One of the few articles that really addresses the real underlying nature of the affordable housing problem, beyond the fact it's not as profitable to build housing for poor people as it is for rich people.  It's the nature of the financial model which was put into place after WWII and made housing a financial asset which could be financed by making large debt financing purchases possible for J6P.

Where he goes wrong is after identifying the actual problems, he says this system is immutable, basically handed down by God and can't be changed.

"The term "housing trap" is a way to explain the financialized craziness that makes housing prices more responsive to macroeconomic capital flows than local supply and demand dynamics. The reason housing prices are crazy everywhere at the same time isn't because every local market has the same supply constraints. Supply constraints exist in many markets, sure, but the story of housing affordability is primarily a financial one.

We financialized the housing market for expedient, even righteous, reasons. The consequence of this approach is that today's housing acts more like a financial product than a shelter for a family.

Local governments won't change our country's macroeconomic environment. No city can decouple bank reserves from mortgage-backed securities. No mayor will outlaw the thirty-year mortgage. There won't be a protest movement forcing public employee pension funds to divest from the housing market. For most housing products purchased by most people, we have to deal with the system we've been given.

WHY do we HAVE to accept this stupidity?  All that has to be done is give the HUD the authority to open competitive bidding to contractors for the price target housing you want in a neighborhood.  Da Goobermint can get all the materials for building the units cheaper than individual contractors can because they can contract directly with the large corporations like Weyerhauser or Dupont that produce the materials and cut out the middlemen.  Then, instead of selling the units at whatever the market will bear, make the price 33% of the average monthly income for a min wage worker in that neighborhood.  Maintain Price Controls on buying and selling units, and require the owner to live in the unit, not use it as a rental property.  Poof, problem solved.

The solutions he suggests like turning rooms in your McMansion into rental apartments andd building Tiny Homes in the backyard will do almost nothing, despite what afficionados like to say, most people don't want to line in a shipping container, and you can't cut up the inside of the typical McMansion and maintain the kind of privacy people buy those things for to begin with.

Housing can't be both a financial product to be securitized and traded and also a place J6P can afford to live.  Why won't it happen?  Because Baby Boomers who own paid off McMansions would see the value of the property drop like a stone, and people who have a mortgage would go so far underwater they would drown.  TBTF Banks holding 30 year mmortgages would all go belly up as the securities that form their Tier 1 Capital structure dropped to 20 cents on the dollar.  It won't happen because all the people who have benefited from this system would lose most of their wealth an because our financial system is built on it.  It will take a full on crash of the RE market for it to change.  Keep your fingers crossed.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/5/28/how-affordable-housing-distracts-people-from-housing-affordability

How Affordable Housing Distracts People From Housing Affordability

RE