Vice President Kamala Harris just released a proposal to solve our nation’s housing crisis that is completely unrealistic. Former President Donald Trump is on record of opposing zoning reforms that would open our suburbs to more housing. If I had to choose between betting on the chances that a thousand monkeys could type out Shakespeare’s "King Lear" in a year or either candidate solving our housing crisis within a century, my money would be on the monkeys.
In my newly published book, "Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis," I chronicle how one failed government policy after another has contributed to one of the worst housing crises in our nation’s history. What we don’t need is to double down on failure.
Take Harris’ proposal to impose federal rent control on corporate-owned rental housing. Economist Assar Lindbeck once called rent control the most effective way to destroy a city other than wartime bombing. Study after study has shown that rent control discourages the construction of new homes and apartments and increases the overall cost of housing in rent-controlled jurisdictions while lowering the quality and availability of existing housing.
HOME BUILDERS TELL VP HARRIS HER HOUSING PLAN NEEDS TO ADDRESS REGULATORY BARRIERS
But as bad as rent control is in some cities today, at least builders can take their homebuilding elsewhere where saner jurisdictions still welcome new housing. With federally imposed rent control, the disaster of rent control can now be experienced by the entire nation.
Trump hasn’t put forward any concrete proposals to deal with the housing crisis except to laud single-family zoning and oppose federal attempts to weaken zoning laws and build low-income housing in the suburbs.
While he is correct that federal mandates never work well, he fails to recognize that large lot single-family zoning is making it impossible in many communities for private landowners to build modest starter homes, granny flats, duplexes and triplexes that would allow young people to live where they grew up and working families to afford to live where they work.
Then, there is the Harris proposal to shovel money, to the tune of $25,000, to new first-time homebuyers. On top of that, Harris proposes to spend $40 billion in subsidies to the housing industry. The cost to taxpayers would be monumental. Our deficit and inflation will continue rising. And we should shudder to think what sort of bureaucracy this policy will generate. But worst of all, whenever the federal government has bombed a sector of the economy with money, prices have gone up and up and up.
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Take federal money for higher education. With all the supposedly free federal money from the government, every college and university went on a spending spree. Spartan dormitories morphed into luxury apartments for undergraduates. At great cost, armies of educrats have wormed their way into every institution of higher learning, not to teach but to manage the innumerable federal programs and dictates.
Housing will be no different. Pump enough federal money into it; regulations, bureaucracies and substantially higher costs will follow.
The homebuilding industry estimates this nation is roughly 7 million homes short of what we need to meet demand. Harris says her plan will create 3 million homes. What Harris proposes does not make it easier to build, but it would forever distort the housing market with federal price controls, federal bureaucracies and federal failure.
If we are to solve this nation’s housing crisis, we will need less, not more, government. We must rein in environmental laws that have taken tens of millions of acres of private land from potential homebuilding, whether for wetlands, endangered species habitats, open space, or so-called viewshed corridors.
We need to put a stop to the endless lawsuits that stop housing project after housing project. We need to restore sanity to zoning so people can use their land to meet the market for more reasonably priced housing. We need to stop pandering to renters with rent control that never works.
In short, we don’t need more government. We need the government to get out of the way and allow people to build the homes that people want where they want to live.
