What Is “Affordable” Anyway?
Photo courtesy of San Jose Library
When I got to the council room to set up for the affordability task force meeting, it was occupied by children and dogs. “What’s going on?” I asked the man outside the door, whom I recognized as Swarthmore’s children’s librarian.
PAWS for Reading, the popular program in which children practice their skills by reading aloud to a therapy dog, was just finishing up, he explained.
PAWS for Reading is all about learning and support. It’s about progress and words. So is the Swarthmore Task Force on Development and Affordability.
Right now, in the second month of our one-year assignment, those of us on the task force are learning about what kind of housing we have in our town and what other communities are doing to address rapidly rising housing costs. We hope the preservation and expansion of reasonably priced housing in Swarthmore will support our residents and shape our town’s future in a positive way. At tonight’s meeting, we hope to get our minds around a slippery, tricky word: affordability.
Affordability is right there in the name of our task force, but what does it actually mean? Also, affordable for whom?
After the dogs and children cleared the room, we began to wrestle with these questions.
“I think allowing people who have been living here the ability to stay is important,” one task member said. “But,” he added, “I wouldn’t limit it to that.”
“Does staying in Swarthmore mean being able to stay in your house?” another asked. “Or does it mean being able to stay in town?”
A third wondered which Swarthmore properties might fit the zoning code’s criteria for conversion to cooperative senior housing. Seniors were definitely on our minds, but so were families with children, multigenerational families, and single people. How did affordability apply?
Dueling Definitions
As I talk to people in town about my concerns that the rising cost of housing is rapidly pushing the price of entry to our community beyond the reach of many—and changing the nature of the town in the process—I’m alert to what they hear when I say affordability. Some immediately picture public housing apartment buildings for people with low incomes. Others see condominiums selling for between $125K and $300K, or one-bedroom apartments renting for less than $1,000 a month. Still others imagine single-family houses selling for less than half a million dollars—an increasing rarity around here.
According to the department of Housing and Urban Development, households should spend no more than 30% of their income on housing costs: rent or mortgage payments, insurance, taxes, and utilities. If you spend more than 30% of your income on housing, HUD considers you “cost burdened.” If you spend more than 50%, you are “very cost burdened.”
This table shows specific dollar amounts for that 30% depending on how much someone earns:
According to an assessment done by Local Housing Solutions of New York University’s Furman Center, 51% of Swarthmore renters were moderately or severely cost burdened in 2019. This was up from 38% in 2014. For owner households, the percentages were 23% in 2014 and 21% in 2019.
It’s clear that many of my neighbors are struggling to afford to keep living here.
Other Words and Terms
I’ve contacted other communities that are trying to do something about the affordability crisis. In talking to town planners and council members in places like Mansfield, Connecticut, Norwich, Vermont, Leavenworth, Washington, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. I’ve heard various words and terms for what Swarthmore (and America) doesn’t have enough of.
Attainable housing is defined by the nonprofit Urban Land Institute as “nonsubsidized, for-sale housing that households earning between 80 and 120 percent of the area median income can afford.”
But this framing raises questions too. If we’re talking about making it possible for families earning “area median income” to live in Swarthmore, what area are we talking about? Swarthmore only? The Wallingford-Swarthmore School District? Delaware County?
Workforce housing nods to the idea that people who work in a community should be able to live there.
Of course, in any community, there is a wide range of occupations. People who work in the borough are small merchants and restaurant wait staff, elementary school teachers and Swarthmore College professors. With the housing market in its current state, few if any of these folks can afford to buy a home in town unless they have family money or a spouse who earns a lot. Renting is cheaper, but rents too are rising fast.
Community housing is a term I ran across when learning about Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, an affluent town about the size of Swarthmore that built an award-winning multi-family mixed-used complex back in the early 2000s. (Now they’re trying to figure out how to follow up on that success.) According to resident Chris Olney, community housing means “homes that are well designed and priced to address the broad needs and aspirations of the whole community of Manchester, not just those wealthy enough to pay for stately new residences.”
A Work in Progress
Back in the council room, our talk circled around retirees on fixed incomes, opportunities for newcomers to gain a foothold in our housing market, and recent changes in the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore, where few of the families who lived there for generations are left. We jotted ideas, definitions, and questions on big pieces of paper stuck on the council room wall.
“I don’t feel we need to have one all-encompassing definition of affordability,” someone said. “It could be helpful to have multiple definitions, some more ambitious than others.”
Someone else volunteered to assemble a working list of definitions to bring to the next meeting.
Knowing we’d revisit the topic again and again, we agreed to set it aside for the evening.
I’m guessing the early readers didn’t perfect their literacy skills in one afternoon with a therapy dog either.
If you have thoughts on the question or definition of “affordability,” please share them in the comments section below.
