The Institution of ‘Affordable Housing’ – Comparing
Legitimacy in Contemporary Urban (Affordable) Housing
Agendas
Edward Carmody
11187212Supervisor: Dr. Richard Ronald Second Reader: Dr. Wouter van Gent
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Summary 3
1 Introduction – The Housing Question 4
2 Theoretical Framework 7
3 Methodology and Research Design 21
4 Boston – Housing Context and Major Policies 26
5 Boston – Data and Analysis 39
6 Amsterdam – Housing Context and Major Policies 56
7 Amsterdam – Data and Analysis 66
8 Comparative Analysis and Discussion 90
9 Conclusions, Limitations, and Contributions 100
References 105
The Institution of ‘Affordable Housing’ – Comparing
Legitimacy in Contemporary Urban (Affordable) Housing
Agendas
Summary
Housing affordability has been a perennial urban question; when capitalist economies rely on the clustering of large amounts of people for work, the basic human need of housing runs the risk of becoming a commodity, as the land it is tied to increases in value. This is increasingly the case today, as the world’s economic growth is concentrated in select large cities that are drawing households to those urban areas to take part in that growth.
Boston and Amsterdam are two such cities, of similar size and similarly strong global economic clout, whose populations are steadily increasing. As such, each city’s residents and policymakers face ‘the housing question’ with newfound urgency as housing prices increase beyond previous limits. Policies addressing affordable housing challenges have been in place for decades and are ever changing, especially in recent years as urban governments play catch up to an explosion of housing demand. Yet city governments differ in how quickly they respond to this demand via deployment of housing policies and the shape those policies take – namely their intentions, goals, and motivating values. So how do housing policy actors in Boston and Amsterdam actually legitimize their specific policies and programs tackling this issue? This paper seeks to compare the discursive logics and appeals embedded within housing policy actors’ arguments of policies and practices addressing housing affordability in each city. In doing so, it shines light on the unique ways that specific values and normative goals shape the political organization of housing in different urban contexts. It thus reveals a broader scope of causal forces at work in influencing the trajectory of modern cities’ top-down housing actions, adding nuance to contemporary discussions of urban affordable housing agendas.
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – THE HOUSING QUESTION
Housing affordability has been a perennial urban question. In 1872, Frederick Engels suggested that “The Housing Question,” – that is, the question of how to confront the issue of housing shortage – is one that is both always relevant in a capitalist society andparticularly relevant when cities see an influx of new people, as this growth gives urban
land “an artificial and often colossally increasing value” (1872, p. 2). We likewise see the modern issue of housing as an intensely urban problem, as there are renewed global
economic pressures to live in cities in the 21st century, and the underlying value of land and subsequent housing costs have increased as a result, far outpacing income growth in many large cities. This has been referred to as the Global Urban Housing Affordability Crisis (Wetzstein, 2017).
As housing has become an increasingly urban question, a look towards the city as a primary unit of analysis where housing affordability is concerned is increasingly
appropriate. Kadi and Ronald (2016) explain how variation in housing provision and policy exists not only between countries but when comparing cities within the same nation.
Indeed, cities themselves have in recent decades adopted strategies to promote housing speculation as a means for increased urban investment, oftentimes disregarding
consequences of affordability. While increased urban investment has coincided with a widespread ‘return’ to the city in many Western countries in recent decades, inflated land values and speculative activity have created what has been described as an era of “hyper-commodification” in cities, in which “all of the material and legal structures of housing” become commodities (Madden and Marcuse, 2016: p. 26). Here, commodification is
defined as “the general process by which the economic value of a thing comes to dominate its other uses,” and in the case of housing, a unit’s “function as real estate takes precedence over its usefulness as a place to live” (p. 17). A modern tension has thus arisen between housing as essential need for personal livelihood and its increasing function as financial asset. Deregulation, financialization, and the dominance of global economic networks in real estate markets have increased this “decoupling of housing from residential needs,” exacerbating affordability issues in large cities that are subject to these political-economic trends. Scholars mark a shifting point towards the privatization of housing in many
societies in the late 1980s as the early stages of this trajectory (p. 31-5).
This modern trend makes housing affordability and, by extension, the provision of
affordable housing, a more complex issue than ever before, and one which city
governmental actors must address with urgency. Because housing is a basic need, cities can only continue functioning as equitable economic and population growth centers when its housing stock is affordable, and thus accessible, to a majority of residents. When this is not the case, economic polarization becomes a necessity; urban growth may continue, but it does so at the price of a developing radical social inequality. As such, there is renewed focus on housing policy as the primary toolkit with which governments can address affordability issues, and these policies are mobilizing across national boundaries
(Wetzstein, 2017). Yet regulation in regards to housing has seen several incarnations over hundreds of years. While “housing policy” suggests a government’s straightforward attempts to solve the housing problem, indeed the state’s actions over history often appear “uncoordinated” and “contradictory,” as housing policy has been motivated by several goals beyond the direct provision of adequate shelter, such as the need to maintain public
order, prevent working class protest, and improve sanitation (Madden and Marcuse, 2016: p. 119). The modern, urban incarnation of the housing problem suggests the relevance of consistent inquiry into these governmental motivations in housing policy as a way to understand the logics city housing actors are employing today in addressing housing affordability.
In this paper, I undertake such an inquiry using two large cities as analytical cases. In the following section, I expand on the concepts crucial to this study, sketching the theoretical framework that leads to my research question. Then, I explain the methods and research design appropriate for this framework that guide my research. Following this, I explore my two cases separately, analyzing data gathered from each via its individual housing context. The subsequent comparative chapter draws out specific differences and similarities between my cases. I conclude by discussing the contributions this study makes to the field of housing studies.
CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
In this section, I will begin by addressing key academic debates in housing affordability and policy, ultimately introducing the fundamental concepts of historical institutionalism and legitimacy as frameworks for this research. In doing so, I will situate this paper within relevant literature and state the research questions of this study. Finally, I’ll comment on the comparative frameworks guiding this paper.
Affordable Housing Debates
Housing affordability has been theorized and measured in several ways. Stone (2006) discusses five approaches, arguing for the residual one, which says the residual income left after paying for housing is the most appropriate indicator of housing
affordability. Yet the ratio approach – denoting the ratio between housing cost and income – maintains “the longest history and widest recognition (p. 162). Moreover, normative “physical standards of decency” are inherent in housing affordability debates (p. 154). At its conceptual heart, the affordability of housing is “a relationship between housing and people,” vital to keep in mind when talking about affordability via the phrase, “affordable housing” (p. 153).
