Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck once asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” Economists disagree on many things, but almost universally agree that rent control is a bad idea. But this hasn’t stopped politicians and housing advocates from calling for more rent…
An opinion piece in the San Bernardino Sun essentially claims that zoning is an application of property rights: When someone “owns” property, they own a “bundle” of ancillary rights. Bundle of rights is a term for a group of legal privileges granted to the owner at the time of purchase. The bundle contains ownership. Right…
A professor in San Diego has concluded that Yelp reviews of ethnic restaurants are contributing to gentrification and displacement. The reviews “contribute to the transformation of urban foodscapes — the physical, symbolic, cultural, lived, and imagined food environments — that have been built by people of color….” And because the reviewers are “primarily young, white,…
An article at MultiHousingNews.com examines Biden’s proposals for addressing the housing shortage, and concludes, In the end, the affordable housing problem is about money. To create housing that costs less, either the cost of construction must be reduced (not likely, given rising costs of land, materials and labor costs); developers must accept reduced profits (which…
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Texas has a shortage of about 600,000 rental homes that are affordable and available to extremely low-income renters. Across the state, there are just 29 affordable and available housing units for every 100 extremely low-income families. The shortage is slightly more than 170,000 for the Houston-Woodlands-Sugar Land…
An opinion piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican argues that affordable housing really means subsidized housing. The author correctly notes that government housing programs are subsidized by taxpayers, and below market-rate housing (often extorted from developers for permission to build) is subsidized by other home buyers and renters. The author then asks, who is…
After throwing millions of Americans out of work with lockdowns, the government discovered that many of those individuals could not pay their rent. The government responded with a moratorium on evictions. And then, when landlords began to face economic hardship, the government responded with rent assistance. But according to CNBC, only $5 billion of the…
The Biden Administration has announced plans to build or restore 2 million homes to address the housing shortage. This is a very grand plan, and it is receiving praise from many advocates for low-income housing. However, it is more than likely that the number of homes built or restored will fall far short of the…
In October 2020, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, city council enacted a citywide 100 percent affordable housing overly (AHO). The AHO allows apartment buildings up to four stories in all neighborhoods in the city. However, all units must be permanently affordable to households earning up to 100% of area median income. The standard for affordability is paying…
On September 8, 2021 the Pacific Legal Foundation hosted a webinar titled “Can Free Markets Solve America’s Housing Crisis?” The panel members were Jim Burling from the Pacific Legal Foundation, Judge Glock from The Cicero Institute, Nolan Gray from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Patrick Tuohey from the Better Cities Project.
Housing advocates frequently claim that the housing crisis represents a market failure, which Investopedia defines as an inefficient distribution of goods and services in the free market. In market failure, the individual incentives for rational behavior do not lead to rational outcomes for the group. In other words, each individual makes the correct decision for…
About 24 hours after the Supreme Court struck down the CDC’s latest eviction moratorium, housing advocates assembled in at least twenty cities to protest. The protests were organized by Cancel the Rents for the purpose of demanding that Congress enact an eviction moratorium for the duration of the pandemic. Cancel the Rents (CTR) called for…