PITTSBURGH (TNS) — A friend who develops affordable housing in and around Pittsburgh once told me about a young woman who was interested in buying a subsidized home.

The deal was tremendous: a sale price far below market value, and over $200,000 below construction costs. It would amount to a six-figure infusion of wealth, the kind of asset that could become the foundation of generational financial stability.

Yet the woman’s friends and family discouraged her from buying it. She would be mad to give up her Section 8 voucher, they argued. That, not a deed of sale, was her golden ticket to stability.

This story has stuck with me as one of America’s most affordable cities confronts an affordability crisis that has led to everything from neighborhood upheavals to pricing-out young families from middle-class neighborhoods.

NEO-FEUDALISM

A system that excludes large numbers of willing people from homeownership can’t sustain local communities and a free society — especially when landlords increasingly aren’t neighbors, but faceless corporations or a distant government.

Such a system stifles ambition, erodes social stability and limits people’s ability to commit to a community, including raising a family, while leading to the atrophying of the skills and habits of independence.

As for-sale housing prices wildly outpace wages, permanent tenancy is becoming the best life to which anyone can aspire. A permanent and expanding underclass becoming dependent for shelter on corporate and government landlords is our version of a social and economic system we thought we’d left behind.

Today’s emerging feudalism is a degraded version of the original. At least in the Middle Ages, there were strict expectations of mutual service between lords and serfs. The former, for instance, were expected to protect the latter by force of arms, sometimes with their lives.

Real estate fund executives, or for that matter housing authority leaders, feel no such obligation to their serfs.

Instead, the executives see housing as nothing more than an asset on a balance sheet. How they deploy it — for rent, for sale, subdivided, torn down and replaced — depends entirely on what will make the numbers on the spreadsheet go up the most. The effects on households and neighborhoods aren’t relevant to the calculation.

The public-sector leaders see housing as numbers to place in glossy annual reports so they can justify their jobs and salaries. Their system warehouses people in income traps that discourage personal and financial growth.

For example, Pittsburgh’s IZ (inclusionary zoning) ordinance stipulates that tenants must leave their homes once their incomes exceed 80% of the area median income. And where will they live if they reach 85% AMI?

Neither the rental nor for-sale markets, nor affordable housing crusaders, cater to this middle range. These tenants work hard and raise their income, and the reward is a sharp drop in security and predictability. Safer to settle for serfdom for the long haul.

NOWHERE TO GO

Over time, the expectation of owning a home and the habits of homeownership — long-term saving, DIY maintenance, the pride of owning a tangible stake in the community — simply vanish from entire communities and classes of people. This is perhaps the most important part of creating the permanent, dependent underclass that many of the lords want to create or, at least, are indifferent to creating while their system seems to work on their own terms.

In the U.S., of course, this underclass developed in a particular way along racial lines. In Northern cities during and after the Great Migration, redlining prevented Black people from accessing promising neighborhoods or homeownership at all. Then (at least partially) well-meaning people cleared Black-majority “slums” and replaced them with government rental projects.

They often barred able-bodied men from living in these developments, on the theory that a family with a working-age man shouldn’t need government housing. But there was nowhere else for these families to live. So, through government regulation, a cycle of fatherlessness was begun that persists to this day.

And a cycle of serfdom, where even thinking about homeownership — even subsidized homeownership, which amounts to a huge gift of equity — is considered alarming and imprudent.

At least with a Section 8 voucher, you know you’ll have a place forever. It might not be a great place or even a good or decent place, but you’ve got it. Aspiring to anything better is for dreamers.

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

Affordable homeownership, not just generic affordable housing, which so often means an expansion of serfdom rather than an expansion of opportunity, is the biggest economic challenge in America today.

Building additional supply is essential. That means reducing regulations and reforming financing systems that channelize housing into either single-family homes or mid- to high-rises. There are many other ways to build that would suit the present moment, such as tri- and quadruplexes and backyard cottages, that our laws and other systems aren’t designed to support.

At the same time, targeted programs that assist with everything from down payments to financing to the sticker price are essential for breaking the cycle of serfdom in long-marginalized communities as well as among the growing number of people who simply can’t imagine being able to afford a home — and risk joining the class of permanent, generational tenants.

On the other hand, every renter converted to a homeowner is the potential progenitor of a family where the habits of homeownership can be formed and passed down — and the sinews of society remade.

(Brandon McGinley is the editorial page editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)

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