Building Housing is Good, Actually

There’s nothing lonelier than being a pro-housing progressive these days.

I recently had a disturbing and hilarious interaction on Facebook, a platform I have repeatedly told myself not to engage in discourse on. A meme page posted this:

Despite knowing better, I commented and asked if the meme referred to corporations buying up existing residences, or corporations buying property that is zoned residential to build housing. Already I am too far in the weeds for a meme page, but I can’t help myself. I am, after all, the founder of an organization devoted to infill and affordable housing. The initial responses were still a little less substantive than I expected, but that’s on me for having unrealistic expectations.

I’m not censoring the names because I don’t care and also nobody reads this blog. If you think, “get fucked” is a little aggressive for a question about land use, I agree! I responded to Sonny and Michael by making my case for supply-side housing policy. I told them that building more housing drives down prices overall, regardless of whether the new housing is market rate or not. Again, I’m too in the weeds for this crowd. Later in the comments I would ask someone: who is going to build large-scale affordable housing developments if not companies? Nobody would engage with that question, but a back and forth with various people continued for quite some time. I just asked for people to engage with my central argument: does building new housing put a downward pressure on price? The answer, by the way, is of course it does. You can read about why here, here, and here. The evidence is extremely clear.

In a comprehensive 2023 study, researchers found that “supply-skeptics” are just plain wrong in their crusade against privately owned market rate development. I quote at length because it’s important.

“Although ‘supply skeptics’ claim that new housing supply does not slow growth in rents, our review of rigorous recent studies finds that: 1) Increases in housing supply reduce rents or slow the growth in rents in the region; 2) In some circumstances, new construction also reduces rents or rent growth in the surrounding area; 3) While new supply is associated with measures of gentrification, it has not been shown to heighten displacement of lower income households; and 4) The chains of moves resulting from new supply free up both for-sale and rented dwelling units that are then occupied by households across the income spectrum, and provide higher income households with alternatives to the older units for which they might otherwise outbid lower income residents.”

At several points in my exchanges, I asked – begged even – for someone to explain to me what the alternative is. Nobody would engage with me. Nobody would read the research and data I was presenting. One commenter insisted that the construction of housing was not driving down costs specifically in her city of Philadelphia. When asked for a citation, she could not provide one. When I pointed out that population growth in her metro significantly exceeded new housing construction according to some estimates, there was no substantive response to that either. I did not have the information to cite at the time, but it turns out that rents in Philadelphia are mostly steady or slightly down as housing supply grows, which is precisely my point.

Another commenter told me that my argument was wrongheaded because there are “only” about a million homeless people and 14 million vacant housing units. This is was the closest anyone got to citing any evidence, though economists argue that, much like the economy has a healthy level of unemployment, there is a healthy number of housing vacancies that are normal for cost-filtering. But when you spend more than ten seconds thinking about this argument – that the number of unhoused people nationwide exceeds the number of available housing units nationwide – it just sort of falls apart. What good is a vacant house in rural Oklahoma to an unhoused person in New York City? And for that matter, what good is an overpriced shoebox apartment in New York City to a cost-burdened worker in rural Oklahoma? Sure, these units are vacant, but they aren’t accessible.

One commenter simply told me that we need “smarter housing policies.” I asked what those policies were – there certainly are many! – and did not get a response. It might have been a great opportunity to talk about restrictive zoning or the right level of federal housing assistance or how landlords can legally discriminate against holders of housing vouchers. It would have been a great time to talk about the role of public housing, which is severely lacking; the most generous interpretation of their arguments is that they support designated-affordable housing built by non-profits with taxpayer dollars. I’m also in favor of that, and am disturbed by how difficult jurisdictions – particularly large Democratic-ruled cities – make that process. But nobody would even make that case, or any policy case for that matter. It’s impossible to know whether they couldn’t make the case for lack of understanding or were unwilling to engage with even a token amount of disagreement. After all, I am a proponent of affordable housing and made that very clear. Can’t we get together on something?

I can’t quote most of these interactions directly because I was eventually blocked from the page for being a “fan of Wall Street” and my comments were deleted. It’s difficult to chalk this up to anything but the disturbing pockets of anti-intellectualism that characterize the political left in this country. Willing to accept nothing but the total dismantling of private ownership of housing (apparently?) they are doing what my mother calls cutting off your nose despite your face. They are engaging in a form of NIMBYism that is more palatable to Internet Socialists than outright racial and class discrimination, but the end result is exactly the same! Housing remains expensive, and homeownership stays out of reach for my generation. 

Jonathan Zasloff makes this point concisely in his piece Left-Wing NIMBYism Strikes Out – Again, in which he says, “NIMBYism is bad. Left-wing NIMBYism is worse because it co-opts progressive goals and rhetoric. Over the last few years, it has served as a cover for wealthy homeowners who want to say they are very liberal while pulling up the ladder for those who came after them.” In the comments, when I said that opposing housing because of who is building it was NIMBYism, I was called a “silly creature.” But it speaks to the way economic privilege morphs one’s worldview and ideology to the point that a supposedly progressive (and housed!) person can argue that we’ve built enough housing already and everyone else be damned.

This is mostly me venting. The whole saga depressed me. I am more than willing to accept when my preferred policy prescriptions are wrong, or my arguments are half-baked or fallacious. I’m not purporting to be some sage. I just want us to engage in the conversation, because the alternative is the status quo, and the status quo is 22 million cost-burdened renters and hundreds of thousands of unhoused people. We should not accept that as normal, and anyone who cares about it should, at the very least, have an idea of what to do about it. 

My take is this: I think we should build housing and then put people in the housing. Is that so hard to understand?

Thanks for reading.

Devon