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The Cato Podcast: Fixing Housing Affordability

Ryan Bourne, R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute, is joined by Howard Husock, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Projects: A New History of Public Housing, to discuss housing affordability, New York City’s rent stabilization and public housing policies, and what other cities can learn from its mistakes.

Ryan Bourne: Housing has become the frontline in America’s debate about affordability. Demographia’s 2026 report shows that across 23 of the 58 major US metropolitan markets it tracks, housing is severely unaffordable or impossibly unaffordable — meaning the median house price in the market is more than five times the median income of the area. In many expensive cities, politicians are reacting to discontent about this by dreaming up ways to manage that price pressure through rent freezes, larger vouchers, taxpayer-funded social housing, and tighter restrictions on landlords and investors. But what if many of the problems stem from too much government intervention to begin with? And what can New York City teach us about what not to do to improve housing affordability? To answer those questions, I’m delighted today to be joined by Howard Husock. He’s senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the country’s leading scholars on housing policy. So welcome to the podcast, Howard.

Howard Husock: Thank you so much for having me, Ryan.

Ryan Bourne: So I think it’s probably a good place to start with a basic overview. There’s been a lot of talk about housing affordability in Washington, D.C., and housing is the largest single expense for most American households. So how would you characterize the state of US housing affordability? Would you call it a national crisis? Is it mainly a series of local challenges? How would you think about that?

Howard Husock: Well, you know, we have this cabinet department called the Housing and Urban Development Department, so people have this tendency to think of housing as somehow regulated by the federal government. But that is far, far from the truth. As Tip O’Neill once said about politics, all housing policy is local in the United States. Housing may be expensive in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but it’s inexpensive in Buffalo, Detroit, and other so-called Rust Belt cities, St. Louis — all housing policy is local. And not only is place variability an aspect of local housing markets in the United States, but so is supply — how much housing we build, which has a tremendous effect on price. In fact, that’s the single biggest determinant, along with demand, as we know from Econ 101. There are more than 18,000 local municipal governments in the United States, and each one of them regulates its own local housing market. How do they do that? Through local zoning — how much can be built on what size lots, what size homes, can you build one house on a quarter of an acre or do you have to do it on two acres, which is not uncommon. The more housing on the less space, the more affordable housing is; the fewer houses on the same amount of space, the less affordable housing is. And there’s a tug of war going on in the United States between what people want to buy — small houses on small lots, in many, many cases — and what local municipalities in many parts of the country permit to be built.

Ryan Bourne: So I think it’s fair to say that if you were talking, say, a decade ago, people would talk about the housing affordability challenge in many Californian cities and places like New York and Boston. But you now look at the house-price-to-median-income ratios, and things look pretty unaffordable in some other markets as well — whether that be Portland, Oregon, Denver, Salt Lake City, Fresno, Milwaukee. So are those pathologies that we used to talk about on the coastal cities increasingly merging out into some of the second-rank cities in the United States?

Howard Husock: Well, many of those second-rank cities are still comparatively affordable, so I don’t think we should exaggerate this problem. We do see increases in population in a city like Detroit, where people are discovering it as an affordable option compared to the coast. As far as what people can afford to pay, there are income distribution issues in the country that transcend housing — how much labor gets as a factor of growth. Those are macroeconomic issues, and we can’t pretend that housing markets are insulated from those kinds of issues either. So I find a lot of the debate about what’s driving house prices deeply unsatisfactory as a matter of economics, because a lot of commentators, and even some economists, like to talk cleanly about demand-side pressures in housing versus supply-side factors. And I advocate for the use of the basic supply-and-demand model all the time, but in a market economy, asking whether it’s supply or demand causing a price change is a bit like asking which blade of the scissors cut the paper — the two together are what determine price movements. You can have more demand from population growth, higher incomes, but that only leads to a sharp increase in price if supply is inelastic — if supply is not responsive to that increase in demand. And so more of that demand pressure turns up in price instead of more housing being built.

Ryan Bourne: So I’m guessing from what you said in your first answer that you consider those supply constraints that make housing less responsive to be a key factor across the country in why we have localized housing affordability challenges.

