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Glaeser: Let Housing Prices Fall
Ed Glaeser gives three compelling reasons why the government should end their infatuation with high housing prices. (Nonetheless, some of the same politicians speak through the other side of their mouths about promoting housing affordability): Why We Should Let Housing Prices Keep Falling There is a superficial attractiveness to policies that seem to promise an end to falling housing prices, but there are three reasons why these proposals don’t make much sense to me. First, the government has no business trying to make housing less affordable to ordinary Americans. There is no reason to hope that middle-class Americans should pay more for any basic commodity, whether that commodity is coffee or oil or housing. Government should be fighting to reduce supply-side barriers and make housing cheaper, not trying to inflate prices artificially. Second, most of these proposals seem likely to be expensive failures. The government just doesn’t have the tools to rewrite the laws of supply and demand. If the cost of building a home in Las Vegas is $150,000, and there are no restrictions on building, then all the credit policies or bailouts in the world aren’t going to permanently keep prices above $150,000. Finally, these policies all have the common feature of getting the government further entrenched in the operation of the housing market, and this creates all sorts of long-term market problems. I would have thought that recent events at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, would have made Americans recognize the costs of having government-sponsored enterprises play mortgage lender to the nation. I would have hoped that the history of public housing would have made us wary about spending huge amounts of tax dollars to get into the business of public property management. The current crisis may imply a need for more federal regulation of […]
