The thing pricing American families out of housing is not the federal permit office. It is the homeowner next door whose house you cannot outbuild, and the institutional landlord waiting to absorb whatever you do build. That is the omission in Pat Toomey’s America’s broken permitting system is quietly raising your cost of living on Fox News, which argues that the cure for the country’s affordability crisis is to strip down NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and a few other federal procedural hurdles, running the fix through the SPEED, FREEDOM, and PERMIT bills. There is a real observation in here about a real problem. The piece declines to name every other actor in the story except as a beneficiary of the solution it proposes.
The kernel is honest. Federal permitting reform would help. NEPA review has been turned into a litigation buffet by repeat filers. The Mountain Valley Pipeline did fight its way through nine years of NEPA litigation before a single molecule of gas moved, and somewhere in those years the project picked up costs that get passed downstream. Authorizing agencies to make timely decisions on transmission lines and pipelines is not a bad thing to do, on its own. The bipartisan permitting-reform bills Toomey names have genuinely unusual support across the aisle.
The case holds. The framework is missing the part that does most of the damage.
The biggest barriers to building more housing in the United States are not federal. They are local. They are your neighbors. The median single-family home in Los Angeles sits on a lot zoned to permit only a single-family home, in a city whose median rent is now what the median mortgage used to be. The homeowner on the planning commission who already owns a detached house with a yard, and would prefer that no apartment building be built within six miles of his. The power he wields is not in Washington. It is the zoning ordinance that says one house per lot. It is the variance his block association packs the room to oppose. It is the design-review board that sends the same project back for the eighth time. It is local law, decided at local hearings, where he shows up and you try to, while you keep writing forty percent of your check to your landlord. He has a vote. He has a lawyer. You don’t. Federal permitting reform doesn’t unlock a single lot zoned for one house on one quarter acre.
Then the second omission, which is most of the cost. America’s housing crisis is not a construction-cost crisis. The lumber, the nails, the carpenters — those costs have roughly tracked inflation for decades. They did not drive the price up. The biggest variable in a new home’s price is the land underneath, and in a supply-constrained metro, that land value flows to whoever owned it before the reform passed. Land values in America’s major metros have outpaced the cost of building by multiples economists have documented for years, and in a housing crisis, that gap is the prize. Strip the permits, and the value of the dirt jumps on the day the announcement is made. The homeowner’s equity ticks up. The renter’s rent does not. Permitting reform in a financialized market speeds up the extraction; it doesn’t lower the price.
The third omission is more pointed. At the height of the pandemic buying spree, institutional investors were buying a sizable share of homes sold — some estimates put it at one in seven, though the methodology is contested. Blackstone, the largest single-family landlord in the country, owns more than 80,000 houses through Invitation Homes. Its closest competitors hold portfolios in the same range. They are not NIMBYs, exactly. They are something worse: they are the consumers of the new building opportunity NIMBYism creates. When the new homes get built, they are the buyers best positioned to absorb them. Speeding up the construction line just speeds up the extraction. The supply does not move toward a homeowner. The supply moves toward the holder.
So: “more supply will fix affordability” is the easier half, an easier half that hands the buyer’s market to the homeowner at the planning hearing and the institutional landlord waiting to absorb — the two actors who never needed fixing because the fix was designed for them. The piece is happy to argue in the abstract that “more supply” equals “lower prices.” It declines to ask: lower prices for whom.
The real fix is the one other countries figured out long ago: stop treating housing as an asset class and start treating it as shelter.
Vienna houses roughly sixty percent of its residents in social housing — no other major city in the developed world is in the same neighborhood. The model is not a “waiting list for the state to hand you a thing.” It is municipal construction of permanently affordable apartments through revolving funds, mixed-income inclusion, and a hard rule that the buildings remain nonprofit forever. It has been running for roughly a century. The wait list is short because the model is durable. Singapore’s Housing Development Board has housed more than three million people in flats they mostly own. America’s economy already runs partly on cooperative and public ownership — credit unions, mutual insurers, rural electric co-ops — we just refuse to say the word about housing.
Community land trusts are the closest the United States has. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont, founded in 1984 and now the country’s largest, separates the building on a parcel from the parcel itself. The household owns the home, with a resale formula that protects affordability. The trust owns the land, in perpetuity. When the homeowner moves, the home goes to another moderate-income household at a controlled price. The trust never sells. The model is the inverse of asset-class housing, and it has run continuously for four decades.
Housing cooperatives, of which the United States already has a substantial stock. New York has hundreds of thousands of co-op apartments, much of it built through the Mitchell-Lama program of the late 1950s and 1960s, in which a residents’ cooperative owns the building and a resident owns a share whose resale price is permanently limited. Limited-equity co-ops stay affordable because a unit has to be affordable to be sold back to the cooperative. A city with a hundred thousand units of this has a hundred thousand units not in the asset-class market. The institutional landlord cannot acquire them. The asset-class bid cannot extract them.
Public construction at the federal level, which the country did in living memory and can do again. The Housing Act of 1949, the GI Bill, the FHA mortgage-insurance programs of the postwar period — every one put public money directly into publicly regulated, and often publicly owned, housing, on land acquired with public powers. The result was the mid-century middle class. Stripping a few permits does not reproduce that. Building the public stock again does.
None of this is frictionless. CLT organizing costs years of patient coalition-building, often in cities where the existing homeowner class does not want it. Mitchell-Lama produced durable mixed-income housing in part because it required the buy-in of organized labor, which the country does not have at scale the way it did then. Vienna’s sixty percent took a century of public patience. America’s fifty major metros would each need a different version of the same broad move. The difficulty of building the alternative is not a reason to pretend the alternative is the same thing as faster permitting.
Congress can fund community land trusts as a federal line item, the way it funds public housing and rural co-ops. States can preempt single-family-only zoning, the way Massachusetts did in 1969 and Minnesota did last decade. Cities can put inclusionary zoning on every project that breaks ground, so the units created by the supply “solution” have to include a share that’s actually affordable.
Permitting reform would help. It would shave months off timelines, lower financing costs, and free up some stuck projects. None of that makes a $700,000 starter home affordable to a teacher. None of that stops the next Blackstone subsidiary from buying the subdivision that does break ground. The thing pricing families out is who owns the building. The thing that fixes it is putting it in the hands of the people who live there.