Approaches to providing affordable housing for non-profit workers

http://brewster.kahle.org/2020/06/28/results-of-7-approaches-to-affordable-housing-for-non-profit-workers/

by panic • 6 years ago

58 73 6 years ago

brewster.kahle.org

matchbok• 6 years ago

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.

AlexTWithBeard7• 6 years ago

Well, in author's defense:

Of all the approaches, the one working the best is #7: Remote Work. Get good at it, and we won’t have the housing stresses of San Francisco.

which makes perfect sense to me.

Or just move out of SF altogether - et voila.

acomjean• 6 years ago

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.

mc322• 6 years ago

It is but there isn’t a good fix that satisfies everyone.

Even the USSR had private apartments for people who didn’t want to live in multi-family per apartment arrangements (communal apartments). Obviously not everyone could afford private apartments —very few could, buy they existed because even with all the resources of a top down bureaucracy they could not meet the needs of the people.

AlexTWithBeard7• 6 years ago

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.

jseliger• 6 years ago

In-demand locations are always going to be expensive

They need not be nearly so expensive as they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501

justinzollars3• 6 years ago

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.

vkou2• 6 years ago

That's the natural consequence of the value of land eclipsing the value of the economic activity generated by that land. It makes doing anything with land that ruffles anyone's feathers a nightmare.

In no sane universe should a house cost millions of dollars - multiple decades of a person's labour. Yet, thanks to easy access to credit, and bad property tax policy, here we are.

carapace2• 6 years ago

We couldn't build another bridge, tunnel, or anything.

We just built a bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Brid...

And dug a tunnel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway

justinzollars3• 6 years ago

The bridge was a replacement, and the tunnel is a decade late and still not complete. Both are way over budget. China build 16,000 miles of fully connected high speed rail in the same period of time. I'm going to stand by my statement that the future is not in San Francisco.

jordonwii5• 6 years ago

Not only could we not build it today, we can barely modify it today: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Co...

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.

justinzollars3• 6 years ago

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

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

smileysteve2• 6 years ago

Most financial advice and even some loan approval is based on only 25% of income going towards housing.

spaetzleesser2• 6 years ago

If you buy a house, this situation is hopefully only temporary. If you rent, this will just keep going or get even worse.

supernova87a• 6 years ago

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.

yonran• 6 years ago

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.

pascalxus2• 6 years ago

concerning point #5, the voting public is beyond greedy. they'll sue the sh out of any builder that wants to build anything, and there's soo many zoning laws and so many restrictions and taxes. At the end of the day, people who don't have houses yet end up paying for all this.

I think Remote work is by far the best option. If you can live in a lower cost city like Houston, TX or Chicago, it's a great way to go. Places like CA are so far beyond repair, there's no more hope, at all.

xvedejas2• 6 years ago

So long as companies pay proportionally less when you work from a lower cost-of-living place, as most seem to do, it's not going to become especially popular to work from a cheaper location. And why should they -- being able to work remotely is something workers want, and companies have the perfect information of your permanent address; supply and demand dictates companies will continue to be able to get away with this kind of policy. If it works the other way around, and companies will pay more when you move to a more expensive area, I expect California to become _more_ popular, not less.

AlexTWithBeard7• 6 years ago

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.

opportune3• 6 years ago

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

ska• 6 years ago

it's only so many people can be accommodated in S

This is true but not very important today; as has been clearly demonstrated in many different contexts, that number is a large multiple of the current population.

s1artibartfast4• 6 years ago

San Francisco has a population density of 7,000/km2.

Manhattan has a density of 27,000/km2.

San Mateo has a density of 1,000/km2

rayiner4• 6 years ago

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.... 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.

chrisseaton3• 6 years ago

Moreover 80% of non-profit funding comes from the government, so it’s taxpayer dollars that are paying for people to live in San Francisco.

Really? This astounds me! I would have thought the vast vast majority of non-profit funding would be companies funding non-profit industry publicity bodies and standards bodies and similar.

rayiner4• 6 years ago

Apparently the 80% number includes hospitals and fee-for-service revenues (think Medicare or Medicaid) which isn’t quite what I’m getting at. I’ve edited the able to refer to the 65% of government funding for “human services” non-profits as reported here: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/docu...

Consultant324523• 6 years ago

If I ever find a baby trapped at the bottom of a dry well, I'm not going to help until I know whether or not the legacy of slavery had a role in it. If yes, I'll help. If it's just an unlucky white baby, it's on its own.

alexilliamson• 6 years ago

Have you ever tried talking to a baby? Good luck getting the information you seek. Their communication skills leave something to be desired.

smileysteve2• 6 years ago

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.

