Houston Strategies

The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less - NYT

I've had this excellent NYT opinion piece queued up to share for a while, because it essentially argues for adopting the Houston approach to housing regulation for the whole country: The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less (no paywall gift link). In fact, Houston shows up quite favorably in a lot of their excellent graphs.  Below I share the opening, an AI summary of the main points, and the excellent conclusion that this deserves to be a bipartisan issue (bold highlights mine).

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"I would be the first to argue that if an economist claims to know of a cure-all policy — a reliable way to relieve a long list of social ills in one fell swoop — common sense tells you to stop listening.

So it is awkward for me to declare that I know of something close to a panacea policy: one big reform that would raise living standards, reduce wealth inequality, increase productivity, raise social mobility, help struggling men without college degrees, clean the planet and raise birth rates. It’s a sweeping reform that Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives could all proudly support.

The panacea policy I have in mind is housing deregulation. Research confirms that there are large benefits in saying yes to tall buildings, yes to multifamily structures, yes to dense single-family development and yes to speedy permitting. The growing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement already has high-profile wins in Minnesota, Oregon, California and beyond, but even YIMBY devotees rarely appreciate the scope of the merits of loosening rules on housing.

• The economic argument for housing deregulation rests on basic supply and demand principles: allowing more construction leads to lower prices. This is evident in historical data, showing that housing prices were relatively stable before stricter regulations in the 1970s, while rising significantly afterwards.
• Housing deregulation would directly improve the standard of living by significantly lowering housing costs, which currently represent a significant portion of the average American's budget.
• The distributional effects of deregulation would be impactful in reducing wealth inequality, as rising home values have been a key driver of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
• Deregulation would enhance social mobility by removing barriers to moving to higher-wage areas. Current strict regulations often make the cost of living in such regions outweigh any potential wage gains, discouraging relocation for many.
• Deregulation would create numerous job opportunities in the construction sector, a large and well-paying industry, particularly benefiting men without college degrees, who have faced challenges in the job market.
• Environmental protection is a common rationale for restricting construction, but deregulation can actually lead to more sustainable practices by encouraging denser housing in urban areas, resulting in lower carbon emissions.
• While concerns exist about homeowner resistance, the bigger obstacle to deregulation is public misunderstanding of basic economic principles, with many believing that increased housing supply will not lead to lower prices.

Labels: affordability, density, development, economic strategy, governance, home affordability, land-use regulation, opportunity urbanism, perspectives, politics, YIMBY

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:51 PM