Howard Husock: That’s right. There aren’t many markets we have, if any, that are more regulated than our housing markets — we intervene and distort our housing markets to a great degree. That said, the nature of demand is also changing, and that shifts demand curves, if you go back to Econ 101. We have more and more households per population in the United States, which is to say we have smaller and smaller household sizes — more and more older women, for instance, living alone, and they want their own apartment. It used to be that people would have their in-laws living with them, or would take in lodgers — those kinds of decisions that people made have been replaced by people desiring to live in their own small units, and that increases demand for more units, disproportionate to that supply issue. All the supply issue, I agree, is key.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s right — and as incomes grow, we also seem to demand proportionately more housing. People want second homes, they want more square footage, and things like that, so you get all of these demand pressures that manifest in many different ways. So you’ve talked about how local governments have the real power for supply-side reform when it comes to housing, but Congress still drafted a law to address the housing affordability challenge that passed with bipartisan support — the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, in July. Now, I think you, like we at Cato, have mixed feelings about that bill — you thought some provisions might be useful on the margin, but a lot of it was kind of doubling down on things that hadn’t worked in the past, or reforming things that are probably unlikely to move the needle. So why don’t you talk us through what you think that bill got right and what it got wrong about housing?

Howard Husock: Well, fundamentally, I think it was small beer. It’s going to ease federal technical requirements on what’s called manufactured housing — long ago those were called trailer homes, and we know those are not necessarily mobile anymore, but manufactured housing is a good aspect of the market. It’s not going to change the dynamics in San Jose, because there are no vacant lots to park a manufactured house on, and local governments are unlikely to accept it. But there are many parts of the country where manufactured housing can increase supply, and to the extent that we permit it to be built off-site — that is, you don’t have a carpenter building the house on the lot where it’s going to stand, but you’re building it in a factory and bringing it to the site — there can be economies of scale with that. Now, I do wish they’d looked at material costs, which is a little different from what was considered in the bill — the President has deemed it appropriate to install tariffs, for instance, on Canada, which is a major supplier of lumber. We need lumber for our homes, so that works in the opposite direction. But going back to the bipartisan housing bill, a lot of it was focused on correcting mistakes we’ve made in the past. Now, that’s a good thing, but it’s not a breakthrough either. For instance, there’s something called the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program. That’s a way to direct private funds to repair dilapidated public housing — public housing authorities can declare their housing in a different category than it used to be, private developers can borrow against the rental voucher stream associated with public housing, and private money can be used to repair dilapidated public housing. But it was a mistake to build the public housing in the first place, and we’re just kind of sawing off the bottom of the table leg and trying to get it even again — that may be a fool’s errand. There’s also an expansion of what are called Moving-to-Work Housing Authorities — that’s a program that began under Bill Clinton, which allows housing authorities to adopt time limits and work requirements. Those are good things, and they might create more turnover and upward mobility among public housing and subsidized housing tenants, but it’s not a breakthrough in supply. I think those are positive, but the idea that the bipartisan housing bill is going to boost supply and therefore decrease prices — I think that’s pretty unlikely.

Ryan Bourne: Now, whenever politicians pass a bill like this, they celebrate the fact that it was done on a bipartisan basis, but often bipartisanship actually produces some of the worst policies in the country’s history, and I think the bad housing policies you’ve outlined have been supported on a bipartisan basis over decades.

Howard Husock: Well, I’m all about that. In fact, I’m working on a book about the tragic history of what was called slum clearance. Just in St. Louis, 20,000 houses were cleared because they were declared to be slums, even though some people had their wealth invested in them — and that was bipartisan. Harry Truman and “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft — they all thought these neighborhoods were fundamentally evil and had to be torn down, and they did it all over the country. It’s extraordinary.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, no — and housing vouchers, a whole range of other policies we could discuss. So I think one theme running through your work, as I’ve seen it, is that many well-intentioned housing policies have produced these kinds of disastrous, unintended consequences. So looking back over the last century — from public housing, urban renewal, slum clearance, through to housing vouchers, rent stabilization — do you think there are any common misconceptions about housing that policymakers hold that lead them to keep repeating these mistakes and errors?

