Issues of Affordable Housing

The sociological issue examined within this document is the dearth of affordable housing. This phenomenon is adequately deconstructed in an article in USA Today entitled “The ‘affordable housing’ fraud”. The premise of this article is that affordable housing does not exist. The use case on which this article relies is the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area’s dearth of affordable housing is characterized by astronomically high rental rates, steep prices for homes, and small spaces for these costly prices (Sowell). It is worth noting that although this phenomenon is examined in the Bay Area, it is a national social problem particularly prominent in places such as New York and Miami. Thus, there are many concepts in Mooney’s Understanding Social Problems which are applicable to it.
The structural-functionalist perspective would analyze this problem from a granular level. This perspective is predicated on the notion that society is formed from a montage of different cogs, each of which is assigned a particular social function (Mooney et al 8). From this perspective, there appears to be a granular issue with the way society is functioning. A basic social function is to provide housing for people at the civic level. If the average one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco costs upwards of $3,000 to rent (Sowell), then the housing function in this city is not properly operating because that amount is much too exorbitant. Specific parts that are failing in this instance include politicians for allowing developers to enrich themselves at the expense of their social duty, developers for doing the same thing, and aspects of the economy which are not creating situations in which average working people can afford housing.
Another important concept related to the lack of affordable housing is the tenet of sociological imagination. Sociological imagination is the capability to understand how the personal problems of a specific person correlate to the public problems of society. It involves not just looking at statistics and data as numbers, but as people with real lives affected by systemic sociological issues. In particular, there seems a lack of sociological imagination on the part of housing developers and realtors who are getting rich from overpricing housing so that there is no affordable housing in the Bay Area. The same applies to the banks and financial companies who are contributing to that shortage of affordable housing. People in these positions are simply looking at their bottom lines, and not the displacement of individuals who cannot afford real estate.
The tenet of sociological imagination naturally lends itself to certain facets of the conflict perspective of societal problems. This perspective contends that social problems stem from conflicts of certain groups of people who have oppositional interests (Mooney et al 10). The partisans in the set of conflicts for this particular problem of housing are clear. On the one side there are developers, real estate agents, bankers and political magnates who are all wildly profiting from the escalating prices of housing. On the other are the middle class and lower class people who cannot afford those prices. The objective of this latter group is to pay as little as possible for housing that it as beneficial as possible. Meanwhile, the objective of the former is to extract as much money as possible from housing and from those who pay for it. This conflict of interest can explain the housing shortage because the developers have the political and financial power.
Another idea which is related to the sociological imagination concept (and is applicable to the lack of affordable housing) is the symbolic interactionist perspective. The confluence between these two tenets is that they both involve the imagination; the symbolic interactionist perspective requires seeing through the eyes of another or another social stratification (Mooney et al 11). People must be able to understand how others view them to learn about themselves within this societal lens. The symbolic interactions between groups of people—among capitalist real estate developers and those who are low or middle class—create the definitions of human behavior via this perspective. If one were to apply this perspective to the affordable housing shortage, one would get two polarized viewpoints. The capitalist real estate developers would not even acknowledge that a problem exists because they are too busy counting their profits to even care, or look through the eyes of those who cannot afford their realty. The other group would acknowledge the problem.
A really effective way to analyze this problem is through the four parts of a social structure. Social structures consist of institutions, social groups, statuses, and roles. There are a number of salient institutions involved in this problem. These include the political powers granting authority to developers to zone and create housing that is not affordable, and financial institutions (such as banks) backing these developments. Status is also extremely revealing about this problem The status of those building (and even living in) housing which not quintessentially affordable housing is wealthy and privileged. The status of all others is middle income or low income. These statuses are determining factors in the social groups. Essentially, these social groups are comprised of those who have, and those who have not. Those building and living in expensive housing are the haves; those who are not are the have-nots. The role of the haves is to dispossess the have-nots, who exist primarily to become displaced.
Additionally, the dichotomy between functional and dysfunctional in the context of the structural-functionalist perspective described in Mooney’s book is applicable to the lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area. The article in USA Today explores the effect of supply and demand on the affordable housing shortage (Sowell). Functional factors are those which help to provide stability for a social system, whereas dysfunctional ones reduce that stability. If only the affluent can afford housing in the Bay Area, the vast majority of the population there cannot afford it. Thus, the affordable housing shortage is reflective of the dysfunctional nature of the laws of supply and demand in terms of Bay Area real estate. The article details limits on the housing which can be built, which increases the demand well beyond the supply (Sowell). There is a dearth of balance between the functional and the dysfunctional as a result, which results in the shortage.
Perhaps the concept found in Mooney’s work which is typified by the lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area is the notion of anomie. This term refers to a condition in which the normal affairs of things have become so weakened that acts of immorality become normal. When one considers that there are political proponents for capitalist developers who are allowing land not to be developed—simply so that which is available increases its demand and its prices—the immorally high prices in the Bay result.
Works Cited
Mooney, Linda., Knox, David., Schacht, Caroline. Understanding Social Problems. Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Sowell, Thomas. “The ‘affordable housing’ shortage.” www.usatoday.com 2015. Web. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/10/03/affordable-housing-fraud-sowell/72994670/