Housing Policy is American Liberalism’s Achilles Heel

by | Nov 29, 2021 | Politics | 4 comments

Nestled in a humid forest at the midpoint between the Appalachian Mountains and the mighty Atlantic, the Research Triangle of North Carolina has attracted migrants for decades. Raleigh’s growth has been particularly impressive: Between 2010-2020, the Raleigh-Cary metropolitan area grew by 23%, the second-fastest growth rate in the country. Yet just down the road from Raleigh, and despite its magnificent tree canopy and a great university, Chapel Hill did not grow at all. The reason for this failure was housing policy.

A house in Chapel Hill is likely to be almost as expensive as in the notoriously costly region of southern California. Because of this expense, the artists, graduate students, and junior faculty who once made Chapel Hill a shining gem of Southern intellectualism have been priced out of the town, replaced one for one by wealthy people in a trade-off that left the town’s population stagnant. If students, let alone the poor, cannot afford to live in a town that styles itself the capital of blue North Carolina, there are legitimate questions about whether the town’s liberalism is truly operative.

This story could be told about almost any elite liberal enclave in the United States. The New York Times had a piece over the weekend detailing how Austin, Texas, which has attracted thousands of transplants seeking its technology jobs and affordable housing, has become too expensive for the people who want to live there. The state of California actually lost population for the first time ever–both the leading state in Blue America and the epicenter of liberal NIMBYism. By pricing out all but the wealthy, liberal municipalities risk transforming progressive communitarianism into a luxury good.

The substance of this trend is bad enough. But what makes NIMBYism so pernicious is that it plays into the hands of the far right. Posing as populists, right-wingers can point to the expense of living in elite cities as evidence that American progressives are a bunch of rich snobs, toffs who hold the hoi polloi in contempt and hoard gentility for their educated brethren. This, of course, is nonsense. However, it resonates with people who live in places with lower wages and weaker unions, who cannot imagine a life in Seattle or Cambridge, and resent the people who can.

Worse, high housing costs in liberal cities allow Republicans to muddy the waters on what drives living standards. Many Americans have become convinced that people move from places like California to Texas, or elect to live in Johnston County rather than the Southern part of heaven, because of the supposedly crushing burden of taxation. This is not true: for poor and middle class people, Texas is a higher-taxed jurisdiction than the Golden State. But it’s an intuitive narrative that has gotten traction, and has arguably kept the anti-tax ideology on life support despite supply-side economics being utterly discredited by the George W. Bush and Donald Trump presidencies.

It is time for elite liberal towns, starting with the one (Chapel Hill) in which I live, to aggressively take on housing costs. This means accepting the ironclad logic of supply and demand and building more houses, condos, and apartments for middle-class Americans to live in. Liberals need to demonstrate to Americans that you can live a prosperous life, indeed likely a healthier and better educated one, in the cities where the liberal-left is based. We need to discredit the Republicans’ anti-tax theology and reify our conviction that an open and welcoming society is what America should be.

4 Comments

  1. gordon whitaker

    Actually, “the iron law of supply and demand” will NOT solve the affordable housing problem in Chapel Hill. Over the past several years Chapel Hill has experienced a boom in new apartments, but they are all “market priced” for (upper) middle class incomes. And some have been built by tearing down housing that was available at much lower rent. That is why the population shift to wealthier residents occurred: housing at lower rent was replaced by housing offered only at considerably higher rent. The market cannot solve that problem. Only public policies that restrict further replacement of low income housing with more expensive coupled with public action to increase lower income housing will address this problem. One potential part of the solution is for UNC to build more student housing and encourage students to live there. Another is for the town council to refuse to approve zoning changes that allow construction of almost entirely high rent buildings. A few token “affordable” units at 80% AMI don’t really help address this issue.

    It is also important to note that Chapel Hill’s current housing policy actually decreases reliance on public transportation. In order to afford the rent, many of the folks moving to Chapel Hill must work in Durham, RTP ,or Raleigh/Cary. The newly built apartment buildings in town all have capacious parking garages to accomodate their commutes. Meanwhile, many of the people who work in town can’t afford to live here. They must commute, too, at least to the park and ride lots at the fringe of town.

  2. phoenix

    This is hardly a mystery. Chapel hill and Orange county have long been known to purposely keep their water bills etc very high so as to keep out minorities. There was an article on it in th N&O probably a decade ago about this very thing.

    Hypocrites. A huge problem is that Liberals want YOU to live THEIR values while they don’t live their own. Its one of liberals many problems that everyone sees but them.

    NYT has a good article on it and also shows why Liberals never get headway with others. They see they hypocrisy and figure “they don’t want it. Why should I?

    Enjoy

  3. Jim Bartow

    You can’t really have this discussion without talking about the “rural buffer”, which I support. The rural buffer is a circle of land surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro where no city services will be provided and should never be annexed by either town. The rural buffer prevents “sprawl”. Chapel Hill is rapidly building “luxury” condos and apartments which in a few years will be more affordable. But there is limited land available for growth.

    • Frank

      I’m still wondering why Restoration Media newspapers have changed your above heading/lead-in to: “HOUSING POLICY IS AMERICAN LIBERALISM’S BIG MESS”.

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