Howard Husock: I do. I think there’s a misconception that private housing markets will fundamentally and inevitably fail those of modest means. I think private markets fail those of modest means only when they’re not permitted to meet the needs of people of modest means — and what people of modest means need are small houses on small lots, small multifamilies like two- and three-family houses that allow them to have rental income as well as having to pay their own mortgage. We used to do that before zoning, before public housing. We did a very good job, between 1890 and 1930, of building a vast array of housing types — variegated housing, I like to call it; that’s a biology term I adapt to the housing market. We built two-flats in Chicago, three-flats in Boston, small apartment buildings with ground-floor retail in Brooklyn, almost 300,000 row houses in Philadelphia. We knew how to do this, and then we decided that these were evil in some way, and that the market was failing the poor — even though it was allowing them to acquire wealth and move up the economic ladder. So this misconception, foisted on the housing market by public intellectuals beginning in the ’20s and ’30s, that the private market will inevitably fail — that’s the driving misconception, I think, behind all of our interventions. Zoning is a different matter, but that’s a different discussion.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, and I think this is something that manifests itself in lots of different forms of regulation in other areas. I study quite a lot the increasing regulation of child care, and it seems to me an analogous story to what you’ve just outlined — you get people in government who have a certain conception of what the quality of housing or the quality of child care should look like, and then they just impose their preferences through policy, because they think everybody is deserving of that type of housing or whatever, ignoring the fact that those types of regulatory intrusions basically outlaw a whole range of cheaper alternatives that enable people to be located close to their communities, close to their place of work, in circumstances they can actually afford. We see this in child care too, where a lot of the so-called quality requirements imposed on carers actually lead to less supply in the poorest areas of the country. So I think this is something we see in the regulatory environment again and again and again.

Howard Husock: Yeah. I once wrote an essay called “Standards Versus Struggle,” and the higher you set standards, the less you allow people to struggle with their own choices about how they want to spend their money — and whether they’re willing to have two children share a bedroom, which in subsidized housing is not legal, but historically was done all the time. So people are willing to struggle with scarcity to put money aside, but standards set the bar so high that they don’t get to make that choice. Housing vouchers are another good example — I know we talked about child care — housing vouchers tell the poor, “We will give you money for housing if you use it in the following way,” as opposed to, “We will cross-subsidize your income in some way, and you can disperse it as you will.” Dictating what standards should be — whether it’s child care or other aspects of the regulatory state — reduces choice, there’s no doubt.

Ryan Bourne: So you live in New York City, I think?

Howard Husock: I live in a suburb just north of the city, but I’ve got four grandchildren in Brooklyn — I’m there all the time.

Ryan Bourne: So New York is one of the clearest examples of a city whose housing affordability challenge has been met over the years with more regulations, subsidies, rent stabilization, tenant protections. You have a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who excited some people with talk of zoning and permitting reform upon winning office, but at the same time he’s often advocated extending a lot of existing programs, or doubling down on cost-inflating measures like inclusionary housing mandates, affordability quotas, prevailing wage laws, good-cause eviction laws, and of course expanding rent control by making it a rent freeze for rent-controlled housing. So I think it’s fair to say it’s a mixed bag — perhaps not a particularly good bag — but where do you stand on his approach to housing, as you’ve seen it since he’s come into office?

