As someone who has been homeless on multiple occasions, housing is an issue that I find to be extremely important. The typical view of how to help people achieve and maintain housing is one of homeless shelters, transitional housing, welfare programs, public housing, landlords, predatory bank loans, mortgages, evictions, and artificial scarcity. So how do we move away from this towards something that better meets our needs as a society made up of people who all need shelter?
Well we can start by abolishing, or at very least greatly loosening, zoning laws and building codes. This might seem counterintuitive for some seeing as building codes help ensure the buildings we live in are safe and zoning laws help ensure that our homes aren’t near landfills, pollution-spewing factories, loud businesses, and other unpleasant places. But not only are the racist in origin, they also greatly limit the supply of housing. Building codes can for example include excessive environmental regulations which, while well intentioned, put a greater cost on landlords, some of which cannot afford the extra cost and thus end up keeping those properties off the market, contributing to a whopping twenty-eight empty houses for every houseless person. Zoning laws not only contribute greatly to urban sprawl and often prevent us from building walkable cities, they also often ban multi-family households and limit economic opportunities for home-based entrepreneurs.
Now of course we still need to ensure our buildings and our communities are safe but how? Well, building safety can be inspected a certified by a number of independent consumer advcacy groups. Where I live there is a group known as the Community Weatherization Coalition that is volunteer run and does free assessments of any type of housing to see how environmentally sound the place is, recommending fixes to make the place even more so. Tenants, landlords, and homeowners alike are incentivized to utilize their services because doing so can actively lower your energy bills by making your building more energy efficient. Allowing landlords to be sued for damages and/or medical bills when the state of their property causes issues will also cut down on the amount of dangerous living situations and further incentivize landlords to seek property assessments and certifications from consumer advocacy groups to protect their asses. Renters are more likely to rent certified safe housing if they can afford to and for those who can’t, tenants unions also go a long way towards ensuring safe and environmentally sound living conditions. Hell, even volunteer fire departments could offer free fire inspection and certification services without backing it up by law. If a property owner doesn’t bother getting their place fire code certified then they will have a much harder time finding people to rent or buy. And for those willing to risk living in an uncertified property, that is by choice and even where economically coerced, it could still be preferable to being homeless. In order to ease such economic coercion, we must increase the supply of affordable housing.
In terms of zoning, the few benefits seen from them can also be replicated in other ways. Community boycotts and protests can drive unwanted businesses out of the area, tenants unions can keep more noisey or disruptive businesses from operating in shared housing complexes, and environmental lawyers and activist groups can hold polluting companies accountable for their messes and keep our communities clean. In fact, we rely on activists and lawyers to keep our communities safe from pollution now, with the rich able to lobby politicians to write the zoning laws in their favor, only protecting wealthy neighborhoods from pollution while sacrificing poor neighborhoods for the sake of profit. Repealing zoning laws would allow people to start home businesses, allow for more freedom to co-house with others, and allow for the creation of walkable cities. Working from home cuts down on the obvious costs of renting a business space. That partnered with more walkable cities allows people to significantly save on transportation costs. Allowing more people to live in a single household allows for more people to share in paying the rent. All of these benefits allow for one amazing benefit: housing becomes more affordable.
How else can we increase the supply? By abolishing rent control laws and property taxes. In a rare example of unity, economist from pretty much every discipline agree that rent control laws decrease both the quantity and quality of rental properties by disincentivizing new investments into the housing market by developers and landlords while simultaneously incentivizing landlords to take their properties off the controlled rental market and put them up on the uncontrolled sales market. And while ownership is far preferable to landlords, in an artificially scarce market such as ours where many cannot afford to own, we need rental properties to be more widely available. If we wish to increase ownership then abolishing property taxes would make that more accessible by decreasing the cost, plus that would establish real ownership over our property without the threat of the government taking it away due to unpaid taxes. This would also lower the investment cost for landlords and developers, thus increasing the supply of rental properties as well.
