This tax credit is actually being used by a wealthy developer in financing the project in my area that I mentioned. This lowers the federal income tax this developer would have to pay, but it does not eliminate the property taxes owed on property.

I have been looking in my area to see what types of property tax breaks there are for owners of property of affordable housing, and it isn't straightforward. One of the issues is that the local government, school districts, and other taxing authorities would prefer for the property to be used in a way that will provide tax revenue for them. I did see that an affordable housing complex is being built in my area with some special funding--90% of the complex is one-bedroom, 7% is two-bedroom, and 3% is market-rate one bedroom units. The cost per unit for construction is $190,000; this seems pricey given that there are a number of 3-bedroom homes for sell for about $200,0000 here.

I did a little bit of investigation of what it would take in my area to purchase a rental and provide affordable housing. I can purchase a property for $200.000 to rent. The median income in my area is about $33,000. 30% of that would be $9,900 I could charge and be within 30% of the median income. The property taxes on the unit would be about $6,000 per year. That would leave me $3,900 per year to cover other expenses (roofing, AC repair, fresh paint, etc.) and any profit. Considering that I could put $200,000 in my savings account and earn 4% without risk or headaches and earn $8000 per year, I cannot see that it would be financially feasible to purchase and rent this property. High property taxes are a barrier to providing affordable housing.

I am not understanding the overall arrangement. Party A is paying non-profit B to provide services for person C and non-profit B contracts with Party D to provide these services to get Person C involved in the community? Is that correct? That sounds like an odd situation.

I don't know how well the operate in other areas, but I have been impressed with the intiaitives and projects of Habitat for Humanity near where I have lived to address affordable housing opportunities.

But, there are still a range of issues. Are we discussing how to we make sure there is zero-cost housing for someone without a job? Are we discussing the fact that the family with two kids can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment at less than 30% of income, but cannot afford to buy a three-bedroom house? Are we talking about a 20-something who can share an apartment with a roommate at 25% of their income, but an apartment without a roommate would be more than 30%?....

I think a prerequisite for designing a model for addressing affordable housing is defining what is meant by "affordable housing". To some people that means housing for typically homeless individuals who have no job or income. To some people addressing the affordable housing issue means that a person in their early 20's should be able to find an apartment near their place of employment that does not require them to have a roommate. To others it means that a family can purchase a three-bedroom home on the income of one wage earner. And there are many other standards people would use as their definition of "affordable housing." Those are very different issues with very different possible solutions (and those solutions can be at odds with each other.)

I don't have any good alternatives, but I think I figured out that one person in my house was using the bins to pull the door open more widely and tugging on the bins to shut the doors which was leading to breakage.

At most airports, a boarding pass can be printed at a kiosk without having to see an agent. Although I have the airline Apps on my phone, I still like to have a paper boarding pass, and on many international flights they have been printed whether I have wanted them or not.

I am in Texas. Previously I lived in the San Antonio area; although it is a major toursit destination, I am unaware of people buying condos to rent as VRBO in numbers large enough to impact the real estate market (unless perhaps condos right in the center of downtown, which isn't where families usually want to live). Anyone I have known there who has owned a condo has had difficulty selling; I agree that if they lowered the price they would sell more quickly. I am now in north Texas. I live in an area directly impacted by university student housing, which brings its own issues. But, in the broader area, I find the same issues with the condo/townhome properties. When DH and I looked, one of the things we found that many of these properties were multi-level or did not have easy access from parking into the unit, often making them impractical for older buyers to consider, Another thing that impacts the pricing of property here is that we have relatively high property taxes, especially if the property is not owner-occupied with a homestead exemption. When I first moved to this area, I rented and could see that about 2/3 of the rent I paid went to covering the owner's property tax bill.

I am curious as to what size of smaller houses people would want to buy in your area, if they were available: about how many sq feet? how many bedrooms? baths? And, how much does that vary from what is available? In other words, are most of the houses in your area 3000 sq ft and people want 2000 sq ft? Or, are most of the houses 2000 sq ft and people want 1500 sq ft, etc.? I have also found that it is difficult even to talk about sq feet size in different parts of the US. I live in an area where sq footage looks high, but when people from other parts of the country move here and say "but where is the basement?" they are used to significantly more space from unfinished basement which doesn't count in the sq footage, but we don't have basements here.

Where I am condos, duplexes, and townhouses will sit on the market forever. One of the reasons that I would be very hesitant to buy one is that the resell is a nightmare. It depends upon how "smaller home" is measured, but some of the smaller--two bedroom one bath houses with no dishwasher, microwave, etc. sell quickly as teardowns, not because people are wanting to live in them. Two bedroom houses that are too nice to teardown sell very slowly here.

What is the evidence that the truth is there is higher demand for smaller homes? Real estate markets are highly location-centric, but I am not aware of people in my area wanting smaller homes. I cannot remember a time of hearing someone (either younger people or older people) saying that they are looking for a smaller home and cannot find one.

In my area, condos and townhomes are generally not lower cost/more affordable options. DH and I have looked into condos and duplexes and have found that their cost/sq foot is higher than a single-family home. In addition, they are often associated with high fees--security, landscaping, property management, etc.

