Affordable housing (actually the lack of it) is one of the biggest public health issues in the US.
Where families live, how stable their housing is, and how much of their paycheck goes toward rent or a mortgage have a direct effect on physical health, mental health, food security, transportation, and access to medical care.
In fact, housing is the largest part of a low-income family’s budget. Electricity and food are close behind. For many families, there is no extra money left at the end of the month. That has a profound effect on the family’s physical and mental health.
The Core Problem: Supply & Demand
The basic problem isn’t complicated, but the solutions are.
There aren’t enough homes and apartments that working-class and low-income families can afford. When demand for housing is higher than the supply, prices go up. Families compete for too few apartments, homes, and lots. Landlords and sellers have more leverage. The people with the least money have the fewest choices.
The result is financial stress, overcrowding, frequent moves, evictions, homelessness, and families being pushed farther away from jobs, schools, grocery stores, and health care.
Housing instability is linked with worse physical and mental health. Families that spend too much on housing have less money for food, utilities, transportation, and health care. That is not a political opinion. It is a basic public health fact.
The Biggest Housing Roadblock Is Local
A major reason we don’t have enough housing is local zoning and the NIMBY effect.
Getting Past NIMBY’s Chokehold on Housing – AZ Public Health Association
City governments often make it difficult or impossible to build apartments, townhomes, duplexes, accessory dwelling units, manufactured homes, or smaller starter homes in many neighborhoods. Existing homeowners have figured out how to put a chokehold on this kind of housing development.
That is the NIMBY problem: “not in my backyard.”
NIMBYism keeps the supply of housing supply low by locking in onerous and overly restrictive zoning ordinances. That drives prices up. It pushes workers farther from their jobs. It makes homelessness worse. And it helps create the affordability crisis we see today.
The problem is spread across thousands of local jurisdictions, which makes it politically difficult to solve. But that is also where much of the work must happen.
States & Congress Have Adjacent Roles
States can help by setting reasonable limits on exclusionary local zoning rules. They can make it easier to build duplexes, townhomes, accessory dwelling units, manufactured housing, and smaller homes near jobs, schools, and transportation. They can do that by essentially micromanaging cities and ‘preempting’ them keeping such a tight stranglehold on zoning laws.
The federal government can play a role too, but in a more indirect way.
Congress took a meaningful step in that direction this week when it passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act last week.
It’s not a cure for the housing crisis, but it can help some (if the president signs it). It won’t quickly lower rents or home prices. And it won’t overcome local zoning barriers that stop new housing from being built. But it’s a start.
What it Does
The federal housing bill includes several practical ideas that can help increase housing supply over time.
- It makes it harder for large institutional investors to keep buying existing single-family homes. Institutional investors that already own at least 350 homes would face limits on buying additional single-family houses.
- It removes outdated federal barriers to manufactured housing. Manufactured homes can be a lower-cost option for families, but federal rules and financing barriers have often made them harder and more expensive to build or buy than they should be.
- It incentivizes state and local governments to modernize planning, permitting and zoning.
- The legislation also makes changes to federal housing programs that help communities use existing resources more effectively, including for housing-related infrastructure and the conversion of vacant commercial or industrial buildings into housing.
Housing & the Immigration Crackdown)
There’s another less talked about part of this conversation that deserves more attention: labor.
We can’t build more inventory to balance the supply and demand equation without workers building homes.
Immigrant workers are a major part of the construction workforce. They’re framers, roofers, electricians, drywall installers, landscapers, painters, and concrete workers.
For the last 1.5 years our federal immigration policy and the behavior and decisions by ICE around mass deportation and punitive enforcement make the housing shortage worse. It shrinks the labor pool, delays projects, raises construction costs, and makes it harder to build homes that working families can afford.
So honestly it could be that even if the president signs 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act – it may not even counteract the punitive immigration policies they’re implementing that are dramatically shrinking the construction labor pool.
A Helpful Start—But Not the Finish Line
As I write this the President still hasn’t signed the bill. He canceled a planned signing event on June 24. Hopefully, the bill becomes law soon.
This legislation will help around the edges and create useful incentives for reform. But the biggest barriers are still local land-use rules, neighborhood opposition to new housing, high development costs, limited construction labor, all of which results in a lack of enough homes for people with low and moderate incomes.
The Bottom Line
In order to fix the affordable housing crisis cities need to stop treating every new housing proposal as a threat to existing homeowners.
States need to keep pressure on local governments that refuse to allow enough housing.
The federal government needs to stop pursuing immigration policies that make it harder and more expensive to find the workers needed to build homes.
We’re not going to lower housing costs without building more housing. And we are not going to build more housing unless policymakers at every level are willing to take on the political forces that benefit from keeping supply low.
