A Flawed Framework
As I point out in my book, The Affordable Housing Crisis: Causes and Cures, for more than one hundred years housing policy has been dominated by the same flawed framework. Each “new” housing policy simply repeats policies that have previously failed.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an example. He ran on a promise to freeze rents in the city. More recently, he has said that he may need to raise property taxes by 10 percent to balance the budget. In other words, he wants to increase expenses for the city’s landlords while arbitrarily limiting their income. Mamdani wants us to believe this will address the affordability of housing despite the destructive history of rent control.
New York City first instituted rent control in 1943 as a temporary measure to address the city’s housing shortage and rising rents. More than eighty years later, the city still has rent control, a housing shortage, and rents have continued to rise. Yet New Yorkers believe this time will be different.
Whether it is rent control or zoning, subsidies or monetary policy, housing policies are founded on collectivism. These policies allegedly seek to address the needs or desires of one group or another, while imposing the costs on non-members of the favored group. That these policies never achieve their stated goal is lost on their advocates. Having abandoned principles, housing activists and their political supporters view each issue in isolation.
For example, it is well-documented that rent control reduces both the quantity and the quality of rental housing. With their rental income limited, many landlords remove their properties from the rental market by converting them to condominiums. Others refrain from repairs and maintenance, and the property slowly deteriorates.
If government edicts and prohibitions were effective in addressing housing shortages and rising rents, New York would not remain under a “temporary” measure enacted during World War II. Freedom for housing producers, not more government controls, is the only effective way to address the affordability of housing. And that requires a new framework for thinking about housing policies.