By Alan Mallach : shelterforce – excerpt

Some say yes. But simply making it easier to build will not reach those who are unhoused.

It takes some serious chutzpah to assert that the answer to homelessness is obvious, as a piece published earlier in this year in The Atlantic does. If only “The Obvious Answer to Homelessness” actually had offered the answer, obvious or otherwise. Sadly, it didn’t. And even more sadly, it perpetuated a narrow and misleading—and ideologically charged—view of the homelessness crisis. The more this view is propagated, the more it gets in the way of thinking clearly about a problem that should be solvable, but is far from simple.

The article, authored by journalist Jerusalem Demsas, does get a couple of things right. Yes, the homelessness problem is much worse in the “superstar cities” like Seattle, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C. And no, people do not go to these cities to become homeless, or because of their mild climate or liberal politics. But to conclude that the answer is (drumroll, please) to get rid of burdensome regulations so that developers can build more housing in those superstar cities, is to seriously misinterpret a number of facts on the ground. In fact, eliminating regulations would hardly make a dent in the problem. Regulation is a red herring that directs attention away from finding real solutions.

I’m not saying we don’t need more housing supply. Yes, we do. Since the Great Recession, we have under-produced housing relative to the growth in the number of households and the need to replace old units. In the last couple of years, the number of new households being formed and looking for a place to live has spiked, and housing production has not kept up. This is one of a host of reasons why prices and rents have skyrocketed in the last two or three years. There is little doubt that if we built more housing, particularly plain vanilla housing like the small single-family homes and modest garden apartments that relieved the post-World War II housing crisis, we would make a big dent in the needs of the millions of young people, middle-income families, and others for decent, affordable housing. I have been saying this since long before the idea became the solution du jour. But there are some big catches…(more)