with the rise and fall of the free market and this must surely be the clue to the problem. The reason that there is very little affordable housing at the lower end of the price spectrum is because all of the housing that is available is affordable to others. The market is under supplied and so prices rise.
To get more affordable housing there just needs to be more houses.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 