
Approaches to providing affordable housing for non-profit workers - panic
http://brewster.kahle.org/2020/06/28/results-of-7-approaches-to-affordable-housing-for-non-profit-workers/
======
rayiner
We are having some important conversations about equality these days, so I
think it’s worth bringing up this point. The notion of subsidizing housing for
non-profit workers is concerning. While many non-profits deal with problems
like homelessness that overwhelmingly victimize people of color, non-profit
workers themselves are overwhelmingly white. Much more so than the workforce
as a whole: [https://communitywealth.com/the-state-of-diversity-in-the-
no...](https://communitywealth.com/the-state-of-diversity-in-the-nonprofit-
sector). Moreover a large fraction of revenues (for example, 65% for “human
services” non-profits) comes from the government, so it’s taxpayer dollars
that are paying for people to live in San Francisco and would be paying to
subsidize their housing.

This is one reason why people are interested in things like UBI. It seems
perverse for the government to use taxpayer dollars to say combat homelessness
in San Francisco (the supermajority of whom are black, Hispanic, or multi-
racial) only to have much of that money go to paying salaries for mostly white
college educated people. Of course, non-profit workers of all ethnic
backgrounds can be tremendous value-adds. But when we’re considering whether
we want to subsidize housing for those workers, it’s worth stepping back for a
moment. There is a lot of money on the line: even excluding universities and
hospitals, non-profits spend $750 billion annually, more than the US military.
When taxpayers spend money out of a desire to help certain groups of
people—especially now that we are becoming more aware of the disproportionate
impact of things like homelessness on certain groups—we should strive to make
sure that the money helps the people taxpayers think they are helping.

~~~
smileysteve
One thing I think about non profits and volunteering, is the jobs displaced by
volunteers; For example; Adopt-A-Roads

In "The Legend of Bagger Vance", Hardy's dad becomes a street sweeper in the
midst of the depression to pay his bills;

What if, instead of volunteering to clean up roads, the city collected taxes,
and paid a living wage with benefits to people cleaning up the streets.

This line of thinking also applies to the Coronavirus, restaurant + school
shutdowns; If only, instead of asking for volunteers, non profits were paid by
the state to re-employ restaurants and/or their workers, to make meals for
children now without a meal.

~~~
rayiner
> What if, instead of volunteering to clean up roads, the city collected
> taxes, and paid a living wage with benefits to people cleaning up the
> streets.

Viewed through the lens of equity concerns, I worry that the result of your
hypothetical is a bureaucracy of unionized, mostly white college educated
managers overseeing the street cleaners.

My hope is that recent events make us think hard about the nature of need in
America and how we address it. Over 90% of white people are above the poverty
line. The median income of a white household is $70,000, versus $40,000 for a
black household. 60% of all homeless people are black or Hispanic. We talk a
lot about middle-class "stagnation." But _median_ wealth for white people has
more than doubled, after inflation, since 2000. It hasn't budged at all for
black people.

More than ever, we are recognizing today that a huge part of systematically
addressing poverty in America is about addressing race disparities. That’s
critical: the black-white income gap (at the median, so forget about Jeff
Bezos) is proportionally the same size today in 2020 as it was when George
Wallace ran for President in a segregationist platform. Meanwhile, we have
spent vast sums on the premise that the best way to remedy racial disparities
is through government programs for education and creating “good jobs with
benefits.” State and local spending per person has therefore doubled since
1977.

But it turns out that much of that spending merely perpetuates those gaps. For
example, increased education spending (which has tripled in inflation-adjusted
dollars per student since 1970) has overwhelmingly gone to white, college
educated teachers and administrators. (Indeed, black people were actively
excluded from many of these jobs by unions.) Cities with majority black and
Hispanic populations owe hundreds of billions in retirement and health
benefits to retired teachers, police, etc., who are overwhelmingly white.

