New “affordable” homes cost the SAME as new market homes except for the subsidies for the project. Subsidies are gov’t funds, not random goodwill of less profit or less expensive finishes.

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The cost to build a new 6 storey “affordable” apartment is the same as the cost to build a 6 storey market apartment. There may be slight + or - in the finishes & a small portion of fees might be waived for affordable projects, but these aren’t what makes them “affordable”.
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The “affordability” comes from gov’t subsidies or low cost financing, usually in the order of millions on such size of a project, AND usually, free land (which is also in the order of 10’s of millions +).
w/o them, the new homes literally are the same as new “condos”
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Orgs like non-profits have missions to provide below market homes, so they do “affordability” & apply for gov’t funds & subsidies. They pay the same costs for everything on said project, they just then get subsidies.
For everyone else, free land does not fall from trees.
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This means they still pay for consultants, contractors, municipal fees, interest, property taxes, & a whole list of other things. And yes, non-profits AND gov’t orgs also pay themselves a fee to act as a developer. Yes it’s real; that’s literally what I did for a non-profit.
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New homes just cost what new homes cost (aka all the costs req’d on new projects). The affordability for non-market homes is determined by the gov’t funding available at the time. When the gov’t funding isn’t enough to make them below-market rents, the project doesn’t happen
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So if you’re asking for us to just only build “the right supply”, or to only build the “affordable” homes, or only the homes at the “right prices”, then all you’re doing is literally asking gov’ts to provide more subsidies on more or all projects.
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Do I think we need more gov’t funding & investment in affordability? YES. We should see WAY more funding from ALL levels of gov’t. Do I think that will happen anytime soon? I don’t know, but this is something I (& many others) advocate for
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Having worked on both non-market & market homes, my exp is that non-market is WAY harder (& often way less efficient). Therefore I’m not super optimistic about the idea that we can just suddenly exponentially increase our non-market sector. But we need to.
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In the meantime, we also need to build WAY more market homes, bc market will still houses many folks. If we don’t do this, we add MORE pressure to limited gov’t funding for housing, & add MORE people to the portion of society that need to rely on non-market homes.
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