But with apologies to the staff at Mother Jones, land and what is built on it are inextricable. We can’t imagine housing without land, even though many people rent their housing and own neither their shelter or the land under it.
CEO Diane Yentel [said] in an emailed statement[,] “Without a significant federal intervention, housing will continue to be out of reach for millions of renters.”
To crunch these numbers, the NLIHC relied on a common metric for housing affordability: a home is affordable if it requires workers to pay up to 30 percent of their monthly income in rent. Using this metric, NLIHC’s report found that workers would need to earn a little less than $52,000 per year—or $24.90 per hour—to afford a modest two-bedroom home, or at least $20.40 per hour to afford a one bedroom. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
I prefer a different metric, one that gets people out of the landlord’s game. How many years (at 2,000 hours/year) will you need to work to own a place of your own? At $24.90/hour, you would earn $49,800/year. To buy an $800,000 home (the current median price in Seattle), you would need to put every penny for 16 years to buy that. And people argue that $15/hr is too much. Ideally, it would be about 10,000 hours but where are the $300,000 homes in Seattle or other cities?
But we know that home prices are not the real metric: it’s land. In cities with huge lots (6,000 sq feet) and a slavish worship of single family homes on those big lots, you are setting a cap on the population that can buy in, turning the rest into renters or forcing them to live outside the city and commute in. Why you would want to pump local wages outside city limits to enrich neighboring communities is a question to ask your local city council. This is especially important when you consider than many of workers forced to live outside the city where they work are city or state workers: why could you take wages funded by local taxes and send them to be spent in other cities?
And the answer to the question above — “where are the $300,000 homes in Seattle or other cities?” — is that they are all over those cities. The tax records for King County — where Seattle is — make clear that where the assessments on housing have risen slowly over the years, the assessed value of land has sometimes exceeded the value of what is built on it. What makes housing unaffordable is the land under it. We have all the land we have ever had and will ever have but we can make far better use of it, to make a better life for everyone and generate more revenue for those cities.