How to solve the "housing crisis"

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Several online commenters have written about the "housing crisis," suggesting off-site, modular building, or reduced regulation, etc., would solve the problem. I'd suggest these amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

First of all, there's really no shortage of built homes. There are more vacant homes in the US than its current, biggest-since-the-Great-Depression homeless population. San Francisco has five times as many vacant homes as its homeless population, for one.

Is there any suggestion to raise property taxes on vacant properties, as Vancouver did to solve this problem? [Crickets]

Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable housing, and Reagan--as he lowered taxes on the wealthy roughly 50%, and with his successor raised payroll taxes eightfold--cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Clinton signed the Faircloth amendment limiting federal affordability support, too, so the attack on the poor is bipartisan.

Setting that history aside, we could build mixed-income (poor among the wealthy), mixed-use (offices and retail among the residences), and remove a regressive tax imposed by sprawl--i.e., having to own a car. People could walk to work, school, or shopping. Four- or Eight-plexes among the mansions would accomplish this, and the poor (more generous, less materialistic) might be a good influence on the wealthy.😊

Build pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use at sufficient densities (11 units per acre and up), and we would have enough customers and transit riders within a walk of those destinations that local commerce and transit would be financially viable.

People often say they don't want denser neighborhoods--something that dramatically lowers land cost per unit--but many people pay premiums to live in NYC or Hong Kong.

The problem with density is that public services are absolutely critical. People are concerned about crime (yet per capita crime rates are lower in densely built NYC than in sprawlified Phoenix, AZ), and need things like parks, museums, etc. As I've pointed out above, the public realm (what's available to everyone) has been aggressively defunded since LBJ left office.

Implementing this would be a bit of a turnaround in a country where people are shocked to hear public enterprises actually beat private ones in providing goods and services. Publicly-owned SMUD is 35% cheaper than privately-owned PG&E, for just one example. Yet gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer somehow thinks "competition" will improve a natural monopoly like an electric utility. Wouldn't public ownership be an option? [again: crickets]

Unfortunately, the US population is eager for a deck chair rearrangement rather than a genuine solution, and kept that way by the massive marketing machine that tells us the post office is bad, and the courts are crooked, etc. And there is no shortage of well-funded saboteurs scheming to make those criticisms come true. 

How to (really!) improve the economy

 

Hey, what's a little crime amongst oligarchs?

 

Never forget:
-The only Republican US attorney fired in GWB's great purge of the DOJ was the guy who was about to indict the Sacklers
-Then Obama went and made Purdue's former defense attorney his AG https://t.co/V8yHZAQkKn

— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) January 5, 2026

American Thuggery Echoes History

 

In the last Gilded Age, Wall Street virtually controlled our government and turned the U.S. military into “a high-class muscle man for Big Business.” We’re living in the Second Gilded Age now, and history is repeating itself.

We can do better in this country. https://t.co/0LhCyHgK1N pic.twitter.com/w7Spe8Hf69

— Basel Musharbash (@musharbash_b) January 3, 2026

"Hope" = "Nope" ... The Obama "Justice" Pursuit

Alec Karakatsanis 

In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh.

At sentencing, Gilbert noticed an error that increased his sentence by about *10 years* based on a misclassification of a prior conviction. In 1999, without a lawyer, he filed a petition complaining about the mistake. The Clinton DOJ opposed him, and a court ruled against him.

Ten years later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in another person’s case, confirming that Gilbert had been correct about the error in his case. A public defender helped him file a new petition for immediate release from prison back to his family. He had served his time.

The federal judge sided with Obama/Holder, and Ezell Gilbert remained in a cage even though everyone agreed he was now in prison illegally. He had the audacity to hope that courts would follow the law.
A federal appeals court disagreed with Obama/Holder, and in June 2010, three judges set Gilbert free after more than 14 years in prison.

The judges rejected the DOJ’s argument as a departure from fairness and common sense. They said that it could not be the law in the U.S. that a person had to serve a prison sentence that everyone admitted was illegal. Ezell Gilbert went home and stayed out of trouble.

Here’s where it gets interesting. There are many people like Gilbert in federal prison whose sentences are illegal. Did you know that? Instead of rushing to ensure that thousands of people illegally separated from their families were set free, DOJ decided to fight and appeal.

The Obama/Holder DOJ argued: If prisoners were allowed to file more petitions, the “floodgates” would open and many others — mostly poor — would have to be released. They asked a larger group of judges to reverse Gilbert’s victory.

In 2011, a larger group of judges, led by a Republican majority, agreed with Obama/Holder that the “finality” of sentences was too important to allow prisoners to be released on a second rather than first petition, even if the prisoner was correct all along.

