STILL HERE, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Before I get into what I want to post about today, I thought it would be good to post a response I got to the previous post, from Brandon Bell, Lead Regional Planner at the Bear River Association of Governments:

“Your point about Planning and Land Use being proliferated by Federal funds, is also documented in the book: Escaping the Housing Trap by Charles Marohn.  As a requirement for mortgage loan guarantees, essentially, single family zoning with minimum setbacks were created. City Councils across the country raced to adopt SFR zoning, so that residents of their cities would be eligible for mortgage guarantees. What is more American than property ownership? The threat of losing that opportunity drove the creation of single-family zoning, due to this federal mortgage guarantee requirements policy.”
Good observation, thanks Brandon.  Okay, on to my topic for today.
 
More evidence of the continuing prominence of the housing affordability crisis in the national dialog, this from New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein.  In addition to talking about the difficulty of addressing this issue from the Federal level, and also about how expanding the acceptance of modular housing could improve homebuilding speed and efficiency and thus cost, Klein does use some space talking about the role of housing at the state and local levels.

He introduces the topic thusly:

Both those ideas are trying to solve the hard problem at the heart of housing politics: It’s the people who already have homes who have a voice in local politics and planning. They often like their neighborhood the way it is. They don’t want more traffic or new neighbors or the hassle of nearby construction. What’s in it for them?

We’ve written on this topic before – that much of local government politics is dominated by older, wealthier homeowners who are pushing for what they think will preserve their home values and community character, which is some more housing (not a lot!) similar to their own.  Klein quotes a housing policy proponent:

You can put this kind of crassly as you’re incentivizing renters to show up at local elections and push their elected officials to do things that are renter-friendly … . “If most renters showed up in the primaries and demanded that their mayor and City Council actually do good things, we could have some pretty different outcomes. But mostly renters don’t show up — particularly in the primary — and so you get these homeowner-dominated coalitions in cities that make it hard to build.”

Klein then throws in some material from The Searchlight Institute, a non-profit public policy organization.  One of their policy priorities is housing, for which they did some polling:

Some polling Searchlight did is telling here. Seventy-nine percent of Americans say housing costs are “too high” or “way too high.” Sixty-two percent say it’s become harder to find housing they can afford. But only 24 percent think building more housing in their community would lower costs. People do not believe building housing near them will benefit them.

Goes right along with my own experience – I hear at public meetings and hearings that people do indeed think there is a crisis in housing, and that more housing of different types need to be built, just not in their neighborhood.

Klein then also highlights an issue we complain about here every year in our legislative session – the continued piling on of more and different housing and land use initiatives.

The other problem is that even a housing policy that does benefit a community will do so slowly. It takes years to plan and build new homes. It takes time for new supply to lower costs. That time breaks the feedback loop between good policy and good politics. “ If you’re a politician and you have a four-year term, you really need to do all of your housing stuff in Year 1 if you want to have people feel the benefit within that single term,” Aaron Shroyer, who served as special assistant to Biden for housing policy and coauthored the Searchlight plan, told me.

So, I don’t pretend to think that this post will do much of anything to help address the housing issues we face, but just maybe it will help us to see them a little more clearly – maybe!