Affordable housing: control prices on a subset of the housing stock, and leave the rest to the market.
Market rate housing: let developers build housing if it's profitable for them to do so.
The former results in some members of a favoured class getting cheap access to housing, whilst preserving/increasing the value of the remaining 'market rate' housing.
The latter seeks to allocate housing based on willingness to pay, whilst increasing the housing stock to stop/reverse the trend of price increases.
The way people use the word 'affordable' wrt to housing makes it sound like it's an intrinsic property of the houses. When it actually refers to a non-market allocation mechanism. 'Affordable housing' sounds better than 'price caps allocated to a lucky subset of the folks we deem deserving'.
Market rate housing: let developers build housing if it's profitable for them to do so.
The former results in some members of a favoured class getting cheap access to housing, whilst preserving/increasing the value of the remaining 'market rate' housing.
The latter seeks to allocate housing based on willingness to pay, whilst increasing the housing stock to stop/reverse the trend of price increases.
The way people use the word 'affordable' wrt to housing makes it sound like it's an intrinsic property of the houses. When it actually refers to a non-market allocation mechanism. 'Affordable housing' sounds better than 'price caps allocated to a lucky subset of the folks we deem deserving'.