Ezell Gilbert was rearrested and sent back to prison to serve out his illegal sentence in a cage. Here's a link to one of the most shameful court opinions I've ever encountered, and one of Barack Obama and Eric Holder's most enduring victories: https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/200912513op2.pdf

An 87-year-old Republican judge wrote a dissent. Having served in WWII, he called the explicit decision to illegally keep a human being in jail “shocking.” He wrote that a “judicial system that values finality over justice is morally bankrupt.”

Addressing Obama/Holder argument directly, he said: “[T]here are many others in Gilbert’s position — sitting in prison serving sentences that were illegally imposed. We used to call such systems ‘gulags.’ Now, apparently, we call them the United States.”

Major media ignored Ezell Gilbert’s case at the time. Eric Holder did something similar in an even more egregious effort to preserve illegal sentences in the cases of Cornelius and Jarreous Blewitt, which consigned tens of thousands more people to federal cages illegally.

In 2013, two years after sending him back to a cage, Obama granted Gilbert clemency, and the media praised Obama for his leniency. Tens of thousands of other human being remained in prison illegally. You’ve never heard their names.

These legal precedents, and the unaccountable formations of lawyers, judges, politicians and bureaucrats who make them possible, are essential to the authoritarian project. They normalize the unjustified deprivation of liberty.

Once this normalization of the senseless deprivation of a single person's liberty is allowed to sprout, it is almost impossible to contain. This is the enduring import of the civil rights work that we do, and why telling these stories matters to the hope of a better world.

Homelessness Isn’t Caused by a Housing Shortage—It’s Caused by Low Wages and High Rents

From LA Progressive (Platkin is always a good read): 

Why Vacant Homes, Flat Incomes, and Political Deference to Landlords Are Driving Overcrowding and Homelessness in Los Angeles

 

Dick Platkin Dec 27, 2025

Overcrowding and homelessness are both increasing because -- after controlling for inflation – the price of housing is up and most wages are flat. The causes are not a mystery: elected officials who dance the tune of major campaign contributors.

While the housing crisis is already severe in US urban areas, the situation is particularly tough in the greater Los Angeles area because elected officials ultimately control housing policies. For them, their concerns are rarely their poorly housed constituents. Instead they parrot that false narrative that an (imaginary) housing shortage is the cause of rising homelessness and overcrowding.

This explanation is not only wrong, but it hides the real causes of both homelessness and overcrowding. As shown in the chart below, the price of housing has continued to increase, while most incomes have been flat for the past 50 years. In fact, Los Angeles has an ample supply of vacant houses and apartments. What it lacks is people with enough income to buy or rent them. The problem is simply a lack of money by the homeless and overcrowded, not the supply of housing. Nearly all of these groups would gladly move if they could afford to rent or buy. But they can’t afford existing vacant housing, so they remain homeless or over-crowded.

 

Until this situation is remedied with higher wages, real rent control, and the restoration of public housing, little will change.

There is a solution, but it is a shot across the bow of both major electoral parties and their claim that homelessness and overcrowding result from a housing shortage. They ignore the 16 million vacant homes in the United States, including many in the Los Angeles area, as well as an average local apartment vacancy rate of 5.1%.

The Remedies: First, the solution is already known. In addition to raises, it is real rent control to replace LA’s anemic Rent Stabilization Ordinance, plus the restoration of HUD public housing programs jettisoned during the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton presidential administrations.

Second, in addition to reestablishing HUD public housing programs, California must end vacancy decontrol by revoking the Costa-Hawkins bill. Real rent control should mean that rents do not increase when tenants move out.

Third, in Los Angeles the cutoff date for rent stabilization should not remain 1978. Instead, rents should continually change, such as replacing 1978 with a sliding date, such as apartments built 15 or more year ago.

What are the real barriers? The barrier is the power of landlords -- as opposed to tenants - to shape national, state, and local legislation. Until this changes and tenants gain the upper hand, we will be subject to minority rule since renters far outnumber landlords.

The chances of positive changes trickling down from Washington are minimal. Elected Democrats don’t offer any credible housing solutions. As for Republicans, the Trump Administration proposes major cuts in HUD’s low-income housing programs, then adding work and service requirements. Internal HUD documents estimate that an additional 170,000 people may become homeless because of these changes.

This cure is worse than the disease!

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.

By

Dick Platkin

Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner and veteran Planners Network member who reports on local planning issues for City Watch LA, which published an earlier version of this article. Please send any comments or corrections to rhplatkin@gmail.com.

Whence Housing Inflation?

 Answer: from the Fed's Quantitative Easing. Excerpt:

This paper examines the impact of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve from 2020 to 2022, during which the Fed’s mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchases ($1.33 trillion) were equal to nearly 90% of the growth in MBS ($1.50 trillion). Evidence suggests that housing’s unique role as an asset class is a factor explaining the rise in the cost of housing and hence overall inflation.