Changes in housing provision and policies within cities and nations have been widely tracked as well. Researchers note a widespread expansion of market principles into the realm of housing provision since the 1970s and ‘80s (Kadi and Ronald, 2016), leading to a “heightened emphasis on value capture” in affordable housing policy (Wetzstein, 2017:
government-assisted housing provision worldwide. This neoliberal restructuring has led to the sector’s residualization and marginalization in many contexts (Musterd, 2014) and specifically informed state-led gentrification leading to displacement in urban settings (Van Gent, 2013). Indeed, these trends are seen most explicitly in ‘global cities,’ where
investment activity is the strongest (Sassen, 2012). Implications of increasingly
unaffordable housing, due to these changes, are well documented in recent years. Short-term consequences may mean vital service workers (police, teachers, nurses, sanitation workers) are excluded from urban housing markets, effecting the basic functioning of cities; longer-term implications include middle class unaffordability in both rental and homeownership tenures, spatially segregated and unequal cities, and an undermining of social mobility (Florida, 2017; Wetzstein, 2017).
Still, in urban housing affordability research conceptualizing policy changes and consequences, there exists a gap in understanding “actor intentions” (Wetzstein, 2017: p. 3168). Scholars also call for more international comparison across different housing systems, and a focus on “historically and spatially specific context and conditions, emerging out of contingent developments and their cumulative effects, but also actively made and remade by the deliberate decisions and actions of specific actors” (p. 3174). Priemus (2000) provides a useful comparison of American rent subsidies and Dutch housing allowances, showing how different cultural and contextual motives for the programs contribute to their policy differences, but it deals minimally with primary discursive data and instead fondles quantitative policy details. Recent scholars also argue the importance of ideology in housing policy, as well as that of historical and comparative research in understanding the unique aims of housing interventions (Jacobs and Manzi,
2013; ibid., 2017). Moreover, Wetzstein (2017) calls for further investigation into the “constitution of affordable housing as key contemporary urban and social imaginary” that centers on “actors’ visions, knowledges and beliefs” (p. 3171). The present study aims to help fill this gap via an international comparison of key housing actor understandings in two cities, Boston and Amsterdam.
Housing Policy and Discourse
Wetzstein is not alone in his call for inquiry into housing actors’ visions and beliefs. As mentioned in the introduction, “housing policy” is a vague phrase alluding to different goals over time, motivated by different values. Dodson’s (2007) detailed work, Government
Discourse and Housing, argues for investigating the discourse of housing policy actors
themselves. He informs Madden and Marcuse’s (2016) later acknowledgment of the complexity of housing policy aims, arguing: “That state officials might be either erroneous in their perceptions of housing, or that they may be influenced by broader social conditions, needs to be assessed” (p. 2). More specifically, Dodson explains, “…housing policy and the conceptualization of housing problems by policy actors can be distinguished…from the empirical and material aspects of housing phenomena” (p. 7). Beyond an evaluative study of policy interventions, policy actors’ conceptualization and identification of housing problems are themselves worthy of study because these motivate solutions: “…the policy solutions to perceived housing problems will be strongly shaped by the manner in which they are defined, manipulated and constructed by the policy experts, such as state officials and scholars, whose role it is to produce them” (p. 10). Dodson argues that it is important to
words, Dodson posits “the state as an ideological force within housing policy” (p. 21), and thus questions the comprehension of housing problems by state actors as a central facet of the deployment of policies. Moreover, he takes a pragmatic epistemological approach, arguing that housing policy discourse and ‘truths’ rely on historical trajectories:
“…Policy is organized and ordered around prevailing truths of both the reality of housing conditions, the identification and definition of housing problems, and of the apposite material governmental practices to achieve policy change” (p. 28).
These “prevailing truths” are the norms, values, and beliefs of policy experts and actors, informing their perceptions of housing problems and conditions, and codified into political instruments.
‘Affordable Housing’ as Institution
Because discursive values and perceptions are understood as ultimately shaping policy, and following Kemp’s (2015) conception of housing tenures as institutions,
‘affordable housing’ can be viewed as an institution itself. An institution is here defined as “a relatively enduring collection of rules and organized practices embedded in structures of meaning and resources” (March & Olsen, 2006, p. 3). This means viewing affordable housing as socially constructed and produced, maintained, and evolved over time, influenced by many actors but primarily centered around ideas as a glue that generates preferences, goals and outcomes, and concerned with investigating how and why they
institutions, Kemp (2015) argues that historical institutionalism (HI) is an appropriate theoretical model for examining the “wider context” of an institution such as ‘affordable housing’. HI specifically “seeks to examine the genesis and development of institutions,” including their “construction, maintenance, and adaptation” (Sanders, 2008: p. 4-5). The HI perspective is relevant because it lends itself to inquiry about how framing (ideas)
influences changes (outcomes, policy solutions). HI looks at goals and motivations from a public perspective and in so doing, relies on narrative (Sanders, 2008).
Legitimacy
Conceptualizing affordable housing as an institution, and following Blessing’s (2015) investigation of the changing trajectories of housing associations in the English and Dutch housing markets, the concept of legitimacy is a useful link between individual housing actors, as invoked by Dodson (2007) and Wetzstein (2017), and the larger
‘institution’ of affordable housing. Legitimacy is here defined as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions” (Suchman, 1995: p. 574).
Legitimacy is linked to broader institutions because it concerns an understanding of the “nature and direction of change over time,” be it organizational or institutional
(Blessing, 2015: p. 205). While the concept does not fully explain causal processes, it can reveal a wider scope of forces at work in concert, thus contributing to an understanding of broader trajectories and projections of an institution such as ‘affordable housing’.
(2015) explains, are emergent as rationalization tools but also then employed as
justification moving forward that legitimize action and policy. With this in mind, legitimacy requires “qualitative narrative interpretation” (p. 603), where historical trajectories play a central role in legitimacy maintenance precisely because legitimized norms are established from “a history of events” (Suchman, 1995: p. 574). An organization may depart from established norms from time to time but retain legitimacy if such departures are viewed as unique (ibid.). Here legitimacy as a conceptual tool fits within HI because it rests on the trajectories HI emphasizes.
Moreover, legitimacy is instrumental in nature – something organizations use to pursue their goals (Suchman, 1995) – and can be further aligned with institutionalism: “Cultural definitions determine how the organization is built, how it is run, and,
simultaneously, how it is understood and evaluated” (p. 576). The concept of legitimacy works precisely in making institutions “seem natural and meaningful” (ibid.), and thus
legitimized in their endeavors. Suchman posits three forms of legitimacy: pragmatic (based
on an organization’s direct audience’s self-interest), moral (based on whether an organization’s actions are judged as positive and normative), and cognitive (based on a perception of the inevitability or taken-for-granted nature of an organization, or the way it uses cultural models to mark its actions as coherent, understandable, and plausible).
