David Edward Garber (@DaveGarber1975)

This Libertarianism-dot-org video explains why American housing has become so unaffordable, which is partly due to zoning laws that were originally enacted to preemptively thwart neighbor nuisances, but largely due to creeping massive bureaucratic regulations that artificially limit the supply of housing---and how allowing plentiful-and-cheap housing produces more benefits than detriments, while rendering housing scarce-and-unaffordable requires people to spend more of their earnings on subsistence expenses, which exacerbates economic inequality. As I might reiterate... American housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable as taxpayer-guaranteed federal home-loan programs artificially raise housing demand while housing supply is artificially lowered by a massive proliferation of bureaucratic "red tape" that includes environmental regulations, zoning ordinances, licensure laws, building codes, et cetera, all of which is further exacerbated by ongoing Fed-induced monetary inflation that normally raises prices of products (including homes) faster than it raises homebuyers' salaries/wages. Ending the Fed and restoring Constitutional gold/silver money would maintain our purchasing-power and, although I like high quality standards, I believe that such standards are better achieved through customer-accountable private-sector agencies than through politician-accountable public-sector agencies. As for municipal zoning specifically, it has become so standard throughout these United States that few Americans question it anymore---but we should! Zoning originated among 19th-century European socialists to force markets to deviate from what they'd do freely, in theory to perfect them but in practice to worsen them, and current American socialists may try to wield zoning codes to unduly favor high-density housing, which is generally less-desirable, less-affordable (such that it struggles to exist without both enforced city-size limits and political subsidies to developers), congestion-causing, and crime-ridden, but Marxists may favor high-density housing anyway because it psychologically renders its residents less resistant to socialism (as KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov testified) while facilitating state surveillance-and-control---but zoning is more-often wielded by current residents to try to preserve their neighborhoods endlessly from redevelopment while maximizing their property values. But zoning violates God-given (or natural) rights, defies Constitutional law, and can be arbitrary, inconsistent, unfair, and subject more to political favoritism than to citizens' preferences. Moreover, zoning de-optimizes local economies in countless ways, which ways include imposing false "order" and/or aesthetics over people's genuine needs, curbing competition, curtailing needed development, reducing housing supplies, raising housing costs, wasting developers' time on needless paperwork, impeding local entrepreneurship to escape poverty, favoring older/larger businesses unfairly over newer/smaller ones, stifling innovation, slowing progress, increasing car traffic and its resultant air-pollution, lowering overall standards-of-living, excluding "undesirables," discouraging social connectedness, contributing to homelessness, and so forth. As 2020s America endures a housing "crisis" of increasingly-unaffordable housing (which is part of a broader affordability "crisis" of subsistence expenses consuming an increasingly large percentage of our earnings), we Americans should strive to emulate NOT heavily-zoned Los Angeles, from which the middle class is fleeing in droves, BUT non-zoned Houston, which is thriving with some of America's most affordable housing. So, let's please spurn central planning to embrace free markets, including in housing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Nttj28C_E #PoliticalPhilosophy #Libertarianism #FreeMarkets #Economics #SupplyAndDemand #Affordability #AffordabilityCrisis #HousingCrisis #Housing #Zoning #Regulation #Deregulation