More Building Won’t Make Housing Affordable

America’s housing crisis has reached unfathomable proportions. But new construction isn’t enough to solve it.

This New Republic article’s title is pretty clear and not hyperbolic. The U.S. is in a housing crisis and getting worse. The conventional wisdom is the answer is simple math - more housing. “Building more is not a panacea on its own. In fact, it can make the crisis worse without strong policies designed to help low-income people stay in affordable housing.” Much of the new housing is a result of gentrification, displacing middle and low-income residents from their neighborhoods. And they have nowhere to go.

“Given the scale the housing crisis today, (these) victories might seem marginal. None of them, it’s fair to say, is nearly sufficient to upend what urban geographer Samuel Stein has called “the real estate state,” that bloated alliance through which our elected representatives serve corporate property owners far better than they serve anyone else. The noxious result of that alliance is not the American dream, by any average person’s standards, but the fever dream of American elites. Any successful refusal of real estate interests forms a wake-up call, an insistence that fighting for outcomes beyond rampant building and limitless price hikes can work. “The truth is that no one is going to hand us the gentrification-proof city we want,” Kern writes. “We have to imagine it, we have to believe in it, and we have to do it.”

Read the full article https://newrepublic.com/article/170480/building-wont-make-housing-affordable-gentrification-book-review