The Housing Bill We Needed… Sort Of

So can I ask a simple question that may seem obvious? So obviously, if there's a housing shortage, increasing supply seems to be like that would be an easy fix.

I don't know about easy, but a fix.

What about the wages for people that are actually affording these places? I mean, is building 100,000 new units at the same price going to make a difference if people can't afford that? Yeah, it will make a

difference to a point.

And you're right to say that.

building all this housing.

So what it will do is make it, it will have the effect of more supply in the market, should lower the cost a little bit for market rate housing that is provided by for-profit landlords, if we're talking about renting.

And that's good.

But the reality is it can only go so far.

And that, for instance, the average rental price in our hometown of Indianapolis, which is relatively cheap compared to other metropolitan areas, is about $1,200 a month for a one-bedroom.

And maybe a for-profit landlord, if there's a lot of supply out there and they've got to compete a little bit more, they could lower that price to, you know, maybe they lower it a couple hundred bucks a month.

But they can't lower it all the way down to the level that's affordable for the very poor people because then they can't pay their own expenses.

So market rate housing is good for a substantial percentage of the population.

But for the folks we see in eviction court, folks we see who are on the streets, people who are sleeping in their cars, et cetera, they're in need of subsidized housing.

And so we have some fixes that we should make to that that we can talk about.

But there's one of the real deans of housing policy in the United States is a guy named Alan Malick, and he wrote a piece, an article back in 2019, and I think his title said it exactly right.

Rents will only go so low no matter how much we build because for-profit landlords are not going to be able to provide rents.

housing at, you know, just a few hundred dollars a month.

And when we have folks, which we have, we talked about it in last week's episode with Steven Nunez of the Roosevelt Institute.

There's millions of people in this country who are living with disabilities and their entire monthly income is a thousand dollars a month.

For them, the recommended amount that we all should be paying for housing is like 30% of our income.

So the recommended amount they should be paying is $300.

There's no for-profit landlord in the country who is going to rent out a home or a unit for $300.

They can't afford to do that.

So for-profit landlords can't be the real answer for these very poor people.