There are several strategies through which institutional actors can and must
construct, maintain, and manage the legitimacy of organizations (Blessing, 2015), and these are often forms of communication between the institution and its audiences (Suchman, 1995). In the case of urban affordable housing, this is seen in publicized city planning, aspirational, or goal-setting documents. “Legitimacy management” is also invoked in the
spoken, rationalizing discourse of key agents, as Suchman explains that “shared
understandings are likely to emerge to rationalize patterns of behavior” – thus connecting the discourse of key actors to the trajectory of policy actions, which are themselves patterns of institutional behavior (p. 575). Understanding the symbolism – the cultural frameworks, beliefs, norms, and values – that both motivates actors and is employed by them, provides an understanding of the substantive outcomes of the institution, aligning with Wetzstein’s (2017) and Dodson’s (2007) argument that policy actors’ ideological narratives are central to policy development. Taken together, this suggests that an investigation into the
legitimizing discourse – as revealing of these cultural norms, values, narratives, and beliefs – of policy actors themselves can help us understand how these fundamental arguments shape the political organization of housing in modern urban contexts, revealing a broader scope of causal forces at work in contemporary housing policy. This leads to the questions guiding this study:
Research Questions
In what ways do housing policy actors discursively legitimize the institution of affordable housing?
- How do policy actors in Boston and Amsterdam perceive the affordable housing problem and legitimize proposed solutions?
In its use in this study, discourse operates “as a set of rules that permit and guide thoughts and actions” (Dodson, 2007: p. 32). In this way, discourse is essentially
constitutive. One can thus read affordable housing policy as a “means of constituting the reality of a particular set of social problems and organising a set of procedures to ‘address’ these problems” (p. 46). The language of legitimacy is invoked here, as a
socially-constructed (discursive) system of beliefs, norms, and values act “as a set of rules that permit and guide” – and legitimize – “thoughts and actions.” Put another way, the constitution of a reality of certain social problems legitimizes the policy action or “set of procedures” to “address” them, as Blessing (2015) and Suchman (1995) would agree. The analysis of discourse done in this study draws on Foucault’s conception of discursive formations, which are a defined “regularity” in a discursive work, meaning any identifiable orders, correlations, functions, and positions (Dodson, 2007: p. 42).
I combine this with Kemeny’s (2002) argument that discourse focuses on utterances and texts that “reflect an internally consistent rhetoric.” Moreover, building off of
Wetzstein’s (2017) discussion of the “imaginary” and actors’ “visions,” this discourse reveals “a particular world view that takes the form of a narrative, often in the form of a saga, myth or fable, with implicit moral imperatives built into it” (Kemeny, 2002: p. 186). These “culturally shared and morally charged social meanings” can lend particular power and salience toward housing policies supporting certain outcomes, as Kemeny explains of the U.S. homeownership narrative (ibid.). Thus the present study focuses on narrative with cultural and moral tendencies. In identifying these narratives and describing their embedded legitimacy appeals, I often use the term ‘logic’ and do so in a strictly colloquial (and thus, general) sense to refer to the sort of reasoning actors employ and the principles guiding that
reasoning. Perhaps most strikingly succinct is one of Dodson’s (2007) final proclamations on the subject: “Meaning in housing assistance policy derives from the optics of the state” (p. 256). These optics are the central empirics in this study.
Such a framework aligns with a social constructionist, relational ontology and epistemology. A social constructionist perspective tasks the researcher with understanding “the multiple social constructions of meaning and knowledge” with a focus on fluidity, or the notion that these constructions can change over time (Robson and McCartan, 2016: p. 25). This aligns with HI as a methodology, and my framework of affordable housing as a socially constructed, consistently evolving institution.
My conceptualization of ‘the urban’ here is one of “constitutive essence” and “concentrated urbanization” (Brenner, 2013: p. 96). As a “constitutive essence,” the processes (capital investment, political regulation, social struggle, etc.) through which the urban is produced as a phenomenon, condition, or landscape are analyzed. “Concentrated urbanization” points to the particular clustering of people and capital in certain spaces of settlement. This agglomeration model is appropriate because these forces produce inflated land values, leading to particular problems of housing affordability. This framework’s inclusion of wider social processes that make ‘the urban’ aligns with an understanding of affordable housing as a social institution operating in urban space.
Case Selection
TABLE 1: CASE POPULATION AND GROWTH
Boston Amsterdam
City Population 673, 184 (2016) 834,713 (2016)
Metropolitan Region Population
4.27 million (2015) 2.4 million (2016) Projected City Growth 2014 to 2030: 8% growth
(+91,000)
2010 to 2025: 15% growth (+110,000)
[Sources: Walsh (2014), Bluestone and Huessy (2017); De Jong and Van Duin (2012), Daamen et al. (2016)]
Boston and Amsterdam are cities of a similar size growing at a similar rate (see Table 1). They are ranked side-by-side on A.T. Kearney’s global cities index, which ranks the 25 leading cities based on indicators measuring business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement (Hales et al, 2017). Their adjacent ranking (Boston: 21; Amsterdam: 22) suggests these cities are experiencing a similar intensity of global economic activity, indicating similar levels of economic growth, leading to increasing populations in each case and a newfound relevance of housing affordability as urban land increases in value. This represents a pairing of most-similar cases (using Gerring’s [2007] case selection typology) in that these cities are most-similar in terms of indicators of housing unaffordability, suggesting that actors in both places are grappling with housing problems and solutions with a similar urgency. This makes them ripe for comparisons that ask, in general, how they are doing so.
Housing Systems
However, each city’s housing actors’ legitimation of affordable housing issues and solutions are hypothesized to be quite different given dissimilar housing contexts.
Kemeny’s (1995) seminal housing systems approach defines two groups of rental housing markets – dualist and unitary – that helps explain the contrasting housing contexts of these two cases. Dualist systems maintain “two polarized rental tenures and a strong preference of housing policies for the owner-occupied sector,” where the private rental market is profit-driven and works almost exclusively on market principles with little regulation. In such systems, the social sector is strongly regulated and strictly operates as a safety net for the poor and severely marginalized (Lennartz, 2010: p. 6). Here the social or public rental sector is thus small and often stigmatized, while the private rental sector maintains high rents and limited tenant protection (Van Duijne and Ronald, 2018). The United States is recognized as a dualist market.
