Place character and workforce housing policy frames

Abstract

Affordable housing policy has shifted from government-sponsored to primarily market led, leading to the potential for high variation in policies across places. Despite this, many municipalities have trended toward workforce housing as a policy frame to provide housing for those who cannot afford market rate housing but who do not qualify for government subsidies. In this paper, we use place character – the confluence of political, economic, social, and infrastructural conditions that shape and are shaped by meaning and action – to explain how workforce housing policy is framed at the local level in ways that contribute to the policy’s path dependency. We draw upon the case of a zoning change in a small city in the United States that enables the rezoning of land to allow for the conversion of hotels/motels into affordable housing units. We found that municipal officials and property stakeholders exploited place character to frame affordable housing policy as “workforce housing” in ways that engaged localized conditions and discourses to garner community support. These findings provide insight into how housing policies and practices become path dependent through municipal proceedings, despite social, political, and economic heterogeneity at the local level.

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