One more point on the Village on Little Texas. As I noted, the Austin Housing Finance Corporation plans to provide a subsidy of $5,000 or so per year per affordable unit.* Austin's cost of money is roughly 5%, the interest it pays on bonds. A $5,000/year subsidy is thus equivalent to a $100,000 lump-sum investment, assuming the $5,000/year subsidy increases with inflation.
That's a lot of money. At this price, $1 million buys just 10 affordable units. Austin has 300,000 occupied housing units. An extra ten units here or there is not even a rounding error.
$100,000 is too much to pay for one unit of affordable housing. Good non-profits can do much more with much less by matching city money with private donations and federal grants. We have no business spending $100,000 per unit if a non-profit can procure an affordable unit for $10,000.
*I should be clear that this is my estimate; I'm using the reported difference between market rents and subsidized rents. It could be that the 50% MFI units are receiving a subsidy of just, say, $3,000 per year. It would be nice if AHFC told us, rather than making us guess.
