$1 Million for an Affordable Apartment in California—Coronavirus Could Make it Worse

Liam Dillon, Ben Poston, and Julia Barajas and report on the state of the affordable housing development industry in California, where a recent multi-family development in Solano Beach recently became the most expensive affordable housing project in the state, and likely the country.

When developer Ginger Hitzke first proposed an affordable housing complex on a parking lot in Solana Beach, she envisioned building 18 new homes for low-income families and adults at a cost of $414,000 per apartment.

More than a decade later, her project has shrunk in size by nearly half and become more than twice as expensive.

According to the article, the price of the project serves of evidence of the state's broken housing development market. 

It’s not just the notoriously high price of land or the rising cost of construction materials that explain why it’s so expensive to build affordable housing in California, The Times found. Numerous factors under state and local government control also are to blame, including opposition from neighbors and rules that compel developers to meet labor and environmental standards that often exceed what’s required for luxury condominiums.

While affordable housing was a crisis before the coronavirus started spreading throughout the state, sudden unemployment (2.7 million in California have filed for unemployment, according to California Governor Gavin Newsom on April 15), and other economic stresses are likely to make the need for affordable housing all the more pressing.

An earlier article by Dillon cited experts opinion on the likelihood for economic effects of the pandemic to increase demand for affordable housing. Although the focus of that prediction would seem inconsistent from a prediction by experts at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University that the pandemic would reduce demand for rental housing, both predictions share the same express concern about the potential for the coronavirus-related housing crisis to worsen housing affordability for low-income renters.