Opinion: To create working-class jobs, deregulate the housing market

Echoing prevailing arguments from Bay Area housing experts, economist Bryan Caplan explains in Reason why housing deregulation will open up working-class jobs — much more progressively than, for instance, factitiously adding factory positions. For further innovation, for a competitive free market, Caplan calls for local policy reform.

Upshot: We can credibly do everything national conservatives hope to do for America's non-college males via deregulation. Even modest relaxation of existing regs could swiftly create one or two million more well-paid working-class jobs. The radical housing deregulation I champion could easily double the size of the construction industry for decades.

Just imagine all the honest toil required to demolish those silly two-story homes in San Francisco and replace them with skyscrapers.

Unrealistic? Well, adding millions of construction jobs is vastly more realistic than adding millions of factory jobs. Even if you give Trump's protectionism 100% credit for all the manufacturing employment increase during his administration, that's only about 400,000 jobs total. And that's a crazy assumption because the growth rate was virtually the same during the last seven Obama years. …

The same is not true for construction, because this industry has been suffocated by regulation for the last half century. Instead of being near-satiated, we have massive pent-up demand. Americans hunger for cheap, spacious, homes in desirable locations. We have the technology to build these homes. We have millions of working-class males hoping for better jobs. All we lack is government permission to let them do the work….

Working and lower-middle class men and women alike could also have much to gain from expanded ability to vote with their feet and "move to opportunity," which would be created by breaking down exclusionary zoning and other barriers to new construction. As I have long argued, this is an underappreciated common interest of mostly Democratic poor minorities and the increasingly Republican white working class. Many in both groups would be able to move to places with better job and educational opportunities.

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

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