On the other hand, the unitary or integrated housing system is characterized by a housing market in which non-profit and for-profit landlords compete to provide housing, causing an overall “dampening effect” on market rental prices and a social housing stock higher in quality than that in dualist systems. Renting is a “more competitive alternative to the owner-occupied sector,” and housing policies reflect a level of neutrality between different housing tenures (Lennartz, 2010: p. 6). The Netherlands has long been considered a unitary rental market, though recent changes in access of social housing and growing price differences in social versus private rental housing suggest a shift toward a more dualist system, so much so that it has been positioned as the “unraveling of the unitary
positioning of ‘affordable housing’ is different in each model, and this translates to unique affordable housing contexts, histories, motives, and trajectories in each case – which I’ll outline in Chapters Four (Boston) and Six (Amsterdam). These suggest that housing actors’ discursive legitimations of affordable housing will be unique across the two cases.
Comparative Framework
HI is suited to comparative international research because it calls for an “interactive approach” that looks at conditions, interests, and actors in both state and society (Sanders, 2008: p. 6). As such, it lends itself to qualitative research methods such as interviews and discourse analysis. A comparative framework allowing for contextual and historical
differences while also referencing broader trends in housing affordability is thus necessary. Comparative housing research has developed substantially since the mid-1900s. Kemeny and Lowe (1998) posit three 'schools' of comparative housing research, suggesting that the most progressive of these three takes a middle-ground approach toward generalization, eschewing "highly particularistic analyses" while also refraining from "universalist and global approaches" that assume a common direction for all modern societies. The mediated "divergence approach" is both culturally astute and historically grounded and best suited to the present study (p. 161-2).
In the particularistic approach, noted by its use of juxtaposition of cases, the nation state is the fundamental unit of analysis because the central government's role in housing systems is a primary concern. This approach highlights how very local conditions such as household composition can change the housing landscape. Yet the contemporary urban
conception of the housing problem – in which cities are the unit of analysis – lends itself to a different approach.
The second school, Kemeny and Lowe’s universalist approach to comparative housing research, on the other hand, is driven by the perspective that societies are converging toward a common condition or along a shared linear trajectory – such as a neoliberal retreat of the welfare state. Yet such linear, universalist references in housing research, for example of widespread "migration from the public sector towards the private market" (Malpass and Victory, 2010: p. 3) may actually limit our ability to understand nuanced change because of their high level of generalization (Blessing, 2015). While they are useful in bringing in larger theory, universalist approaches can become reductive in their own right.
While this study suggests similarities between cases so far as they present indicators of similarly increasing levels of housing unaffordability, it specifically posits that there may be unique ways in which legitimacy is created, maintained, and used by housing actors in each case. While there may be a noted convergence toward neoliberalism among different housing systems, the appeals of legitimacy allowing for or justifying that convergence are thought to be unique and distinct, and suggesting of a more complex and nuanced causal story and trajectory than “convergence” implies. The middle-ground 'divergence'
perspective allows for such nuance, and thus is an appropriate perspective for this study. This compromise between the particularistic and highly generalized approaches allows for “careful attention to historical and cultural contexts” (thus aligning with HI and legitimacy frameworks) while also referencing broader trends in housing provision (Kemeny and Lowe, 1998: p. 170).
Implications
Identifying how housing actors conceptualize and legitimize housing affordability problems and solutions can thus show the values and concepts held in highest esteem that motivate policy action in certain directions. While housing policy is (naturally) often understood from an outcomes-based perspective, a focus on legitimacy draws the curtain back on the causal forces operating underneath and alongside public political discourse in driving institutional change. An investigation of this kind can then indicate ways in which legitimizing tactics operate successfully and not so successfully, or as Wetzstein (2017) explains, what can and cannot work “under particular conditions” (p. 3174). This is an especially fruitful quality of inter-urban comparative research as undertaken in this paper. Given the frameworks discussed here, I will outline the methodology of this investigation in the next section and sketch the design of the research informing this paper.
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH DESIGN
Following the theoretical framework, and with the understanding that legitimacy management operates through the spoken discourse of housing policy actors, interviews are a relevant method for revealing the norms and shared understandings at the heart oflegitimacy’s use within institutional housing discourse. These socially constructed norms
legitimize the “actions” (policies; modes of provision) of an “entity” (the state, via city and
state actors) as appropriate (Suchman, 1995: p. 204). Thus, interviewing housing policy actors, as individuals who represent or are adjacent to this “entity,” can reveal those norms, and understanding those norms sets the foundation for understanding the motivations behind policy changes, which are the practical essence of the institution of affordable housing. Borrowed from Suchman (1995) and Dart (2004) and as utilized by Blessing (2015), legitimacy as a central methodological concept calls for empirics consisting of policy items, accompanying organizational Public Relations documents, and expert interviews. Since the research questions focus on housing actors’ perspectives and use of legitimacy in their own arguments, interviews are the primary data source; these questions do not call for or on-the-ground policy evaluations, and similarly it is not this study’s goal to evaluate the validity or accuracy of actors’ claims, but instead to show how legitimacy arguments operate in the actors’ conceptions of (affordable) housing phenomena
(identification of problems, aims, and policy solutions). Because of legitimacy’s reliance on the cultural-historical trajectories invoked in the framework of HI, situating current
discourse within a historical trajectory is also necessary, and this information was gathered from literature as well as interviews themselves.
To explore the discursive legitimation of affordable housing institutions in both Boston and Amsterdam, a qualitative comparative case study design was followed. An understanding of legitimacy and discourse requires qualitative research, as this study sought to explore the ways housing actors understand and ascribe meaning to housing phenomena. As such, a constructivist philosophy, focusing on understanding multiple meanings and social construction (Creswell, 2014), informed the approach, design, and methods. A comparative case study was used in order to study two cases on their own (separate) accord using similar methods, and then allow for comparison of each after individual case research and analysis. This choice is justified via Kemeny and Lowe’s (1998) divergence approach earlier discussed; individual case analyses allow ample attention to unique historical and cultural details, before side-by-side case comparison calls more directly on reference to larger trends.
The first case was Boston. In line with the needs of discursive research, the researcher focused on the gathering of text, both written and spoken. Preliminary reading on current housing policies at the City, State (Massachusetts), and Federal levels was done to gain understanding of both major housing policies and the City-level organizations and actors responsible for them. This reading included City-level evaluations on the condition of affordable housing, organization-wide progress reports, and heavily publicized
documents setting out housing goals, agendas, and priorities for the City of Boston. The researcher then met with a key academic informant heavily involved in research on
Boston’s housing policies over the last several decades. Together they identified ten actors or organizations for potential interviews. Ten interviewees cannot possibly represent a full understanding of a major city’s affordable housing context, yet a purposive sample of
actors from the most relevant public, non-profit, and academic organizations informing affordable housing institutional development were contacted. Several interviewees expressed the names of other relevant actors, many of whom were already in the list of those to be interviewed, which provided a built-in check of the purposive sample identified. In several cases, would-be interviewees referred the researcher to someone else within their organization more appropriate for the topic. Eight in-person interviews and two telephone interviews were conducted, lasting approximately 45 minutes each. These interviews followed a semi-structured format in which interviewees were encouraged to speak openly on housing affordability in Boston.
