This is one of those things that sounds radical now but was completely normal policy 70 years ago. The federal government used to directly build housing—lots of it—for working-class families. Projects like the New Deal and post-WWII housing initiatives weren't perfect, but they did provide millions of people with stable places to live.
What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
You ignore the administrative/legal barriers to any new project that greatly increased since that time, due to legislation pushed mostly by left. Today it is substantially harder to build anything, both for public and private sector (although private sector can push through by throwing more money at the problem).
> We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
We are in vetocracy, because cheapest way way to placate your political supporters is to give them power to veto what they do not want (instead of accomplish anything positive).
Your initial take is bizarrely politically charged for something that transcends the left-right divide.
Many non-“left” barriers have been raised too and ignoring that only contributes to the mess we’re in. For example: zoning and planning. Plenty of folks would like to claim they want more homeless housing, just not near them.
> To meet demand, there needed to be sufficient worker housing near shipyards, munitions plants and steel factories.
There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this.
There was an era where company owners were aware of this.
There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
Is it really the case that primary residence is the largest asset of most of the upper class? My impression is that many upper class people have far more money invested in stocks and businesses than in their house.
>Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
Weeeell let’s see what that translates to today. Assuming 30k houses for 100,000 people this effort would have budgeted… $77k per house in today’s dollars.
record stops
The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented
When I was a baby, my Baby Boomer parents and I lived for a year or so in a Quonset hut, which was military housing repurposed for civilians after World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut
My Grandparents, mother and a couple of the older aunts lived in Rodger Young Village [1] when they first moved from Pennsylvania to Southern California just after the war. My grandparents picked strawberries until they could find "proper" jobs.
Grandmother and Mother worked eventually doing keypunch for Kaynar (sp?), which was a contractor for the aerospace industry. Stories of pallets of punchcards...
Grandfather ended up becoming and efficiency engineer.
My pet theory is that we could solve 80% of society's problems by providing affordable housing. Most other things that plague us are just symptoms of this one issue.
I’m a gigantic believer in this and will hop on the nearest soapbox at any chance to evangelize it. High housing prices are literally destroying civilization, pricing the next generation out of existence and fueling every form of resentment.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
You'd need to build a lot more around the houses. Many "bad neighborhoods" in various countries started as affordable housing projects, but that's not enough to have a healthy social situation.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes
- labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
If only there was a model that worked that we could copy and paste from. Some sort of plan for building healthy communities that would last a hundred years. Read the article.
Germany - where I live - built Housing like there‘s no tomorrow in the 60s, which lead to the most prosperous phase of the country‘s existence. Then we stopped. And now we‘re where we are. Companies can’t hire because people can‘t move. There‘s sub and 0.1% empty apartments in cities.
I was reading this yesterday and it's wild to me how much changed in Canada in 1995: https://progressingcanada.com/ - Seems like 95 through 97 set in motion some bad things for Canada?
Around the turn of the millennium many countries seem to have decided to underproduce housing, both by ending government programs like you describe and by erecting government barriers to private home construction.
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
Decommodification of housing is the exact last thing that you want if your goal is to make housing more affordable. How did that particular buzzword get off the ground?
> there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
There is a lot of affordable housing; it's just that no one wants to live there for reasons such as work, location, crime, etc. Sure, there is no affordable housing in places like NYC, because too many people want or need to live there.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
Most of the scarcity around houses are artificial. Home owners want housing to be scarce because they have an expectation of property value going up, forever.
If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No.
We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
In corporate environments people often get into a frame of mind where they acknowledge they are behaving irrationally but are convinced - convinced! - that behaving rationally would bring terrible results and everyone is going to move in mad lockstep. I think it is some sort of groupthink-related phenomenon. They're pretty much always wrong about the bad results if someone can force change.
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
There are places in the West where this has been done and all you get is ghettos full of scum and crime. You have to pair this with jobs and a way of promptly removing undesirable elements from the neighbourhood. Cf. section 8.
If you build all those houses, people will have a ton of babies, and you'll be back to square one within a generation: only with more pollution, more ugly, more traffic, more crowded parks, trails, and parking lots, and a less water and beauty. And lots more carbon in the air. This is how the planet is choked off: one house at a time. Habitat control is the only solution.
Lots of breathless waxing about the ambition and scope of the project, so I was surprised that when I followed through to source material I found this:
> 9,543 single and 3,996 semi-detached homes while 5,000 apartments
So 18.5k homes of one kind or another over ~2 years. That’s, umm, nothing? Like seriously - the current rate of housing completions is over 2 orders of magnitude above that (it’s hovering just over 1.4M/yr right now).
