Victims of NIMBYism, Unite
The headline on the cover of Time magazine read “Sky High Housing.” Behind it was a graphic of a young couple and their dog looking upward to the sky as their dream home floated away. The story was about rising home prices locking a generation of buyers out of the market. It was published on September 12, 1977, but might as well have been yesterday.
The United States has a housing crisis. By now, the facts of the problem are so familiar—growing homelessness, rents that are rising much faster than incomes are, the 4 million “supercommuters” who spend at least three hours driving to and from work—that the political conversation has moved toward what can be done to solve it.
[Read: Why housing policy feels like generational warfare]
On the surface, the answers are simple: Build more housing and expand subsidies for people who can’t afford what the private market has to offer.
But, as the 1977 cover shows, the lack of moderately priced housing, while never as severe as it is now, is a decades-old problem—and a problem that has resisted myriad efforts to solve it. And there’s a very simple reason why. Aside from developers—whose financial
