Economy Great Article Breaking Down the US Housing Crisis & Why Government Isn't Doing Anything About It

[blackheart]

https://archive.is/45bGb

Why Isn’t the Government Doing More About the Housing Crisis?

The Department of Housing and Urban Development should consider doing some housing and urban development.

www.theatlantic.com

I'm just going to quote a selection of informative paragraphs. You can visit the links for the full article.

What Does HUD Even Do?​

The Department of Housing and Urban Development should consider doing some housing and urban development.
By Annie Lowrey

The department of housing and urban development is the agency responsible, one would imagine, for housing and urban development. Over the past two decades, America has done far too little urban development—and far too little suburban and rural development as well. The ensuing housing shortage has led to rising rents, a surge in homelessness, a decline in people’s ability to move for a relationship or a job, and much general misery. Yet the response from the federal government has been to do pretty much nothing.

[...]

What is happening with housing might not seem as dramatic. But that is only because the crisis has been brewing more slowly. Despite the unemployment rate sitting at record lows and household wealth sitting at record highs this year, an also-record number of Americans were experiencing homelessness: 653,104 in just one night this January. And by some measures housing is less affordable now than it has been in half a century. Shaun Donovan, who served as HUD secretary from 2009 to 2014, told me he had “never seen availability problems this bad … Housing has always been a top-three issue in New York and San Francisco. What is changing now is that it is a crisis in red parts of the country, rural parts of the country—in places where it’s never been an issue.”

Yet legislators have not passed a significant bill to get people off the streets and out of shelters. Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments in high-cost regions or to protect families from predatory landlords. Congress has not made more families eligible for housing vouchers, or passed a statute protecting kids from the trauma of eviction, or set a goal for the production of new housing.

[...]

The country’s lack of a national housing policy is part of the reason we are in a housing crisis, and Washington needs to take a real role in ending it.

In the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts why Congress, HUD, and the administration weren’t doing more.

The problem is structural: Washington just isn’t set up to address the housing crisis. The federal government plays a large, but largely indirect, role in the housing market. It operates through incentives, credits, guarantees, and subsidies. Rather than building housing, it makes mortgages cheaper and covers part of market rents. Rather than setting up retirement communities, it provides tax breaks for developers. You could say the country’s real department of housing and urban development is the Treasury Department, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Senate committee responsible for housing is the Banking Committee.

And here lies the heart of the problem. This is neoliberalism. "No no, don't take direct action to directly address the issue, let's just manipulate interest rates and provide tax credits and vouchers and surely the market will take care of it!"

The article continues -

“The biggest footprint is in mortgage markets,” Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Federal Housing Finance Agency—which oversees Fannie and Freddie—“has more practical authority over housing markets than HUD does. And it’s this obscure agency that most people don’t even know exists.” But the Treasury Department, she added, “doesn’t view itself as a housing agency. I don’t think that many people are sitting inside Treasury actively working on housing-access issues.”

It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, Washington played an aggressive role in expanding the country’s housing stock from the 1930s to the 1970s. As part of the New Deal, the government financed the construction of homes for tens of thousands of families. HUD was founded during Lyndon Johnson’s administration and, as part of his Great Society, set out to build or rehabilitate millions of housing units.

Oh dang whaaaaaaaaat???? You mean to tell me that the period of modern American history where housing was the most abundant and most affordable, the government was directly building new homes by the millions?

How can that be? Neoliberals keep telling me that housing issues are because of government interventions in the market. How come the empirical and historical record says the opposite?

But concentrated poverty and social unrest in public housing—and the anti-Black racism it triggered in voters and politicians—led Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, to put a moratorium on new government-financed projects. HUD would instead provide eligible applicants with vouchers to help pay for their housing. This would “in the long run be the most equitable, least expensive approach to achieving our goal of a decent home for all Americans,” he told Congress. A decade later, Ronald Reagan gutted the voucher program, slashing HUD’s budget by 60 percent.

Shocking - it was two Republican administrations that destroyed government housing initiatives, then replaced them with neoliberal reforms, and then they even destroyed their own neoliberal market-based reforms, therein creating the conditions that lead to the crisis today.

