Shelter is infrastructure. The market alone won't supply it.

The US housing shortage is geographically uneven but structurally consistent. High-demand metro areas — coastal California, the Northeast corridor, Seattle, Denver, Austin, increasingly the Sun Belt — face supply shortages of millions of units relative to job and population growth. The cause is twofold: restrictive zoning that prohibits multifamily construction in most residential land, and chronically inadequate public investment in non-market housing. Reform at the local level (zoning) and federal level (financing) are both necessary; neither is sufficient alone. State-level zoning preemption (California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, others have all moved in this direction) is one of the most promising tools — overriding local exclusionary zoning where it would otherwise paralyze construction. Federal financing reform — restoring meaningful Section 8 supply funding, expanding Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, lifting the Faircloth Amendment cap on public housing — is the federal-level companion.

US tenant law is remarkably weak by comparison with most peer countries. Most US tenants have no just-cause protection — landlords can decline to renew leases for any reason or no reason. Rent increases are largely uncapped outside a small set of jurisdictions. Eviction proceedings are typically rapid; tenants are usually unrepresented while landlords have counsel. The combination produces a high-churn rental market in which most tenants live one rent increase or non-renewal away from displacement. Reform options span scales. Just-cause protections (which require landlords to identify a specific cause for non-renewal: nonpayment, lease violation, owner move-in, etc.) are the single most consequential tenant-protection reform; they shift power back toward tenants without the supply-side concerns rent control raises. Right to counsel in eviction proceedings (NYC, San Francisco, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, others) measurably reduces eviction rates. Rent stabilization (capping annual increases) is more contested — empirical effects depend heavily on design and market conditions.

Through 2010, single-family rental homes in the US were predominantly owned by individual landlords — mom-and-pop owners with one to a few properties. Post-2008, institutional buyers (Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent, Tricon, Pretium Partners, others) acquired hundreds of thousands of foreclosed single-family homes at scale. They have continued buying since. The post-acquisition pattern is consistent: aggressive rent increases, fee proliferation (application fees, late fees, pet fees, maintenance fees), reduced maintenance responsiveness, faster eviction filings. The rental experience for tenants of institutional landlords measurably differs from that of individual landlords on most quality and stability metrics. Reform options: disclosure of beneficial ownership for residential real estate (currently opaque through LLC layering), federal tax disincentives for institutional acquisition above a threshold, state-level limits on the number of single-family homes a single entity can own, and antitrust scrutiny of consolidation in specific metro markets.

Homelessness in the US has been rising steadily, with particularly sharp increases in unsheltered homelessness and family homelessness in recent years. The causes are well understood — primarily, housing costs that have outpaced wages and Social Security disability and SSI benefits. The solutions that work are also well understood: Housing First (offering permanent supportive housing without preconditions like sobriety or treatment), adequate emergency shelter capacity, robust homelessness-prevention programs that intervene before eviction. The empirical record on Housing First is among the strongest in social policy — it produces better outcomes at lower cost than the alternative of long-term emergency-shelter use. The alternative agenda — criminalizing sleeping in public, sweeping encampments without offering housing, restricting service providers — has been gaining ground in many cities. The 2024 Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson eliminated a key constitutional check on enforcement (which had previously prohibited prosecuting unsheltered people for sleeping outdoors when no shelter was available). The federal lever — HUD funding, USICH coordination, defense of Housing First as the federally preferred approach — remains substantial.

The federal housing budget is roughly $50-60 billion annually — modest relative to the scale of the housing crisis. Most of it flows through Section 8 vouchers, which are tenant-side subsidies that can chase market rents but don't expand supply. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the largest supply-side federal program, finances roughly 100,000 affordable units per year — useful but inadequate to the shortage. Larger-scale options exist. Social housing programs (Vienna's model is the best-known international example) provide permanently affordable housing to a broad income range, paid for through public investment and rents. State-level versions (California's Social Housing Authority, Maryland's Social Housing Act, Seattle's social housing developer) are early experiments. Federal versions would require lifting the Faircloth Amendment cap and substantial appropriations — politically difficult but technically feasible. Public banking, at federal and state levels, could finance affordable housing construction on terms private capital won't offer; the Bank of North Dakota provides a working model.