Howard Husock: Well, just to take a step back — New York is in a permanent housing crisis. It’s been in a housing crisis for decades. At the same time, New York has more public and subsidized housing than any other city, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of its housing stock. There are about 3.1 million housing units in New York; 960,000 of them are rent-stabilized, meaning the prices are regulated by the government — that’s a third. 177,000 of them are owned by the government — that’s public housing. And another 119,000 are housing vouchers, distributed by the local housing authority. Then there’s a whole array of smaller subsidized housing programs that are creatures of the state of New York, with mortgage write-downs and other things. If housing interventions through subsidies were going to solve the scarcity of housing, New York should be a poster child for affordable housing — instead, it’s in a permanent housing crisis. Mayor Mamdani astutely capitalized on the perception of crisis through an even more extreme intervention. On January 1st of 2025, he jumped into the water at Rockaway Beach in a full business suit, saying he was going to freeze rents — just like, I suppose, he was freezing in the water. It was key to his victory; the idea was very easy for people to understand and remember, since there’s almost a million regulated housing units, so the idea that he was going to freeze the rent really resonated, and that has been the signature, most tangible accomplishment of his term in office to date. Rents in New York’s regulated apartments are set by something called the Rent Guidelines Board, and it’s supposed to take into account the expenses of property owners and the incomes of tenants — but basically it ignored all of that. The board members, all new appointees of Mayor Mamdani, ignored the fact that heating costs are up, insurance costs are up, property tax costs are up — an array of property owners’ costs have increased — but they still froze the rents at zero percent for two years, at a time when nationally, inflation is one of our most vexing issues. So the inflation that property owners are facing was clearly overlooked. The rent freeze is going to deter new construction, just like all rent regulation does — who wants to build a building if you’re not going to be able to realize a market rent that covers your expenses? And not only that — this is one of the great distortions — rent-regulated apartments may be inexpensive, but you don’t have to be a low-income household to get one. Anybody can get one; it’s first come, first served, like musical chairs — people run around trying to get the good deal, and then they stay there as long as they possibly can. The effects of this are incredibly deleterious for New York City. First of all, the largest group of tenants in New York who benefited from this rent freeze were households that earned more than $100,000 a year — the richest third of tenants enjoyed the rent freeze more than any other single income group. Second, those wealthy tenants, in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side, tend to stay in those units for 20 years or more. One of the things that characterizes affordable, dynamic markets is turnover — when households don’t need as big a place as they used to, they move out and up, or they move to a smaller unit, they downsize. Older families do this all over the country: when their property taxes go up on their homes in the suburbs, they sell and make way for younger families — that’s a healthy housing market. When you have an artificially cheap rent, as you do in New York, those older, wealthy couples who benefit from the rent freeze stay in place, and by the way, it’s a heritable asset — they can have their children move in with them and then pass that cheap deal on to their children. So the distortion ripples through the market for generations.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, we had a great chapter in my edited volume, The War on Prices, by the economist Jeff Miron, on all the deleterious effects of rent control, and you’ve touched on some of them there — of course, on the margin, you encourage more landlords to exit the sector if they can, to convert the properties to owner occupation where possible, perhaps sell them to a family member, or leave them vacant. You’ve talked about “zombie apartments” — tens of thousands of rent-stabilized units sitting vacant because landlords just can’t recover the cost of bringing them up to code. So can you explain how these regulations can end up actually keeping housing off the market entirely?

Howard Husock: Yeah. Even before Mayor Mamdani — when he was a member of the New York State Assembly, before he became mayor — he voted for, and the state legislature adopted, the Tenant and Eviction Control Act in 2019. What that did was limit the rent increases that property owners could get for capital improvements. Now, we’re not even talking about increased operating costs — we’re talking about capital improvements: if you replace the bathroom, modernize the bathroom, modernize the kitchen equipment because it’s been failing, put on a new roof — you can only get reimbursed a very modest amount, less than 5% of the cost, amortized over time. The effect of that is to keep housing off the market. Why? Because you can’t rent an apartment that doesn’t meet the building code. So if you need a new roof on your building but can’t really get compensated through the rent for the cost of installing that new roof, well, then that apartment doesn’t meet code — you’re deterred from putting it back on the market. Nobody really knows how many of these zombie apartments there are, but the latest estimate could be 50,000.

Ryan Bourne: And of course, that same dynamic — even if a building does meet code, there’s still less incentive to invest in the refurbishments that improve the quality of housing over time, so the rent-controlled stock tends to be lower quality on a range of objective metrics relative to the private stock.

