Susan Pendergrass speaks with Tim Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about why American culture may be making it harder to have and raise children. They discuss the long-term consequences of the declining U.S. birth rate, how intensive parenting culture may be driving childhood anxiety, the “travel team trap” and the arms race of youth sports, what cities and communities can do to become more family-friendly, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Tim Carney. Thank you for joining us. You’re a senior fellow at AEI? I listened to a podcast the other day with a demographer from the University of Pennsylvania, and it was really good. I think they have a pretty strong department. He said that the United States reached peak child in 2012 or 2013, and basically

Tim Carney (00:06): That’s about right.

Susan Pendergrass (00:24): numbers have been going down on babies ever since. We definitely see that in Missouri. That was our biggest kindergarten cohort, and numbers are going down. I have five grandchildren under the age of five, and it seems to me this is going to be the policy conundrum of their generation. What do you think?

Tim Carney (00:44): It is certainly the biggest story of the next thirty years, policy, cultural, economic, everything. Another way of putting it: the number of births in the US peaked in 2007. Those kids born in 2007 either graduated last year or are graduating this week. Colleges know this very well. They’re all bracing for it. What about ten years from now when the workforce starts significantly shrinking?

Susan Pendergrass (01:03): Yeah.

Tim Carney (01:11): What about the towns that are built around a public school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and those start shrinking? Particularly in rural places, they’re seeing consolidation, two different public schools or two different Catholic schools consolidating. Can schools adjust to being small? How much is this a self-reinforcing spiral? When there are fewer kids, people aren’t used to seeing kids around. Yes, absolutely. It’s the biggest story of the next thirty years.

Susan Pendergrass (01:37): In your new book, Family Unfriendly, I think it’s interesting to juxtapose these two things. At the same time, we’re making it so much harder to raise kids in our culture, and we’ve raised the expectations for each and every one of them so high that people who are considering having kids find it daunting. It used to be, when I was young, people had six or seven kids and just hoped for the best. Everyone did okay. But now every child has these insane expectations, and I sympathize. If your child doesn’t roll over by six months old, they need occupational therapy now. That did not used to be the case. Doesn’t that work against it?

Tim Carney (02:12): Yes. A lot of economists have been praising quality over quantity parenting for years. Isabel Sawhill is an economist I’ve worked with for years, but I think she’s dead wrong when she says this is good, that people are choosing fewer kids so they can invest more in each one. That sounds right, but then you realize

Susan Pendergrass (02:33): Okay.

Tim Carney (02:53): the American Pediatrics journal says the number one cause of the epidemic of childhood anxiety we’re facing right now is lack of unsupervised play. So parents who are giving their kids the best of everything, making sure they’re not just wandering around the neighborhood, making sure they’re safe and busy with violin lessons and enrichment activities and a special private pitching coach for softball, that’s supposedly high-quality parenting. But it comes with low-quality results, which is very anxious kids, as well as stressed-out parents. People ask how my wife and I do it with six kids. I like giving answers about the special cool systems I have, but the real answer is a lot of times we just don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41): Yeah. I feel like I’m probably going to say a lot of unpopular opinions on this. I never liked elite sports or travel sports, but I see travel sports going nationwide now. People from Texas are going to Florida, going to California for travel sports, which I always thought was kind of insane because it didn’t work for my family. We would normally have tournaments at Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. I also see kids being absorbed into the adult world more. Craft breweries have children trying to find something to do there, which is not a very normal environment for them. High-end restaurants have little kids in them, and I just feel like that takes away from the time when they’re supposed to just be kids.

Tim Carney (04:28): I actually think mixed-age mingling is something we need more of. Sometimes when I need to get work done, I’ll go to the local craft brewery to get away from my kids, and then somebody else has all their kids there. But those kids aren’t asking me any favors, so I’m fine with it. I think it’s good that we’re building places for parents to bring kids. The way I put it, though, and again

Susan Pendergrass (04:35): Okay. Yeah. That’s right.

