Source: The Real Deal —
One of the biggest reasons affordable housing isn’t available in the most expensive cities in the U.S. is because those localities aren’t permitting enough homes to be built in them, the Atlantic reports.
Some areas have allowed housing to keep up with population growth, such as the South, but others, including San Francisco, New York and Boston, have as a matter of policy, made it more difficult for the less affluent to live in.
As it stands experts have a difficult time answering the question of what it would take to make so-called superstar cities on the East and West coasts affordable for workers without college degrees or families with kids and people living on fixed incomes.
But what is evident is the number of units needed to be built in those cities is huge.
“They’re massive,” David Garcia, the policy director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, told the outlet. “And they’re all a massive undercount.”