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You might have noticed that the rent is too damn high.
Rent is expensive because there isn’t enough housing to go around. Everyone pays what they have to, inadvertently bidding up rental prices. The end result is that there are very few homes left that stay cheap, about 1 affordable and available rental for every 3 extremely-low-income renter households.
Like any serious plan to fix that, Elizabeth Warren suggests the obvious: make there be more housing. Her plan proposes $500 billion dollars for more than three million units. That’s $170,000 per new apartment unit and experts seem to think it’s a good deal. The status quo can cost several times that.
Her plan would also encourage states to reform the land-use and zoning rules that prevent building housing in the first place (by tying federal grants to reforms).
Warren is solving the right problem, knows her economics, and is pointing out solutions that will actually help.
But the most exciting parts of Warren’s plan are the amazing side-effects.
The zoning and land use rules Warren wants to get rid of are incredibly harmful. Making it harder to build…
