When will affordable housing advocates push for more supply and fewer rules?
The lack of market rate supply contributes to high prices that puts market rate housing out of reach, and as long as that problem goes unaddressed, more and more subsidies will need to be...
The death of the small apartment building
Developers in the U.S. built 358,000 units of new multifamily housing in 2017. That’s less than half the number of single-family homes built last year, but the gap between the two has narrowed a...
Our perception of skilled trades needs to change
The U.S. is in the midst of a crisis of masculinity. According to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, men without four-year college degrees, ages 25 to 54, have left...
What goes wrong when the government interferes with prices
Prices are a fact of life, and so is complaining about them. You probably prefer lower prices on just about everything, but especially when buying a house or paying for college, and you wish...
The “folly” of fair housing
These obligations are not made out of whole cloth, but were explicitly set out in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (FHA), which has two separate parts. The first is a general command prohibiting...
A reasonable proposal
Much has been made of the recent proposal by the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform to modify the current, virtually unlimited mortgage interest deductions available to homeowners. The NAHB, The National Association...
Banning demon coal
One mystery of U.S. politics is why Al Gore, California billionaire Tom Steyer and the green lobby view President Obama as a disaster for global warming. Maybe nobody could satisfy their ambitions. But the...
Raising minimum wage hurts workforce
The Senate Budget Committee’s blog says, “Top economists are backing Sen. Bernie Sanders on establishing a $15 an hour minimum wage.” It lists the names of 210 economists who call for increasing the federal...
New York’s self-inflicted housing crunch
But there’s also the anxiety from New York’s crazy-quilt pattern of land use regulation, which a New York Times editorial recently labeled “High-Rise Anxiety.” The unease stems from the many overlapping restrictions both on...
More rent control in California will make the housing problem worse
Rent control is a terrible idea that just won’t die. The latest example is a new bill working its way through the California legislature that would cap annual rent increases at 5 percent for...
NMHC weighs in on HUD
After considering the Administration’s goal as well as its previous attempts to shoehorn minorities into largely homogenous communities in which they otherwise could not afford to live, the author comes to this conclusion:
“Seemingly incapable...
Our water system: What a waste.
The price of this neglect will be high. In Flint, Mich., the mayor has estimated that it will cost as much as $1.5 billion to fix or replace lead pipes. Over all, repairing our...
Let’s get something straight about the Clean Water Act
The Clean Water Act expressly prohibits the discharge of a pollutant to “navigable waters” of the United States without a federal permit. The Act also expressly states:
It is the policy of the Congress to...
The time the federal government built a flawed housing project and tore it down...
On the 50th anniversary of the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, it’s nearly impossible to understate the failure of the St. Louis public housing project.
Famed architect Minoro Yamasaki, who would go on to design the World...
The hidden virtues of income inequality
The New York Times recently ran a front-page exposé of segregation by wealth in the booming cruise business. The article, by Nelson Schwartz, was entitled “In an Age of Privilege, Not Everyone Is in...
