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abbyinsm's avatar

Darrell, this is a perfect explainer! I stopped using the term "affordable housing" about a year ago, and started explaining to people that "affordable housing" means deed-restricted, income-qualified, government-subsidized apartments, not a place that your 30-year old kid could afford to rent. Now I will send them your article. Actually, I won't. I recently moved to pro-housing Santa Rosa after 40 years in Santa Monica. I was partly motivated to leave because I was so tired of explaining this to my friends, neighbors, and even the clerks at the grocery store on a site that is slated for a large mixed-use project. "At least you may be able to rent an apartment in this new building; your union-scale paycheck is too high to qualify you for most affordable housing projects, and an affordable housing project will have to select tenants from a national lottery, not from the neighborhood workforce." GRRRRR.

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Philip Soffer's avatar

Great article, as usual. One candidate for the absolute floor on per-bed costs in coastal California is the proposed Munger Hall at UCSB. According to Wikipedia, it's supposed to cost $1.4 billion and house 4,500 people, which is a per-bed cost of around $310,000. This is for a building where 90% of the rooms won't have windows, which would not be considered habitable under any zoning code I've ever heard of. So if that's the cheapest we could *possibly* build, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a humane living space with a window and a toilet is going to cost quite a bit more.

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