The Dual Moon Shot
American affordable housing policy is the equivalent of asking an Apollo Program to prepare for a single flight to the Moon AND Mars.
Durham, North Carolina recently considered a zoning code reform that is specifically designed to restart the market for small-scale affordable home building. It is targeted at small builders who average fewer than ten homes per year, a scale that is the exclusive domain of the local practitioner.
The core affordable housing problem to be solved is two-fold: 1) no local is biting on the current affordable policy carrot, and 2) no one has ever built an unsubsidized home that qualified under the city’s definition of affordability. Put another way, no one was willing to take on a 30-year commitment without substantial subsidy.
It isn’t working.
But why? Durham’s builders identified an objection few advocates or politicians were aware of. They are not participating due to a fear of bureaucratic non-response:
What paperwork do I fill out when? Who do I file it with? What does the buyer need to complete?
What about when I sell? What burdens do my buyers have when they sell?
Most importantly, who in the city can help with this stuff when it doesn’t make sense? Are they tuned to the needs of a two-person building company that has neither lawyers nor compliance officers on staff?
Lacking certainty, builders are unwilling to attempt the journey. Even those fully committed to affordability shy away. That’s why incremental for-sale affordable housing was encouraged in the reforms known as Simplifying Codes for Affordable Development under provisions known as “The Affordable PATH”1.
While it sounds great, the journey is gargantuan. What builders are seeking blessings for is the equivalent of taking not one but two moonshots.
Compliant builders have to:
Profitably build & sell a home at a price point no one in Durham has seen in decades and
Find a buyer who exists in a very narrow and limited buyer pool where they are both below an income threshold and ready, willing, and able to qualify through a HUD Rule-5 compliant certifying agency.
That’s a lot to ask. And potentially impossible to execute.
These dual moonshots must be executed sequentially without failure. It’s like JFK saying, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade”... (pause for dramatic effect) “...and while you boys are up there, we’re going to need you to stop by Mars, too.”
What goes from a 1% chance of success quickly goes to .0001%.
But there’s more. One reality of nationalizing the affordable housing industry is that politicians and affordable housing advocacy organizations are constantly looking for ways to prove how much they are committed to affordability. In the moonshot metaphor’s case, it’s the equivalent of adding requirements perspicuously unrelated to the primary task at hand:
“OK, I get it; we want to go to the moon. But is the shuttle sustainable?
It’s important to me that our astronaut heroes are comfortable, so can we make sure we codify a minimum capsule size?
What about engagement? I’d also like for the Cape Canaveral community to be able to conduct a discretionary review of the rocket's aesthetics, just so they can feel like it’s their program, too.”
.0001% quickly goes to .000000000000000000001%. Sure, the monkey at a typewriter will deliver War & Peace, eventually. But hope is not a strategy.
So, the conversation needs to change. First we need to recognize that most of the people talking about going to the moon really have not the slightest clue how to get to the moon. They are not wrong or bad people, but sometimes they are not helpful. There is a difference between cheerleading and engineering, and the more we let Sally Ann from Sugarland dictate the flightpath, the less likely that bird gonna fly.
Second, as we form a clearer dichotomy between the classes of doers and cheerers, we should celebrate both. The engineers need support, particularly our astronaut-builders. They need world-class training, they need flags, they need events, and they need cupcakes. They need supportive families.
Think about it: If a city is not building any homes below $400,000, and a brave young soul commits an attempt to build new homes for half that, then we should treat them like Chuck Yeager.
They are taking on an extreme risk. They risk bankruptcy. They deserve to be treated like someone who is risking death. They exist in pursuit of a vision greater than themselves. Offer them godspeed.
Lastly, we just need to recognize how hard this is. It requires politicians, in particular, to not overload the ship with more weight—no more unnecessary, mission-unrelated load. In any ambitious and unprecedented campaign, we have to eliminate absolutely everything that isn’t absolutely necessary.
Whenever attempting something complex, leaders should seek to eliminate variables. In affordable housing terms, that would be the length of affordability commitment. Until the moon is achieved, discussing anything else is just a distraction. Engineers must obsessively build for efficiency by saying “no” to everything except items essential to the primary task at hand. For any moonshot to work, there is little room for negotiation on this front.
The paradigm shift largely requires depoliticizing housing, which requires more courage from an elected leader than one might think. It requires politicians to cede back power to private interests willingly, and abdication is something humans in power struggle to do. It requires acknowledgment of civic failure combined with a confidence in an unknown. It requires a leap of faith. When the leaders do get it, it will look like this:
Let's be honest. We have failed. We are not building affordable homes. And now we have someone here before us who wants to do exactly that. Someone who is ready, willing, and able to build affordable homes. I do not know if they will succeed. I do not know if their business will survive the attempt. But I support it. And thank them for it. And I am inspired by it. We choose to build an affordable city. We chose to build an affordable city in this decade. Not because it is easy but because it is hard.
Those would be the sounds signaling the first human steps into the final frontier, a hope for and communal pursuit of sustainable & affordable cities for all.
1 The Affordable PATH was pulled from the amendments prior to passage in November of 2023.