| There are few ideas more frustrating in today’s hosing discourse than the idea, held by a troubling number on the left, that blocking the construction of new housing is a way to “stick it to the rich” by denying a developer a business opportunity.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For proof, just look at the most recent batch of quarterly earnings reports from some of the nation’s biggest apartment landlords.
These real estate investment trusts, like Equity Residential and AvalonBay Communities, are reporting strong earnings as banks pull back from lending after the turmoil of four high-profile bank failures ahead of a possible recession. And stock analysts are expressing optimism that the collapse in new construction nationwide will increase these companies’ pricing power further.
Put in layman’s terms, this means the people who own large parts of the nation’s working-class and middle-class rental housing are going to have the power to jack up rents because they are facing less competition.
Talk about horseshoe theory. Marx and Engels would surely roll in their graves to know that their intellectual descendants were embracing a politics that directly and substantially benefits the bourgeoisie and the rentier class while pummeling workers.
On the for-sale side of the housing market, Massachusetts is a poster child nearly without peer. The supply of homes for sale has become so restricted that, for all practical purposes, you either have to inherit property or make at least $153,000 a year – not quite twice the Greater Boston median household income – to buy the median-priced home within Interstate 495. If that doesn’t make home ownership a mark of the gentry, it’s hard to know what does.
The sad truth is that absent a thorough overhaul of the nation’s politics, there is no prospect of big, new federal subsidies to build affordable homes. Likewise locally, no one is crafting the kind of Vienna-style social housing development pipeline that might be more ideologically palatable to some than Wall Street-funded projects. And unless the governor has a surprise up her sleeve, there’s no immediate prospect that the state has billions of dollars of new money to lend out every year so housing can be developed free of the “financial speculation” that some on the left like to deride.
The good news is that many cities’ rental and for-sale housing markets, including in Boston’s rental market during 2020, prove again and again that the fastest antidote to rising housing costs is a larger supply of market-rate homes than the number of people seeking them.
Given all this, it’s morally reprehensible verging on hypocritical to oppose a housing project on the sole grounds of stopping a “rich developer” from making a buck. We can debate displacement and how Boston’s suburbs need to pull their weight in allowing more multifamily development. But let’s consign this one talking point to the dustbin of history.
Letters to the editor of 350 words or less responding to this editorial or other topics may be submitted via email at editorial@thewarrengroup.com with the subject line “Letter to the Editor.” Submission is not a guarantee of publication.