Now, that’s not an argument for saying that we should, for example, renege on
those obligations. But we certainly shouldn’t perpetuate the disparities. If
we are appalled by say homelessness in American cities (and we should be), we
should figure out how to efficiently channel money to homeless people or
people likely to suffer homelessness. Not to some government bureaucracy which
by its nature is likely to be staffed with people who have various indicators
of privilege (white, college educated, from a middle class household—who do
you think government agencies tend to hire?)

~~~
HouseOfLard
> we should figure out how to efficiently channel money to homeless people or
> people likely to suffer homelessness.

Governments entail some degree of bureaucracy, much the same way that
corporations require some degree of management. It's a question of balancing
that overhead with actual results.

Civil services need to better align with making a meaningful impact. More
focus on the actual impact of civil services, and less on aggregate budget
allocation.

------
matchbok
Another attempt that doesn't address the real issues: rent is too high and/or
wages are too low. In-demand locations are always going to be expensive.

The minute you start providing "special" apartments to a certain group of
people you introduce tons of other (negative) issues. That person is basically
locked into that apartment and can never move. Any issues with quality or
landlord disagreements will be tilted towards the owner, because they know the
renter will never leave. The whole thing is a mess.

~~~
acomjean
Housing is a society issue. income inequality and turning housing into
business with rent seekers, seeking high returns. hard to fix piecemeal. One
wonders if the current pandemic can cause a change.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
Greedy renters is not the reason here: in the original article the author
considered building a house for workers on the company land. But that turned
out to be too expensive.

Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap.

~~~
maxsilver
> Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap

I don't really understand this. Building and maintaining houses (especially
single-family houses) is really cheap. (We're talking like ~$600/month or so
for a large 4-bedroom home).

The expense in housing is primarily financial shenanigans and land
monopolization, with some property taxes on top. Actually building and
maintaining a house (construction + maintenance costs) is way less than 50% of
the total cost.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
Please see the original article where the author explicitly complains that
cost of building their own house is too high.

------
LatteLazy
I've never understood the logic in these programs. People either think they
can something for nothing or that they can fool others into believing that.

Pay people enough to cover their needs, or accept that we don't want them to
do whatever they're doing.

Weird systems where you subsidize peoples rent but you won't pay them cash
just end up forcing them to spend more on housing than they want. So you spend
more than it would cost in cash and they're less happy than if you just paid
them. So wtf is the point!?

Plus housing gets very sticky. People get very upset if they are required to
move just because a program ends or they go part time. If an area gets more
expensive, you have to (rapidly) increase the subsidy, if it gets worse you
lose all your employees. Making your employees move house every time they want
to change jobs is very anticompetitive

Programs like this are also opaque and hard to value. I knew a teacher who
thought she was getting free rent up to X, but the small print said it was
actually 25% of rent up to 25% of X. I actually think this is why providers
favour these schemes: they're deceptive.

All this so that... We can avoid paying people what they're worth, and being
honest about what that number is.

~~~
s1artibartfast
You make some good points, but the logic is pretty clear from the employers
point of view. It might be helpful to think of it as analogous to supply chain
integration. One advantage is decreasing overall costs by cutting out the
middle man. If a property owner is making money on your company’s worker, you
can save that much by doing it yourself. Another advantage is supply chain
security. If The market rent doubles, your won’t go out of business.

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opportune
We should not continue shoveling any money into “affordable” (read: subsidized
if you win some lottery system) and instead need to focus on reducing the
market rate rents. The whole “affordable” and “subsidized” housing system is a
scam to sell $10 for $3 to a few lucky souls without addressing the root cause
of the problem

Furthermore nobody should feel entitled to live in SF proper. It is easy to
commute in from much cheaper areas in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and
it doesn’t make sense to subsidize some small set of people to not make that
commute

------
yonran
The housing supply has been very inelastic in the Bay Area. And every business
and individual who wants to be here starts out life short on housing. So I
would group his approaches to staying in the Bay Area into three main
categories:

#1, #6: Cover the short by hoarding enough of the fixed amount of housing for
yourself and taking that out of the market.