Howard Husock: Yeah, there’s a terrific report done every three years by the federal Census Bureau — there’s a lot required for New York City in it, but it’s strange, and very revealing, and I’ve written about this: rent-stabilized units have three times as many rodents and instances of mold as non-stabilized units. So I call this the opposite of gentrification — I call it “shabbification.”

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, that’s such a good term — and also, an important point that you made there about the allocation of this stock. Because people often think about the poor really struggling to make rent and squeezed by recent inflation, but as you say, these units are not allocated on a means-tested basis, so many wealthier households benefit, and they then stay in them for longer. So the people who really suffer are those young, mobile households who, in a dynamic market with a high degree of turnover, could move to New York for a good job opportunity, bring their families, live in an apartment for a couple of years before buying property elsewhere — and that part of the market is just completely dampened by having this widespread rent-stabilized stock.

Howard Husock: Sure. Go to sites that offer roommates in New York, and there’s doubling up, tripling up, quadrupling up, subdivisions with walls put up to create pseudo-bedrooms. All the young workers that tech needs in New York have to adapt to these very strange housing market demands — and they are deterred, of course, inevitably.

Ryan Bourne: So the new city budget adds a voucher expansion — a housing voucher expansion intended to assist more households. As I understand it, that program can cover about 70% of rent. You’ve argued that the structure of these housing vouchers discourages work and upward mobility because they’re means-tested. Can you talk us through the incentives that come into play when you have something like a voucher system?

Howard Husock: Yeah, conservatives tend to say “vouchers” sounds good — you know, school vouchers, we’re for vouchers — but housing vouchers really need to be distinguished as incredibly distorting in a number of deleterious ways. New York City’s vouchers are really no different from the 2.6 million vouchers distributed by HUD through public housing authorities across the country. And here’s the disincentive they create: first of all, rent is limited to 30% of income. That sounds like a great deal — I only have to pay a third of my income in rent! But it also means — and this is crucial — as your income goes up, so does your rent, because you’re not paying a fixed amount signed on the dotted line of a lease, but a percentage of your income. Who would sign a lease like that in the private market — the more I earn, the more I pay? But that’s what we ask low-income families to do across the country. So they have an incentive either to work in the black market — which could include drug dealing — or not to earn more money at all. Why do we want to send that message? And they also have an incentive to stay put, because there’s a limited supply of housing vouchers — if you move out, it’s not likely you’ll get another one — so you tend to stay put and enjoy a good deal, just as people do in rent-stabilized housing. So it’s another distortion of the market. And then, I’m also very focused on the social policy aspects of housing policy — here’s what I mean by that: how do you qualify to get a voucher or a public housing unit? There are still 860,000 government-owned public housing units in this country — still a lot. How do you qualify to get one? Well, the lower your income, the higher your priority. Which households have the lowest income? The elderly poor — and there are a lot of elderly poor in subsidized housing. But the second-largest, and a very significant, group are single parents with children. In New York, you can be a 16-year-old young woman, have a child, go into a shelter, and then when you’re 18, you get in the queue for a permanent voucher. So we’re giving an incentive for household formation among the families whose children have the worst prospects for upward mobility in the country, and we’re discouraging upward mobility on the part of the heads of those households too. So the social policy dimensions, as well as the market distortions, of subsidized housing as it’s implemented in this country are really concerning.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, that’s a point — and I mean, a basic economic point, even beyond those social effects you’ve outlined, is that I think a lot of economists would recognize that housing vouchers are no substitute for doing the supply-side and zoning reforms we’ve talked about. Because if you’re in a very supply-constrained market, of course, if you’re piling on more demand-side subsidies, a lot of that is going to get capitalized into higher housing prices and ultimately higher rents as well. So it can be a palliative for people in terms of paying their rent, but it doesn’t solve that overall market shortage problem we’ve been talking about.

Howard Husock: Yeah, we’re chasing our own tail. And we do that with something you mentioned earlier — inclusionary zoning. New York is the king of inclusionary zoning, and again, it sounds attractive: if you build 100 units, you set aside some percentage as affordable, means-tested based on median income requirements — not the lowest income necessarily, some might be, others could be at 70% of median, there’s a whole gradation. The problem is that for developers of new buildings to “pencil out,” as developers put it — in other words, to come out with a net income, earn some return on their investment — if they’re required to charge less than market rate on some percentage of the units, what do they do for those so-called market-rate units? They charge a higher price for those. So we distort the market, push some toward the upper end, others toward the lower end, and don’t permit developers to meet market demand as it actually exists.

