More Housing Will Make More Housing Affordable

The phrase “we need more affordable housing” carries with it an ocean-liner’s cargo-hold-worth of baggage we need to unpack. My latest piece at Forbes has the headline, “We Don’t Need More Affordable Housing, We Need More Housing So It Will Be Affordable.” The punchline of the post is:

So be wary when you hear advocates ranging from so called YIMBYs and Urbanists to single-family neighbors and socialists and politicians saying, “We need more affordable housing;” that is another way of saying more money for non-profit housing developers to build a few expensive units years from now. What we all should be saying is, “We need more housing so that it will be affordable.” Rising housing prices mean we need more housing and fewer rules.

Over the years of working in public health and housing, I’ve seen policy debates driven by disputes between finding the right population-based strategy — that is, a policy fix to a problem that has wide impact — versus story-driven approaches that try to influence policy formulation mainly by lived experience. In public health, ironically, I tended to view the population-based solutions as important, but favored process assessment and quality improvement as a far better way to tackle problems like tobacco use and obesity.

But with housing, I have the opposite view. The anecdote is not our friend. As I have often mentioned, it is something I call the Galileo Effect, when science and data don’t seem to align with lived experience. I can imagine Bishop Bellarmine saying, “Umm, well, Galileo, that’s all very good and well, but each day the sun rises in the east and sets in the west; and I don’t feel anything moving!” It’s like the oft repeated phrase, “Sure, there’s lots of new housing being built, but it’s all so expensive. Build more and the prices will keep going up!”

People get supply and demand. If Galileo was on a speeding train he might point to a Ptolemaic skeptic that trees outside the window appear to be flying by, but it is people on the train moving fast, not the trees which are quite still. Similarly, people can grasp that when almost anything is scarce and in high demand — from sneakers to doughnuts — its price will rise, unless someone figures out how to make more efficiently.

Housing activists on the left, of course, are generally skeptical of the utility of markets in making housing more affordable. But they might understand the idea that while rationing by price creates painful disutility for the poor, rationing by a centralized bureaucracy — the same one that manages the police department — is painful and likely even more personally abusive. More housing — whether it is a right or a commodity — is the compassionate solution.