The cost of renting apartments and purchasing homes has risen dramatically in the past several decades, and on the surface, addressing the issue of affordable housing would seem to be yet another issue on which any sort of bipartisan solution is impossible.
No doubt, at a time when Beto O’Rorke is ridiculously declaring that everybody has a right to live close to work, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is proposing the federal government guarantee that rent gets capped at 30% of salary, there doesn’t seem to be much room for negotiation.
Proposals that involve drastic federal involvement and new spending and regulatory commitments will be hard to swallow for conservatives.
But right now, there is cross-ideological agreement that local zoning and regulatory restrictions are a significant barrier to building more affordable housing, and creating more housing density. Breaking down zoning barriers has an appeal to free market, limited government conservatives, but also to liberals who see the classism and racism at the heart of NIMBYism.
The Ben Carson-led Department of Housing and Urban Development, last year, released a report on regulatory barriers to affordable housing, which concluded, “Evidence suggests that regulatory barriers and NIMBY opposition are significant factors in affordable housing challenges, particularly in markets with strong job and population growth,” and offered various actions state and local governments could take to break down those barriers.
Booker, in his own housing proposal, linked to the report, lamenting that, “Across the country, cities and towns implement land-use restrictions that make it harder and more expensive to build new affordable housing. The result is fewer units and higher costs for renters.”
There are, of course, many differences to work out. For instance, for Republicans, more of the solutions would have to be at the state and local, rather than federal level. The response that Booker proposes — withholding federal funds from localities that don’t reduce regulatory barriers — would probably be too much of a top-down response for many Republicans. For their part, Republicans will have to be more consistent about the idea of supporting free markets and opposing regulation even when it means opposing zoning laws they may be inclined to support.
If the parties are willing to accept this, there should be ways to increase the housing supply, and increasing density, by breaking down regulatory barriers at the state and local level.
