The State of Affordable Housing

Karrie Jacobs details the state of affordable housing in the United States during the "Age of Trump," tracing the origins of the country's policies to the Nixon Administration to current day.

The Nixon Administration's "Section 8 vouchers issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to subsidize rents in privately owned properties and Community Development Block Grants awarded by HUD to states and cities based on population," are still very much in use today, explains Jacobs. "It’s a financial toolkit filled with an alphabet soup of acronyms, programs tagged by the word 'section' or 'title,' plus a smorgasbord of tax credits, zoning incentives, and rent subsidies." 

Jacobs writes that the traditional approach was already flawed, and now the Trump Administration's proposed budget cuts for affordable housing programs threaten to make a bad situation worse.

Amid that stark landscape, however, Jacobs identifies reasons for hope in the thoughtful approach to the challenges of affordable housing, such as the work of New York-based Bernheimer Architecture, which since 2011 has "become a key player in designing public housing for the 21st century, competing via the city’s Request for Proposals process to build new projects, mostly in collaboration with private, for-profit developers." Jacobs details the design decisions that Bernheimer Architecture used to contribute to housing affordability, and also the "art of financing" that makes it all possible.