Commentary
The United States needs as many as 7.1 million new homes to house low-income renters.
To this end, President Donald Trump is considering opening more federal land to development. Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah have federal lands near urban areas where the lack of housing is the most acute. New affordable homes can be built in these areas by private industry to absorb people as they liberate themselves from dependency on federal housing.
On April 22, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner said that HUD seeks to “maximize the budget that we do have and make sure that we’re very efficient and effective,” while not increasing the number of people dependent on government assistance. HUD seeks instead to “get people off subsidies and live a life of self-sustainability,” he said.
Turner is partnering with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to release federal lands for affordable housing. In the process, they plan to cut through the red tape.
“Streamlining the regulatory process is a cornerstone of this partnership. Historically, building on federal land is a nightmare of red tape—lengthy environmental reviews, complex transfer protocols and disjointed agency priorities. This partnership will cut through the bureaucracy,” they wrote in an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal on March 16.
Yes, we need more housing, freedom, and self-sufficiency. A thriving economy depends on the freedom to earn, and the lack of affordable housing is a side effect of the lack of that freedom, as applied to builders.
In addition to freeing up land and helping people out of dependency, Washington should consider guiding states and localities to targeted relaxation of zoning and building codes near (but not in) particularly unaffordable regions.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I live, is a good example. Reformers on the city council want to jettison the minimum lot size required to build a home. A proposed bill would decrease the minimum lot size from 8,000 to 6,000 square feet, and get rid of it altogether for high-density areas. Critics call this a “build anything anywhere” mentality. But proponents argue that more freedom in choosing lot size gives people the choice to live as they wish, even if that choice is for smaller homes on smaller lots due to their family’s financial constraints.
Edmonds, in Snohomish County, Washington, is an example of a town with highly restrictive zoning that leads to a low rate of growth. The city has grown at 0.4 percent since 2020, four times slower than Snohomish County as a whole. The city sees its restrictive building policies as a form of environmentalism. But refusing to allow taller buildings contributes to urban sprawl and hurts jobs.
In Sacramento, California, legislators are pushing for new statewide affordable housing laws, but their side effects are dependency and debt rather than independence and freedom. While rent control is popular among some renters in California, it tends to push home values down and acts as a taking from homeowners and landlords. It chills investor interest in developing new homes, when housing investment on the free market would provide more jobs and more housing. This is the free market principle. As the supply of housing goes up due to fewer regulations and no rent control laws, the cost of rent decreases over time, all else equal.
State borrowing through bonds to produce more affordable housing, as proposed in California, is another taking, this time from future generations. The state and localities in California have already issued more than $2 trillion in debt since 1985. What more they can afford to borrow will only be a drop in the bucket of affordable housing. More debt-fueled building will fail to solve the problem in a long-term and comprehensive manner.
Nimbyism is a major stumbling block to the development of affordable housing. “I support more affordable housing for the deserving poor, but I don’t want it in my backyard where it will bring down my property values,” would be a classic NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) sentiment. Nimbyism translates into restrictive zoning and building codes that keep out “those who don’t look like us.” Nimbyism may require national-level legislation to overcome in a fair way so no particular region or neighborhood bears an unfair burden from the provision of more affordable housing.
Building new affordable homes requires not only land but also inexpensive labor, construction materials, and a more permissive regulatory environment. Politics will get in the way at each step. Unions in the construction trades may oppose new sources of labor as it could decrease their wages.
Conservationists will undoubtedly oppose the release of federal lands for development purposes. And some will be critical of the use that federal land releases are planned for—will they be used to build mansions with views of vast amounts of remote federal land, for example, or for small starter homes near densely populated metropolitan areas?
Another principle required to solve the housing crisis is that not everybody can live in the best locations. Prime land is scarce. If one finds that one can’t make a good living in Manhattan, Hollywood, Honolulu, Tokyo, Singapore, Geneva, or London, it is time to move to a cheaper place, not beg for government housing. There is still near-free land to be had in many parts of the United States and around the world. Go to where the good jobs are. Move, and help build.
To simplify, if there are both cheap land made available for affordable housing and reasonably light regulations, people who need homes will form companies to build them, or people will get hired by existing construction companies that will have the newfound conditions necessary to build. That is the essence of a free market solution to the affordable housing crisis. The government gets out of the way so that deserving families who really want to work and build or buy their own homes can do so.
The complexities of modern economics and the tangle of modern regulations sometimes obscure the basics: the best social safety net is the willingness of the family to provide food and a home for itself through hard work on relatively cheap land. For those without family support, religious groups and other civic organizations step in. The government can help as well, but it is currently broke. Interest payments on almost $37 trillion in national debt are getting astronomical and unsustainable. That is the reality that requires a return to self-sufficiency and the pioneering spirit that made America great. It is the spirit to which we must return if we really want to solve the housing crisis.
Property ownership is among the foundational principles of freedom of the individual against the king or dictator, found in the philosophy of John Locke. His ideas buttress the U.S. Constitution, through which Americans have a right to property. Most anyone who has owned a home understands that it becomes an extension of the self and one’s personality, providing both a feeling of freedom and self-reliance that is hard to find in this modern world. That feeling of freedom and self-reliance from homeownership is so important to well-being that it should be seen as a human right: the right to build and earn.