Ryan Bourne: So another topic you’ve written extensively about over the years is public housing — that can also create deeper pockets of social problems, given how public housing has been structured for decades. Can you explain the connection you make between public housing and things like high crime? What’s going on there?

Howard Husock: Yeah — I’ll just put in a plug for my book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing, NYU Press, 2025.

Ryan Bourne: Sorry about the shameless plug.

Howard Husock: No, no, that’s fine — we’re all into shameless plugs for books. Yeah, public housing — it’s a fascinating history. When it was conceived, it wasn’t a grassroots movement; it was conceived by a group of public intellectuals in New York, and their idea was that it would be kind of a public utility — it would replace a great deal, maybe up to two-thirds of the private housing market, and government would own and operate it, but it would be a working-class housing solution. In the early years, when public housing was new, it was pretty attractive for working-class families — in New York, for instance, you had to have two incomes, unmarried persons weren’t permitted to move in, there were high standards. But over time, the private market proved really adept at providing starter homes in the post-World War II era for lower-middle-class and middle-class families. My favorite example is Levittown, the Long Island suburb of New York — 17,000 houses, 750 square feet each, built on a former potato field. This was a bonanza, and just one representative example of the bonanza of new starter homes that were built. So those working-class families would formerly say, “Yeah, I’ll move into public housing” — now, wait a minute, I can own my own house and have something that appreciates in value, and the government will let me take a tax break on my mortgage interest — we can debate the virtues of that, but it was the case. And over time, public housing became housing of last resort, predominantly — significantly, anyhow — for those single-parent families I talked about before. And so why does that connect to high crime? Well, first of all, it connects to dilapidation, because originally the rents of public housing tenants were supposed to cover the maintenance costs — it was supposed to be like a normal apartment, with the government subsidizing construction, and the tenants covering the costs of maintaining the roof, the hallways, and so on. But as poorer people came in, and they were only paying 30% of their income in rent, the incomes of the public housing authorities — there are 3,200 of them across the country, it’s an astoundingly widespread program — their incomes collapsed. They didn’t have the money to do the repairs that the original Public Housing Act of 1937 contemplated they’d be able to do, and they fell increasingly into what the government coined a wonderful turn of phrase, “severe distress.” By 1973, we’d begun tearing down buildings that had been built only 20 years before, they were in such bad shape — famously imploding in a cloud of dust, 33 high-rise towers at Pruitt-Igoe, because there was no money to cover their maintenance. So the change in the character of the households affected the income of the housing authorities, but it also affected the social fabric of public housing communities, if you will. Low-income, single-mother families with multiple children — we know that they have a hard time controlling the behavior and discipline of male children, we know that this can lead to gang associations, because boys are looking for some father-figure substitute. I’m not a sociologist, but I think that’s a pretty straightforward and well-accepted view. But even if you don’t think that’s the only or the main reason, gang formation is very common in public housing. In New York, different gangs are associated with different individual public housing units, and some young boys know they can’t walk more than a few blocks in one direction or another. I’ve been to these places and met tenants of the Andrew Jackson Houses in the Bronx — they say boys here can’t walk more than three or four blocks in that direction, because they’ll confront another gang. So the social conditions of public housing have led to dilapidation, and the economic and social character of the tenants has led to the formation of dysfunctional families. It’s been a recipe for tragedy, really.

