Scott Van Voorhis

Want to see the growing middle-class housing crunch morph into a full-blown crisis? Start subsidizing builders to get them to build moderately priced apartments, condominiums and homes.

Home prices are once again rising faster than the paychecks of most families, not just in the Hub but in hot markets across the country. And proposals to subsidize new middle-class housing are gaining traction, from overpriced Cambridge, which recently let middle-class families take part in a lottery for an affordable apartment building, all the way up to Congress.

In a move that has drawn plaudits from the home builders lobby, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) recently filed a bill entitled the Middle Income Housing Tax Credit Act of 2016, which would subsidize builders who roll out new housing for middle-class buyers.

But effectively paying developers to build mid-market housing is a slippery slope, offering at best a modest short-term boost while undercutting longer-term efforts to deal with the obstacles that are preventing the housing market from functioning as it should.

“You have to look at where the real gaps in the housing market are,” said Clark Ziegler, head of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, who isn’t terribly hot on the idea of new subsidies for middle class housing. “There is an awful lot of housing developers would like to build and people would like to buy and rent that doesn’t get built because land use rules don’t allow it.”

Certainly the pain middle-class families are experiencing in the housing market is very real, especially inside the 495 beltway in Greater Boston.

Median home prices in elite suburbs like Wellesley and Newton have long since blown past their previous highs set a decade ago, while middle-class buyers increasingly find themselves boxed out of once-affordable communities like Needham, Natick and even Medford.

But the situation is even more dire in the urban core. Cambridge home prices have doubled in the last decade and are now in the stratospheric $1.5 million range, while in Boston a wave of luxury condo building has done little yet to bring down prices.

Of all the single-family homes sold in Eastern Massachusetts during 2014 and 2015, just 22 percent were affordable to a middle-class family with two children pulling down $75,000 a year, a recent Urban Land Institute study found. Not surprisingly, the number of middle-class families inside the I-495 beltway has dropped by 11 percent over the past quarter century.

And the problem is hardly limited to Eastern Massachusetts, with home and condo prices having reached insane levels in other housing hot spots across the country like New York and San Francisco.

More Buildings Needed

There’s really no secret why prices are going up – and it’s not the economy, which is just finally kicking into gear. Rather, there’s been a growing, national shortage of new housing, which has been particularly fierce in the Boston, which is suffering the effects of decades of underbuilding.

And NIMBY zoning, which is a problem not just in Boston, but also to varying degrees, around the country, has been the major obstacle.

It’s a problem that even the Obama Administration is now taking aim at, with a recent white paper raising the alarm about the “growing severity of undersupplied housing markets” that “is jeopardizing housing affordability for working families.”

Sometimes government has to step in to provide a service the private sector can’t or won’t provide because there isn’t a market for it. But the housing for middle-income Americans certainly isn’t one of those cases.

In fact, there is no lack of demand for moderately priced homes and apartments – if anything, it’s higher than it has ever been before. But builders simply can’t get through all the red tape and NIMBYism to build the large number of homes and apartments to both satisfy that demand and bring down prices.

However, proposals for a middle-class housing tax credit like Wyden’s deal almost solely on the symptoms without getting to the root cause.

In fact, they would start to create programs like those that have been traditionally targeted at the poor – like Low Income Housing Tax Credits and housing lotteries – and extend it to our country’s still very large middle class.

But paying to make housing affordable is neither financially or politically feasible.

There isn’t enough money in the federal treasury to subsidize hundreds of thousands of new middle-class homes and apartments each year. In fact, there’s barely enough money through federal programs like tax credits for builders of housing for the low-income and poor – just a third of those in need of help get it.

Nor is such an approach politically feasible. Subsidized middle class housing would create a benefit available to just a few, sparking major resentment among others who aren’t as fortunate or lucky.

Sure, there are well-intentioned efforts, but to the extent they divert attention from grappling with the real problem, restrictive local zoning rules, these proposals are dangerous distractions.

So forget these gimmicky programs that in the end will help just a handful of middle class families.

Instead it’s time for communities across Massachusetts and the country to grapple with those inner housing demons that have them fighting every new apartment project that comes down the pike.