The housing crisis has so many Americans on edge that they are clamoring for relief at the ballot box. But we should be wary of “solutions” hawked by politicians that would actually make the crisis worse.
Texans should watch with interest what’s happening in New York City, where the cost of living is so unattainable that even white-collar workers with stable incomes can’t afford an apartment bigger than a shoe box. Many of those New Yorkers are leaving for Texas or other states where their dollars stretch further.
Zohran Mamdani entered the national conversation about housing affordability with his decisive win in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City last week. Mamdani, 33, overcame better-known candidates on a platform of making New York more affordable. Unfortunately, that platform is a progressive wishlist of housing policies that are proven failures.
Mamdani said he would freeze rents on one million rent-stabilized apartment units. He also promised to pour in $100 billion to build 200,000 public housing units. He claims he will pay for all of this by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. In Texas, we know what that means because we’ve seen it for years — people and corporations suddenly deciding our summers are tolerable after all.
Opinion
What’s amazing is how predictable this is. New Yorkers don’t have to look farther than their own state to see the pitfalls of rent control. Artificially locking up rents makes people who are lucky enough to get a rent-controlled place hunker down for years, or decades. Whatever units are freed up see fierce competition.
Landlords have little incentive to invest in keeping up their properties. To make matters worse, New York state passed a law in 2019 that caps how much landlords can raise rents to cover major improvements. For some developers, it makes more sense to leave older units vacant than to upgrade them to meet current codes because they can’t recoup their costs.
Subsidized housing won’t solve New York’s housing shortage. If private developers struggle through bureaucratic labyrinths, increasing the size of city government will make things better … how?
We have previously highlighted the lessons from a report on the housing crisis by J.H. Cullum Clark at the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. They are worth repeating here. Metro areas in the Sun Belt and the Mountain Region have kept housing prices more affordable by expanding outward, allowing developers to build a variety of housing types across a wide range of locations and by implementing pro-growth reforms.
Even liberal pundits concede that red states like Texas make it easier to build everything from housing to renewable energy. As New York Times commentator Ezra Klein put it in his podcast last year: “The basic issue is the problem in the blue states is the default is set to make things hard, even when the politics want to make it easy.”
Texas faces its own housing crunch, and state lawmakers were wise to pass measured policies this year that will remove hurdles for developers, from zoning to lot sizes. It’s that much more important as NIMBY voices grow louder.
New York is a cautionary tale. The more we resist development, the fewer homes there will be amid tighter competition. And desperate people might just vote for dangerous policies because they sound like a reprieve.