Affordable Housing in Hawaii: Part I
What’s the problem, and why do we even have it?
What is affordable housing?
There’s no crisp definition that everyone agrees on, but we can stand on the shoulders of giants. According to the State of Hawaii:
Generally, housing is considered “affordable” when costs are at or below 30% of household income.
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says:
…the 30 percent threshold also became the standard for owner-occupied housing, and it remains the indicator of affordability for housing in the United States. Keeping housing costs below 30 percent of income is intended to ensure that households have enough money to pay for other nondiscretionary costs
The big picture is that we’d like housing costs, which means rents and mortgages, to be less than or equal to $3 out of every $10 that someone earns. We do this to avoid a ‘burden’, which practically means that if you’re paying too much in rent, you’re having trouble making ends meet. To make the rest of the rent, the government subsidizes the difference between the fair market rent and the 30% portion actually paid by the render.
who gets to live in affordable housing?
Different parts of the government have funding in their budgets to support the creation and maintenance of affordable housing. An important definition you’ll need as we keep going is the Area Median Income (AMI), which is the ‘…midpoint of a region’s income distribution – half of families in a region earn more than the median and half earn less than the median.’
This number will change over time, but fractions of this number are used as cutoffs to establish eligibility for assistance. Here are a set of figures compiled by the State of Hawaii for 2020 for a 3-person household. Please visit the link to explore different numbers of household members.
The Area Median Income is, by definition, 100% $91,450
Low Income is 80% of the AMI $86,800
Very Low Income is 50% of the AMI $54,250
Extremely Low Income is 30% of the AMI $32,550
Depending on where the funding for a particular affordable housing development came from, this means different things for the renters. You can visit one of the project pages on our website to learn about just one example of the combinations of different income limits and the number of units available.
How did we get here?
It’s dishonest to point to a single reason, but there are a couple that are generally agreed upon.
Not enough housing.
We’ll explore these in greater detail in the near future.