Tuesday, September 20, 2022

One Solution Could Help

 According to Sam Bowman & John Myers & Ben Southwood fixing the housing problem could fix lots of other things with which people struggle.

“Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment,” they wrote. From Covid to slow economic growth to climate change to falling fertility, they all had one root cause in common: “A shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live.”

 

Their argument was as simple as it was true: So long as housing supply remains constrained in the most economically productive cities in the US, so would the country's potential. Whatever else the US wanted to do — solve climate change, reduce economic inequality, make it easier for people to have as many children as they wanted — fixing the long-running housing problem had to come first. Everything else was just hot air.


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