I'm just confused as to why the US population needed to grow by almost 100 million since I was born without any sort of infrastructure undertaking to sustain that massive immigration. My local community is terrifically swollen with people and everything built for 1/3rd the population is now crumbling under that weight.
You believe the increase in population has been caused by “massive immigration”?
We’ve had roughly 4 million births and 2 million deaths per year since 1980. That is roughly a difference of 90 million. Additionally, when people cite immigration numbers, they frequently leave out negating numbers; the amount of people who were here temporarily, the amount of people who were deported or left voluntarily, and those who are “repeat offenders” in terms of migration that are frequently counted multiple times. So while yes, the number of immigrants as a percentage of population has increased in that time, the entire population increase is not a direct result of the roughly 10-15% they account for, which also aligns with the roughly 10-15% of the population they account for. Also, if you go back further than just when you were born, the US had roughly 14% immigrant population since 1900. Racism (in the form of nationalism/anti-immigration/etc) and nationalist changes to immigration laws reduced that number to 3% in the 20s, which has been slowly returning to the same 14% level since the 70s.
The US population growth has slowed overall since you were born, averaging a rate of 1% +/- 0.5% over that time and currently lower than when you were born. During that same time, our average infrastructure spending has grown from 300 to 600 billion a year; a 100% increase over that time compared to 1% growth in population per year.
So, given all these facts, how do you reconcile your statements that we have added 100 million due to massive immigration with no increases in infrastructure, when the facts seem to directly refute your assertions?
Most of suburban America wasn't built yet when you were born. I don't understand this point at all. You don't think sprawl counts as infrastructure? It may not be the housing you (or I) personally think should have been built, but it's absolutely housing. And it was built in great quantity at great cost, and even turned out to be great investments. And it came with schools and strip malls and freeway interchanges and substations to connect it all. Living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways.
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
I think you trying to transmute this to polemic weakens the points you've attempted to make.
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
This article seems to romanticize a time of long ago
Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.
Readit News
What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
> We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
We are in vetocracy, because cheapest way way to placate your political supporters is to give them power to veto what they do not want (instead of accomplish anything positive).
See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-...
Many non-“left” barriers have been raised too and ignoring that only contributes to the mess we’re in. For example: zoning and planning. Plenty of folks would like to claim they want more homeless housing, just not near them.
I find the divide between what people want nationally versus locally very amusing: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44611-opinions-na...
Deleted Comment
There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this. There was an era where company owners were aware of this. There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
Dead Comment
record stops
The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented
waiting for Godot
There's huge demand and not enough supply.
You act like that number should be the target. If the government were to start pumping out houses, supply goes up, reduced demand drops prices.
Sale price at market yes. Let's see cost of goods on that please.
They raised 8 kids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodger_Young_Village
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
This increases the power of the labor class and would hopefully lead to better working conditions.
My pet theory is many of societies problems would significantly improve if we gave more people the ability to walk away.
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
Yes, resource scarcity is a key factor underlying society's problems.
If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No.
We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
> 9,543 single and 3,996 semi-detached homes while 5,000 apartments
So 18.5k homes of one kind or another over ~2 years. That’s, umm, nothing? Like seriously - the current rate of housing completions is over 2 orders of magnitude above that (it’s hovering just over 1.4M/yr right now).
[0] https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html
We’ve had roughly 4 million births and 2 million deaths per year since 1980. That is roughly a difference of 90 million. Additionally, when people cite immigration numbers, they frequently leave out negating numbers; the amount of people who were here temporarily, the amount of people who were deported or left voluntarily, and those who are “repeat offenders” in terms of migration that are frequently counted multiple times. So while yes, the number of immigrants as a percentage of population has increased in that time, the entire population increase is not a direct result of the roughly 10-15% they account for, which also aligns with the roughly 10-15% of the population they account for. Also, if you go back further than just when you were born, the US had roughly 14% immigrant population since 1900. Racism (in the form of nationalism/anti-immigration/etc) and nationalist changes to immigration laws reduced that number to 3% in the 20s, which has been slowly returning to the same 14% level since the 70s.
The US population growth has slowed overall since you were born, averaging a rate of 1% +/- 0.5% over that time and currently lower than when you were born. During that same time, our average infrastructure spending has grown from 300 to 600 billion a year; a 100% increase over that time compared to 1% growth in population per year.
So, given all these facts, how do you reconcile your statements that we have added 100 million due to massive immigration with no increases in infrastructure, when the facts seem to directly refute your assertions?
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
That doesn't sound right.
They said that the US population has grown by almost 100 million since they were born. That would put their birth year around 1989.
Some searching suggests that in 1989 about 50% of the population lived in suburban areas. That would have been about 120 million people.
It is still about 50% which is 170 million people today. That suggests that around 70% of the suburbs were already built when they were born.
Dead Comment
Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.