Over at Forbes I’ve offered a more sustained take on a book that debuted last year called In Defense of Housing. It’s a version of a discussion I had year about a year ago about whether housing should be a right. The truth is it really doesn’t matter. The book spends its pages make the case the the problem with housing is that it is a commodity, bought and sold for a profit. Fair enough. That’s true. But what the book gets wrong is that housing is a commodity because it is scarce. When someone rents and apartment to sublet that rental at a profit, the problem is not the commodification of housing but the fact that it is so scarce the price causes hoarding behavior. Once a person finds himself with something so valuable, he’s incentivized to do something profitable with it. Commodification is a symptom of scarcity, not the cause. I used the water hole scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey to make this point.

I think the scene is perhaps one of the best explanations of human nature and behavior around scarce resources. Our ancestors in the scene are faced with a crisis: one group is setting up barriers to the water hole. Water is essential. It isn’t a luxury now and it wasn’t then. But in the film, the dominance of one group means trouble. One of the monkeys gets an idea. Maybe through intimidation and force he can dislodge the other clan from the water hole. The scene is epic because it illustrates how scarcity leads to violence and the establishment of hierarchies of power around resources. Once the monkey kills the other monkey he’s now not only got access to the water, but something even more intangible and worrisome: power. Imagine how the scene would have played out if the monkey had instead figured out how to use the bone to dig another water hole. More water would mean no need to kill anyone.

This scene could just as easily be a design review meeting or a gathering of a mob of angry neighbors worried about microhousing, small lot housing, or zoning changes. Once the mob is assembled and one of the angry neighbors leading the charge is successful at encouraging something really stupid like Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s abutting lot legislation, they not only get their way about a project but they also accrue power. That power builds and ends up dominating the discourse and influencing policies that make housing scarcity worse.

I like the book. It’s well written and compelling. What I don’t like is that many left leaning and well meaning people are waving it around like it’s the answer. It isn’t. It’s a waste of valuable intellectual space. We can argue all day about how making housing a right and the abolition of private property would end the housing problem. It won’t. All that will happen is that households in need will trade high prices for rationing. We need more housing, and that means standing up to entitled neighbors and saying, “No! We will build housing in your neighborhoods. Lots of it. Get over it!” Anything short of that will guarantee shortages whether housing is a commodity or not.