#2, #3, #4: Help employees cover their short. I think it is smart that of him
to try to do so in a targeted way to help new employees with downpayment and
loans rather than ratcheting up everyone’s salary.

#5: Build more housing. This is the positive sum approach. I wish he
elaborated on this because there are many roadblocks to San Francisco’s
failure to convert high incomes into more housing (zoning restrictions, slow
entitlement process, high fees, high construction labor costs), and it would
help for more leaders to be part of the conversation on how to solve these
problems for everyone, not just for his own nonprofit.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
Or may be we should face the sad truth: it's only so many people can be
accommodated in SF.

Granted, we can build taller houses. It will cause huge influx of people,
transport collapse, school and health care systems overload.

At this point it may be easier to just build another city.

~~~
opportune
This makes my head boil.

The Bay Area can also build more of those schools and infrastructure as well.
There are so many metro areas, probably hundreds, that have done it before.
It’s entirely a political problem. I always hear the NIMBYs complaining about
these made up problems and _other people_ choosing to live in “shoebox
apartments” as if they’re real problems and not simply them imposing
restrictions on everyone else

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
You are absolutely right: NIMBY.

Apparently due to some reasons local people do not want to live in a beehive.

Go and build somewhere else. California is a large state with lots of
unoccupied land.

~~~
opportune
I’m saying the problem needs to be addressed in good faith, because NIMBY
people will put up nonsensical arguments like other people living in small
apartments or needing to build new schools (to support an expanding tax
base...) as problems rather than the actual problems they have motivating them
to politically oppose urbanization

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
You are solving the wrong problem. No matter how hard we try there's no way to
squeeze all the United States in SF.

May be instead just make other places livable?

~~~
stellar678
The Bay Area _could_ host the entire population of the United States with ~850
sq ft of land area per person.

As it is, we currently allocate ~29,500 sq ft of land area per person.

Surely we can find a middle ground somewhere in the name of access to
opportunity and in the name resolving our severe housing shortage.

------
justinzollars
I was admiring Sutro tower on my morning walk, and realized if we tried to
build Sutro tower today it could never happen. We couldn't build another
bridge, tunnel, or anything. Imagine the laughs if you proposed another bay
crossing. It's been made impossible to change or develop San Francisco. I
don't think the future is here anymore.

~~~
jordonwii
Not only could we not _build_ it today, we can barely _modify_ it today:
[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Co...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Confusion-
conspiracy-theories-humor-14963769.php)

> But despite not a single resident registering a complaint about the antenna
> work — a modern-day miracle! — getting the permit from the city's Planning
> Department took two years. Approval came just as special crews arrived to do
> the work.

> “It was held up for no good reason,” Hyams said, echoing a common gripe
> about our city's slow Planning Department, which mirrors the slowness of
> just about every department.

~~~
justinzollars
We should just close down the planning department or change its mission to
mandate very very fast development.

~~~
jordonwii
> change its mission to mandate very very fast development

While no one's going quite this far yet (alas), the mayor's approach actually
isn't too far from this, e.g. for housing:

> The new measure would require an approval process of no longer than six
> months for projects that meet existing zoning rules...[1]

or for SMBs:

> the ballot measure would require that permit applications for storefront
> uses that are allowed by the current zoning be reviewed within 30 days,
> compared to what can sometimes be months of review [2]

Unfortunately the first one is postponed indefinitely because COVID made
signature collection impossible, but the second will be on the ballot in
November.

[1] [https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-
mayor...](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-mayor-
announces-ballot-measure-to-build-more-affordable-homes/2227802/) [2]
[https://sfmayor.org/article/mayor-london-breed-introduces-
ba...](https://sfmayor.org/article/mayor-london-breed-introduces-ballot-
measure-support-san-francisco-small-businesses)

------
chaostheory
I feel remote work is the most viable solution that was listed. It works
around the problem of limited housing inventory. In addition, it helps the
environment.

~~~
nutshell89
When talking about the environment, I think it's useful to think about what
remote work would mean at scale.

Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take Larkin
Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves
interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank
is basically a giant warehouse in SF.

Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom, these
are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries at the
farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are still
excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset District.

