If at First You don’t Succeed

In 2017, the Austin City Council adopted the Strategic Housing Blueprint, which set a goal for the city to build 135,000 new affordable housing units within ten years. According to the city’s own website, in the first two years of the plan, the city built a total of 16,253 housing units, or about 60 percent of its goal of 13,350 units per year. Further, the city built only 5 percent of its annual goal of 3,000 units for families earning 30 percent or less of the city’s median family income.

Despite this impressive display of incompetence, the city council continues to cling to the delusion that it can solve the city’s affordable housing problem. As an example, the city recently increased the fees that developers must pay. That money will be used to fund the council’s affordable housing scheme.

Even though the city isn’t even close to meeting its goals, city council believes that it—not developers and housing innovators—can solve the affordable housing crisis. The city council believes that it—not developers and housing innovators —is most capable to build the housing that Austinites want and need. And so, city council will extort money from developers and shackle them with more regulations and controls.

If a private business produces only 60 percent of its goal, it likely won’t remain a business for long. Investors will withdraw their money and seek a better return. But government agencies don’t have to worry about such things. They can simply force developers, businesses, and taxpayers to “invest” in their boondoggles.

Initiatives like the Strategic Housing Blueprint are announced with great fanfare and bold predictions of the wonderful results that will ensue. But those results seldom materialize, and in the meantime money is wasted and the problem the initiative was intended to solve continues to fester. Government officials are skilled at setting grand goals. They aren’t very skilled in accomplishing them.

The problem with the Strategic Housing Blueprint isn’t that the city’s goals are too lofty. The problem is government is trying to produce a value, and government is particularly inept at producing values. Government’s only tool is force, and force is the antithesis of production.

If city council really wants to address the affordable housing crisis, it would restore the freedom of developers and housing innovators to do what they do best—build housing.