Just because you want something, it doesn't mean it's a right
The common understanding of a "right" is that it's something neither governments nor other people can take away from you. It's inalienable. It doesn't mean it's something your gov't is obliged to give you. Robert Valdez at Forbes contends that housing is what it has always been understood as: a commodity, and we should be focused on making it cheaper.
I’m now fighting the notion that housing is a “right,” a stubborn abuse of language but in the case of housing, deployed for a political not marketing purpose. Without engaging in an extended exposition above my skill set, it would be enough to say that there are rights established explicitly by law, those that are established by precedent by courts, and third, those behaviors and things that groups aspire to make one of the first two.
Even once so established, rights are attenuated by interpretation over time; speech, for example, the right most Americans would cite as bedrock, is limited to time and place by precedent. But still, enshrining something as a right — even if only rhetorically — has become the bullhorn of left-leaning activists even while race remains a dog whistle for the extreme right.
But housing, like smoking and many other things, is not a right. The Fair Housing Act banned discrimination when providing housing or making housing policy, but it did not allocate a 500 square foot unit or guarantee automatic qualification for a mortgage. Housing has remained, to the chagrin of many, a commodity. And if it somehow ends up being the case that housing does become enshrined as an explicit right or a right by extension, one thing won’t change; when housing is scarce it’s price will go up. Markets solve this problem with innovation that is blind to winners and losers, while socialists rely on rationing to pick winners and losers based on criteria set by bureaucrats. Either way, when demand exceeds supply real people suffer from higher prices than consume their incomes, or waiting lists that consume their hope.
Setting all this aside, how do we comprehensively solve the problem of housing scarcity? First, we have to acknowledge that today’s housing debate, regrettably, isn’t about housing at all, but about many other issues and problems that housing policy didn’t cause and will never solve. At most, an efficient housing policy would contribute to ending generational poverty and provide respite for those trying to recover from addiction, mental illness, or incarceration while easing inflation for those with money to spend on housing. At a minimum, a good housing policy would maximize the benefits of private risk for public benefit, getting out of the way of buyer and seller so that price signals would push lower cost product while also creating attractive economic return for investors.
Today, housing policy is gripped by socialist views and deep suspicion of the profit motive. This gives inefficient non-profit producers an advantage; they are believed as the experts on all housing, even though they produce a very small portion of it at huge costs. Politicians also face anger from constituents who worry that their own private investment in their single-family home will be put at risk by a deregulated housing economy. Homeowners have a monopoly on land use, and non-profits on the imagination of policy makers. So politicians say we need more affordable housing, when what we really need is more housing so that it is affordable. Meanwhile, homeowners win while scarcity pushes up the value of their investment.
The discussion about rights, what is or is not a right, and where rights come, from is a very American one. One way to approach this issue is to ask, "Do we need a deontological framework for ethics and morals to be free, or can we rely on history and each other to 'do the right thing," and is that the same as being free?"
In the housing debate one often hears, "housing is a human right" or "people are entitled to housing." Why do we need this formulation? Rights and entitlements end up being about power, while the basic question of how do we lower prices is a far more pragmatic and simple one.
Read the whole thing here.
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