The Housing Crisis May Never Be Solved (The Song Remains The Same)

The Housing Crisis in the United States has gotten out of control

No, this article isn’t about the Led Zeppelin song or its associated movie, although that sounds a lot more entertaining. This story is about Housing — Yes, Housing with a capital H. Because the fight over Housing in the United States has gotten out of control, and I am urging everyone to start paying attention.

The reason is, the same song has been playing for too long in the world of housing, and it's time we stop and face the music.

It goes a little like this:

“I support affordable housing and density, but this isn’t the way we should be doing it. This project is going to ruin our neighborhood.”

This song is sung over and over in supposedly liberal places (such as California), where people have actually gone out of their way to prohibit housing in a state that needs millions more units to keep up with demand, thus keeping their neighborhoods low-density, higher in value, and (off the record) keeping the riff raff out.

Take some California cities, like Venice, California. In 2015, a study found that there was actually less housing in the city in 2015 than 15 years prior, in the year 2000, despite 4,000 more jobs coming to the city in that time period.

Venice, California Has Fewer Housing Units Than in 2000

Laura Kusisto writes: Venice Beach, Calif., is one of the nation's hottest neighborhoods, brimming with affluent young…

www.planetizen.com

How did this happen? A combination of factors. Overly restrictive zoning definitely plays a major part, as does land-wasting parking policies that cost developments (and the residents of the city) precious land, while also reducing the city’s tax revenue.

Venice has become the poster child for what has happened in many wealthy enclaves around the U.S., which, as a rule, resist any type of housing development that they don’t want. These change-allergic cities are often run by City Councils (made up of citizens) who maintain the status quo by shooting down any project that the deviates from the overly restrictive zoning code.

In Glendale, California, parking requirements have actively stopped housing being built, even in “affordable housing developments”, which for some reason were required to be built for every studio or one-bedroom apartment.

An article in Slate depicts how the California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman walked through the cavernous, empty garage of an affordable housing development in Glendale, shocked that the city required the complex to build a structure that would mean less actual affordable housing for residents.

Everyone Agrees California's Parking Laws Are Bad for Cities. So Why Do Planners Like Them?

A few years ago, Laura Friedman toured an affordable housing project in Glendale, the city of 200,000 she represents in…

slate.com

Affordable Housing is the Red Herring in the Housing Crisis

If that’s not bad enough, the worst part of the housing crisis might be the discussion about affordable housing itself. While we all say that “we support affordable housing” and argue about where it should go, cities and citizens simultaneously stop housing from being built, thus driving up the price of housing and requiring that a thing called “affordable housing” exist in the first place.

As Michael Manville explained in his paper “Value Capture Reconsidered”, it’s affordable housing policies that sometimes actively slow down and sabotage the building of new housing. They do this in a process called “value capture”, where cities require that any regulatory relief in the form of more height or density, or less parking, be accompanies either by steep fees or a requirement that the developer build a percentage of “affordable” units.

I put “affordable” in quotations because, paradoxically, these requirements only add to the cost for the developer to build housing, a cost that the developer then passes on to renters and owners by increasing the cost of the units they are building.

Though a few lucky few may get to live in the “affordable” units, the vast majority of people lose out as the new market-rate housing (built in a city where housing is in dire need) becomes more and more expensive.

Yet the affordable housing champions continue to fight the good fight, even as the policies that are supposed to be helping people afford housing are actually slowing down the production of — you guessed it — housing. Michael Manville laments the loss of these possible housing units for the people of California, detailing how places like Piedmont in the East Bay of the San Francisco area have somehow (in a place booming with jobs and people) built only 30 housing units in 10 years.

You Can’t Just Put A Sign In Your Front Yard

People with liberal values often have signs in their front yard that read something like “All are welcome here, no matter race, creed, or sexual orientation”, or something of that nature.

That’s all well and good, but when it comes down to it, do our actions match our values? Unfortunately, they don’t.

Most progressive people would say they support equal rights, access to housing, and affordable housing units. But when you tell them we’re going to have to disrupt your single-family home to do it, they come out in droves to protest those policies.

“Put it somewhere else!” They cry. “I didn’t move here because I wanted to live in New York City!”

In places like education, housing, and tax policy, it seems that liberals don’t practice what they preach. Even the New York Times exposed this fact in a recent video:

One lady at a recent public meeting I attended called the development allowed by the new zoning overlay in San Diego (which allowed up to ten units to be built on nearby parcels) high-rises. High-rises? Labeling that statement as an exaggeration would be underselling the point, because calling a ten-unit building a high-rise gets at the very core of fearmongering in the U.S. housing market.

Ten units is barely an apartment building, and this is a great example of the problem in many of our cities. People who have cemented themselves into their cushy neighborhoods — liberal or conservative — often want things to say that way.

And though they may say we need affordable housing, and need to provide places to live for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum, they just don’t want those people living anywhere near them. Adequate housing for the rest of the 300 million Americans in our country, they say, should happen anywhere else but near them.

So The Song Remains The Same. Meanwhile, one-third of the land area in U.S. cities is parking lots, equating to an estimated 8 parking spaces for every car. California’s housing shortage is estimated to be about 3–4 Million housing units, and experts say the state needs to quadruple current housing production over the next seven years for prices and rents to go down.

Where did we go wrong? How did the land of opportunity become the land of backwards policy? At the end of the day, we have to open the floodgates of change and let people live in the places that they work. We have to stop worrying about our neighborhoods being ruined and worry about whether or not people have a place to sleep at night.

Maybe then we can start to actually solve the housing crisis, instead of singing that sad old refrain time and time again: that it’s always someone else’s problem to solve.