~~~
chaostheory
Any reduction in the commute is a net positive for traffic, the environment,
and even productivity.

> Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take
> Larkin Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves
> interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food
> Bank is basically a giant warehouse in SF.

Sure, not everyone can work remotely. However, even they will benefit from the
reduced traffic and commute times.

> Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom,
> these are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries
> at the farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are
> still excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset
> District.

You're not seeing the bigger picture. Not everyone lives in the Bay Area. With
remote work becoming an integral part of office culture, this also means not
everyone has to work in the Bay Area even when they work for Bay Area
companies. ie. They're not going to go to Sunset on weekends; everything is
more decentralized. Remote work scales better than just throwing money away
when you can't fix the root problem of a limited supply of physical space. If
you can't fix available housing inventory, all that happens long term when you
give people more money is that housing just keeps getting more expensive.
We've already seen this first hand with the large salary increases for Silicon
Valley engineers

------
supernova87a
I'm sympathetic to this particular cause but not to the solutions a non-profit
in SF like them would probably propose. (because generally a story like this
is here for the lessons to be taken by others, not for their particular
situation to be solved)

What we need is _less_ picking and choosing who is to receive specific
housing, and setting aside of property or units for them. Because all that
picking and choosing by well-intentioned (but bad overall outcome producing)
people is exactly what's creating the problem.

Everyone who has a special interest in preserving <x> or helping group <y>
puts in their request to their San Francisco supervisor, solving their little
corner of concern but making it worse for everyone else. One by one all the
little barriers (unaware of what the other hands are doing) get erected to
make it impossible to do anything productive for housing.

We need planning at a city strategy level, that admits that San Francisco
cannot stay the way it has for decades, protecting the landlords and people
who've lived there for 30 years from any kind of change. The tax situation is
a given constraint, and we're not going to change that anytime soon barring a
miracle, so the thing that has to be compromised is "neighborhood character"
(whatever that means as a cover for not letting people live near you) or
housing density and your spoiled view of the bay / Muni wires.

Specify what _outcomes_ you want to achieve, and let the rules be updated to
make that happen. Otherwise we will continue to be in a world where the
external factors flooding in (lack of local leadership, jobs creation without
housing creation, corporate money) will be making the decisions for us without
us realizing it -- and a lot of unhappy people who want to live here but
can't, or have been displaced from their housing.

My desired outcomes:

\-- Affordable prices of the general rental and house purchase market (not
"affordable housing")

\-- Owners who actually live in their housing, and are not absentee landlords

\-- Renewal of the creative, productive population and not creating of a rich
/ retired class that occupies all the housing

\-- Good transport and home-work districts, and the attraction of small
businesses

\-- Ability of homeowners (and renters if desired) to easily and cheaply
improve their properties and change the look and feel of their neighborhood
for better/newer

I am _not_ in favor of soft arguments that are disguised attempts to regulate
who is allowed to live in a place according to some particular interest's
judgment:

\-- neighborhood character, density

\-- equity-related arguments

\-- "I got here first"-related arguments

\-- what is "fair"

You will find that if you set up reasonable rules, the communities that emerge
will be just as interesting, good, and pleasant places to live as before. They
may not look the same, and may not be what you thought, and that may make some
people unhappy. But it's what's best for a city.

------
MattGaiser
> This was the kicker: 30-60% of their income went to rent.

Is this much different from people with mortgages, especially when they first
purchase a home?

~~~
frockington1
I just bout my first house a year ago. Mortgage is around 22% of take home
income. Granted I never asked what mortgage I was approved for and can
guarantee you it would have been at least double what I purchased

~~~
nerdface
Where did you buy though? Bay Area has incredibly high prices.

