Question: How can we make sure housing is affordable for residents? Both for renters and homeowners?
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Karen DeVINNEY
The answer is not more enormous apartment complexes; we’ve been building those at an alarming rate for a decade and rents have not gone down. In fact, research published online in the journal Urban Studies last December noted that rents in upzoned areas of New York actually went up and evidence of gentrification also increased.
The Affordable Housing Toolkit provides many suggestions for providing a diversity of housing options to lower prices, including encouraging infill, funding repairs of existing homes, and educating builders on federal subsidies if they provide affordable housing.
We need a broad range of housing types, and we already have a path toward that goal.
Since increased building costs are passed down to renters, we also need to make sure that any reductions in building costs result in lower rents.
Suzi RuMOHR
Rapidly increasing housing costs are largely due to increases in the cost of land, construction materials, and an insufficient number of homes to accommodate the people who want to live in Denton.
Denton cannot directly control the cost of land or construction materials. However, it can control the amount of land or construction materials required per home. It can also control how many homes are allowed per property. To make meaningful improvements on housing costs, it’s important for city leaders to have a basic understanding of housing economics.
In Denton, empty properties within Loop 288 cost roughly $300,000+ per acre in single-family zoning areas. A single-family home costs $200+ per square foot to construct. An 1,800 sq ft single family home built on a 0.33 acre lot costs $460,000 or more. If that single-family home were a duplex with two 900 sq ft homes, the cost drops to $230,000 per home. Additionally, new construction is more expensive than repurposing existing buildings.
One of the most impactful things the city can do to improve housing affordability for homeowners and renters is to allow homeowners the flexibility to add lower-cost rental space to their existing home. This allows homeowners to generate income from the property where they live while providing lower-cost, lower-impact housing that blends in with the neighborhood.
To lower the bar to homeownership, city leadership must identify why new starter homes are rarely built anymore. Once the “why” is identified, the city should take concrete actions to allow and encourage smaller, more affordable starter homes that help young families and professionals become homeowners.
Margie ELLIS
We can focus efforts there during the budget process when we set the tax rate. The tax rate is what drives what we pay in property taxes. People can get caught up in the value of property, when it is the tax rate that determines what one pays in property taxes. Council raised the tax rate this past Fiscal Year, which means tax bills were higher even if property value remained unchanged or went down. This can then drive rental prices up when landlords try to make up for this increase in taxes.
A new housing stock report came out recently from the city that shows we are meeting or exceeding our projected growth needs for housing. Multi-fam is far outpacing single-family homes, so we must be mindful of this. But keeping on task with the goal can help prices as we deal with supply and demand.