| Affordability | |
| Affordability & Housing | |
| Affordability did not figure dominantly in the early days of manufactured housing. The first manufactured homes, so called "demountable buildings," were developed for easy transport to remote colonial and frontier settlements. Travel trailers originated as recreational accessories. Though wartime innovations made trailers quick and easy to build, their use as emergency housing derived as much from mobility as from affordability. While architects including Buckminster Fuller were suggesting that industrialized processes and materials could make affordable living space, their proposals were not widely accepted by a postwar public whose hunger for more stable housing had been sharpened by the deprivations of World War Two. For this generation, aesthetics were singularly important: affordable housing had to look like a house. Conformance to suburban conventions (following the widespread acceptance of the ranch-style home) makes manufactured housing a viable form, but only after consolidation of production in the 1950s made it truly affordable. |
The twinned terms "affordable housing" figure prominently in American public policy debates. But quantitative measure of affordability is frequently obscured by emotional appeals,
social impressions, and imprecise qualitative statements. For example, the Housing Act of 1949 declared a decent home in a suitable environment as a national goal that every American family. If human well-being depends on adequate housing, then decency is an important standard, albeit difficult to measure.
Answers to questions of adequacy, decency, and affordability are contentious, in part because housing is not simply shelter. Housing acts as a register of the American psyche. At the national level, economists invoke housing construction starts as a prime indicator of economic growth. Local responses to homelessness are viewed as a gauge of civic compassion and responsibility.
In spite of its importance to national discourse, consistent quantitative definitions of affordable or adequate housing elude most Americans. At the same time, however, the language of affordability (at least) has become quite well defined over years of policy debate. |
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