Posted on Friday, March 14, 2025
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by Andrew Shirley
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0 Comments
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Progressive politicians who run America’s biggest cities often boast about how much they’ve invested in “affordable housing.” But multi-billion-dollar bills for affordable housing units are hardly affordable for the taxpayers forced to pay them, even as the affordability crisis grows more severe.
A since-deleted X post from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson last week is a case in point of this absurdity. “We have invested $11 billion in contracting to build 10,000 more units to offer affordable housing,” Johnson bragged. He also repeated that claim in testimony before the House Oversight Committee.
But as one X user was quick to note, $11 billion for 10,000 units works out to $1.1 million per unit.
The median home price in Chicago? Just $350,000.
Amid all the talk of waste, fraud, and abuse consuming Washington, D.C., it only seems fair to train this same scrutiny on liberal city governments famous for spending enormous sums of money but failing to solve any problems. Chicago’s history with affordable housing projects paints a bleak picture and gives taxpayers little confidence that this latest investment will come close to justifying the staggering $11 billion price tag.
In February, for instance, Chicago proudly opened the 5th City Commons project, a 43-unit development in East Garfield Park. Despite the pomp and circumstance, the project proved to be a massive drain on the city’s resources. The development cost $38 million, averaging out to a whopping $884,000 per unit. A recent Chicago Tribune editorial notes that “there’s an existing 21-unit building nearby on the market for $150,000 per unit. Even with any necessary renovations, it would be a far cry from $884,000 per apartment.” Another proposed development would create 22 units for a cost of $20 million, nearly $1,000,000 per unit.
But Chicago is hardly the only Democrat-run city to pour enormous sums of money into “affordable housing” projects. New York City has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building “affordable” housing only to see its homeless population increase more than 50 percent in 2024 alone.
California is also famous for sinking billions of dollars into affordable housing while simultaneously having the largest homeless population in the nation. The LA Times reported in 2022 that “More than half a dozen affordable housing projects in California are costing more than $1 million per apartment to build, a record-breaking sum that makes it harder to house the growing numbers of low-income Californians who need help paying rent.”
The Cascade Policy Institute, a policy research center, has found that subsidized housing “costs about 20 percent more per square foot than unsubsidized homes.” Most of those subsidies go to overpaid developers. Back in 2015, two prominent affordable housing developers in Miami were charged with knowingly inflating the cost of construction projects to net more than $7 million in kickbacks.
Some affordable housing developers even have direct ties to the politicians dishing out the contracts to build the units in the first place. Last year, 70 public housing employees in New York were charged with accepting over $2 million in bribes in exchange for awarding $13 million in no-bid contracts.
Oftentimes, the affordable housing units that do get built don’t even go to the families that need them the most. The Mountain View Whisman School District in Silicon Valley spent $90 million (far above the original budget of $56 million) on a “teacher housing project” that turned into luxury apartments that are too expensive for most teachers.
Meanwhile, in Houston, Texas, the Midtown Development Authority acquired land in the Third Ward over the course of nearly 15 years to combat gentrification and develop affordable housing there. However, the authority’s largest expenditure was a $22 million office building, One Emancipation Center, which is underutilized for residential purposes.
What progressives fail to realize is that it is their own policies that made housing unaffordable in the first place. No amount of taxpayer-funded subsidies can cancel out onerous zoning laws and the ever-mounting costs of an endless sea of red tape. New construction projects routinely take years to receive final approval. The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley has reported that, over the past decade, the per-square-foot cost to construct multifamily homes in California has risen by 25 percent after adjusting for inflation.
New houses in liberal bastions like California must also meet certain “green” building standards, such as mandatory energy efficiency requirements under California’s Title 24 Energy Code, which requires solar panels on new homes and stricter insulation standards. The California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen) further mandates water conservation, sustainable materials, and improved indoor air quality. These regulations, while aimed at environmental sustainability, significantly increase construction costs, making housing even less affordable.
Just a generation ago, the dream of owning a home was attainable for virtually anyone who worked hard and saved wisely. Now, that dream seems more like a fantasy. But pouring billions of dollars into building affordable housing that only ever benefits a favored few will do nothing to solve the underlying problem of housing affordability that government policies created in the first place.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
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