As time goes on, we continue to see the increased importance of considering how the prevailing wage could affect affordable housing. In 2008, CHPC released a report called Prevailing Wisdom: The Potential Impact of Prevailing Wages. It includes an analysis of existing studies, applicable data sets, and incorporation of information from a small sample of affordable housing projects in NYC.
Our main conclusion is that a requirement to pay prevailing wages reduces the amount and affordability of subsidized housing while doing little to improve the real problems faced by workers in the construction industry in general.
The report makesthe following recommendations: