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IF HOUSING IS A
IHUMAN RIGHT... By John Mirisch
f housing is a human right, then it should no up-zoning, forced densification, the elimination of more be the vehicle for profiteering than other single-family neighborhoods, and a lot more market- basic utilities of human existence such as rate housing. Using an oversimplified appeal to the the supply of water, education, or life-saving “law” of supply-and-demand, these density fetishists medicine. If housing is a human right, then essentially advocate for allowing “the magic profiteering off housing is not only bad policy, of the Market” to “solve” the affordable housing its also immoral. Among numerous groups in crisis. There is just one problem with the WIMBY California and elsewhere, there is much talk prescription: it is wrong.
about a “housing crisis.” Yet this talk is misleading, and if self-styled “housing advocates” want to invoke any crisis, they should more properly be discussing an “affordable housing crisis.”
As State Senator Nancy Skinner has pointed out, there are currently more than 1.2 million vacant units in California. According to the quasi-governmental housing giant Freddie Mac, the housing deficit in California amounts to some 830,000 units. This figure comes from just before the pandemic struck, in February 2020, and before the exodus of firms and residents from the state which appears to have accelerated.
The solutions proposed by many of these “housing advocates,” WIMBYs (Wall Street In My Back- Yard) by any other name, generally involve massive
The notion that market-led forced densification (or any kind of densification for that matter) will lead to any meaningful kind of housing affordability is both misleading and unproven, though it may lead to maximizing developer profits through luxury condominiums – which in most cases seems to be exactly the point. Clearly, statutory up-zoning – the urban planning version of turning lead to gold – seems designed to commodify housing even further.
Manhattan, by far the densest locality in the U.S. (though the entire New York urban area itself is only the fourth most dense urban area in the country), is hardly known as a bastion of housing affordability. In short, advocates of statutory up-zoning cannot point to any substantial empirical evidence that the developer giveaways and corporate welfare they are
Activists and homeless gather near tents housing the homeless at an encampment in Echo Lake Park as the city makes plans to evict all the parks encampments in Los Angeles, March 24, 2021.
APARTMENT MANAGEMENT MAGAZINE - DECEMBER 2021 CS-23