I have been getting the sense that if I wandered into the woods, cut off from all communication, spending my days just surviving for five or even ten years, I’d return to find the housing conversation stuck in the same place it is today; one group vigorously opposing increased housing supply to solve price issues, another using the word “supply” but espousing a bunch of really bad policies like Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning, and, well, people like me, those that aren’t willing to comprise the basic notion of the price system. So if I had my way, I’d start an institute kind of like the Institute of Economic Affairs in the United Kingdom to build a strong base for intellectually principled supply side housing economics. I’ll post my draft proposal. It is sort of pie in the sky, something someone may discover someday like a message in a bottle. Here’s the second part. And you can read part 1 here. 

Housing Specifics

• End zoning– Zoning is a 20^th century solution to a 19^th century problem and premised on the notion that separating use is good planning; it isn’t. Allowing many uses – manufacturing, retail, and residential, for example – closer together is more sustainable and efficient that separating uses. Zoning also creates geographic differences in typology that heighten scarcity of housing choices. Zoning also segregates people, limiting their opportunities.
• Support ownership– Ownership of a home doesn’t have to mean a detached single-family home. Policies should be developed to create equity in housing for as many people as possible.
• Incentivize density– It is efficient to have more people living on less land and it is more sustainable. Tax incentives should be structured to allow fewer people on more land but with incentives for people who live in greater concentrations.
• Get out of the way – Producers can meet most of the demand in the economies of most urban and rural areas if government allows it and incentivizes it.

1. Encourage more mixed use multifamily housing
2. Allow smaller units with shared kitchens and common areas
3. Eliminate design review and restrictions
4. Eliminate all height, bulk, and scale limits
5. Eliminate redundant and excessive utility requirements (including impact fees)
6. No parking minimums or requirements
7. Incentivize the speedy processing of permits
8. Require annual review of building and land use codes
9. Eliminate all rules, restrictions, code requirements not benefiting health or safety
10. Require consumer cost impact for all existing and new rules or regulations

• Cash for rent– As long as the normative standard for housing costs is 30 percent of gross monthly income, buy down the “cost burden” with direct cash payments for rent rather than building new subsidized housing. Cost burdened households don’t need a unit years from now – they already have one – they’re just paying more than the normative standard today. Most cost burden could be eliminated quickly and efficiently with cash payments.
• Impact investing– People with less money with needs that they can’t meet create costs to the broader community. These costs can be identified and if they can be reduced through intervention, that intervention has a value that can be monetized. Providing low or no barrier shelter and housing along with case management and other services is a short term cost, but if it is effective those costs can be paid back, with interest, when savings to government budgets are realized.
• Tenants and property owners – When a person or business rents private property to a person or business the property owner is taking a risk and is entitled to benefit from that risk. The only role that government has in the relationship between a renter and an owner is to enforce the rules of a contract, not to impose a contract terms on the renter and owner. Individuals and businesses have no right to use other people’s property and a private property owner is under no obligation to rent property to anyone else with no terms.