In an obviously unsuccessful effort to keep these posts from spiraling to greater and greater lengths, I mostly skipped the quote and response format and just tried to sum up each point a little bit more briefly (still quoted a couple pieces that invited more direct responses).
CrossroadsUrbanApts
If housing isn't zero sum, it's also not a rising tide that lifts all boats. I think low-income renters, particularly the ones who create or are attracted to organizations like KCT, would take a much broader view of what hurts them than you do. The harm that low-income tenants would see from your efforts would be that you are contributing to rising costs in their neighborhoods that will eventually push them out.
I don't believe that building and operating housing (public or otherwise) is easy, but the flaws in America's public housing programs are pretty well-known. It has a sorry track record because we have treated it as housing of last resort for people with low incomes and no better options, then we've underfunded it for decades (among myriad other issues, right down to the designs of the buildings themselves). It should come as no surprise that after we built these nodes of hyperconcentrated poverty and then didn't even pay to maintain the buildings, the projects struggled and in many cases failed. But there are successful models elsewhere that could be emulated if there were any desire to do so, I just don't see much of that desire, though you seem quite confident it exists. I'm thinking mostly about the federal government, which has historically been responsible for funding most of the public housing throughout the country but has since prohibited itself from building any more. I guess I'm not that interested in whether local politicians in cash-strapped city governments would love to build public housing in principle but in reality have no capital to do so, except to the extent that their interest could indicate that maybe at some point in the future the tide will turn on this.
Chuck
You bring up regulation and subsidies a few times throughout your post, but that's not "letting the market function," that is explicitly the government putting its finger on the scale to achieve outcomes that the market won't achieve on its own. Which has been my point all along. Yes, revising land use regulations is helpful, but it's not sufficient. That's the only point I was ever trying to make, and it seems like we agree? I've already said it before, but I am all for revising (including eliminating, where appropriate) those regulations, which I think is good and necessary for reasons wholly apart from any hopes about bringing down rent. I'm not going to argue to maintain the status quo, if that's what you're expecting or what you think I have been saying. I'm just skeptical that this will bring about widespread affordability. If, on the other hand, the government wants to turn on the money spigot, then sure, you can achieve any outcome you want as long as they crank it high enough. That has never been in question.
You also accuse me of "ignoring" the racist and classist history of land use regulations. I don't think that I'm ignoring this history, I just don't think it's especially germane to the point I'm trying to make, which is just about whether "letting the market function" by rolling back those regulations now will suddenly generate a bunch of affordable housing. That history is one of many reasons to rethink land use in this country, but it doesn't really speak to what our expectations should be about what effect that would have on rent.
On the point about landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods hiking rents, renovating, or rebuilding, you say that I'm assuming the neighborhood can support higher rents. Of course I am. If the neighborhood can't support much higher rents than what the existing low-income tenants are paying, developers aren't building there and we aren't talking about anything. You also doubt that "every landlord is operating as efficiently as possible," which is fair because nobody operates "as efficiently as possible," but that's not the point. Yes, at any given moment in time, you will find some landlords who are not necessarily extracting the maximum amount of rent, but over the longer term, rents will correct toward the market rate (obviously, assuming no rent control or similar law in effect). This is true whether or not the building gets renovated (a renovated building could command higher rents, but as you point out, those rents would need to be high enough to justify the cost of the renovation; I hadn't argued otherwise, even though you responded to me as if I had).
How can we sit here and agree that the housing market is overregulated and still call it a "free-for-all"?
I wasn't talking about the status quo, I was comparing two proposed solutions (public housing vs. YIMBY market magic).
That's not the direction the pressure is coming from. If demand is higher than supply, the poorest are pushed out of housing. If housing is built with income-restrictions in place, then anyone above that income line isn't helped. If low-income housing is built without market rate supply being satiated then price pressure will continue to kill people that qualify for the income-restricted units but aren't lucky enough to get into one. There's no realistic scenario where we can build enough social housing that demand across the entire housing market is fulfilled.
Of course demand-side price pressure comes from the bottom up. If you have an infinite supply of a good, everybody can have one cost-free. But if the good is scarce, the price is driven upward by the very people who are "pushed out" of acquiring it -- by pushing them out, you can allocate it to whoever is left willing (and able) to purchase it at whatever price it settles at. (I'm not sure the rest of your response is relevant. I specifically mentioned a "solution that provides an adequate amount of housing" and you're talking about an insufficient number of means tested units.)