An opinion piece by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, titled Stop Blaming Millennials for the Housing Crisis few days ago struck me as a voice of someone who is most affected and who has the least say in our local land use processes. Some excerpts:
The country has turned against my generation once again, this time for having the nerve to try to find somewhere to live.
Home prices and rents have skyrocketed, and available homes for sale recently reached record lows. Bidding wars are fierce. And if a spate of recent news coverage is to be believed, millennial “Zoom towns” are to blame for the resulting housing crisis, particularly in lower-cost areas.
Apparently, the problem is not the chronic underinvestment in new construction over the past decade. Nor is it exclusionary zoning and other NIMBYist obstruction of more, and denser, housing. Never mind that boomers are increasingly hanging on to their many-bedroom domiciles rather than downsizing upon retirement, in part because of state tax laws that reward incumbent homeowners for staying put.
Ignore the persistent supply-chain problems and tariffs that have increased the cost and build time for new construction.
No, the problem is us young(ish?) whippersnappers. We entered our prime childbearing years and then callously decided to put a roof over our children’s heads. If once millennials were accused of failure to launch, now we’re faulted for launching too aggressively.
Much of the problem, Rampell says, is really due to existing homeowners.
You can’t build (new housing) where there’s some aging retail — as in northwest Washington, D.C., where a developer wants to construct 99 new residential units (most of which would be reserved for residents who make less than 60 percent of the median income) and a nonprofit arts space. A local group, Friends of 14th Street, is working to quash it.
The group is “not objecting to affordable housing,” it argues, echoing NIMBYists everywhere. “What we are objecting to is the size, density and scope of the project.”
But millennials are not only victims of the more recent and widespread affordable housing crisis. We are also somehow blamed for it, even though it is older, incumbent homeowners who refuse to either move or permit the creation of new housing for others to move into.
So I ask again: Where exactly are we allowed to live, per the judgment and voting behavior of our elders?
Her piece is the voice of those who are hardly ever heard in those rezone meetings. And it demonstrates the problems we have with our present process for public hearings and comments. It’s worth the read.