Lewis County Democrats recently conducted a survey. A summary of it will be released soon, but the results were given to members in their monthly meeting. Two areas were top concerns for all categories of respondents — the high cost of health care and the high cost of housing.
In national news recently, there has been a lot of talk about the high cost of health care, but nobody is talking about the cost of housing. Does anybody have a plan to lower the cost of housing?
I would also like to add that one of the biggest problems in our cities is the large number of unhoused people. I asked Google AI what the relationship is between the cost of rent and the number of homeless people and it said, “There is a direct correlation between unaffordable housing and homeless rates. When rents rise faster than income, it increases the risk of homelessness for low income individuals and families.”
What are the causes of high rents? Supply and demand is always mentioned when speaking of costs for any item. I have read that the supply of affordable housing has been kept low by zoning laws that people have passed to keep their neighborhoods nice and their housing values high. The specific zoning law that is most important is the number of units that can be put on each housing plot. This has choked the market for affordable housing. Rich home owners need to sacrifice to help younger and poorer people. Zoning laws need to change to make this happen.
Regulations increase the cost of building and the time required to build low income houses or apartments. Regulations need to be looked at to lower the cost and decrease the time needed to build low income housing. I would like to see this done in a way that doesn’t impact the environment negatively.
Large developers from outside the community buy up a large percentage of the available units of houses, condominiums and apartments. They then have a local monopoly on housing and can control the cost of rents. The profits get sent out of the community. Monopolization prevents market forces from lowering the cost of rent. The profits generated from these properties go outside of the community they are located in.
The Rural Urban New Deal has a plan that can address this last problem. We need more local ownership of housing. This can happen by the government passing laws that help local people get financing for local housing projects. Taxes could be written in a way that favors smaller projects and more local projects and that put a higher tax burden on out of area owners and owners of large projects.
Our legislators could write local versions of anti-trust laws that make it illegal to monopolize the rent market in any sector of our county.
Daniel Meekof
Packwood
