The Conflicting Goals of America's Housing Policy

Writing in City Observatory, Daniel Hertz identifies the often conflicting goals of housing policy around the country. The "confused" policy recognizes the need for affordable housing in many areas, but at the same time seeks to maintain the existing housing market, with the goal of increasing housing value because it has become one of the primary investment tools of the American middle-class. Restricting the increase in value of a property would therefore ultimately hurt the individual homeowner who has used the investment as "a path to wealth building." Hertz offers two ideas as potential solutions:

First, the "robust production of housing that isn’t priced by the market, and therefore isn’t affected by rising market prices;" and

Second, "having a wide variety of housing types and sizes can also make room for people of a wide variety of incomes." As an example, Hertz cites his own neighborhood in Chicago, which includes a mix of single-family homes, condo buildings, older multi-family unit buildings, and a few single room occupancy buildings.