Nice summary of the affordable housing crisis

in the Stanford Law Review:

[the cause of the affordable housing crisis] is uncontroversial among urban economists but not broadly understood by low-income families, advocates for low-income families, housing activists, and their allies in academia, policy, and government—in short, the housing advocacy community. In the face of higher housing costs, the housing advocacy community tends to argue for a “kludgy” set of policies that can actually prevent new development and end up increasing housing prices— campaigns to impose building moratoria, for example, or downzonings, community benefits agreements and other exactions, lengthy approvals procedures that disadvantage developers relative to NIMBYs, various forms of rent control, and a focus on affordable housing to the exclusion of other types of development. …. 

In the suburbs, the politics of exclusionary policies are hopeless: the cartellike interests of suburban “homevoters” are well-served by current exclusionary policies, state and federal courts for the most part won’t intervene, and there is very little interest among state legislators to impose regional or state-wide solutions.11 The picture is less bleak in exclusionary cities: renters, who would directly benefit from lower housing prices, are a majority in many of these cities, and advocates for affordable housing already form a politically influential bloc—but they use their power to ends that are often counterproductive.12 While there are other serious obstacles to expanding housing supply, the housing advocacy community could and should become an important part of the fight against urban land use regimes that systematically privilege a city’s wealthiest and most powerful residents. … 

A city’s ability to remain affordable depends most crucially on its ability to expand housing supply in the face of increased demand. Among the people who care most about high housing costs there is a lack of understanding of the main causes and the policy approaches that can address them. The central message of this Article is that the housing advocacy community—from the shoeleather organizer to the academic theoretician—needs to abandon its reflexively anti-development sentiments and embrace an agenda that accepts and advocates for increased housing development of all types as a way to blunt rising housing costs in the country’s most expensive markets.

HT: Campbell