Value With No Values

Affordable housing transforms the social task of producing housing for need into the supply of a commodity exchanged at price. Affordable housing can only assuage need if it is acquired as a commodity. The value we place on housing is realised only in the act of exchange. The affordable housing sector has become one small niche of the real-estate development industry, and affordability serves as a distorted brand name for a package of real-estate practices rather than any reflection of costs. This chapter explores the construction of affordable housing in its various commodity forms. It identifies the sources of capital and revenue funding, the financing of the development process, the grants, loans, and tax credits that underwrite construction costs. It follows the flow of value in the form of interest-bearing capital as it discounts the price of affordable housing before returning to investors as interest. I ask, what happens to the goal of decent housing for all when price becomes the decisive criteria.