Why Both Republicans and Democrats Are Failing to Solve America’s Housing Crisis

In late July, freed from the shackles of a disastrous Ninth Circuit decision, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a cleanup of the state’s sprawling homeless encampments. It won’t work.

On the other coast, Gov. Hochul tried to suspend New York’s “law of shelter” while pouring millions more dollars into housing the homeless. It won’t work. Earlier this week, after failing to convince the homeless to seek help, Atlantic City announced it would ban sleeping in public. It won’t work.

Every year in the middle of winter in January, people disperse to all the cities and towns across America.

They look under bridges, search isolated riverbanks, walk up and down tent cities, look on peaks and under park benches, search for parked cars and visit shelters. They count our homeless. They count the victims of failed government policies.

In 2024, a record 653,104 homeless people were reported. That’s about the size of an average American city. But that’s not the America many of us grew up in. Today’s America has cities like New York that have run out of shelter space. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles with blocks of tents on downtown sidewalks. That’s America heading toward the Third World.

How did we get here? If we understand how we got to this point of misery, we might be able to find a way out of this mess. At least that’s the hope of my book, “Nowhere to Live—The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis.”.”

As explained, it has taken more than a century of bad policy to reach today’s crisis point. We have passed law after law that has slowly eroded the property rights of landowners to build homes where people actually want to live.

Take zoning, for example. The first zoning law in America was passed in Baltimore in 1910—making it a crime for a black person to move into a white neighborhood. Other cities followed suit, but the Supreme Court soon struck down such laws. The court ruled that people had a property right to sell their homes to anyone who wanted to buy them.

But it didn’t take long for cities — modeled on New York’s zoning law — to bypass the Supreme Court.

Cities began adopting economic zoning. Apartments and other multifamily buildings were banned in large parts of our cities and suburbs.

The most famous case is that in Euclid, Ohio, virtually all land was zoned for single-family housing—even on land adjacent to a large tractor factory.

After Euclid convinced the Supreme Court that housing was burdensome, there were fewer places nationwide to build more affordable housing that was open to minorities and the working class. Shortages began and have been getting worse ever since.

American cities have often razed working-class neighborhoods in the name of redevelopment. Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood was razed to the ground for a now-abandoned GM plant.

In New London, Connecticut, a middle-class neighborhood was restructured to make way for the headquarters of pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which was also abandoned.

We have well-intended environmental laws that have been hijacked by NIMBYism to stymie new housing construction. California is full of stories of housing projects that have been delayed for decades by one abusive lawsuit after another.

Government solutions often cause more pain than they cure. Rent control is at the forefront, and it does nothing to lower the overall cost of housing, but it does everything it can to prevent new housing from being built. From New York to Santa Monica, building new housing makes little sense under rent control.

We have failed to repeal the law of supply and demand. Any government policy that restricts our ability to build new homes reduces supply and raises prices.

Changing this poorly thought-out government policy will not be easy.

But if we recognize how we created the void we find ourselves in today, perhaps we can get out of it — by respecting property rights again and allowing people to build homes and apartments where they need to live.

James Burling is the author of Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis. He is vice president of legal affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation.