Band-aids Won’t Make Housing Affordable

The city of Portland is considering new rules that will limit the size of new homes. This will supposedly make housing more affordable, but all it will do is limit the supply of homes that people want and make them less affordable.

The city of Denver is about to adopt new rules charging developers fees that will be used to build affordable housing. As if making new developments more expensive will make housing more affordable.

Voters in San Francisco just adopted a new ordinance allowing the city to require builders of 25 homes or more to dedicate a fourth of those homes to low-income renters or buyers. In the past, such “inclusionary zoning” rules only required that 15 to 20 percent of new homes be affordable. But if rules like this really worked, why not just require that all new homes be affordable?

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