Recently, there was a groundbreaking announcing “affordable” housing units to be built in Buckhead.
Many interested parties attended the event including city officials, neighborhood leaders and others who are invested in housing initiatives and the Buckhead neighborhood. The groundbreaking was lauded by folks involved in housing, yet this groundbreaking is another response to incomplete and short-term policies.
On the outset, the word “affordable” is used too loosely — as a catch-all phrase so that the general public can get onboard with housing initiatives. We have accepted the lumping of low-income housing and median housing prices to be seen as one. Atlanta Housing serves low-income earners. These individuals are very different from those who are left out of the housing market (as renters and homeowners) because of the lack of affordability.
Affordability, in terms of housing, refers to people who do not qualify for housing vouchers provided by Housing and Urban Development and localized entities that implement these policies and provide vouchers. Using funds from HUD is subsidized housing. This means the federal government provides funding to offset the cost of housing to low-income individuals.
We ought to stop calling subsidized housing affordable housing.
Affordable housing means the median income earners in an area can afford housing — to rent or own. The current definition of affordable housing is 30% of someone’s gross income. For multiple reasons this is a challenge. First, gross means wages before federal income taxes, health insurance, retirement plans, as well as the required Social Security and Medicaid taxes. If you consider the various states and state income taxes, like Georgia, your net income may be a total of thousands of dollars less than your gross income.
What’s more, we have not considered food, transportation, utilities and medical expenses. This gap in the working definition of “affordable” creates an illusion of a class of people who cannot afford the dignity of housing when coupled with other expenses.
According to Redfin, the median price for a home in Atlanta is about $425,000 (without insurance, interest and property taxes). If we accept the 30% “affordability” definition, that means that the potential homeowner(s) would need to earn, at minimum, $127,500, just to afford the dwelling. Further, according to Zillow, the average cost of rent in Atlanta is $2,100 for a two-bedroom. This means, to afford the average rent in Atlanta, the renter would need to gross $84,000. Still keep in mind gross versus net and that impact.
The question that plagues us, do we have the jobs available in Atlanta at these income ranges and higher for people to afford to live in Atlanta? According to statedemographics.com, the average income in Atlanta is just under $87,000 a year. While this average income may account for a 2-bedroom rental unit, this income does not meet the requirement for someone to move from being an average-priced renter to average-priced homeowner.
How can people afford to live in the city, let alone have a family in the city?
Then, there is the game being played where housing is a commodity rather than the pathway to people’s dignity of having a home and building stable communities.
According to a study conducted by Georgia State University, renters on the historically Black and poor West Side of Atlanta are paying rent to the wealthy in Buckhead. Further, when we see the conditions of the West Side, one has to ask the question, how can the rich side of Atlanta literally get rich on the backs of the struggling poor of the West Side?
Further, are we rewarding the wealthy in Buckhead with additional federal backed housing, to stabilize their property values while the properties in the West Side are challenged with blight and disinvestment? Also, if these properties are owned by landlords, what is code enforcement doing to reduce blight by the wealthy landowners? Are we adding to the wealthy by providing them with additional economic benefits at the expense of the poor? Because they are wealthy, are we allowing them to blight a community? Because we know blight opens the door to condemn buildings and create gentrification.
Compare the conditions of the West Side to the conditions of Buckhead. Which one needs more financial help?
This is the impact of redlining that began in the 1950s. Government, banks and realtors collaborated together to squeeze poor and Black and Latino communities in one area of the city and deprived that area ‘amenities’ such as grocery stores, medical care and city services. This is the same today.
The difference is the people whose families used to live in original redlined areas are now creating and maintaining new redlined areas.
We are paying for the continued redlining of the city of Atlanta.
At the groundbreaking, comments were noted Buckhead has amenities such as public transportation and walkability that would help the people who will live in the new housing. While this is great for Buckhead, where are the amenities on the West Side? If the people in Buckhead are making money off the West Side, why is the West Side bare-resourced compared to Buckhead? And, why are we okay with this?
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Something as simple as food is considered an amenity. The West Side does not have the rate of grocery stores at the rate of Buckhead or other ‘well-resourced’ areas. So, poor people do not eat? They do not want fresh fruits and vegetables? The West Side is a food swamp, filled with fast food restaurants, corner/convenient stores and gas station food. Meaning, poor people do eat — just the food our local government zones for them to eat.
If our local government would serve the entire city the same, we would not see such disparity and continue to announce new initiatives to address long-term and systematic challenges by creating short-sighted programs with so much administrative overhead costs and little oversight that the funds do not get to the people who need financial support the most.
At this point, low-income and medium-to-low residents appear to be usable people that are being shuffled from neighborhood to neighborhood at the whim of others. We are creating transient communities that we later complain about. We are displacing the poor over and over again then blaming the poor for their neighborhood conditions or lack of social normality of an effective community. For years, we have created this by refusing to understand the political economy impact of this man-made type of movement.
We view housing as a real-estate transaction instead of stability and dignity, and overall economic, political, emotional, physical and social health for families and communities — well … as long as you earn more than $84,000 a year. And so we are clear, most educators, police officers and firefighters are part of the groups that earn less than what is affordable in the city.
How is it we have an entire side of our city, disproportionally owned by another side of the city and one side thrives while the other remains in survival mode? Would the landlords in Buckhead, Midtown and downtown live in the housing they rent out? Would they find those living conditions acceptable? If not, then why is it okay for someone else?
This is why housing has become a game.
Either you are searching for affordable housing where you are not house-poor, or you live in low-income housing that is ignored for decades like Forest Cove and displaced by a rich landlord, or you are the rich/corporate landlords moving pieces around the chess board in order to create a situation where median and low income people struggle, vie for housing, and blame each other for a situation they did not create.
Stable housing leads to affordable housing. Affordable housing leads to safe communities. Safe communities lead to rising potential in adults and children. Rising potential leads to employed people. Employed people lead to stable housing. Then the cycle can continue.
If we know this, then the question is do we, as a society, actually want affordable housing and stable communities? Or, is affordable housing and stable communities talking points for elected officials seeking re-election and candidates seeking elected office?
Tammy R. Greer has a PhD in Political Science and teaches public policy.
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