November 2015 was an important month for law student Matthew Charles Cardinale: A bill he had drafted as an independent study project passed the Atlanta City Council by unanimous vote. After working on housing issues in Atlanta for eight years, Cardinale was keenly aware of how many people struggle to find affordable places to live, and he believed his proposal offered a solution: affordable housing impact statements.
Just as environmental impact statements assess the consequences of potential development on the natural and human environment, affordable housing impact statements, or AHIS, require cities to study how proposed policies might affect the ability of residents to find or keep affordable housing.
According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, about 12 million US households currently spend more than half their income on housing. A wide range of government decisions and policies can affect housing affordability, from permits for new developments to corporate tax breaks to grant applications for federally subsidized housing. AHIS legislation like Cardinale’s promises to put the issue at the center of municipal policy.
The idea is not unprecedented. Austin, Tex., has been using AHIS since 2007, and as Cardinale learned while drafting the Atlanta legislation, Texas developers have begun to respond with more affordable housing. But although Austin requires developers to describe the potential impact of their projects, they do not have to collect quantitative data on affordable units lost or gained.
For Atlanta, Cardinale wanted numbers. His “scorecard” approach to AHIS, which requires that developers work with city staffers to determine a proposed project’s overall effect on affordable housing, grew out of his experience as a lowincome housing advocate. “I got really tired of asking the same questions every time a development was proposed,” he says. “How many units will there be at this affordability level? How many units at that affordability level? We don’t have to ask these questions anymore, because developers have to provide the answers.”
Set to take effect in July, Atlanta’s AHIS ordinance not only requires developers to estimate gains and losses in affordable housing likely to result from their proposals but also requires the city to consider those factors when initiating federally subsidized projects. In most cities, Cardinale says, the greatest number of people struggling to find affordable housing earn 30 percent of the median income for the area, but cities increasingly build for families earning 80 percent of area median income. In light of this mismatch, Cardinale hopes that having AHIS on file will encourage policymakers to learn about the effects of their decisions on housing trends over time.
Meanwhile, interest in AHIS is spreading. Ordinances are under consideration in New Orleans and Pittsburgh, and Cardinale has spoken with officials in ten other cities.
“Historically, we’ve been in a situation of approving or disapproving projects without understanding the long-term impact that it’s going to have on those already living in that community and those living nearby,” says Pittsburgh City Councilman Daniel Lavelle, whose AHIS legislation is currently under consideration by the city’s planning department. “Having an affordable housing impact statement will allow us to better analyze the long-term effect of the housing before we actually approve it, or it will also allow us to say, ‘Wait a minute, maybe we want to include on the front end some additional affordable housing.’”
University of San Francisco professor of urban affairs Rachel Brahinsky believes AHIS could improve analysis of how economic development affects housing in her area, too. “The city [San Francisco] gave Twitter and several other tech companies tens of millions of dollars to incentivize these companies’ development in a particular area,” she says. “It would have been interesting to look at the impact that this development would have on affordability in the area, and then to do a cost-benefit analysis that accounts for the demonstrated need for affordable housing.” AHIS, she adds, also might provide data on the positive impact of inclusionary zoning laws, which require developers to build a certain number of affordable units or pay into a fund to create affordable housing elsewhere.
But as Brahinsky and Cardinale caution, the AHIS process is only as powerful as the public that participates in it. Calls for environmental impact statements have met with bitter opposition from powerful commercial interests and their teams of lawyers, a challenge that is also likely to face AHIS. The real test will be whether citizens mobilize to hold their cities accountable. “To make a system of affordable housing impact statements successful,” Brahinsky says, “you need to have a very active public that shows up at meetings.”
Read more stories by Liz Carlisle.