Pitfalls of Affordable Housing Plague Workers

One of the curious features of affordable housing is that units designated as "affordable" are often beyond the means of working people to afford.Boston Globe reporter Miles Howard detailed his saga of trying to stay in Boston by finding an apartment he can afford. He's lucky enough to be living in a below-market rate unit, but is worried his landlord might raise the rent. So he set out to see what his options were.His article details his attempts to get into affordable housing. He didn't earn enough to qualify for the apartments set aside for those earning 60% of the AMI (the Boston AMI for a single person is $98,000, so we can assume he is earning less than $58,000 as a reporter).And if he actually got into affordable housing, he'd have to recertify his eligibility annually, not just by providing paystubs or tax returns, but also by having his bank statements audited, transaction by transaction.So what will this reporter do? He's staying put for now, but isn't ruling out the idea that he'll be one of the hundreds of thousands of people leaving Boston (145,000 between 2010 and 2020), because he can't afford to live in the city.