How come the Republican track record for destroying America is so overwhelming and obvious and you continue to vote for this clown party???

Nearly all of HUD’s budget goes to its voucher programs. And unlike SNAP benefits or Medicaid coverage, vouchers are not an entitlement; the majority of qualifying families do not get help. (Ninety-three million Americans are on Medicaid; 41 million use SNAP; just 5 million live in a household receiving a voucher.) Applicants languish on waiting lists for years, even decades. Many eligible people don’t bother signing up, and as many as one in three people offered a voucher does not end up using it. Take-up rates are low because the process is so arduous and because landlords discriminate (illegally, but commonly) against voucher recipients.

“Think of lining up families who qualify for food stamps and only one in four families gets to eat,” Matthew Desmond, a Princeton sociologist and the author of the book Evicted, told me. “That’s exactly how we treat housing policy today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because, without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

Something else is stopping Washington from addressing the housing crisis: the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Land-use policy is not the purview of the federal government. It’s the purview of the states. Congress cannot rewrite Los Angeles’s building code. The White House can’t decide to upzone West Hartford, Connecticut. “I used to spend time with my counterparts in other countries and they’d say, Well, we just updated our national building code and national zoning code. We just wrote a national housing strategy,” Donovan told me. “I’d say, Wait, you have a national building code?”

As my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has written, we have delegated our housing policy not just to state and local governments but to every neighborhood’s homeowners association. Residents of a given place have ample opportunities—zoning-board meetings, candidate forums, historical architectural reviews, city-council open mics—to stop development. So they do. And thus mostly wealthy, mostly older people shape policy to their preferences: keeping new families out, maintaining single-family zoning, stopping development, and prioritizing the aesthetics of buyers over the needs of renters.

Local control is going to make it hard to get out of this crisis. “We’ve got 3,000 counties and 40,000 cities and towns,” Schuetz, of the Brookings Institution, told me. “There’s huge variation in not just their political motivations but in their capacity to carry policy out. And there’s no way to implement local reforms in a widespread way, at any kind of scale.”

And this is why there is no way for the US to get out of this situation. It is structurally impossible.

Neolibs at least correctly identify the problem (local HOA's, local home owners shutting down new development and enforcing restrictive zoning) but then they turn around and say "well the solution here clearly, is for the government to do even less and let the market solve this issue!"

But washington can do something—much more than it is doing now. Expand the low-income housing tax credit. Direct even more money to states with high housing costs. Get rid of the law preventing the government from increasing the number of public-housing units. Fix up the units we already have. Make housing vouchers an entitlement, so that every poor family that needs help with rent gets it. Doing all of this would help not just help millions of poor Americans get and stay housed. It would also help boost the supply of affordable apartments and make HUD a strong advocate for all low-income renters. “Maybe I am getting out over my skis here, but I feel like if HUD were an agency funded at the level of need, an agency administering a universal benefit, it would be a different agency,” Desmond told me.

Then it could develop novel policies to address some of the big drivers of today’s housing shortage: building costs and land-use restrictions. The federal government cannot change land-use policies unilaterally. But that doesn’t mean that it is out of policy levers, housing experts told me. It just means that it needs to work somewhat indirectly: providing cash incentives to places that harmonize their building codes, green-lighting dense development near transit hubs, and allowing prefab homes, for instance. The Biden administration is starting to enact these kinds of policies, and pressing Congress to let it do more. In terms of building costs, the federal government can’t do much to lower the price of lumber. But it can allow more skilled immigration for construction workers and tax land to encourage development.

More modest, cheaper policies are at hand as well. For instance, HUD could start advising state and local governments on how to increase their housing supply. “There is a lot of experimentation going on at the local level,” Schuetz told me. “HUD could at the very least be monitoring this stuff, performing research, evaluating what works and what doesn’t.” It could help Tucson learn from Oakland, Iowa from Massachusetts. “This is squarely in HUD’s comfort zone,” Schuetz added, noting that no agency or political entity is doing this work at the moment.