A standard set of starting questions was asked to each interviewee in order to best compare responses. These stock questions were open-ended in format, such as: what is housing affordability? What is the housing problem in Boston? What are the problems beyond housing? Such questions encouraged elaboration on the institution of affordable housing itself, providing crucial information on how terms, definitions, issues, and policies are understood and discursively framed by actors. Asked repeatedly in each interview, these questions left space for follow-up questions that were specific to the interviewee, such as asking about their individual role and their specific organization or department’s role in the City’s housing landscape. Other questions were informed by the preliminary reading, such as asking about the much publicized “Housing A Changing City: Boston 2030” plan published by the Mayor’s Office in 2014. Interviews took place over a period of six weeks in November and December 2017.
Interviews provided the advantage of gathering historical information provided by interviewees, many of whom had been involved in housing for several decades. Some
typical disadvantages of interviews (as mentioned by Creswell, 2014) were often seen as advantageous to this study. While interviews can only provide information as filtered through the interviewee’s perspective, this sort of filtering is a central component of this study, which precisely examines the discourse of influential housing actors in creating, maintaining, modifying, and, in so doing, legitimizing the institutional parameters of ‘affordable housing’. Another potential disadvantage of interviews is that the researcher’s presence, especially in-person, could bias responses of interviewees. This was counteracted through conducting interviews in the offices and organizational or professional settings of the interviewees themselves, as well as asking intentionally open-ended questions that invited them to speak freely. This setting and questioning style were implemented in order to provide maximum comfort for interviewees in an attempt to encourage them to view the conversation as non-judgmental and thus limit (to the extent possible) the biasing effect on responses that the researcher’s presence may have had.
All interviews were recorded and transcribed by the researcher. Each interview was qualitatively open coded and subsequently organized using ATLAS.ti. This allowed
analysis of each interview on a thematic basis as well as a comparative platform for
aggregating the themes emerging from all interviews within the case. Methods of discourse analysis were followed, as open coding enabled an analysis of discursive trends across the interviews and then revealed the associations between codes. Such axial coding allowed broader themes to emerge from the data between clusters of codes. Data analysis here continued hand-in-hand with the gathering of additional data described below.
In order to gain an understanding of supporting written discourse of affordable housing in Boston, qualitative policy documents and reports were gathered, in addition to
those used in the preliminary reading, for a closer textual analysis following the interviews. This data was collected throughout the six-week interview process as interviewees naturally mentioned specific sources or documents. Such documents enabled a direct analysis of the written language of relevant public actors and organizations. As a source of data, these documents represent meaningful, purposeful language presented by housing actors. The ten interviews presented a clearer identification of the most important policy developments and housing-related documents over the last three decades. These documents were individually coded from a perspective primed by the discursive trends emerging from the interviews. Analysis and triangulation of data from both documents and interviews continued from there.
After preliminary written analysis of interviews and documents in the first case, the same steps were followed for the second case, Amsterdam: preliminary reading, meeting with a key academic informant to identify ten interviewees, undertaking ten semi-structured interviews (all in person, over six weeks in February and March, 2018), and transcription, coding, and analysis of the interviews and relevant policy documents. During analysis of the second case, and continuing following its completion, the comparative analysis was done, in which the researcher compared the results of each case and speculated on their meaning, significance, and relevance within larger questions of affordable housing policy and provision.
CHAPTER 4: BOSTON – HOUSING CONTEXT AND MAJOR
POLICIES
The affordable housing system in Boston involves several agencies and actors, both public and private. In this section, I will sketch the key housing actors and organizations in Boston and provide an overview of the housing context over the most recent decades. In so doing, I’ll introduce the major City, State, and Federal policies impacting housing provision today.
Measuring Affordability
Boston’s relevant benchmark for tracking affordability is the Area Median Income (AMI). This figure represents the middle income for an area (such as a municipality) for a household of a certain size. The City, State, and Federal governments use AMI thresholds to set eligibility for housing programs or target certain groups as recipients (see Figure 1). In Boston, affordable housing follows a ratio perspective and denotes a goal of rent levels constituting 30% or less of a household’s income. AMI combined with this benchmark guide housing policies in the city (Walsh, 2014).
FIGURE 1: AMI THRESHOLDS IN BOSTON
TABLE 2: KEY AGENCIES – BOSTON
City
Boston Housing Authority (BHA) Owns public housing developments, administers federal and state voucher
programs
Department of Neighborhood Development (DND)
Manages city real estate, invests public funds in affordable housing development
Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA)
Works with developers on affordable unit construction, oversees Inclusionary
Development Policy
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD)
Statewide funding and resources for affordable housing under Governor’s
priorities
Federal
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Oversees mortgage, grant, assistance, regulatory programs for housing nationwide under Housing Secretary’s
direction
Table 2 presents the major agencies responsible for housing provision across the City, State, and Federal level. As one interviewee succinctly explained, “The BHA owns housing; the DND funds housing; and we [BPDA] encourage developers to create housing.” These organizations support the vision of the Mayor of Boston.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
The affordable housing context in Boston is influenced by state-level housing action. In both the literature and interviews conducted, Massachusetts is heralded as a pioneer among American cities for its progressive approach to housing policy dealing with issues of affordability.
The hallmark legislative effort contributing to this reputation is the 1969
Massachusetts Low and Moderate Income Housing Act, which was the first state legislation aimed at the emergent problem of suburban exclusionary zoning (Stockman, 1992).
Sometimes referred to as ‘snob zoning’, the adoption of zoning ordinances across the United States in the early 1900s delegated a separation of land uses (residential as discrete from industrial and commercial) for subdivided parts of municipalities, and has since been implicated in the ‘sprawl’ of the American metropolitan landscape. Zoning ordinances, devised by local municipalities via the state’s backing, encompass building restrictions on height, depth, and use, contributing to uniformity in aesthetic and function in each defined spatial area.
Yet zoning has been cast as exclusionary since the landmark Ambler Realty Co. v.
Village of Euclid, in which a constitutional challenge to zoning laws in Euclid, Ohio was
accepted by a trial court on the basis that the regulations “served to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life;” however, this was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, as such “upholding the town’s exclusion of apartments from single-family residential neighborhoods and essentially permitting socioeconomic segregation” (Stockman, 1992: p. 538). Combined with continued mid- to late-1900s urban migration of middle and upper-income Americans from cities to suburbs, as well as the Great Migration’s movement of hundreds of thousands of low-income Black Americans into northern Rust Belt American cities, the urban core of cities became
relegated to poor industrial workers of minority background whose chances at accessing desirable suburban housing markets were halted by zoning regulations and racially discriminatory mortgage lending. Still, zoning ordinances have been legitimized by
political actors under preservationist arguments – of property values, neighborhood
‘character’, and maintenance of a hefty tax base associated with large, single-family homes (Stockman, 1992: p. 540).
