> Most advocates agree, however, that lasting change will come only through massive government reinvestment in low-income housing, livable wages (including pay protections for the growing number of gig workers), and an openness to alternative models, such as community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives. The fruit of the laissez-faire approach—deregulating the private market and hoping that, with enough new construction, affordability will trickle down—can be seen, they suggest, in the hundreds of thousands of Americans doubled up or living in shelters and tent cities.
The idea that we currently have a free market approach to housing is absurdly wrong. We haven’t had anything close to free market conditions in housing for generations, mostly since the FDR administration created the federal mess of agencies to commoditize housing in the first place. This is perhaps the single most important myth that needs to be dispelled. When it takes years to get permission to build an apartment, and 80-90% of the average US city’s land is restricted to single family houses on large lots, that anyone can think we have a “liassez-faire” system is shameful.
Of course homeless advocates, who are largely paid by government programs, think that the problems created by too much government would be best solved by more government.
Earlier in the article the author cited a large scale research effort which came to a much simpler conclusion:
> Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”
This, it seems, people are finally beginning to understand. But still there is so much vilification if developers and landlords, which I believe gets in the way of progress.
The system is deeply broken, and the majority of the individual players in it are honest people trying to follow the rules as they’ve been given, trying to do something they believe is good: create more housing. If the city you live in only allows luxury housing to be built — which is often the case, due to the enormous cost of regulatory compliance, anything cheaper would not be profitable to build — then it’s luxury housing or none at all.
In earlier eras with less regulation it was still true that more luxury housing was built. The difference was that when population growth happened, so much housing would go up so quick that the “luxury apartment” from ten years ago was now middle class, and the fifteen year old building was working class.
TLDR; it’s exhausting to read story after story about how acute the housing crisis is, with so little investigation into its root causes. Why is it that our system leaves such an extreme shortage of housing in the first place, and what can be done to address that? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and therein lie the problems we have to solve.