With bi-partisan support, the Republican Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act back in June and the measure has now become law. While the bill includes some good provisions like preventing large institutional investors from gobbling up single family homes, the legislation is chock full of provisions for developers and assistance to produce more allegedly “affordable housing.”
The president and Members of Congress are right to acknowledge the real challenges younger Americans are facing in their attempts to achieve lifestyles similar to, if not better than, those of their parents’ generation.
Homeownership remains a genuine marker of success in this country, as late conservative activist Charlie Kirk recently pointed out in a column just before his death.
Republicans must make it clear, however, that certain interventions in the housing market are acceptable and others are dangerous. Local officials and communities must engage aggressively in the development process to prevent the political left from taking advantage of the so-called “housing emergency.”
The politics behind ‘affordable housing’
Advocating for affordable housing has been a long-standing tactic of Democrats and a critical component of their political calculus: Force more high-density housing into suburban communities to win more elections.
It’s the reason Democrats have been trying to strip zoning authority from local municipalities for years and taking them to court over alleged housing discrimination.
New coalitions of AstroTurf groups pop up all the time, urging suburban counties and state governments to make so-called affordable housing a priority. However, affordable housing is another canard of the left. It’s like calling abortion “women’s health care” or the castration of children “gender affirming” procedures.
What it really means is low-income, often subsidized housing fueled by big tax breaks for developers to build high-density projects. It’s a scheme, in many respects, to change the political character of suburban communities.
It’s not a coincidence that California is considering buying swaths of the Pacific Palisades community that has been devastated by fire for low-income housing. They do it everywhere.
Conservatives should pay much closer attention to their planning boards and legislatures. Attempts by Presidents Obama and Biden to regulate zoning on a national level failed. Now, Republicans are increasingly doing their bidding.
Republicans are surrendering local control
In Texas, grassroots groups claim the state has a deficit of 300,000 housing units. As a result, the Republican-controlled Legislature stripped local municipalities of key zoning powers to spur an explosion in development. The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area has added an estimated 100,000 units in less than 6 years.
In North Carolina, where Republicans control both houses of the General Assembly, lawmakers just stripped local communities of the ability to downzone properties. Another bill, the Parking Lot Reform and Modernization Act, contemplates removing mandatory minimums for parking spaces for developments statewide.
Republican-controlled Knox County, Tennessee, is a wildly popular destination for Americans fleeing high-tax, dysfunctional blue states. Activists there are calling for 10,000 new residential units in the name of affordability.
The leafy suburbs of Knoxville now have dozens of new residential developments, including rentals, multistory apartment buildings and homes built virtually on top of one another.
In Beaufort, South Carolina, where housing activists also claim a deficit of 10,000 units, local columnist Erich Hartmann, a New York escapee, recently wrote a brilliant piece about overdevelopment there. He called “throwing warm bodies at” communities “lazy economics, dressed up in glossy Power Points and a false patina of inevitability.”
Density does not deliver affordability
Republicans beware: No locality that has increased its density has become more conservative and less liberal, nor has it become more affordable for homeowners. The left understands this very well.
Growth must pay for itself
People are expensive. Property tax receipts from condos, apartments and even single-family homes, built arm’s length from one another, do not remotely foot the bill for their fiscal impact. That means taxes in these areas inevitably go up.
Cops, schools, teachers, roads, firefighters and parks require tax money. The average school building today costs more than $50 million. The average police officer makes $60,000 annually, plus decades of legacy costs.
Housing moratoriums are not the answer either. Communities need to grow. They need to grow smartly, though, not lurch wildly toward the future because of political pressure, activism or demand forces.
A better path to homeownership
States and municipalities should emphasize promoting their communities for economic development to increase the tax base rather than dubiously affordable housing that ultimately leads to higher property taxes. Residents need to pay closer attention to Planning Boards and councils that approve construction projects.
We need to continue to push for programs that provide generous tax incentives for first-time homebuyers buying starter homes that temporarily – and meaningfully – reduce a homebuyer’s federal income tax liability.
In every city where high-density housing should be built, underused and abandoned properties must be prioritized first for redevelopment.
Advance policies that allow young people to save more for down payments for first homes, tax-free. Streamline the process of buying a home and provide closing cost assistance for those with good credit.
And while we’re at it, address price gouging at colleges and universities putting millions into debt for degrees they don’t really need and often don’t use.
All these make much more sense than allowing developers to go hog wild on the suburbs.
Communities must control their future
Leadership requires an appreciation of threats to the quality of life and the courage to resist being cowed by special interests intent on fundamentally changing communities.
Unsustainable growth is not a path to affordability. It directly threatens it and the political stability that in many places has ensured that communities are desirable.
Don’t fall into the trap.
About the author: Tom Basile is tthe host of Newsmax’s America Right Now and a national columnist whose work appears in publications across the country. He served in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2004, including as a senior press adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and later served as executive director of the New York State Republican Party. Basile is the author of Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq, an adjunct professor at Fordham University, a member of the New York Bar and the head of a New York-based strategic communications firm. Learn more at TomBasile.com or follow him on X at @Tom_Basile.
Provided by Dallas Express