Further attention to exclusionary zoning came in the 1960s, and Massachusetts Legislators’ 1969 Housing Act provided a comprehensive, fast-track permitting process for those wishing to build subsidized low and moderate-income housing. Developers could appeal to a local Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA), with state backing, which would essentially require suburbs to accept the proposed low or moderate-income construction – bypassing existing zoning requirements – as long as the community had less than 10% of its housing already designated as low- and moderate-income housing. This counteracted ‘snob zoning’ that had barred low-income households from the market via restrictions on minimum lot sizes, floor space, bans on multifamily housing and mobile homes, and the like, which had prevented lower-income targeted units from being built. ZBAs could also grant developers additional development rights in order to make them more profitable (given a recognition that with at least 25% of the units made available to low and middle-income households, the project’s profitability would be adversely affected) (Hananel, 2014). This statewide regulation is referred to as 40B (Stockman, 1992). Since its implementation, it has been consistently upheld by the State against resistant
municipalities, giving ZBAs “the power to override local exclusionary zoning practices” (p. 553). As such, 40B has set a goal of 10% affordable housing in all Massachusetts
municipalities.
While 40B applies to Boston, the City already maintains over 10% affordable housing due to large amounts of public housing built in the mid-1900s. 40B thus remains a
statewide effort focused on suburbs, many of which in Greater Boston still have a housing stock with less than 10% affordable units. Since its adoption in 1969, when only three municipalities in Massachusetts maintained a stock with more than 10% of affordable units, that number has increased to 54 cities and towns by 2010, while 14 more had over 9%, another 54 above 7%, and altogether half of all municipalities were over 5%. 60,000 units were built under 40B by 2010 – 42,000 apartments and 18,000 homeownership units. While evaluations are consistent that this still does not meet the need of affordable units, 40B created “substantially more low- and moderate-income housing in the suburbs than would have been created if the statute had not been enacted” (Hananel, 2014: p. 2497). This distinction between urban Boston and suburban communities in the Greater Boston area in terms of affordable housing provision is a key factor in understanding the modern
institution of affordable housing in Boston, as will be discussed.
Another action consistent with Massachusetts’s reputation for proactive housing policy is the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program (MRVP). Enacted in 1966 as ‘Chapter 707’, this was a “supplement and alternative to” public housing, where housing authorities (such as BHA) would lease private housing units and sublease them to residents at public housing rent levels, using state funds to offset the difference (Verrilli, 2009: p. 11). Initially project-based subsidies, the program changed in reaction to the federal Section 8 programs, alternatively giving qualifying households mobile vouchers (tenant-based) with which they could find their own private units to rent for the subsidized cost. Here the Federal and State programs legitimized one another in involving private landlords in government-assisted housing provision, further justified via the unfavorable state of public housing
“projects” in cities like Chicago and St. Louis, Boston’s Orchard Park development served as the City’s notable public housing failure, as it faced “high vacancies, deferred
maintenance and rampant neighborhood crime” from the 1970s and continuing through the ‘90s (Shamsuddin and Vale, 2017: p. 229). This nationwide disfavor would lead to HUD’s HOPE VI program (1992-2010), designed to redevelop such developments (often through demolition) and replace them with “mixed-income” communities, hoping to de-concentrate poor people, which was seen as a major contributor to public housing’s nationwide
deterioration (p. 227).
Chapter 707 became MRVP in 1992, targeting residents at a lower income limit and doing away with subsidies for utility payments (Verrilli, 2009). This signaled the continued residualiztion of public housing in the 1990s. MRVP indeed served as a model for Federal Section 8, which began with the nationwide Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 and was supplemented with mobile vouchers in 1983 – nationally-subsidized tenant-based vouchers allowing renting from private landlords at public housing-level rents. As such, Massachusetts has maintained a reputation of being ahead of the curve in policies promoting affordable housing, and this plays an important role in Boston’s housing landscape.
Federal LIHTC
Although HOPE VI and its successor, Choice Neighborhoods (2010-), continued a nationwide movement away from a low-income public housing model of provision, the most significant federal housing initiative operating today is the Low-Income Housing Tax
program in 1986, it acts as a catalyst for affordable housing development by allotting “state and local agencies the ability to issue roughly $8 billion in tax credits for the acquisition, new construction, and rehabilitation of low-income rental housing” (p. 79). Developers qualify by allotting either 40% of the units to renters making up to 60% AMI or 20% of the units for those making up to 50% AMI. The credits are a dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax liability that serves to “offset the developer’s inability to charge higher rents over the period,” which was set at 30 years. LIHTC has helped finance over two million rental units since its inception and prioritizes “very low-income populations” (ibid.). Moreover, it “cemented the role of private developers in affordable housing development” (Bratt and Lew, 2016: p. 232). LIHTC’s central inclusion of private development in housing policy reshaped housing provision in American cities.
Economic Context
The strength of the economy in Boston and Massachusetts is important in understanding the context of housing affordability in the city. The 1980s saw a “liberal, activist Democratic state administration,” led by Governor Michael Dukakis, that built off the first decade of 40B development and encouraged more subsidized housing construction, both low-income and mixed-income (Hananel, 2014: p. 2494). These programs came during the “Massachusetts Miracle” decade, in which the state sustained significant
economic growth led by new industry (ibid.). Housing prices rose, and the state government created new programs (both homeownership and rental) in order to “fill the void created by the federal government’s retreat” from funding affordable housing, which began with
(Krefetz, 2001: p. 405). This discourse of the Federal retreat from housing provision is fundamental to understanding modern legitimations of affordable housing policy in Boston, and will be discussed in the next chapter.
From the mid- to late-1980s, Dukakis’ government argued for addressing the “affordable housing crisis” based on economic grounds of attracting and retaining the industry and economic growth that had characterized the first years of the ‘Miracle’ (ibid.: p. 406-7). This marked a shift toward legitimizing affordable housing programs based on “economic prosperity” grounds (p. 405-6). This growth reversed pre-1980 unemployment caused by Boston’s deindustrialization, and the period saw growth in Boston’s high-tech economy. Demographically, 1983 was the beginning of an increase in Boston’s population after declines in the preceding thirty years (Butterfield, 1985).
