Editorial: The housing crises is voter caused
Rents are high, but that is a supply problem
Every single major city in the US limits how many housings unit someone may place on their property. You are no longer allowed to add another building and give it to your son or daughter as a wedding present. You can’t just remodel that second floor when the kids move out and rent it out as a second apartment. Building an apartment over your garage is a thing of the past. It gets even worse if you want to build actual apartment buildings.
Right now, my wife, our cat, and I live in the Philippines. The apartment we rent is out in the provinces. It cost me 95$ a month, and would be illegal to rent in every single US city, and there are plenty of cheaper ones around, (mine has air, many don’t). There is no stove, refrigerator, or even hot water heater. A tenant decides if they want those and buys them themselves. The place is also tiny. The whole thing would fit in the front room of the last three places I lived in Kentucky
.
While not quite that cheap, it is the same across much of Asia. If you want a cheap place to live, there is no law stopping people from renting it to you, though most do have more safety laws than here. This results in enough housing that in much of it, they are competing for renters, instead of the renters competing for housing like almost every US city.
Every place that housing is short in the United States, you have hundreds of investors wanting to put up high-rises and offer low cost housing, and cash in on that very lucrative market. But the voters say no. Over and over and over, no matter the city, the voters block any such cheap housing from going in. Then they blame the corporations when only those that are investing in keeping prices up can afford to invest in owning housing there.
High rent prices is an entirely self-inflicted wound, one that would only take a few years to fix. All it takes is getting out of the way of all those people wanting to build more housing
Until later.
James R Steinhaus
