A President Refused to Sign It. The Case for Building Just Became Undeniable.
From Dublin to San Francisco to London, the Rich World has Made the Same Mistake — and There is Only One Way out of it. Build Housing
The desk was set up and the seal was on it. On the morning of June 24, industry and congressional leaders were filing into the Capitol for the signing ceremony, and Senator Elizabeth Warren was live on CNBC taking a victory lap for the biggest housing bill the United States had produced since 1990 — when the President posted that he wouldn’t sign it, calling it “the Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill, which is of minor importance.”
“I thought it was a joke,” Warren later told The New York Times. It wasn’t. At midnight on July 11, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act became law anyway — no signature, no ceremony, no President in the room. Trump let the ten-day clock run out in protest over an unrelated elections bill; the votes to override any veto were already sitting in both chambers, and everyone knew it.
But the sulk is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is that the bill got over the line at all. It began as an unlikely friendship — Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democrat, and Tim Scott, the conservative Republican who chairs the Senate banking committee, who sat side by side through years of hearings and decided to attempt the first major housing bill since 1990. It nearly died a dozen times: stripped from the defense bill, watered down in the House, revived only when Warren and Maxine Waters cut a deal by phone in June. A polarized Congress, a hostile president — and it passed anyway, because the housing problem has become impossible to ignore.
But notice where all that energy went. The fiercest fight, the one Warren said “ripped the heart out of it,” was over the private-equity cap — over who is allowed to own homes — not over how to build more of them. A few days later, the Financial Times explained, better than any politician has, why that instinct gets the crisis exactly backwards.
This is not an American story. It is a rich-world failure.
The FT‘s survey is essential reading because it refuses to treat this as one country’s misfortune. The same pattern repeats wherever the modern economy concentrates work and money into a few cities. Dublin’s housing demand has jumped 40 percent since 2011 while its stock grew at half that rate — the worst shortage in the developed world. San Francisco, Lisbon, Sydney, London: the story rhymes everywhere.
And the cost is not abstract. It is a generation being locked out. In Ireland, the share of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents has more than doubled, to 42 percent. Among the bottom third of young earners it is worse still — 75 percent in Dublin and San Francisco, 55 percent in London. These are not lifestyle choices. They are people we have failed to build homes for. That is what the housing crisis actually is: a population that needs to be housed, and a rich world that has decided, city by city, not to house it.
There is one solution, and the evidence is no longer in dispute
You can treat the symptom or cure the disease. Rent control — the policy that carried New York’s incoming mayor into office — “eases pressures for people who already have a home,” as one economist told the FT, “but it doesn’t house the people without one.” It rations scarcity. It does not end it.
The cure is supply. Build more homes, of the right kind, in the right places. Where cities have done it, it has worked with striking consistency. Austin let developers build through a demand boom and watched rents fall — not slow, fall — while young homeownership climbed from 70 to 80 percent. Auckland rezoned for density in 2016 and rents flattened. Where building freezes — London after its post-Grenfell cost load, Dublin, the Croydon scheme killed by its own council — prices climb out of reach and stay there. The clearest finding in housing economics: the countries that build, house their people; the countries that don’t, don’t.
Which is the test to apply to the new law. The Road to Housing Act is strongest where it clears the path to build — easing federal regulation, streamlining reviews, backing factory-built homes — and weakest where it restricts, capping investors in a way the FT warns “may worsen” affordability without producing a single new home. Judge it by one question: does it get homes built? To the extent it does, it is the most important thing America has done for housing in thirty years. To the extent it doesn’t, it is theater.
Britain is about to run the boldest version of the experiment
This past Monday, Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on the largest state housebuilding program since the postwar years — and he’s earned the benefit of the doubt: Manchester, the city he ran for nine years, is the one genuine British building success the FT can point to, built by working with developers so that when demand arrived, homes followed.
The part I’d press him on is the tax. You cannot build your way out of a shortage while taxing the act of buying and moving into paralysis. Punitive stamp duty doesn’t just freeze prices; it freezes people in place and strangles the turnover that makes construction pay. Burnham’s reported plan to scrap stamp duty and council tax for a single annual, proportional levy on value is the most pro-supply idea on his desk. It is also the American model — a yearly charge on what a home is worth, and nothing on the courage to buy it.
The direction of travel, on both sides of the Atlantic, is finally right. Warren has already told her caucus to start on “Road 2.0,” and the political will is permanent now; voters won’t let it fade. The only question is what we aim it at. Growth is not the thing to be managed here. Building — at scale — is the answer. There are people who need to be housed, and there has only ever been one way to house them.
— James Bell