It’s all well and good to increase the supply of housing but what about the affordability? Well the only options thankfully would not be limited to unsafe or condemnable properties since these changes would also make it easier and cheaper for Churches, non-profits, activists, and entrepreneurs to create affordable housing. Whether it’s building cheap housing on Church-owned property, converting old malls into apartments, or forming community land trusts, the options are numerous.
These options are also far preferable to public housing. Whether in the fom of public housing projects or HUD-subsidized housing, they provide subpar housing that ends up being highly stigmatized and criticized even by those who live there. We could provide far better housing at a cheaper cost to taxpayers by implementing Housing First policies instead and teaming up with those very Churches, non-profits, activists, and entrepreneurs to house folks in need. Even if this method is at least in part subsidized by the state, it would still be more cost-effective for taxpayers since it greatly lowers the reliance on other more costly tax-funded services such as emergency shelters, jails, and hospitals. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Housing First programs could save taxpayers between $15,773 and $23,000 per year per person helped. In fact, with the repeal of zoning restrictions many Churches and other groups would be more than willing to use their property as emergency shelters when not in use for other services, thus reducing the need for state-funded shelters even more.
And further, private resources such as Sean’s Outpost are examples of the types of innovative resources that provide a blueprint for the future of homeless services. They not only serve meals and hand out clothing and blankets but also started The Bitcoin Homeless Outreach Center, Outpost Thrift, and Satoshi Forest, which is a free private campground for homeless folks as an alternative to illegal tent cities, complete with an organic farm for folks to learn to grow food that helps feed their community and a makerspace where folks can learn and teach various skills that could potentially help folks find decent jobs or create their own sources of income, using mutual aid to help folks eventually regain access to housing. They even created BitHouses, which were RVs that could house up to two people and were sold via a model where for every one sold, one was donated to someone homeless, and used to team up with Bitcoin Not Bombs to teach homeless folks about cryptocurrency as an alternative resource for the unbanked.
But so far we’ve only tackled how to increase affordable rental properties and help those who fall through the cracks, but how do we transition away from landlords and increase home ownership rather than renting? Well, aside from supporting strong squatters rights and homesteading rights for absentee and abandoned properties, we can fight to implement a land-value tax (LVT). Unlike property taxes which are taxes on the value of both the land and the property on the land, land-value taxes are only on the value of the land itself. The idea behind this is that land, unlike many other forms of property, is a natural resource uncreated by humans and therefore should be shared in common by all and if anyone wishes to claim exclusive use of a common resource than they should compensate the community for such. This shifts landed property from a state of artificial scarcity under landlords to one of common ownership. Under the ideal version of this system, one’s primary residence (and possible home business) goes untaxed while any secondary homes or business properties are subject to the land-value tax which would be redistributed in the form of a universal basic income, making home ownership far more obtainable for the average person. Even the poorest among us could squat on abandoned property on commons land and slowly fix it up using their UBI money, with or without the aid of charity, and have an untaxed home that they come to own under homestead laws. And since LVT only taxes the land itself and not any improvements made on the land, they won’t increase when developments are made on the property unlike with property taxes, thus encouraging further development from investors and further increasing the supply of affordable housing, both for rent and sale.
And for those who face eviction under this or any other system, we still have tenant unions and the Occupy-inspired tactics of groups like Homes Not Jails which physically block landlords and police from serving eviction notices or carrying out evictions and help move people back in after they are thrown out while protecting squatters.
A just housing system can exist. The YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement is fighting for zoning deregulation, the related YIGBY (Yes In God’s Backyard) movement is fighting to repeal zoning regulations that specifically restrict Churches from acting as homeless shelters or providing affordable housing on Church-owned property, Home Not Jails and other squatters unions are fighting for squatters rights, tenant unions are fighting for safer and more affordable housing, Housing First policies already exist in Utah, Boston, and Seattle with promising results, the International Union for Land Value Taxation is doing their best to fight for LVT, and voters have and continue to organize campaigns against property taxes, building codes, rent control, and more. We can do this, we just have to understand the issue as holistically as possible and tackle it from as many sides as we can while seeing how each small piece of the puzzle fits together.