Many of these policies cost money. But the federal government needs to spend more on housing, particularly on multifamily rental housing. The first thing politicians and civil servants in Washington need to do is simply see the housing crisis as the federal government’s responsibility. Universal homeownership was once the explicit goal of the U.S. government; affordable housing for everyone, everywhere, and the end of homelessness should be the policy priority now.

 

[blackheart]

Part 2 (the end of my post. SD character limit cut off my op)

It's not that neoliberal market-based solutions can't be useful. But it's insane to think that those solutions are the only thing we should be doing. It obviously isn't working. It obviously hasn't worked.

For me personally, I know that these types of reforms, policies and government initiatives are never going to happen in this country because of the Republican party. I mean all of this with the utmost sincerity and good-faith, out of concern for my fellow Americans - For any of the good, decent people that read this, the people that care about their family and its future, regardless of your political persuasion, I cannot stress this enough - save yourselves and get the fuck out of this country. This is only going to get worse. It is not like this in other nations. Tokyo is the largest metro on earth, and average home prices are 300k. It is not a matter of population size. It is a matter of policy. Your children, and their children, will never be able to afford a home in this country unless they end up wealthy. Your children, and their children, are going to be at risk their entire lives for ending up with medical debt, which could result in them being homeless, or could result in them dying because they couldn't get treated to begin with. You, your children, and their children, should not need to be wealthy to live a quality life of dignity.

I know packing up and immigrating to another country, with or without a family, is a tremendous undertaking and no small task. But neither is ending up homeless or dying because you couldn't get healthcare. You need to do a serious analysis and gameplan for this future. If you and your spouse pick up a second job, maybe a side hustle as well, you budget well and stick to it, and you commit to the plan for a few years, you should be able to save up enough to immigrate to a functioning country. It will be really hard, but the future that is to come in the US is going to be much harder. Choose wisely.

I'm sorry to end on a partisan note but I ask the following completely sincerely. Republicans, what is the Republican answer/solution to the housing crisis? I literally do not even hear Republican politicians talk about it. I cannot recall a single time that Donald Trump has even mentioned it. Somebody tell me - what is the Republican policy solution to the US housing crisis?

 

[Broke Lester]

Haha, renters.

 

[blackheart]

Haha, renters.

Reading and writing are tough business. Don't be too hard on yourself

 

[My Spot]

Sorry brackis, but maybe you should pay off your student loans first before thinking about buying a home.

 

[William Huggins]

Don't worry...... Black Rock to the rescue!!!!

 

[degoj99]

"Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments"

Yes we need a command and control economy, because that works. How the fuck do people still think some communism shit is a good idea?

Also as per OPs question about Republicans' ideas for a solution - bro, look at the Democratic utopias out west. People living on the streets contributing only shit and needles. Kids have to see this on their way to school. Maybe asking Democrats to stop offering ideas would be a really good place to start.

 

[Sinister]

"Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments"

Yes we need a command and control economy, because that works. How the fuck do people still think some communism shit is a good idea?

Also as per OPs question about Republicans' ideas for a solution - bro, look at the Democratic utopias out west. People living on the streets contributing only shit and needles. Kids have to see this on their way to school. Maybe asking Democrats to stop offering ideas would be a really good place to start.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans are immune to being influenced by corporate interests, as well as NIMBY types, whose interests tend to be aligned when it comes to rejecting the notion of housing the homeless.

 

[blackheart]

"Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments"

Yes we need a command and control economy, because that works. How the fuck do people still think some communism shit is a good idea?

Uh - actually it does work genius. Did you not read the article? That's exactly what the US did from 1930 to 1970 which increased the US housing supply. That's exactly what other functioning nations do that don't have a housing crisis.

Also as per OPs question about Republicans' ideas for a solution - bro, look at the Democratic utopias out west. People living on the streets contributing only shit and needles. Kids have to see this on their way to school. Maybe asking Democrats to stop offering ideas would be a really good place to start.

This is such an unserious delusional take. Why can't you just answer the question??? What is the republican solution? Why doesn't Trump even mention housing??? Crying about democrats doesn't answer the question

Lmao at what a can @Islam Imamate is. Homie you're 1 step away from being a right wing culture warrior at this point.