Tim Carney (04:58): my local brewpub allows for this, but we need places where parents can bring kids and ignore them. I brought my kids to the brewery on a cold winter day when they couldn’t be outside because it was ten degrees and forty-mile-an-hour winds. I start the book with a story, in contrast to

Susan Pendergrass (05:05): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:27): high-intensity travel sports, of a program that we saw and then emulated in the Catholic parishes when we lived in Maryland, which was called Friday Night on the Field. There was T-ball and coach-pitch baseball, so this was kindergarten, first grade, second graders. Maybe 10 percent of the dads were coaching. The rest of them, if they were there, were hanging out with other dads. And the kids who were older

Susan Pendergrass (05:53): Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:56): were running around or playing wall ball. The kids who were younger were on a playground. When my wife found out what was going on there, she said, you are bringing all six of the kids to this while I stay home and rest. So I brought the kids there. I maybe had a baby in my carrier, ignoring the other four while one of them played T-ball. And that was exactly what suburban parents needed. Not this high-intensity mom and

Susan Pendergrass (06:08): Yeah, sure.

Tim Carney (06:22): child attached at the hip, but the whole family is there, it’s mixed age, and the children have freedom. This is a really important part of it in so many ways. One, that childhood is expansive and not just intensive. Two, that raising kids isn’t this hyper-intensive, constant thing. There was a commercial I cite in the book about Mother’s Day and how we need to honor mothers more. But it goes way overboard. It says they pretend they’re hiring for a job, and the requirements include you’re never allowed to sit down and you don’t get to eat meals until all of your colleagues are out for the evening. Being a mom is exhausting, and there are days where you don’t sit down, but come on. This is just not true.

Susan Pendergrass (07:00): The hardest job in the world. Yeah. I have three kids that are pretty close together. It was rocky there for a while, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a practical matter, how do you change culture? If the prescription is to back off on intensive parenting, it feels more like an arms race where people say, maybe I don’t even agree with it, but if every other kid is going to Kumon Math, my kid has to go to Kumon Math. What do you do?

Tim Carney (07:36): It’s a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. I discuss it particularly in sports. In chapter one I call it the travel team trap. The reason it’s a trap is you get stuck without wanting to. I know lots of people whose kid just wants to play JV baseball, but the coach says they have to play fall baseball too. But I’m a football player. If you’re saying I’ll miss some reps and the other guys might get ahead of me, well

Susan Pendergrass (07:57): Yeah.

Tim Carney (08:05): that’s one thing. But then the coach says you’re shirking if you’re not playing year round. We have sought out schools and programs that explicitly do not do that, but we had to seek them out. It’s harder to be a backup point guard on a varsity basketball team if you’re going to play three sports, so you might get cut from the team. To some extent the parent is just saying, I really just want them to make the team, and that’s why I’m doing this.

With the academics, there’s a similar dynamic. We put our daughter, who was struggling in math, in a remedial program, something like Kumon. When we showed up, we realized, this was in Northern Virginia, specifically McLean, which is a wealthy area. Nobody else there was remedial. Everyone else there was an A student whose parents wanted their third grader

Susan Pendergrass (08:52): I see. Okay.

Tim Carney (09:03): to be at the sixth-grade level so they could get into Thomas Jefferson, the special super-magnet high school.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08): Yeah. If kindergarten is the new second grade and preschool is the new kindergarten, where does it end? I just feel like we’re overwhelming parents. You said it’s raising anxiety in kids. It’s definitely raising anxiety in parents too. It’s making people not want to be parents. It feels very stressful right now. There are books and apps, and there’s even a book on how to be a more free-range parent, which is strange to me. Does somebody need to be told how to do this? You just let them go outside.

Tim Carney (09:46): No, it does take work. And another thing is, to quote what a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. Being free-range is easier when other people are doing it. We used to back up to a big playground, and nine times out of ten my kids were the only ones there unsupervised. I actually got an email from a neighboring parent. It wasn’t criticism. It was saying your kids are great and it’s great that you let them run free, and asking if I could talk to them about letting their own kids run free. If you’re in a neighborhood where there are kids but they don’t come out, you might have to build organized activities. We didn’t do that growing up. We just played stickball. My mom wouldn’t organize it. We did it on our own. But now parents might have to be more involved. It’s a little bit of labor, but you connect the families, connect the kids, build the trust.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (10:44): The community, and we talked about policy. I’m in DC. Everybody wants it to be a federal bill, this or that. The fact is it’s a cultural thing, as I said, and the community is going to have to have these organic, or sometimes deliberate and intentional, structures to help parents raise kids. The more parents who are walking around the neighborhood, the safer the neighborhood is. The more parents making it clear that their kids are going out and should come home when the streetlights turn on, the more that’s known, the safer it is. Remember when you and I were young, other people’s parents would correct us when we were wrong? Now, I have close friends I know I can do that with, but a lot of parents say they’re terrified of correcting someone else’s kid because they’ve been screamed at by the other parents. Your kid was

Susan Pendergrass (11:25): Mad at us. Yes.

