Who is the priority on housing policy?

When Austin voters overwhelmingly approved housing bonds in recent years, who did they think their votes were helping? The homeless? The working poor? The middle class?

It's not a rhetorical question. I don't know the answer. And I think this is one of the problems with the imprecise talk about "affordable housing" in Austin and all over the country. The purported victims of the housing crisis range from people sleeping on the streets to people frustrated because they can't find a four-bedroom detached house with a big yard near "good schools."

In response to my previous article, a reader suggested that "there's a constituency who wants affordable housing to serve the lower middle class because it's easier to build politically than serving the indigent."

The reader is right in at least one sense: people generally don't want to live near facilities that serve homeless people.

At the same time, there is tremendous pressure on city government to reduce visible homelessness. Its persistence frustrates people of all income levels in a way that a shortage of homes for the working poor doesn't.

In other words, it's possible that housing for the homeless is the thing the median voter wants the most of in general. They just really don't want it in their neighborhood.