In 2018, Austin adopted a “preference policy” to sell homes to families displaced by gentrification. Six months ago, the city finally got around to actually putting a house on the market. It remains unsold, despite the fact that the house is selling for about 40 percent of Austin’s median sales price. The program is just another folly in Austin.
The city has twenty-four houses that it intends to sell under the program. At the current pace of sales, it will take more than a decade to unload all of the properties. And in the meantime, taxpayers will have the honor of paying for upkeep and maintenance on the houses.
A manager with Austin’s Housing and Planning Department, explained why the house hasn’t sold. “Typically it’s lack of credit, poor credit or lack of assets or their debt-to-income ratio,” she said. In other words, these families do not have the financial resources for home ownership, even with a deeply discounted sales price.
However, the sales price is only one part of home ownership. A homeowner must also pay for insurance, property taxes, and repairs and maintenance. If a family must struggle financially to even purchase a home, it is unlikely that it will have the resources to pay the other costs of home ownership. As with other policies intended to help low-income families purchase a home, Austin’s “preference policy” will ultimately harm the very people it is intended to benefit.
This is the kind of silliness that often results when government implements a policy that it has no legitimate reason to adopt. Rather than accept the fact that market conditions change, the city is attempting to ignore economic reality. As demand for housing in central Austin has increased, so has the cost of housing. It is a simple matter of supply and demand. The city wants to evade this fact.
Even if the city manages to sell the properties, it will be helping a small number of families at the expense of all taxpayers in the city. The many must sacrifice for the few in another folly in Austin.