The Saturday Morning Post: A place to call home

There are a group of angry young people who are convinced that the reason they can't find an affordable home, is because we baby boomers insist on aging in homes that we love and enjoy.  To some extent baby boomers are responsible for the difficulty in affordable housing, but the objection is to the result, not the cause of a widespread shortage of housing for sale in the United States (and Great Britain.) 

Part of the cause, is a social reform movement before the baby boomers were born to eliminate substandard housing in cities.  Crowded urban housing was often unsafe and unsanitary, but rather than address the health and safety issues, the reformers pushed the idea that the only "proper" home was a free standing home, with a garden space around it.  The reformers posited that crowding led to drunkenness and immoral behaviour.  Somehow the reformers thought that living 30 feet from your neighbor would prevent adultery.  Higher density housing was seen a breeding ground for crime, and immoral behaviour. This belief mated well with racism, leading to housing codes that made housing unaffordable for many. 

There are three aspects of housing codes that drive up housing prices. 

First is limiting land available for development. Yes green space is pretty, but limiting land available for development, drives up the price of the land that is available. The economic law of supply applies here.  If we increase the supply, and demand remains constant, prices will drop to meet demand.  We need to allow higher density and mixed use development (the community above has been high density and mixed use for over 1,000 years - and I would move there in a heartbeat.) 

The next set of factors are minimum lot sizes and minimum home size. The larger the minimum lot size, the higher the cost. The larger the home, the higher the cost. These factors have been misused for decades to make housing unaffordable. 

The third factor is costs added onto land, bricks and mortar to build new housing.  These include utility connection costs, and in many communities "impact fees" charged for the issuance of a building permit to fund building community infrastructure such as roads, schools, parks, water and sewer facilities.  These can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of each new home built.  

How to lower housing costs and promote home ownership: 

• Increase the land available for development 
• Allow higher density development and mixed use development
• Let the market determine home size 
• Tax all property to pay for needed community services such as schools, parks, streets, libraries, and utilities.  We all benefit from them.  We all benefit from growing healthy communities.  

Sorry to bore many of you, this was a rant that has been building for sometime and needed to get out.