I haven't seen statistics on variation in size, but the average size was definitely smaller 100 years ago. Even in 1970, only 49% of the houses in the US had 3 or more bedrooms. The median sq footage of a house built before 1960 is only about 1500 (as it stands today after any expansion). There may have been a high standard deviation because of a few very large houses, but the majority of the houses in the US were small two-bedroom houses

Does the .pdf appear one time in the entire spreadsheet? Or once in each row? If it is once in each row, is it always in the same column?

Is there one occasion of a ".pdf" appearing in the row? Or, might it appear multiple times and you want to know all of the cells in which it appears?

Housing varies widely from family to family and location to location. It is easy to read a lot more into these headline/statistics than what the story is really telling us. What does it mean that baby boomers own a larger percentage of large homes than they did in the past? First of all "large home" is defined in this study as 3 or more bedrooms--so my parents 1600sq ft house was a "large home" but an 1800 2 bedroom house with a study and an exercise room is a "small home" These statistics do not necessarily point to "elderly" living in 3000 sq ft houses. DH and I are baby boomers living in a "large home"--two blocks from my work--we count in the statistic. Also, it is easy to jump from statistics that we are short on affordable housing in the US, when these statistics are based on the availability for a household living below the poverty line to find housing that is no more than 30% of their income to "we are short for middle class families to find a 3-bedroom home with a yard, in a good school district in Seattle that they can afford". Both are significant issues, but they are very different issues with different causes and different possible solutions.

One of the colleges I applied to had a one page "why are you interested in attending Univ X?" (which I did not go to); that was the closest thing I ha to write to an application essay. Neither one of my children (who are in their 20s) wrote an essay about a future possibility. One wrote something about "how do you define success" and the other wrote something about a "significant experience".

If you are going to make a distinction between sharing profits with workers of the company and suppliers to the company, you must also consider how companies decide whether to use another company to provide a service or whether they hire their own employees to to provide the service/work. Suppose you have Pharmaceutical Co A and Pharma Co B. A scientist at Pharma A develops a vaccine that results in a significant increase in the company's profits. The person cleaning the floor at Co. A is working no differently and contributing to the profitability of the company no differently than the person cleaning the floor at Co. B. Should the person doing this job at A be compensated more than the person at B doing the same job, simply because the person happened to be lucky enough to be employed by the company where the scientist made the discovery? Should the person doing the job at B receive less than the person at A because that person was unlucky enough to choose to work at a company where a scientist didn't make the breakthrough? And, what if one company hires cleaners as its own workers and the other company hires an outside cleaning service? If the person cleaning the floor should be compensated (through profit sharing) for the contribution to the company whose floor is being cleaned, why would the contractual arrangement of employment change this?

Ben and Jerry's was a privately-held company. The salary of the top employees was originally no more than 5 times the lowest salary, then it was increased to 7 times the lowest salary. When Ben Cohen retired (in 1994), the company could not find a CEO who was willing to come to work for the company at that salary and the salary structure was abandoned. When the company was sold, the original owners (who did not take a high salary when they were working for the company) received a large payment; thus, instead of taking a high salary while they were working, they delayed the compensation until they sold the company (and the workers did not receive a percentage of that compensation).

There are issues such as what is fair compensation and how would it be determined, what is a fair return on capital, what is a fair return for taking risk which raise interesting ethical issues and are worthy of discussion by society. The answers to those questions are much more philosophical than mathematical. Those questions must be addressed before any mathematical formula is derived. Jumping to a formula before the other issues are discussed can lead to odd and perverse outcomes. For example, companies do not have to pay dividends. They can keep the money in retained earnings and the owners of the company then profit from the increase in the stock price (capital gains) rather than receiving dividends. Dividends are not considered expenses of a company but interest payments are, and dividends are paid out of profits. Say a company has $1m in profits and pays $250,000 in dividends, paying a % of profits and dividends would mean paying a % of $1.25 million--with the $250,000 being counted twice. This scheme would change business decision making; companies would be more likely to finance their project using debt rather than shareholder equity. This would change the capital structure of companies, making them more risky (which would impact the stability of workers jobs).

The interaction between income, wealth, and lifestyle is complex and there are many different situations that individuals find themselves in. Many people really do struggle to pay medical bills, buy food, pay for childcare, and save. At the same time there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck who justify spending $10 at Starbucks and $500 on a purse because it isn't enough to matter. However, if you put $10 per month in a retirement account earning 7% for 45 years (ages 20-65) you will have about $38,000 in the account when you retire (if you earn 8% that increases to $53,000). That is only about 33 cents per day of savings. Making those small decisions at the margin, especially when young, can really add up.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2020, 58.1% of Americans between the ages of 56-64 owned a retirement account. If a man works and has a retirement account, although his wife may have a claim to benefits from it, he is considered the owner of the account; if the wife has not worked, or has worked without contributing to a retirement account, she is counted in the 42% without account ownership. it is difficult to determine how many people do not have access to retirement savings because "ownership" of the account is attributed to one person.

"Living paycheck to paycheck" is an expression that means different things to different people and is not a precise economic description. In general terms, it refers to people who would have difficulty in paying their bills if they lost their employment. There is no set length of time of how long it would be before the family has difficulty paying a bill. Someone whose savings would be deplleted after 3 to 6 months of unemployment can still be considered "living paycheck to paycheck". In the general sense of the term, if we work for a laving, we are living paycheck to paycheck. The lifestlye that working provides for us is not really the relevant measure.