 

[ferrisjso]

"Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments"

Yes we need a command and control economy, because that works. How the fuck do people still think some communism shit is a good idea?

Also as per OPs question about Republicans' ideas for a solution - bro, look at the Democratic utopias out west. People living on the streets contributing only shit and needles. Kids have to see this on their way to school. Maybe asking Democrats to stop offering ideas would be a really good place to start.

State govts are not federal govts and aren't capable of being a substitute because they don't have their own currency which is the backbone of MMT. Also they are not communist or socialist. They are capitalist. You're using the failures capitalist states and blaming it on the solution. There is no leftist utopia or even a non dystopia in the US.

 

[terrapin]

https://archive.is/45bGb

Why Isn’t the Government Doing More About the Housing Crisis?

The Department of Housing and Urban Development should consider doing some housing and urban development.

www.theatlantic.com

I'm just going to quote a selection of informative paragraphs. You can visit the links for the full article.


And here lies the heart of the problem. This is neoliberalism. "No no, don't take direct action to directly address the issue, let's just manipulate interest rates and provide tax credits and vouchers and surely the market will take care of it!"

The article continues -


Oh dang whaaaaaaaaat???? You mean to tell me that the period of modern American history where housing was the most abundant and most affordable, the government was directly building new homes by the millions?

How can that be? Neoliberals keep telling me that housing issues are because of government interventions in the market. How come the empirical and historical record says the opposite?



Shocking - it was two Republican administrations that destroyed government housing initiatives, then replaced them with neoliberal reforms, and then they even destroyed their own neoliberal market-based reforms, therein creating the conditions that lead to the crisis today.

How come the Republican track record for destroying America is so overwhelming and obvious and you continue to vote for this clown party???



And this is why there is no way for the US to get out of this situation. It is structurally impossible.

Neolibs at least correctly identify the problem (local HOA's, local home owners shutting down new development and enforcing restrictive zoning) but then they turn around and say "well the solution here clearly, is for the government to do even less and let the market solve this issue!"

My cousin just shared a statistic with me since they live in Utah and said that one quarter of homes are owned by Black Rock and most of them are sitting empty and I keep hearing that's not a real problem, but that sounds pretty serious. What do you think about that? TS?

When I asked why it was that they would let them sit empty, they said it's because it drives up the prices of other homes they're selling.

 

[Sinister]

My cousin just shared a statistic with me since they live in Utah and said that one quarter of homes are owned by Black Rock and most of them are sitting empty and I keep hearing that's not a real problem, but that sounds pretty serious. What do you think about that? TS?

When I asked why it was that they would let them sit empty, they said it's because it drives up the prices of other homes they're selling.

The FTC are suing over this. They are aware that the housing market is being artificially inflated, using a few different means on behalf of investment value. Also Arizona has a lawsuit over this practice within their State, which should spawn other lawsuits.

Fun fact: A Republican administration would dismantle the FTC.

Company towns would become a thing not long after that. And we all remember what those were like:

 

[blackheart]

My cousin just shared a statistic with me since they live in Utah and said that one quarter of homes are owned by Black Rock and most of them are sitting empty and I keep hearing that's not a real problem, but that sounds pretty serious. What do you think about that? TS?

When I asked why it was that they would let them sit empty, they said it's because it drives up the prices of other homes they're selling.

As a share of the total US housing supply, Black Rock/Black Stone don't own a gigantic share of it. But in specific regions of the country, specific cities, they own entire blocks of homes and a significant chunk of the housing. When you combine them with all of the other corporate landlords/investors AND you combine THAT with foreign investment in US housing, it creates an insane amount of upward buying pressure.

 

[terrapin]

The FTC are suing over this. They are aware that the housing market is being artificially inflated, using a few different means on behalf of investment value. Also Arizona has a lawsuit over this practice within their State, which should spawn other lawsuits.

Fun fact: A Republican administration would dismantle the FTC.

Company towns would become a thing not long after that. And we all remember what those were like:

That is some seriously evil and manipulative shit man. 1/4 of home sounds impossible to me and I'm trying to confirm it. Are you saying that's accurate??

