October Housing Roundup

A Tax Credit for Cost Burden

One of the biggest problems in housing policy is measuring what “affordable” means. Generally, the word is a qualitative one, measuring a person’s relationship to price. What is affordable to Bill Gates might not be affordable to me even though it has the same price. “When it comes to describing housing affordability, the coin of the realm is still 30 percent of a person’s income as the ceiling of affordable housing. Anything more than 30 percent is called unaffordable.” I’ve been suggesting for a long time that we should look at ways to buy down that burden rather than building very expensive apartment units, a few at a time, very slowly. In a post titled, Time To Explore A Payroll Tax Credit For Housing Cost Burden I take a closer look at how the federal government could use regular payroll to distribute that kind of a subsidy in workers’ regular paychecks.

Preemption to Standardize Housing Policy at the State Level 

I’ll be in Indianapolis next month speaking to the Indiana Apartment Association (IAA) on emerging policy issues affecting multifamily housing. I wrote a long series on preemption last year hoping to build the case for legislatures to rein in their more progressive cities by taking away their ability to regulate the contracts made between tenants and landlords. Well, Indiana has done just that. In a post called, Preempting Bad Local Housing Policies: Indiana Shows How I share how the IAA put together successful legislation that is now law. My advice to them is to preempt local governments from making eviction policies. The argument is the same: eviction regulations should be the same everywhere in a state, not a patchwork quilt of complicated rules that confuse housing providers and residents.  

Regulatory Overreach on Artificial Intelligence and Rental Housing 

And no, landlords aren’t using artificial intelligence to collude with each other to set higher rents. In Rent Fixing: FTC Needs A Lesson About Economics IRL, I take apart what is an absurd attempt, maybe motivated by the upcoming election, by the Federal Trade Commission to criminalize (yes, criminalize!) housing providers using online platforms that gather information from various sources to understand rent trends in various markets. Just downloading this information, even if it isn’t used to set a rent price, is price fixing. Hopefully, this misdirected effort loses steam after the election.

Tiny Homes Offer an Option, but Costs are Too High

And yes, Tiny Houses Are Still Too Expensive. There is still a belief out in the country that somehow, we’re going to innovate our way out of housing problems using novel gimmicks like little houses, modular construction, or cheaper materials. All these solutions can be helpful, but what is true for a conventional single-family home, a townhouse, or a large apartment building is true for every other kind of housing, even small modular units. Too many rules, regulations, fees, fines, and taxes mean that a clever solution ends up becoming just as expensive as the regular solution. The answer is to take a close look at existing building codes and strip them down to the most basic safe and healthy designs.

Oh Yeah, There is an Election Next Month

The Election Will Change Things But What About Housing? For this post I sought out a housing professional and investor about which candidate he thinks is better. He thinks that Trump is better for investors and increasing supply. In my view, neither candidate seems to have a good handle on the problems of housing in the country or have a viable solution. It’s going to take time to figure out just where we’re heading in the next few years no matter who wins.