Tim Carney (11:41): about to shove gravel down the throat of her two-year-old sister at the playground. And that’s my job too, if I’m right there. That social trust and community takes work. There are people who say it takes a village, and they can’t find their village. You have to build your village. I’m one of those conservatives who really believes that.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54): Are we willing to do the work? Do you see people doing it?

Tim Carney (12:09): We’re too individualistic, and that’s part of all of this. But I’m also one who believes the burden is really on you. You can’t wait for somebody else to do it. You build the community, and then you can sit back and bear the fruits of your labor as a neighbor yells at your kid so you don’t have to.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): You’ve also talked about building family-friendly communities. There’s a conundrum we face in Missouri: no one wants to live in downtown St. Louis. A lot of cities face that, and St. Louis is probably at the forefront. We’re in the top five for cities in decline, and St. Louis and Pittsburgh are going to serve as examples, because

Tim Carney (12:28): Yes. Mm-hmm.

Susan Pendergrass (12:53): we hit that death spiral with more deaths than births a while ago, and all of our demographic trends are going to be out ahead of everyone else. People are going to look to us. But parents don’t want to raise their kids in the city of St. Louis. And if you don’t have children, you just keep getting older. Tell me a little bit about what has happened to make cities unfriendly to families and what they could do to change it.

Tim Carney (13:19): I’m a believer that we need all of the above. I’m very pro-suburbs. That’s where I raised my kids, that’s where I went to high school. But before high school I grew up in Manhattan, and I’m very pro raising kids in cities if you can do it. The number one thing is crime, or crime and disorder. You saw this a lot during the 2020s when people would say, who cares if people are hopping over the turnstile, so what if people are smoking pot, that homeless guy sleeping on the corner isn’t going to do anything. All those little things that adults can, maybe they shouldn’t but can, turn a blind eye to are disturbing to kids and disturbing to parents. Crime and disorder needs to be put in its proper place.

But then also, this is something where liberals tend to be better than conservatives: walkability and public amenities. I don’t mean my ability to walk to work or to my favorite cocktail bar. What I really mean is my ability to walk my baby in a stroller somewhere nice, and my eight-year-old and ten-year-old’s ability to walk together to a cool park, and more importantly to walk together to their friend’s house. Cities can actually do that better than suburbs to some extent, because they can put in those amenities, which are playgrounds, parks, and other things. That means traffic. Cars have to slow down. This is something I’m really studying now at AEI. The federal government has a walkability index, and it’s laughably bad. It’s published by the EPA, so it doesn’t actually show you

Susan Pendergrass (14:45): It’s about car exhaust.

Tim Carney (15:10): whether your kids can walk somewhere without getting run over by a car. We’re trying to see if there’s a way to improve this. That’s part of the built environment. That’s explicitly a government duty. Are the roads too wide? Are the cars too fast? Are there crosswalks? Are there trails? Because once you can let your kids walk around without getting run over by cars and without running into meth heads, their childhood is so much better. And your family life is so much simpler.

Susan Pendergrass (15:41): What about safety? I think it was you mentioning something like setting up safety zones within which families could have some reasonable degree of comfort that police respond and that crime is being attended to.

Tim Carney (15:58): A big part of raising kids, in my view, is you want to give them a sort of walled garden and let them be free in that garden. Every year that garden gets bigger, and at some point you realize the walls are gone and they’re out in the world. For me, this was a back campus at St. Bernadette’s and St. Andrew’s, the parishes where we had these programs. The kids were running free, but unless there was a kid who was going to run into traffic, and there are those kids, and probably some of your viewers and listeners have one who they know is a flight risk, in general they were going to be safe. When I would leave my kids alone in a museum, I tell the story of my son Sean, who three times I’ve totally lost him, but it was always in a botanical garden or a museum or someplace similar,

Susan Pendergrass (16:33): Yeah.

