“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
