A snippet of science news on nomenclature sparked a chain of ideas that took me from the Kuiper Belt to the problem of providing affordable housing in Portland.
Anyone under age 80 grew up learning that the solar system includes nine planets, ranging from Mercury to Pluto. When it was discovered, astronomers believed Pluto to be about 3600 miles in diameter, more or less comparable to Mercury in size. Later observations led astronomers to move their estimated downward, and when the Hubble Telescope finally got a good look at the planet, they concluded that Pluto is only 1413 miles across, and its satellite Charon 728 miles across.
The International Astronomical Union is meeting in Prague this month and one topic on the agenda is to define "planet." One proposed definition is that a planet is any object massive enough for gravity to shape it as a sphere and that orbits a star instead of something else. Any object of several hundred miles or more in diameter that's spherical and orbits the sun would qualify. Pluto would stay in the planetary club, but more than forty other objects in the solar system would be admitted, including Charon, a few asteroids, dozens of objects in the Kuiper Belt such as Sedna and Quaoar, and Rush Limbaugh. (Just kidding about that last one, but he does meet most of the definition.)
All that fuss reminded me of a riddle that Abraham Lincoln used to pose: "If you called the tail of a dog a leg, how many legs would a dog have?" he would ask. "Five," the mark would say. "No," Lincoln would answer, "calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one." Similarly, calling Pluto, or Charon, or Sedna, or Mr. Limbaugh as a planet doesn't make any of them one.
And calling a subsidy program an "affordable housing program" doesn't make it one, unless the result of the program is housing that someone making less than $X can afford, and then someone who actually makes less than $X moves into the housing. (In Santa Barbara, California, "$X" is $160,000 a year.) The Oregonian reported that since 1998, the City of Portland has spent $107 million on providing affordable housing, and has with those funds provided 2,212 dwelling units. Professor Bogdanski points out that this equals $48,372.51 per dwelling unit. Did these subsidies work? They certainly helped build the various buildings. I'd like to suggest, however, that the way to decide if these subsidies worked is not to see how many units were built as a result (though that helps) but to see how many of those units are still owned or rented by low-income households, and if there's a more effective way to spend $48,000 per dwelling to get low-income households into houses and apartments, which is (or should be) the real goal of an affordable housing program. A subsidized unit that's occupied by a high-income tenant or buyer doesn't help achieve the goal of the program.
For contrast, let's suppose we took $20,000 and lent it to a low-income renter to use to buy the renter's house, with $10,000 going toward the down payment and $10,000 going toward paint and repairs. The condition is that the $20,000 is a loan secured by a second mortgage on the house, not a gift, and has to be repaid without interest 10 years later or whenever the tenant sells the house. Some of the loans wouldn't be repaid, but a whole bunch of houses would be painted and fixed up and have first-time homeowners as occupants. I think a program like this would be more effective at getting low-income households into houses and it would have the side effect of improving some Portland neighborhoods.
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