I have two posts at Forbes from last week that I think hinge on the story we tell about housing.

Is It Time For “Housing Vigilantism?”, is really about asking and answering the question, “What does a community do when local government fails to take care of essential functions?” In this case, some people in Oakland have taken filling potholes into their own hands. For thousands of dollars they are fixing city streets. What did the City do? Propose a program that would pay union labor millions to do the same thing. The analogy with housing is hard not to make. Why deregulate the housing economy and allow private business to solve a big part of the housing scarcity problem when you can tax new housing, give the money to politically powerful non-profits who will produce a fraction of the housing for as much as twice the price?

There Is An Addiction To Bad Narratives About Homelessness, is a response to a Crosscut post that kind of makes my point that you find out where a person’s politics are when that person tells you what causes homelessness. If someone says that jobs cause homelessness you know that that individual thinks that there is one pie divided among a growing population; if your slice is bigger it is because mine is smaller. If someone says it is drugs that cause homelessness you’re likely talking to a neighbor who opposes new housing development and thinks homeless is a law enforcement issue. The problem is that we don’t even really know what we mean by “homelessness,” and neither of these causes or solutions gets at the point: we can do more to ease the suffering of people with less money and housing issues by building more housing.