Housing policy isn't that complicated

If you want more affordable homes, make it legal to build more. If you don't, then don't.

I spoke recently to a group of people that included an elected official who’s likely to run for governor in the upcoming cycle. One topic that came up was the relative merits of different theories about the housing market — hedge fund investors, collusion via algorithmic rent-seeking, Airbnb driving up scarcity.

I said to her that I think all of these things are worth some scrutiny, just as it’s not crazy to give some consideration to ideas like AOC’s bill to create a big new federal investment in social housing.

But I also said that more fundamentally, we shouldn’t ignore the broad cross-sectional facts. New York and California and Massachusetts are richer than Florida and Texas and South Carolina. But instead of people moving to the rich states of the northeast and the Pacific coast, they’re moving to the south. Lots of factors might go into that decision, but we also know that Florida and Texas and South Carolina are cheaper than New York and California and Massachusetts. So whatever grievances people might have about those blue states, the grievances have not (at least not yet) resulted in objectively low demand. But they have created a situation where demand in New York and California and Massachusetts leads to upward pressure on prices, while demand in Florida and Texas and South Carolina leads to an increase in the number of housing units.

Or to put it another way, I think progressives are grappling with two important questions now that housing has become a higher-profile national issue:

1. What is actually the best way to create an abundant supply of housing, with more affordability and more choices?

2. Given that a lot of voters want to hear about housing, what’s the best way to connect housing to the ideas the progressive movement really wants to talk about?

Questions like No. 2 are important in politics. JD Vance is running around the country saying that mass deportation is the solution to America’s housing problems. Vance wants to talk about immigration and lots of people want to hear about housing, so he draws a link between the two. Because I personally am obsessed with housing, I will often come up with ways to link whatever people are talking about to housing policy, because I always want to talk about housing policy. And I think it’s completely fair for people whose obsession in life is antitrust policy to want to talk a lot about RealPage when housing comes up — it’s absolutely a good antitrust angle on housing policy. If you’re a socialist, then “we should address housing shortages by building housing the government owns” is, similarly, a good way to turn a conversation about housing into a conversation about collective ownership of the means of production. I can’t begrudge anyone wanting to derail housing conversations into housing conversations about the stuff that they are most interested in.

And this is exactly why I have deeply mixed feelings about housing becoming a more salient issue in national politics.

Back when the public was much less interested in housing policy, housing policy conversations were normally held amongst people who were interested, which led to convergence on sensible ideas. But if the mass public wants to hear about housing, then political entrepreneurs who are mostly interested in mass deportation or antitrust policy or socialism crowd into the space and risk leading us off track.

So I just want to emphasize this: