Op-Ed: End the Excuses for Lack of Housing Construction

Dante Ramos takes the example of the Copley Place—a 542-unit residential tower approved in 2013 by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, beset again and again by delays—to argue in favor of a much more relaxed regulatory environment.

Ramos explains his approach to supply and demand as follows:

In a tight housing market, every new unit helps — even units sold to 1-percenters at eye-popping prices. Today’s luxury unit is tomorrow’s fixer-upper. When private-equity barons and suburban empty-nesters buy into glitzy new condo towers, they’re not pushing up the cost of units in historic brownstones and older loft buildings. When middle-class professionals can afford existing units in the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, they aren’t bidding up prices in Roxbury, Dorchester, and South Boston.

According to Ramos's line of thinking, requiring developers to include affordable housing incurs unintended consequences that work at cross purposes with the affordable housing agenda:

This policy is ironic: States impose stiff cigarette taxes in part because they want fewer people to smoke; countries in Europe tax gasoline heavily to discourage unnecessary driving. Cities that need more market-rate housing should make it easier, not harder, to construct. When Houston officials concluded that there wasn’t enough housing downtown, they went as far as offering $15,000-a-unit incentives to persuade developers to build it."

Ramos is really calling for an end to the regulatory and legal mechanisms that enable NIMBYism, with more details from the Copley Place example and more strongly worded rhetoric included in the full article.