Ryan Bourne: So many people in the Mamdani administration have talked about housing as a public or collective good. So a lot of the things you’re talking about may be regarded as bugs of housing policy — you know, like allowing the creation of dilapidated apartments in rent-controlled blocks, or those rent freezes leading, alongside increasing costs to landlords, to default and the city eventually taking over parts of the property — those might be regarded as features by them, not bugs, because they see housing as a public good. I’m guessing they like a lot of the public housing that you’ve just critiqued as well. So, obviously we as libertarians are in favor of zoning reform, relaxing urban growth boundaries, as in some of the western cities. But suppose a serious mayor of New York asked you for a realistic program to make housing broadly more affordable — are there any other important things you think the city could do differently, other than perhaps rowing back on some of these programs and doing some zoning reform? Is permitting a big issue in New York City? Are there other things that could actually help on the margin?

Howard Husock: Permitting is very slow in New York, and so it can take a long time to open a restaurant, it can take a long time to open any business, and it definitely takes years to get a permit to build an apartment building. The former mayor, Mayor Adams, initiated a program they called City of Yes, which limited the power of any individual member of the city council to essentially veto a new housing development — that was a step in the right direction. He also initiated the idea that there should be more small multifamilies in the outer boroughs, where the land is cheaper, with ground-floor stores. Those were very good improvements, and they’re still with us — we’ll have to see how it plays out, they’re not getting as much attention now that he’s no longer mayor. But not only zoning reform, but specific types of zoning reform — I’m a big fan of small multifamily housing. We don’t have to have just high-rises versus single-family homes; small multifamilies, two-to-fours, that could be owner-occupied, give working-class households a source of rental income, and give tenants a model when they see the owners living on-site — it can help improve maintenance, because the owners have to keep up the buildings, since they live there too. So I think anything that New York or any city can do to make it as-of-right — meaning without special zoning variances — to build these two-to-four-unit structures, which used to be very common in the outer boroughs and all over the United States, would be a real step in the right direction. I have some crazy, or maybe subtle, ideas too. I’d like to call attention to the fact that we have all these wealthy tenants in rent-regulated units. I don’t want to means-test all the tenants, because then you’re turning all of these 960,000 units into subsidized housing, and that would be a really bad idea. But I think it would be a good idea to have all tenants declare their income and assets. Most — 70% — of rent-stabilized tenants are lower- or moderate-income, so if we’re going to keep their rents low, okay, I guess that’s the political reality. But for upper-income tenants, their rent should rise, in my view, with the Consumer Price Index — the rate of inflation — reducing the discretion of regulators to squeeze the rents of property owners when they’re renting to people who can really afford to pay. Now, look — would I rather just wipe the rent stabilization regime clean altogether? Of course I would. But I think anything that calls attention to the distortions in a way that would change the political conversation — if a city council member were to introduce a bill saying upper-income tenants have to pay more rent — well, it’s hard to oppose, and it would change the nature of that discussion in a positive way. Again, it’s not regime change, as we talk about in foreign policy, but I think it would be a step in the right direction.

Ryan Bourne: Well, we’ve had just about enough attempted regime change of late, but I think you’re absolutely right — we’re in a world of second-best at best, so we’re having to make marginal improvements. But of course, we as libertarians here at Cato think that, as far as possible, we want to be moving back toward more of a property and land rights regime — so that if people want to build certain forms of housing, provided they’re not imposing too much of what we describe as negative externalities on other people, then they should be free to do that. And I think you’d get much more of the type of multifamily, small-unit housing you’re talking about if we did that. But I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for, Howard. Housing affordability is going to remain, I think, one of the defining challenges facing the country for years to come. There’s no shortage of bad proposals out there, and we’ve been through them today — rent controls, housing vouchers, government-run housing. But I think understanding what’s driving high housing costs is essential if policymakers hope to make housing more abundant. Regardless of how policymakers choose to help renters or home buyers, affordability ultimately depends on having enough homes to meet ever-rising demand. So a lot of the efforts that we’re doing here at Cato are about increasing housing supply, but you’ve given us some fresh ideas here for other things that could be done to improve the allocation of housing and remove some of the other barriers. So, really appreciate your time with us today — thanks for your insights. And thank you to everyone for listening to today’s episode of the Cato Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s discussion, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the ideas and research discussed in this episode, visit cato​.org. The Cato Podcast is a production of the Cato Institute, dedicated to advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Join us next time for more insights and conversations on the issues shaping our world.