The lack of affordable housing has been a major issue front and center in many communities around the United States and the world. Politicians have been suggesting that we can fix this imbalance by addressing the supply side of the issue, boosting housing construction, creating greater flexibility within existing community zoning, providing financial and tax incentives to encourage housing construction, limiting investor-owned properties and utilizing various other tools to manipulate the number of homes.
The quandary facing communities, regions, states and countries that are experiencing unaffordable housing is that the more they try to fix the problem by increasing the supply of homes, the greater the host of problems they encounter with that growth.
Housing needs land. Sometimes it is land that already has residential or commercial buildings. More commonly, new housing construction is created by displacing farmland, forests and other green space. Growing in lockstep with this new housing is the infrastructure necessary to support it; expanded water and sewer treatment facilities, more electric substations, and the web of transmission lines criss-crossing the landscape, wider roadways, more street and traffic lights, parking lots, commercial buildings, strip malls, nondescript big box stores, fast food chains, gas stations and self-storage facilities.
This growth incrementally erodes the quality of life and character of a community. Greenspace disappears. The Milky Way at night is lost to a growing orange glow that creeps its way in from expanding artificial lighting. Trash accumulates alogside roadways and clogs streams. Air and water quality suffer everywhere. Traffic congests and chokes many neighborhoods, and peace and quietude are replaced by the constant din of traffic and construction.
So who benefits from this housing growth? The home buyers certainly do, because more supply will initially help reduce the price associated with finding a place to live, and who can blame them. Everyone deserves an affordable home. More so the developers, debt sellers and cheap labor employers reap the financial benefits profiting massively in the short-term from this housing growth, while the rest of us suffer long-term from the greater social, economic and environmental costs that come with this growth.
Do we just roll over and accept this growth as inexorable and surrender to its negative impacts on our environment and quality of life?
If we value the beauty and nature that surrounds us, if we value the health and happiness of our friends, family, and neighbors, then sustainable growth must be an important long term objective. Sustainable growth means stabilizing and reducing population growth.
If we encourage and incentivize a culture, practices and policies that stabilize this growth, by encouraging and celebrating small families, providing universal access to reproductive health, and ensuring legal immigration, fewer farms will be lost, forests cut down and natural habitat lost. People will be able to afford to live in our communities; communities that aren’t overcrowded, overdeveloped, overpriced, over regulated, and over-polluted.
We know this works. Recent studies demonstrate countries that are experiencing steady or declining populations, their housing prices are stable, families are more financially secure, economies are vibrant and the communities benefit immensely from the preservation of its clean air, clean water and the natural beauty that surrounds them. They are experiencing sustainable growth.
Yes we need to increase the supply of homes, but just as importantly we must decrease the demand, or we will never fully solve our housing and environmental crises.
