Housing Policy
Christian Britschgi | 4.23.2024 12:10 PM
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
I wanted to change up the newsletter's format a little bit to write about an underappreciated benefit of increasing the production of private, market-rate housing: It's an incredibly simple strategy for improving housing affordability!
If states and cities remove zoning restrictions, complex permitting processes, and the like, builders will construct more housing and prices will fall. There's endless evidence that this neat-and-tidy free market story is true.
America's non-market affordable housing strategies, in contrast, rely on a bewildering system of price controls, mandates, and subsidies to achieve the same results.
In addition to being costly to taxpayers, hard to navigate for program participants, and occasionally constitutionally problematic, this needless complexity is also self-defeating.
The beneficiaries of complex affordable housing programs often end up being a near-random group of people who are poor candidates for public subsidy. Meanwhile, many of the people who policymakers are trying to help end up being worse off. And affordable apartments that are supposed to be housing people are instead left vacant.
Three recent stories make this clear.
Earlier this month, the White House finalized new rules that impose a 10 percent cap on annual rent increases at federally subsidized affordable housing developments.
Crucially, the White House's rent caps aren't directly rent caps but rather caps on the incomes that make one eligible for affordable housing programs. In effect, this means that the Biden administration is holding rents down for some tenants by excluding others from affordable housing completely.
Want more on urban issues like regulation, development, and zoning? Sign up for Rent Free from Reason and Christian Britschgi.
Δ
NEXT: The Morningside Heights Tent City
Christian Britschgi is a reporter at Reason.
Show Comments (0)
Costly Complexity
5
0
23.04.2024
Housing Policy
Christian Britschgi | 4.23.2024 12:10 PM
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
I wanted to change up the newsletter's format a little bit to write about an underappreciated benefit of increasing the production of private, market-rate housing: It's an incredibly simple strategy for improving housing affordability!
If states and cities remove zoning restrictions, complex permitting processes, and the like, builders will construct more housing and........
© Reason.com
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
