Homesick

Heartfelt book, occasionally lyrical, occasionally tedious and hectoring. It doesn’t fully deliver on its promise or spend nearly enough space on trying to understand exactly how the spiders in private equity funds spin webs around cities and towns to keep the game of musical chairs going (always making sure there is less housing than people so as to keep people desperate for a place they can be safe in). He doesn’t wrestle at all with city/county budgeting or where the money is supposed to come from to create these community land trusts that he places so much reliance on for a better future. He alludes briefly to neighbor NIMBYs who profess that “housing is a human right” while doing everything possible to ensure that no one builds any near them, especially if it’s for poor people.

Perhaps the best part of the book is his clear-eyed realization that a system built around private profit will always configure itself to optimize the net profit from the system — not the amount of housing. This is an insight that far too many who write about housing miss — they rail about “market failures” in the housing arena, not realizing that an unstable market that whipsaws people (booms and busts) is not a failure at all for those with capital who like to buy low and sell high, and for whom boom-bust cycles are necessary. Talking about market failures while a few are becoming rich off of the housing market means you don’t understand — a market that is generating profits is no failure, it’s working just as designed. So of course change is hard, because the few who benefit enormously from this system have every incentive to spend big buying politicians who only attack housing shortages (intentional and unintentional) with ineffective solutions that are only capable of perpetuating the problem on an ever-larger scale (while they make comforting but useless noises about “caring” and “fighting for” affordable housing).