By Peter Dorfman
Iam cautiously optimistic that the administration that takes over Bloomington’s city government in January will at least tap the brakes on its predecessor’s lust for growth. Incoming Mayor Kerry Thomson has repeatedly taken the position that we can have a better city without necessarily making it bigger. Until further notice, I’m taking her at her word.
The incoming City Council? I’m a lot less sanguine about them. I strongly anticipate that we’ll see another round of legislative grandstanding around building more market rate housing and densifying the city’s core neighborhoods, on the (I believe) utterly debunked, libertarian premise that housing affordability is fundamentally a supply problem.
Bloomington Dissident Democrats has been refuting this nonsense continuously for more than four years. But don’t take our word for it. Prof. Fran Quigley, of the IU Robert H. McKinney School of Law, offers a fresh takedown of the supply side housing theory that animates so-called Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) ideologues, across the country and here in Bloomington.
It’s here: “A Lack of Supply Isn’t Causing Our Housing Crisis” (from the Common Dreams blog, August 13, 2023.
The article cites Alex Schwartz, a professor at the New School, author of the textbook Housing Policy in the United States, and Kirk McClure, professor emeritus in urban planning at the University of Kansas.
“Schwartz and McClure put it plainly: ‘Nationally, there is no shortage of housing, and adding to the surplus won’t resolve the nation’s affordability problems,'” Quigley writes.
(Believe me, I get it: Arguing bluntly that there is no shortage of housing is one of the easiest ways to elicit cynical snorts, and to make enemies, in Bloomington. I’m used to that response.)
So what is the source of the problem? In Quigley’s view, backed up by Schwartz, McClure and many other experts who haven’t been co-opted by banking, private equity and corporate real estate interests yet, it’s just this: “Millions of people simply do not make enough money to consistently afford market-rate housing.”
The problem isn’t high rents. It’s low incomes. And it’s true everywhere…but nowhere more so than in chronically underpaid Bloomington.
Quigley’s prescription: Greater investment in public housing “freed of the for-profit market,” universal housing vouchers and laws that protect tenants from discrimination by landlords against voucher-holders. He also advocates expansion of rent control; that, unfortunately, isn’t an option under Indiana state law.
The Common Dreams post is worth the couple of minutes it will take to read it. It offers yet another refutation of the YIMBY fantasy that all the expert opinion is on the side of “any new housing is good housing.”
The Dissident Democrat 