An increasing urban population, new economic growth, and a changing state and federal landscape in housing provision signaled a new era in affordable housing for Boston. Growth factors increased housing prices – a far cry from the previous decades in Boston’s housing market. Given the shifted narrative on public housing and governmental housing provision (kick started by Nixon’s 1973 moratorium), a more flexible mobile voucher program (1983) involving private landlords in subsidized housing provision, and LIHTC (1986), the turn of the new decade proves a dynamic starting point in investigating a recent ‘era’ of affordable housing.
Indeed, demographic and economic turnarounds of the ‘80s were just the beginning; the 1990s would see a 6% increase in population, an 8.3% increase in employment, and a dramatic decrease in housing vacancy rates in Greater Boston, adding pressure to the city’s housing market and increasing housing demand faster than population growth itself (Allen,
Bluestone, Heudorfer, and Weismann, 2002). The end of rent control via a statewide referendum in 1994 marked continued movement away from a subsidy model of direct, widespread provision. Combined with the trends mentioned above, housing affordability in Boston emerged as a very urgent issue.
Inclusionary Development
This set the stage for the most important city-initiated housing policy still in effect today: Boston’s Inclusionary Development Policy (IDP), established in February 2000 by then-Mayor Menino. IDP applies to proposed residential developments of ten or more units that are either financed by the City, on City property, or require zoning relief (of which most projects over ten units do). Aiming to produce moderate- and middle-income housing units typically ineligible for federal, state, or city subsidies, IDP leverages private
developers by requiring they earmark a certain percentage of the units of proposed projects for households earning up to 70% AMI (rental) or households earning either 80% or 100% AMI (homeownership). Developers may construct affordable units on-site or off site, or they may choose a ‘Cash Out’ option in which they forego building affordable units but pay the city a lump sum that would fund the creation of these units by the city itself.
FIGURE 2: IDP ZONES
(Source: Boston’s Planning & Development Agency, 2016)
As an update in 2015, the City was split into three geographic zones based on median sales price of the neighborhood (see Figure 2). Zone A represents the most expensive areas, while Zone C denotes areas with comparatively little development. These zones determine the percentage of units that must be included or Cash Out amounts that must be paid. If the developer chooses to construct the affordable units onsite, all zones require 13% of the total units to be affordable units. Should the developer choose for the affordable units to be
affordable for Zones A and B, and 15% for Zone C. As of 2017, 1,737 on-site and off-site affordable units have been created since 2000, with 229 completed in 2016. The total amount paid to the City’s IDP Fund by developers through 2016 was $96 million, which has supported 1,070 additional affordable housing units (BPDA, 2017). IDP’s focus on units for middle and moderate income households and its weaving of public and private dollars are notable features of the modern affordable housing institution in Boston.
FIGURE 3: BOSTON POLICY CONTEXT TIMELINE
Recent Housing Efforts
The most recent housing efforts have been initiated on a regional and statewide scale. In December 2017, mayors and representatives of 14 municipalities around and including Boston, all of whom make up the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition of Greater Boston, announced a regional housing partnership with a focus on addressing “Metro
Massachusetts 40B 1969 1973 Nationwide Public Housing Cosntruction Moratorium Federal Section 8 Mobile Vouchers 1983 1986 LIHTC Inclusionary Development 2000
the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), a regional planning agency serving 101 cities and towns making up Metropolitan Boston, focuses on housing production goals in an effort to “increase the pace of housing construction in every community throughout Metro Boston, sharing the burden of production in order to increase housing affordability for all household types and incomes” (see Un, 2017 – MAPC press release). This represents a shift toward a regional discursive outlook on affordable housing production, elaborated on in the next chapter.
Also in December 2017, the Baker-Polito Administration of the State Government announced the Housing Choice Initiative, aiming to incentivize communities to create more housing through over $10 million in grants, technical assistance, and other funding
incentives per year. The Initiative encourages improved zoning regulations by allowing changes to the zoning code by a municipality’s simple majority vote, rather than the two-thirds majority long needed to change (exclusionary) zoning laws that are often a barrier to multifamily development. This initiative recognizes that 40B has not been enough to spur development in all communities, especially those resistant to changing exclusionary zoning codes.
CHAPTER 5: BOSTON – DATA AND ANALYSIS
In this section, I will present data from the Boston case, highlighting the
legitimizing strategies actors employ in affordable housing discourse. I provide a summary of these below and a list of referenced interviewees (see Table 3) before moving into the full analysis.
An analysis of the data suggests a discursive story with several facets: (1) housing actors distinguish between “affordable” and “public” housing, placing the latter in an antiquated position on the timeline of housing policies, while characterizing the former as private market-oriented, geared toward middle-income development, and straying from a needs-based provision of housing. (2) Boston housing actors discursively legitimize the affordable housing institution via a ‘growth is good’ logic, which leads to a focus on long-term middle-income affordability. (3) They combine this with a business logic that
legitimizes programs incentivizing private actors to take center stage in housing production. (4) A strong thematic discourse emphasizes the centrality of the federal government in any housing provision. This rhetoric seeks to explain that city-level action will never be able to replace declining federal funds for housing provision. (5) Finally, actors discursively focus on the metropolitan area – Greater Boston – as the primary conduit for housing solutions, as a way to place responsibility on suburban communities to change restrictive zoning
ordinances and ‘Not-In-My-Back-Yard’ attitudes to development, again furthering the agenda of growth and legitimizing shortcomings in City-level provision.
TABLE 3: REFERENCED INTERVIEWEES – BOSTON
Name Position & Institutional Affiliation
C. Norris Executive Director, Metropolitan Boston
Housing Partnership
D. Quirk Director of Operations, Dept of
Neighborhood Development, City of Boston
T. Davis Housing Policy Manager, Boston Planning
and Development Agency
B. Rushing State Legislator and Representative,
Massachusetts House of Representatives
B. McGonagle Chief Administrator, Boston Housing
Authority
B. Bluestone Founding Director, Dukakis Center for
Urban and Regional Policy; Founding Dean, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University; Senior Fellow, Boston Foundation
K. Milchman Chief Housing Planner, Metropolitan Area
Planning Council
‘Affordable Housing’ vs. ‘Public Housing’
One of the main themes emerging from the Boston case is the conception of the ‘housing problem’ in Boston as one primarily concerning middle and moderate-income affordability, echoing Wetzstein (2017). This conception is legitimized via a repeated discursive distinction between “affordable housing” and “public housing.”
One interviewee, a housing expert who has served on several City advisory boards and leads the production of the annual “Greater Boston Housing Report Card,” which has evaluated housing issues and policies since 2002, explained:
other forms of subsidies…what we couldn't build was everything in between. So if you think about the whole population from the poorest 20% - we know how to build some housing for them. We know how to build housing for the richest 5%. We don't know how to build housing for the 20 to 95%.”
