If there isn't enough housing to go around, build more

By bfields, 13 March, 2024

Ann Arbor has an increasingly severe housing shortage. People with the lowest income see the largest impact of the shortage, but, as everyone's noticed by now, we're pricing out a lot of middle-income people as well.

The way out of this is to build more housing.

The new housing will be expensive. But that's OK--it still increases the number of units, which frees up older units for everyone else.

Sometimes people will say things like "Ann Arbor doesn't need new housing, it needs new *affordable* housing"! But that's not the way things work.

It always costs more to live in new construction.

That rule has one small but important exception: what governments call "affordable housing", which is means-tested--if you want to live in affordable housing, you'll have to apply and turn over your tax returns and bank statements. (And, unfortunately, get on a long wait list). Ann Arbor is making important progress towards building more affordable housing. We should do a lot more. But there is no realistic scenario where that makes up more than a small fraction of our new housing. Market-rate housing is where the big numbers are.

Anyway, there's no reason we have to choose one or the other! We should do as much of both as we can.