Is there any way to show that a development/housing/apartments is restricted to low income only?
Would amenity:low_income_only work?
The way such things are implemented is going to vary from country to country. I’m not sure that your “low income” housing would correspond with the UK idea of “affordable housing”.
Also, assuming the UK is typical, houses have all sorts of restrictions on them, e.g. common ones are not to hold auctions, and not to allow the sale of alcohol, why should “low income” be singled out, especially when it could be read as having negative connotations for the area.
Low-income is housing where the government (usually city, or some other non-profit society) helps pay part of the rent in special housing developments. Usually, the tenants need to agree to help maintain the development in some manner, otherwise, their apartment application is denied.
Where I live it is the city’s Housing Authority that helps. The Housing Authority also owns most of the low income housing.
It can also be called subsidized housing.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing for more info.
That sounds like what would be called social housing in the UK, and used to be called council housing, but now has largely been semi-privatised, using not for profit housing associations. I’m not quite sure how the latter are actually funded, as one of the reasons for the move to housing associations was to reduce government spending.
Although I’m not particularly familiar with the US social housing market, I’ve heard the term “projects” used.
Such areas tend to be perceived of as blighted by at least private buyers, so whilst useful for some governmental purposes, the occupiers, and those of neighbouring streets, might not particularly like this information on a general purpose map. In particular, in the UK, the squeeze on spending in this area means that most low income tenants are in the private sector, albeit with state subsidies, and only those who are totally unacceptable to that sector are left.
In the UK the low income restriction has been largely eroded by governments that didn’t like the idea of state funded housing. They introduced a right to buy for tenants, at a discount and which generally didn’t come with restrictions on reselling, or they only had small time limits. As a result, much of the housing built as social housing has ended up in the private rented sector at full market rents.
Nowadays, housing associations also buy or rent properties built for owner occupations and use them for social tenants.
As such, in the UK you could only really map the original intended purpose, and for flats, whether the freeholder was public or private sector.
(Affordable housing is housing that is sold, often on a part ownership basis, i.e. it is leasehold, but with a large rent, and a reduced premium (the amount you have to pa up front. Most new developments have a condition that they include some affordable hosing properties, and I think they tend to be restricted to certain, low paid, but important, workers: key workers. They are likely to be in the less attractive parts of new estates, but otherwise mixed in.)
As I noted, the ways that governments address the underlying problem, will vary widely, and including the information on widely used map will have the side effect of blighting neighbouring streets.
For most of our areas, the name of the housing already indicates low cost housing with all the applicable sell/rent/own restrictions. They are aptly named “People’s Housing Project ”.
I agree with hadw btw.
I was hoping for a way to differentiate subsidized housing from normal housing. Mostly, in my area, the subsidized housing consists of a few buildings with several apartments in each building. There are other areas like that that are not subsidized housing. Right now I am using landuse=residential for the plot and building=apartments for the buildings with units=xx-zz for the apartment numbers. That’s good for the non-subsidized housing, but I’d like to be directed to a key I could add to show that a particular residential area is also subsidized.
An example of subsidized housing is Horatio Gates Village in Martinsburg WV. But, as I said, there are other identical apartment complexes that are not subsidized.
I suppose owner= and ownership= could help. But, even then, that doesn’t say if the housing is subsidized or non-subsidized.