While “subsidy programs” focus on low-income housing, the market provides for “the richest 5%,” and city’s effort is on that broad swath in between. DND’s Director of Operations further frames this strategic focus on middle-income housing units:
“But we want to be focusing our efforts to ensure that the private market is meeting that middle-income demand, and part of that's just opening the gates for
development to build more…we don't want to be a city that's 20% income restricted housing and 80% luxury housing. We want to make sure that there's housing for every income in between; and so, particularly recently, a lot of the new focus is middle-income affordability in market rate housing. So that...there's housing at every income.”
Here “the private market” is posed as a solution to meet “middle-income demand” and, thus, actions that can “open the gates for development” are legitimized. The first interviewee positions a “subsidy” as only applying to very low-income housing and the second explicitly acknowledges that the private market can take care of middle-income development.
Their words suggest a discursive strategy of delineating “affordable housing” from “public housing.” Interviewees repeatedly expressed “public housing” as something strictly for extremely low-income households and tied to a subsidy. Moreover, actors distinguished these subsidies as something coming from above the city-level – typically referencing Federal dollars – and characterized them as a continuous government investment with no marked end date, but instead a product of the household’s eligibility based on extremely low incomes. The DND employee made the distinction explicit:
“For 30% AMI, even if we give you a giant check, you still need an operating subsidy…there's just not enough return to pay your debt and keep the building operating. So the solution to that is private-based vouchers or mobile vouchers. Those are provided by the state and the federal government. So what you're really talking about there are forms of public housing, which is different than private market affordable housing. And it just requires significantly greater resources and those resources to be in perpetuity rather than the one-time costs.”
The business logic is intertwined in the distinction between “public housing” and “private market affordable housing”: for public housing, “there’s just not enough return to pay your debt.” Financial concepts add significant discursive pragmatic legitimacy to creating “affordable housing,” which thus denotes more moderate-income-targeted dwellings provided by private market parties. BHA Chief Administrator supports this distinction by explaining that the average public housing resident makes 17% AMI, while ‘affordable’ often denotes 60% AMI (see Appendix). Through these delineations, the affordable
housing agenda at the city level takes on a definitional middle-income approach, straying from that of “public housing,” the responsibility of state and federal governments. Because of public housing’s disfavor, cemented by Nixon’s 1973 moratorium on its construction and the subsequent turn toward Section 8 mobile vouchers, the distinction is plausible. This disfavor is reflected in lasting stigma towards its residents (see Appendix). A modern distinction between ‘affordable’ and ‘public’ has thus been embedded in housing policy and a nationwide moral consensus that ‘public housing’ is a thing of the past.
Proving this point, interviewees directly suggest “public housing” is an antiquated notion, regardless of how they characterize the result of this. One actor claimed:
“The only government affordable housing in the United States is probably public housing. Public housing is a percentage of your salary, right, and it's open to everybody, and that's it… it's the only real affordable housing, and it was the worst thing we ever did to stop expanding public housing.”
Here, the concepts “government affordable housing” and “public housing” are one and the same, and their creation has ceased. The need to add the qualifier government implies that “affordable housing” no longer includes the government, indicating a private market-dominated institution. While he discursively presents the halt in expanding public housing as “the worst thing we ever did,” He still reinforces the discursive shift away from ‘public housing’ in his explanation. The BHA Administrator also emphasizes continued movement away from public housing “as we have known it” (see Appendix). The discursive shift suggests the current era of affordable housing leaves all indicators of “public housing” in
the past by centering private sector inclusion in questions of affordability that focus on middle- and moderate-income households.
Legitimizing Power and Implications
These conceptions take Stone’s (2006) theory of “affordable housing” one step further. He notes that the term gained relevance in the US in the 1980s "as part of the retreat from public responsibility for the plight of the poor and as affordability challenges moved up the income distribution" (154). This movement is reflected in Boston actors’ distinction between public and affordable housing. Yet while Stone notes that ‘affordable housing’ denotes both low-income housing as well as “financially assisted housing for middle-income households," Boston actors' current conceptions reveal a revised movement of an urban "affordable housing" agenda as referring to only that middle-income group. This is justified via its juxtaposition with that of low-income, "public" housing, lending the middle-income focus cognitive legitimacy in its coherent definitional distinction, as well as moral legitimacy in its discursive distance from the unfavorable public housing outcomes of the past.
Under the understanding that ‘public housing’ has been under the purview of federal dollars, interviewees suggest this is not the City’s responsibility, even though they perceive the federal government has cut funding of low-income-targeted programs, leaving these groups in larger need. Yet city-level actors remain focused on middle-income groups. They thus demonstrate that the affordable housing agenda is not needs based, suggesting a continued “decoupling” of housing from its residential function (Madden and Marcuse,
2016). The data here reveal a decoupling as not only occurring in market-rate housing but even within the institutional affordable housing agenda.
Growth and a City of Extremes
While the distinction between public and affordable housing legitimizes the middle-income focus of late and allows the agenda to stray from a needs-based assessment and subsidy model of provision, the positioning of ‘growth’ as a normative goal combined with fears of being an unequal city reinforces this focus by legitimizing greater amounts of building in all housing segments, suggesting a continued decoupling.
BPDA’s Housing Policy Manager echoes other interviewees in positing middle-income affordability as a legitimizing force for supporting housing at all income levels, instead of focusing on those in most need:
“I think the important thing here is that we can't serve everybody…we do need to help very, very low-income households. But we also need to support some middle-income households because we don't want the city to be a city of very poor and very rich – because it's not a matter of just saying who has the greatest need, but there's also this kind of balancing act of saying: we have a vision for the city that is more varied.”
The grounding assumption here – “that we can’t serve everybody” – characterizes the City as limited in providing public services to residents, thus legitimizing the perpetual existence
Still another actor, whose constituents include residents in Boston’s South End neighborhood, positions a lack of housing in the middle-income range as further limiting economic advancement:
“My low-income people generally are in subsidized housing. And they have a maximum amount of money that they can make to stay in the housing. When they do everything we tell them to do - go to school, get a better job, stay out of jail - and start making more money…because that next level of housing some people would say would be that 50-80 [AMI] – no one's built it. Those places just don't exist.”
Here we see that a clear rationale for this middle-income focus then is on the opportunity to climb the economic ladder. A City employee provides a similar justification:
“…What we really don't want to do is be so successful at building extremely low income housing and be successful at workforce development - but if we're not successful at building housing at the next level up…then when your income increases you're going to have to leave the city because there's no opportunities for you. That's an outcome we don't want. So that's why building housing at all income tiers and at the moderate-income tier and middle-income tier is really important for preserving the long-term diversity of Boston.”
The outcome positioned as a failure is one where households leave the city because
