Why both Republicans and Democrats are failing at solving America’s housing crisis
In late July, freed from the shackles of a disastrous Ninth Circuit decision by the Supreme Court, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the state’s burgeoning homeless camps to be cleared out. It won’t work.
On the other coast, Gov. Hochul has tried to suspend New York’s “right to shelter” while throwing millions more dollars into housing the homeless. It won’t work. Earlier this week, after failing to persuade the homeless to get help, Atlantic City announced it will ban sleeping in public areas. It won’t work.
In the dead of each January winter, people fan out across every city and town in America.
They look under bridges, they search along isolated riverbanks, they walk up and down tent cities, they look on top of and under park benches, they seek out parked cars, and they visit shelters. They count our homeless. They count the casualties of failed government policies.
In 2024, they counted a record 653,104 homeless. That’s roughly equivalent to a mid-sized American city. But this is not the America that many of us grew up in. Today’s America has cities like New York that have run out of shelter space. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles with block after block of tents sprawled across downtown sidewalks. This is America slouching toward the Third World.
How did we get here? If we understand how we have arrived at this state of woe, perhaps we can figure out how to get out of the mess. At least, that is the hope behind my book, “Nowhere to Live – The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis.”
As explained, it has taken over a century of bad policies to reach today’s crisis point. We have adopted law after law that has slowly destroyed the property rights of landowners to build homes where people actually wish to live.
Take zoning. The first zoning law in America was adopted in Baltimore in 1910 — to make it a crime for a black person to move into a white neighborhood. Other cities followed, but the Supreme Court soon struck down such laws. The Court ruled that people had a property right to sell a home to anyone who wanted to buy it.
But it didn’t take long for cities — modeled after New York City’s zoning law — to do an end run around the Supreme Court.
Cities began to adopt economic zoning. Apartments and other multi-family housing were banned in large parts of our cities and suburbs.
Most notoriously, Euclid, Ohio, zoned virtually all of its land as single-family residential — even property next to a large tractor factory.
After Euclid convinced the Supreme Court that apartments were nuisances, there were fewer places across the nation to build lower-cost housing open to minorities and the working class. Shortages began and have continued to worsen ever since.
American cities have often destroyed working-class neighborhoods in the name of redevelopment. Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood was leveled for a since-abandoned GM Plant.
New London, Conn., reduced a middle-class neighborhood to make way of the headquarters of Pfizer Pharmaceutical — also now abandoned.
We have well-meaning environmental laws that have been co-opted by NIMBYism to throw monkey-wrenches into new home-building. California is rife with stories of housing projects that have been delayed for decades by one abusive lawsuit after another.
Government solutions often cause more pain than they cure. Front and center is rent control which does nothing to lower the overall cost of housing but does everything to prevent new housing from being built in the first place. From New York City to Santa Monica, the construction of new apartments makes little sense under rent control.
We have not managed to repeal the law of supply and demand. Every government policy that reduces our ability to build new homes reduces supply and raises prices.
Unwinding these ill-conceived government policies will not be easy.
But if we recognize how we have created the hole we are in today, perhaps we can crawl out of it — by once again respecting rights in property and allowing people to build homes and apartments where people need to live.
James Burling is the author of Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis. He is the Vice President of Legal Affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation.
