What Does “Affordable” Actually Mean?

Affordable housing is one of those phrases we use all the time, often without stopping to ask what it actually means.

When we started Gratitude Village, affordability was one of our core values from the beginning. I knew I didn't want to create a beautiful cohousing community that only people with significant financial resources could afford to join. I had spent years looking at cohousing communities myself and had already discovered how quickly the numbers could put many of the most desirable communities out of reach (see the blog Who has Historically had Access to the Cohousing Lifestyle?) If we were going to go through the enormous effort of creating something new, I wanted us to do better. What I didn't understand then was just how complicated “affordable” would become once we actually started trying to build housing.

There is an understandable assumption that developers have a lot of control over the eventual price of a home. If a home is too expensive, build it smaller. Choose less expensive finishes. Reduce the developer's profit. Find cheaper land. Those things can certainly matter, but after spending the past year working with architects, engineers, financial consultants, city staff, lenders, contractors, and other housing professionals, I have learned how much of the cost of a new home has very little to do with the home itself, and building smaller doesn't necessarily translate to less expensive.

Before we build a single house, we have to prepare the land. That means roads, utilities, drainage, grading, water and sewer connections, engineering, permitting, and other infrastructure. We have architectural and civil engineering costs, development fees, financing costs, legal expenses and a long list of professional services required to get from an empty piece of land to a neighborhood where people can actually live. Many of those costs don't change very much whether the eventual homeowner has a household income of $60,000 or $160,000. Once all of that is done, we still have to build the house.

This has created one of the biggest tensions in our work. We want Gratitude Village to be accessible to households with a range of incomes, yet wanting that doesn't magically make the cost of development disappear. Every time our financial models change, we are balancing two very real numbers: what it costs to build the community and what future residents can reasonably afford to pay. Those numbers don't always meet, and the gap between them is where the real work of affordability begins.

For a long time, I thought about affordable housing primarily in terms of price. I am beginning to think that is too simple. A $400,000 home might be affordable for one household and completely impossible for another. Even two households earning similar incomes may have very different circumstances depending on debt, savings, family size, caregiving responsibilities, disability-related expenses, or whether they have accumulated equity from a previous home.

There is also an important difference between being able to purchase a home and being able to afford to live there over time. Mortgage payments matter, but so do utilities, insurance, property taxes, HOA expenses, maintenance and unexpected repairs. Building a less expensive home that costs significantly more to heat, cool, maintain or modify later doesn't necessarily make housing more affordable. Sometimes spending more upfront on energy efficiency, durability, accessibility or thoughtful design can reduce costs for the person who lives there for years afterward. That matters to us because our goal has never been to build the cheapest housing possible.

We are trying to create homes that people with a wide range of incomes can afford to buy and continue to afford, while also creating a neighborhood that is accessible, sustainable and intentionally designed for connection. Those goals sometimes support one another. Other times, they create difficult choices, which is why we are exploring a number of different ways to close the gap.

Mixed-income housing is one of them. Instead of creating a community where every home is priced at exactly the same affordability level, we can create homes at different price points. We are exploring public and philanthropic funding that could help reduce the cost of some homes. We created the Equity Access Fund because even within cohousing, the cost of becoming involved during the development process can become a barrier long before someone ever applies for a mortgage. We are also looking at different construction methods, home sizes, building types, financing structures and partnerships that might allow us to reduce costs without giving up the things that make Gratitude Village fundamentally different. None of these is a magic solution.

That may be the biggest thing I have learned about affordable housing. There isn't one lever you pull to make a home affordable. It is dozens of decisions, made over several years, involving people, organizations and systems that weren't necessarily designed for what we're trying to create. A city may be thinking about infrastructure. A lender is evaluating risk. A contractor is dealing with labor and material costs. A future resident is wondering whether the monthly payment will fit into their budget. Our job is to keep all of those realities in the room while continuing to ask a very simple question: Who will actually be able to live here?

That question has become increasingly important to me because housing is about much more than getting a roof over someone's head. Where we live affects our transportation, our energy costs, our relationships, our health, our independence and our ability to participate in community. Homeownership can also provide stability and an opportunity to build equity over time. When people have very few housing choices, they often don't get to prioritize those other things. They choose from whatever they can afford.

I don't want affordability at Gratitude Village to become a number we put on a website or a box we check because a certain percentage of homes meets a particular definition. I want us to keep asking whether the people we hoped to include when we started this journey still have a realistic path into the community we are creating. I also know we won't solve the entire affordable housing crisis in one neighborhood in Brighton. We will make compromises. Some ideas we are exploring will work and others won't. There will probably be moments when the numbers force us to make decisions I wish we didn't have to make and I think there is value in being honest about that tension.

Creating more affordable homeownership isn't simply about finding a way to build cheaper houses. It requires looking at the entire system that determines what housing costs, who can finance it, who receives assistance, who carries the risk, and ultimately who gets the opportunity to own a home. For Gratitude Village, “affordable” is becoming less of a price point and more of a question we have to keep asking throughout the development process: Can the people we say we are building this community for actually afford to be part of it? If the answer isn't yes, we still have work to do.

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