Category Archives: Housing

On Monday, President Trump announced that he plans to kill the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which could have required suburbs to change single-family zoning to allow multifamily housing. This rule had been written by housing activists to make housing more affordable even though there was no evidence that single-family zoning made housing less affordable or that abolishing it would fix the problem.

“Far-left Washington bureaucrats,” Trump said, “are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations. , , , Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”

The truth is that supporters of the rule have a hidden agenda: to stop urban sprawl, even though measures to stop sprawl are the real cause of housing affordability issues. This can be seen in the housing plank of Biden’s campaign platform, which calls for “eliminat[ing] exclusionary zoning policies and other local regulations that contribute to sprawl.” In fact, it is sprawl that keeps housing affordable, and it is only in urban areas that have tried to stop sprawl that housing has become unaffordable. Continue reading →

Should cities build more dense housing or sprawl out at the urban fringe? Scott Beyer, the Market Urbanist, wants to see more density while I want to allow more sprawl. Surprisingly, in a debate yesterday over which was the best way to make housing affordable again, Beyer conceded that low-density development was more affordable than high-density. Instead, he argued for high-density development for other reasons.

High-density development, he said, was more environmentally sound, fiscally sustainable, and led to greater worker productivity (which economists call “agglomerative economies”). He claimed that people would live a lot denser if they could but such density is outlawed. Continue reading →

I like Scott Beyer, who calls himself “the Market Urbanist.” He and the Antiplanner see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. But we also have some areas of fundamental disagreement, as shown in the Reason video below.

Some of them are simply factual. He thinks there is a large, pent-up demand for dense housing in the cities. To the extent that such demand exists, I think it is an artifact of restrictions that prevent low-density development at the periphery of many urban areas. Continue reading →

“Housing is a human right,” asserts Oregon’s U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer in a paper titled Locked Out: Reversing Federal Housing Failures and Unlocking Opportunity.” That’s debatable, but if Blumenauer really believes it, then why does he support Oregon’s land-use laws that heavily restrict suburban development? After all, that’s the only kind of housing development that is truly affordable.

Click image to download this 28-page report.

Blumenauer was a first-term state representative in 1973, when the legislature passed the state’s land-use law, and he’s been around enough since then to know how urban-growth boundaries have driven up land prices in the cities. Yet his paper completely ignores the role of this law in creating the housing crisis. Continue reading →

Thanks to its urban-growth boundary, Denver has a housing affordability problem. Apartment rents have increased by 65 percent in the last decade, while the nationwide cost of living in that time rose by just 18 percent and rents nationwide increased by an average of 28 percent.

One of the city’s responses was to create a housing voucher program for people who earn too much to qualify for federal housing vouchers but still can’t afford rents in the city. Last July, it allocated $1 million to the program which was supposed to help 125 families.

So far just three households have been able to use it. Out of the million dollars, $180,000 went for administrative overhead, which is a lot of money for just three renters. Continue reading →