The reason I ask is because I've heard many people on the left on this website say that corporate ownership of homes is not a very big problem But if it's a quarter of homes in Utah. That would be a massive problem for them wouldn't it?

 

[Dirt Road Soldier]

What housing crisis? I live in a upper end building with a pool, gym, theatre, and heated garage next to huge university. Its under 1k a month here, half the fucking building is empty.

 

[terrapin]

As a share of the total US housing supply, Black Rock/Black Stone don't own a gigantic share of it. But in specific regions of the country, specific cities, they own entire blocks of homes and a significant chunk of the housing. When you combine them with all of the other corporate landlords/investors AND you combine THAT with foreign investment in US housing, it creates an insane amount of upward buying pressure.

Amazing that our government allows this kind of b******* to happen then.... I've got lots of family in Utah and I know at least three people that make $80 to $90,000 a year who can't afford a home!!!

If you're in California or New York, that doesn't sound like a lot of money, but the median income in Utah like under $50,000..... 90000.0 is upper middle class

 

[The XL]

It's because they want people weak and impotent. They openly speak of not wanting people to own anything. That's why they're allowing giant multinationals and even hostile foreign countries to buy everything up. Make no mistake, Western elites want us as docile and impotent as the Russian and Chinese elites do and they're endeavoring very hard to make it so.

 

[terrapin]

What housing crisis? I live in a upper end building with a pool, gym, theatre, and heated garage next to huge university. Its under 1k a month here, half the fucking building is empty.

Do you think cancer doesn't exist if you don't get it? Just wondering how far this lack of reasoning affects your life?.

 

[Scheme]

Part 2 (the end of my post. SD character limit cut off my op)

It's not that neoliberal market-based solutions can't be useful. But it's insane to think that those solutions are the only thing we should be doing. It obviously isn't working. It obviously hasn't worked.

For me personally, I know that these types of reforms, policies and government initiatives are never going to happen in this country because of the Republican party. I mean all of this with the utmost sincerity and good-faith, out of concern for my fellow Americans - For any of the good, decent people that read this, the people that care about their family and its future, regardless of your political persuasion, I cannot stress this enough - save yourselves and get the fuck out of this country. This is only going to get worse. It is not like this in other nations. Tokyo is the largest metro on earth, and average home prices are 300k. It is not a matter of population size. It is a matter of policy. Your children, and their children, will never be able to afford a home in this country unless they end up wealthy. Your children, and their children, are going to be at risk their entire lives for ending up with medical debt, which could result in them being homeless, or could result in them dying because they couldn't get treated to begin with. You, your children, and their children, should not need to be wealthy to live a quality life of dignity.

I know packing up and immigrating to another country, with or without a family, is a tremendous undertaking and no small task. But neither is ending up homeless or dying because you couldn't get healthcare. You need to do a serious analysis and gameplan for this future. If you and your spouse pick up a second job, maybe a side hustle as well, you budget well and stick to it, and you commit to the plan for a few years, you should be able to save up enough to immigrate to a functioning country. It will be really hard, but the future that is to come in the US is going to be much harder. Choose wisely.

I'm sorry to end on a partisan note but I ask the following completely sincerely. Republicans, what is the Republican answer/solution to the housing crisis? I literally do not even hear Republican politicians talk about it. I cannot recall a single time that Donald Trump has even mentioned it. Somebody tell me - what is the Republican policy solution to the US housing crisis?

Republicans are blocking people from owning homes!!!!

Except that home ownership in republican-run states is much higher than democrat-run states.

Maybe there are other actual factors at play? Maybe you should look up the data yourself before writing your anti-republican fan fiction?

 

[blackheart]

Republicans are blocking people from owning homes!!!!

Except that home ownership in republican-run states is much higher than democrat-run states.

Maybe there are other actual factors at play? Maybe you should look up the data yourself before writing your anti-republican fan fiction?

I asked a very direct very specific question. Pointing to home ownership rates in red states isn't an answer to the question "what is the republican solution on housing? why don't republicans even talk about housing?"

hey genius - do you think the higher home ownership rates in red states might be due to higher affordability that results from lower demand to live in those red areas?? So is your solution to housing to make everywhere in the US less desirable to live?