A new article by economics professor Jason Barr just dropped in his blog:
Barr discusses the rate of housing, causes of underbuilding – now going on since WWII. As he says, it’s misleading to call an 80-year event an “emergency” but it is a chronic and growth-stiffling shortage in any case.
The article follows a more narrowly focused article from last fall: The Housing Twenties: New York’s Biggest Building Boom and Its Lessons for Today:
https://buildingtheskyline.org/housing-twenties/ but perhaps because it compares the last 80 years to the (housing) roaring twenties, the contrast is all the more apparent. I augmented a comment I left to the earlier article thusly and I hope CGUSA members will especially take the action recommended at the end:
The spike in the later 1920s through early 1930s is so much of an outlier, so enormous, that it deserves a special explanation. I left a major explanation in your previous article “The Housing Twenties: New York’s Biggest Building Boom and Its Lessons for Today”: https://buildingtheskyline.org/housing-twenties/ but it’s worth repeating here too:
There is another big reason for the relative explosion in housing construction in the 1920s and into the late 1930s (because housing starts are planned years in advance, there is a lag between policy and production): the Land Value Tax. The late Georgist professor Mason Gaffney wrote about it here: https://economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers01/01-01.pdf.
“The leading specific topic is to illuminate the aftermath of NYC’s 1920 law exempting new housing construction (but not the land values) from the property tax from 1920 until the end of 1931. I will identify it as “The Al Smith Law,” after the New York Gov. who sponsored and signed it. The finding is that NYC population grew much faster, percentage wise, than that of comparison cities, from 1920 to 1940, and for a while thereafter…NYC had been slowing down just before the law of 1920. After 1931 when the law expired, NYC grew slower than before, but this was the Great Depression, when most comparison cities stopped dead, and began to waste away. NYC not only held its #1 population ranking among U.S. cities, it pulled farther ahead in numbers, even in percentage terms.”
The population grew along with housing. Gaffney writes:
“The original stimulus for this study was a pamphlet by Charles Johnson Post, titled How New York Solved its Housing Crisis. Post gives data on per capita spending on new buildings in NYC and four comparison cities for the years 1910 to 1929. These data show that NYC abruptly recovered from stagnation in 1920, and outstripped the other cities: Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and, to a lesser extent, Chicago. Post credits the housing tax holiday, enacted in 1920, for this recovery.”
Today, we have almost the opposite policy by undertaxing vacant lots, then greedily ramping up taxes on developed lot, even right next door! This discourages building unless the profits are so humongous that they can overcome the tax increase. Meanwhile, undertaxed surface parking lots continue on, while their owners wait for the right opportunity to “pounce” (sell) and make a huge profit, largely because the value goes mostly untaxed. Our policies encourage hoarding and speculation, instead of production to the highest and best use. Zoning compounds these malinvestments, but it’s not the only cause, or, arguably, even the largest in some neighborhoods.
======
Since your previous article and my comment on it, the City of Yes has passed, but as you point out here, that doesn’t address either the root cause of the supply issue, nor is the scope large enough to fix the “emergency,” now going on for 80 years.
However, with respect to the Land Value Tax, there HAS been some progress in reviving this tried-and-proven solution. A new bill that “Directs the department of taxation and finance to establish a pilot program for implementation of local land value taxation” has been introduced in the state senate: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S1131. It needs many more sponsors and it’s only a pilot program so it would need bold leadership and frankly, less NIMBYism, to get it to the scale that existed in the 1920s under then Governor Al Smith. But it’s a start. I hope you and your readers will support it.