There has been no shortage of government plans purported to make houses more affordable in America, including most recently a $25,000 government subsidy to select first-time buyers proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. However, recent reports argue that the government itself has played a pivotal role in putting houses out of the financial reach of many middle-class buyers.
“We are short, depending on who you ask, between 4 and 7 million homes nationwide, and we’re building fewer homes than we were back in the 1970s,” James Burling, a property rights attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation and author of “Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis,” said. “Part of the problem is that government is making it difficult to build.”
Burling says that “restrictions on property rights imposed by all levels of government,” including zoning laws, environmental regulations, rent control, and government ownership of land, are discouraging the construction of affordable housing. While zoning laws are the biggest culprit, he says, there are also numerous cases of agencies and activist nonprofit organizations using the Endangered Species Act to block housing construction or criminally prosecute landowners for disturbing habitats.
Edward Pinto, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, believes the solution is to shift land-use rights back to property owners. Zoning laws originated a century ago and “ultimately replaced private property rights with vague and nebulous communal rights,” he argues.
“The answer to our housing crisis is to legalize duplexes, triplexes, and other forms of light-touch density
