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Vice President Kamala Harris just put forward a proposal to solve our country’s housing crisis that is completely unrealistic. Former President Donald Trump has demonstrated his opposition to zoning reforms that would open up our suburbs to more housing. If I had to choose between betting that a thousand monkeys could write Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in a year or that either candidate would solve our housing crisis in a century, I’d bet 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 country's history. What we don't need is more failures.
Take Harris’s proposal to impose federal rent control on corporately owned rental housing. Economist Assar Lindbeck once said that rent control was the most effective way to destroy a city, short of wartime bombing. Study after study has shown that rent control discourages the construction of new houses and apartments and increases the overall cost of housing in jurisdictions where rent controls are in place, while reducing the quality and availability of existing housing.
HOME BUILDERS TELL VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS THAT HER HOUSING PLAN MUST ADDRESS REGULATORY BARRIERS
But as bad as rent control is in some cities today, at least developers can move their housing to other places where more sensible jurisdictions still accept new housing. With federally mandated rent control, the disaster of rent control can now be experienced by the entire nation.
The country's housing crisis is a major problem for both builders and home buyers, making it an election issue. (iStock)
Trump has not put forward any concrete proposals to deal with the housing crisis, other than to praise single-family zoning and oppose federal attempts to weaken zoning laws and build low-income housing in the suburbs.
While he is right that federal mandates never work well, he fails to acknowledge that large lot zoning for single-family homes is making it impossible in many communities for private owners to build modest starter homes, attached apartments, duplexes and triplexes that would allow young people to live where they grew up and working families to live where they work.
Then there's Harris' proposal to allocate $25,000 to first-time homebuyers. Then there's Harris' proposal to allocate $40 billion to housing subsidies. The cost to taxpayers would be monumental. Our deficits and inflation will continue to rise. And we should shudder to think of the kind of bureaucracy this policy will generate. But the worst part of all is that every time the federal government has pumped money into a sector of the economy, prices have gone up and up.
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Take federal money for higher education, for example. With all the supposedly free federal money from the government, every university went on a spending spree. Spartan dormitories were transformed into luxury apartments for undergraduates. At great expense, armies of education bureaucrats have infiltrated every institution of higher education, not to teach, but to administer the myriad federal programs and dictates.
Housing will be no different. If enough federal money is invested in it, regulations, bureaucracy and substantially higher costs will emerge.
The homebuilding industry estimates that this country is about 7 million homes short of demand. Harris says her plan will create 3 million homes. What Harris proposes does not make building easier, but it would forever distort the housing market with federal price controls, federal bureaucracies, and federal failure.
If we want to solve this country's housing crisis, we'll need less government, not more. We must rein in environmental laws that have deprived tens of millions of acres of land for housing development, whether for wetlands, endangered species habitat, open space or so-called visual corridors.
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Then there's Harris' proposal to allocate $25,000 to first-time homebuyers. In addition, Harris proposes spending $40 billion on housing subsidies. The cost to taxpayers would be monumental.
We need to end the endless lawsuits that stop one housing project after another. We need to restore sanity to zoning so that people can use their land to meet the market for more reasonably priced housing. We need to stop pandering to tenants with rent control that never works.
In short, we don't need more government. We need government to step aside and let people build the houses they want and where they want to live.
