A response to ‘Why housing is so
unaffordable’

This is in response to Phil Anderson’s Sept. 3 story “Why is housing so unaffordable?”
Phil Anderson is right that housing costs are a serious problem and that demand, incomes and speculation all play a role. He is wrong that the conventional supply-and-demand story is a “campaign slogan,” that regulation is a minor footnote and that only large-scale public provision can work.
The article treats building-permit fees of $1,688 as proof that “red tape” is insignificant. The permit itself is not the issue. The issue is the stack of rules that determine whether a modest unit can be built at all, and how long and how expensively it takes: minimum lot sizes, parking minimums, single-family zoning, lengthy environmental and design reviews, impact fees and unpredictable delays. Those costs are not $1,688. They are a large share of why a starter home or small apartment is often illegal or unprofitable in the exact places people want to live.

Anderson notes that zoning keeps out cheaper housing, then immediately recasts it as local prejudice against “riff-raff.” Neighborhood opposition is real. So are school capacity, traffic, fiscal impacts,and the simple fact that existing owners have a rational interest in scarcity. Calling the whole thing bigotry does not explain why cities that allow more housing tend to have lower prices or why cities that tightly ration it do not.

Developers prefer larger, more expensive projects in part because the rules make small, cheap projects harder. That is not proof that “the free market will never” produce modest housing. It is evidence that the market is not free to produce it. Private equity buying homes is a consequence of expected price growth, not the original cause. When supply is constrained, almost every actor — owner, landlord, flipper, fund — has an incentive to bid prices up. Restricting who may buy does not create more houses.

The postwar suburban boom did involve government-backed credit and rising wages. It also involved mass production on land that was allowed to be developed. Today’s high-cost metros have done the opposite: they have added households faster than homes. Subsidies and public housing can help the lowest-income households. They cannot substitute for allowing enough housing to be built. Treating every market outcome as “greed” and every constraint as incidental leaves the actual bottleneck unaddressed.

Housing affordability requires more supply where people want to live, faster approvals, and targeted aid for those who still cannot pay. It does not require pretending that prices rise only because someone is making money.
Ed Newman
Duluth, Minnesota

Externalities

Once upon a time the World was in balance. Trees and abundant other forms of plant growth needed, and absorbed, carbon-dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere. They gave back their waste product, oxygen. A limited population of humans and numerous animal species needed the oxygen, and gave back their waste product, carbon-dioxide. The World was in balance.

The exponential growth of human civilization has thrown nature’s balance out of kilter. It is our modern human civilization that is slowly increasing the concentration of carbon-dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately for us this throws the Earth’s thermal balance out of kilter. More of the Sun’s radiant energy is trapped in and under our atmosphere (a thermal blanket that envelops the Earth). This is due to the increased concentration of heat-trapping carbon-dioxide. Economically we call this an “externality.” That’s when a business limits its costs by not paying for environmental (or other) damages they inflict in the production of goods or services.

When we breathe the air and exhale an increased concentration of carbon-dioxide we do not call that an externality. That’s nature. That’s life. 
But now we have pushed our burning of fossil fuels too far. Our human population is approaching 10 billion! 
We don’t just burn wood or coal in the fireplace to keep warm. Humanity’s carbon footprint has become too big for the planet. Draw your own conclusions, but I’d say we need to put a price on carbon externalities. 
Petroleum and coal companies should not be unduly profiting as excessive use of their products is slowly killing the planet.
George Busséy
Ashland, Wisconsin

9/11 - Then & NOW

For those of us who are old enough to remember JFK’s assassination (November 22nd, 1963) we remember where we were, what we were doing and when it happened. For me I was in the 9th grade and just finished lunch. I made it to my classroom and the teacher had the radio on and she heard “the President has died”. Our teacher started to cry and put her head down on her desk.

Now for the details of 9/11/2001. I was working in the Purchasing department at IBM Rochester, MN and it was mid-morning when someone was running down the hall saying a plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in NYC! No details but sounded intentional. I had a meeting with an IBM supplier salesman and went down to the lobby to meet him. As we were walking towards a conference room he mentioned that he heard about the plane hitting the tower at the World Trade Center. Without hearing any news reports on details I said to the salesman, “I bet it was Osama bin Laden”! After the meeting I went to a TV which IBM had on every floor of every building and some early reports stated the main suspect was Osama bin Laden.

Now it was the 25th anniversary on 9/11/2026 with many ceremonies recognizing the 2,977 Americans murdered that day. However, in today’s political climate many DSA candidates in the primaries have claimed “America deserved 9/11”! How can any true patriotic American can say that? I feel any political candidate saying those words should be considered a traitor and be deleted from the ballot!
Chuck Bracken
Cannon Falls, Minnesota