Housing First takes a body blow--now from the Left

Economists have always known that hyper-regulation and an unrealistic reliance on taxpayer-subsidized affordable housing to solve CA's housing woes was a non-starter. And now, even high-end liberal opinionmakers are realizing the folly of the progressive housing playbook. Dan Walters at CalMatters parses how the influential liberal publication The Atlantic's recent takedown of progressive housing strategies is making waves.

A new article in Atlantic magazine lays bare the real reason California and other blue states have a homeless crisis while red states don’t.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, newly inaugurated Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and legislative leaders are pledging decisive action on California’s homelessness crisis, which raises a pithy question: Why did it erupt during a period of strong economic growth?

The Atlantic article argues persuasively that California and other left-leaning states tend to have the nation’s most egregious levels of homelessness because they have made it extraordinarily difficult to build enough housing to meet demands.

Author Jerusalem Demsas contends that the progressive politics of California and other states are “largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue.

“Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups … But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.”

Demsas singles out Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of how environmentalists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups and left-leaning organizations joined hands to enact a thicket of difficult procedural hurdles that became “veto points” to thwart efforts to build the new housing needed in prosperous “superstar cities.”

While thriving economies drew workers to these regions, their lack of housing manifested itself in soaring rents and home prices that drove those on the lower rungs of the economy into homelessness.

This article originally appeared in CalMatters. Read the whole thing here.

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