The Outstater
‘Affordable’ Housing
“A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop,’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” — Mission Statement, the National Review
READING UP on the Indianapolis “Vacant to Vibrant” housing plan, I’m honestly having trouble differentiating it from Zohran Mamdani’s New York City.
Both assume that “affordable” housing is independent of the incentives (lower taxes, fewer regulations, public safety, practical zoning) that would attract private investment to build or renovate housing in line with market demand at all price points.
Rather, the Indianapolis version “guides” investors vetted for their dedication to “equitable development.” These investors are exclusively offered property that the city deems inadequate — abandoned or degraded for reasons either murky or unstated such as impossible regulations, toxic culture or crime.
Again, the program sidesteps the free market, empowering government to decide who can and who cannot own property. The specifications are draconian but include a social-justice promise to rent only to lower income, politically defined tenants.
It won’t work. How do I know that? Well, if it were a solid business plan someone in the private sector already would be doing it. The blight that City Hall would “fix” is the market’s way of saying that the properties are overvalued for current conditions and have a ways yet to fall.
My suspicion is that “Vacant to Vibrant” is not a housing program but a financial scheme for politically connected players who will cash out down the road. It could be taken seriously only if the city, supported by the neighborhoods themselves, were focused on dramatically reducing crime, building infrastructure and inviting unrestricted investment. They are not.
The designers of the New York version, unrestrained by the niceties of Midwest expectations, don’t even pretend their plan will work. We are watching a master class there in how to bring a city to ruin with housing policy being the wrecking ball of preference.
Mayor Mamdani announced this week that his administration, on top of already severe rent controls, will: 1) further handicap a landlord’s ability to repair and maintain his property; 2) in effect bankrupting owners failing to meet its new stricter standards; and 3) placing billions of dollars of property in unaccountable third-party hands.
Look, if there’s one thing history tells us it is that the best designers of public policy are citizens making individual choices as to how they want to manage their affairs and invest their money, all with due respect for Common Law and the Golden Rule.
That involves free markets setting prices as signals of what is to be manufactured and sold as well as guiding how we deal with others in the management and exchange of our property. Coercive government, as opposed to private charities, has no useful role in any of that other than to stay out of the way, although it tries mightily and continually to convince us otherwise.
As the economist Ludwig von Mises argued decades before his work accurately predicted the collapse of Communist Russia, government attempts to solve such problems merely create more problems. Intervention beyond public safety, protecting property and ensuring the smooth operation of the market only distorts economic calculation and replaces individual sovereignty with an arbitrary bureaucracy.
So, what will Indianapolis and New York do as failure inevitably looms? Call for even more intervention, of course, eroding individual liberty and threatening the system of private property itself leading to economic and social chaos.
How “affordable” is that?
It is not a matter of reform, you see, but a matter of taking Willam Buckley’s sage advice and stopping it altogether. I don’t see anybody in either political party here willing to do that. — tcl
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