Consultant324523• 6 years ago

There's a Youtuber named Hotep Jesus who had an interesting plan about cleaning up after the various protests/riots. His idea was to give all the government contracts for cleanup to minority owned local businesses. Additionally, he discouraged people volunteering to help cleanup for free. This would create a big local stimulus for the local community, people would be learning skills like how to install windows, how to rebuild structures, re-pave roads, plumbing, etc. Some wiggle room could be given on licensed professionals there. Of course, the work would have to be to code, and oversight by a skilled/experienced person is necessary for important things like buildings, but with guidance people could pick up a lot of skills.

rayiner4• 6 years ago

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?)

naveen992• 6 years ago

The biggest nonprofit of them all is the United Nations. Maybe they should have a department for equality at the world level. Let’s do it properly for everyone at once...

justin66• 6 years ago

The UN's annual budget isn't extraordinary, and it's certainly not the largest nonprofit of them all. As the very off-the-cuff numbers mentioned elsewhere in this thread hint at, the largest nonprofit in the world is probably involved in healthcare. (some very quick googling suggests the UN, the Gates Foundation, and the Kaiser Foundation all have annual budgets close to $3 billion, with Kaiser the highest at $3.5B)

It actually would be interesting to know how the UN addresses hiring and diversity in the companies they contract with, but their hiring is not a force that's going to move society in any direction.

jordonwii5• 6 years ago

You can't help the homeless if the workers who help them can't afford to live near the people they're trying to help.

This is one reason why people are interested in things like UBI

Can you elaborate on how UBI would help? Homelessness in high-opportunity low-housing-supply regions is not a problem of individuals not having enough cash, and neither is the inability of non-profit workers to live in these places. If we handed everyone cash, we would simply be writing a check to the landlords in high-opportunity regions like the Bay Area, because everyone would still be bidding up prices on the same housing supply.

The core problem on both sides of this is that these places, the Bay area in particular, make it extremely difficult and expensive to expand the housing supply to mitigate this problem, and the article alludes to this:

We have the empty lot to do it in and we hired an architect but it came out to cost so much we postponed

At the end of the day, high rents push people on the margin onto the streets and they make it expensive to house the people who need to help them. Solutions that purport to dodge this problem with cash handouts (UBI, renter's credits, etc.) will only help landlords unless we also ease supply restrictions.

That said, for people who are already living on the streets, the solutions are even more complicated, as there are often confounding issues like mental illness, substance abuse, etc. that require shelter space and intervention by non-profit workers (and then we're back to the housing supply problem).

rayiner4• 6 years ago

You can't help the homeless if the workers who help them can't afford to live near the people they're trying to help.

It’s certainly true that some fraction of non-profit work is hands-on social work, and yes, those people do need to live near the people they serve. But I think it’s fair to say that non-profits should think really hard about who really needs to live in NYC/SF/etc. versus the degree to which they’re just subsidizing the lifestyle choices of college-educated white workers who could do the same work from somewhere else.

Can you elaborate on how UBI would help? Homelessness in high-opportunity low-housing-supply regions is not a problem of individuals not having enough cash, and neither is the inability of non-profit workers to live in these places.

Let’s not overstate the “opportunities” available in places like SF and NYC. Lower income people live there because there are a lot of service jobs for unskilled workers. But it’s not like those people are going to be able to work their way up from the mail room at Facebook or JP Morgan. What you have is a situation where these workers have to be in SF or NYC because that’s where the service jobs are, and where landlord can capture a big fraction of the rent that the government might subsidize.

UBI addresses that problem by decoupling wages from location. Someone receiving UBI can move from SF to Bakersfield. That increases their standard of living while limiting the cost to the government relative to trying to support that person in SF of NYC. 1 in 12 people in SF broke their leases during pandemic. Imagine what would happen if the government told everyone tomorrow they they’d get $1,000 per month guaranteed, which they could draw upon either in SF or in Des Moines. It would have the double effect of reducing the demand for housing in places like SF and NYC, and enabling that demand to be diverted to places where building new supply might be much easier.

roenxi• 6 years ago

The other important point to remember (on the topic of unintended consequences) is non profits are quite likely to be producing less in the way of useful resources than they consume. If a given community is quite poor, a likely contributing factor is that too many people are consuming more than they produce.

The subtext of the article seems to be 'the Internet Archive doesn't pay their employees very much and makes up for it by helping to organise their lives'. I respect that, no complaints, good work. But it would be better to read 'internet archive so profitable that its employees can afford a nice house & retirement savings'. Things that make profits are more robust and reliable.

chaostheory2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

chaostheory2• 6 years ago

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

opportune3• 6 years ago

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

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

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.

s1artibartfast4• 6 years ago

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.

Approaches to providing affordable housing for non-profit workers

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