THE AFFORDABLE HOUSING crisis facing America today is complex. No single villain exists. Rather, a tangle of problems arose over the last century, beginning with well-meaning but misguided local governments deciding they knew better what do with private property than the property owners themselves.
Once the U.S. Supreme Court gave local authorities the unconstitutional privilege to ignore private property rights in defense of “the public welfare,” the problems metastasized and created the housing crisis before us.
This thicket of housing laws created new problems that now are much worse than the problems governments intended to solve because they restrict the building and availability of affordable housing. We must untangle this government-created Gordian knot.
That is why Pacific Legal Foundation exists: to untangle the knots in the courts through litigation. A society cannot flourish and individuals cannot advance their private interests without the right to create and productively use property. As issue haves detailed, PLF litigates in several areas of law to improve housing affordability as a foundation of liberty:
- We fight onerous and unconstitutional local zoning and permitting schemes designed to slow down and ultimately stop housing development.
- We oppose state laws that allow the government to take people’s property, including rental property, in the name of recovering a small fraction of the property’s value.
- We sue governments that impose burdensome regulations on landlords and make it impossible to feasibly rent a piece of property to a tenant.
It bears repeating: The only way to make housing more affordable is to build more housing. That will bring down the costs of owning, leasing, and renting property for all Americans.
More people are coming around to our way of thinking. As President Barack Obama neared the end of his eight years in office, his administration all but adopted the PLF approach to housing in a well-received but little-publicized September 2016 report known as the Housing Development Toolkit:
“Over the past three decades, local barriers to housing development have intensified, particularly in the high-growth metropolitan areas increasingly fueling the national economy. The accumulation of such barriers – including zoning, other land use regulations, and lengthy development approval processes – has reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to growing demand…By modernizing their approaches to housing development regulation, states and localities can restrain unchecked housing cost growth, protect homeowners, and strengthen their economies.” (emphasis added).
Pacific Legal Foundation will continue to seek new and innovative ways to prevent bureaucrats from strangling housing affordability, just as we will continue to defend those entrepreneurs who are trying to bring additional and affordable housing into the market.