Tim Carney (16:55): where someone would say, hey, who are you with, four-year-old? And then slowly expanding that realm of freedom. You can walk around the neighborhood but can’t cross over Route 50, and then slowly it gets bigger and bigger. Community norms are really what make that possible. That two-year-old shouldn’t be walking down the street alone. That six-year-old is fine.

Susan Pendergrass (16:57): Yeah. Who are you with? But haven’t we kind of ruined that with the twenty-four-hour news cycle where everybody believes their children are at risk of being abducted by a stranger at every moment?

Tim Carney (17:35): Yes, and this is part of the problem I run into. When I say we need to let kids be free to run around like we Gen Xers were, people say it’s so much more dangerous now. It’s not. Statistically, almost the whole country has gotten over the violent crime wave that came with the George Floyd unrest and COVID lockdowns. That caused a spike in all the cities, and every place in the country right now is much, much safer than it was in 1984 when I was six. By a long shot. Every parent’s worst nightmare is their child getting abducted by a stranger. These cases happen, they end up in the news, and so we all think they’re happening all the time and all around us. Evolutionarily, we don’t have a brain that can understand a country of 340 million people.

Susan Pendergrass (18:08): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (18:32): So if there are three major cases a year and people talk about it for a few weeks, it seems like there’s some kid who got kidnapped half the year. It happens fewer than a hundred times a year. If you see numbers saying children are abducted ten thousand or a hundred thousand times, those are bad situations, but they’re not stranger abductions. In almost every case, the boyfriend goes off with the kid without the mom’s permission, or the grandparents have custody and then the mom comes and takes the kid. These are not good situations, but they’re not a kid who was left alone at a playground and then shoved in the back of a white van.

Susan Pendergrass (19:20): To the extent that we could bring any of that back, and this is where I’m a little pessimistic, I think kids learn decision-making in a way that isn’t being taught now, so that we end up working with people who never made an independent decision in their life. I certainly was out and got hurt and had to figure out: am I hurt enough to go home? Am I hurt enough to keep going?

Tim Carney (19:37): Ask a boss who has hired somebody right out of college recently. Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (19:45): Got a flat tire or whatever, we had to make decisions on the fly. I just don’t think we’re building that type of independence and resilience into our kids, and it’s a loss at the global level.

Tim Carney (19:58): Absolutely. Employers should all really be getting behind what you and I are saying right now, because if they want to hire a kid out of high school or college who can make a decision. I always remember the time I used to mow lawns in high school. Once I showed up at a lawn across town, used his mower, and it just didn’t start.

Susan Pendergrass (20:05): Yes.

Tim Carney (20:21): He was not home. He had a number on the fridge. I called and said, Mr. Zellinger, your mower’s not starting. And he said, good news is I don’t come home until Monday. So you have between now and then to get the lawn mowed, and I’m confident you’ll figure out a way to do it. It wasn’t an assignment. It was a responsibility. The best way to give your kids a responsibility that’s not an assignment they can just beg out of is to let them be free. And all of a sudden they’re like, wait a second.

Susan Pendergrass (20:40): Yes. Right.

Tim Carney (20:51): I need to be there in twenty minutes. How do I make that happen? Or I’m lost, how do I get unlost? And again, the children suffer. It’s not just that they go through life happy and dumb. They end up more anxious because life will inevitably bring them these problems. There is an epidemic of childhood and adolescent anxiety, according to

Susan Pendergrass (20:56): Yeah.

Tim Carney (21:19): HHS, and it’s caused by the fact that kids don’t have enough freedom in childhood.

Susan Pendergrass (21:29): I want to circle back to actionable items. What can we do about it, realistically?

Tim Carney (21:33): On the parental freedom side, there’s not that much the government can do except build better sidewalks, crosswalks, and pathways. Housing reform is interesting here. I’m a big believer in suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be more dense. One thing that’s really freeing is when you can buy a house in the neighborhood you want to live in,

Susan Pendergrass (22:01): Yeah.

Tim Carney (22:01): because your mom lives there and you have grandma to babysit. That’s a huge predictor. So many people in Washington think everybody needs universal daycare paid for by the government. Most people want mom to work a little less and grandma and grandpa to chip in, with neighbors to fill the gaps. More housing is what enables that to happen. But for the most part, we need more robust community institutions and more robust community connections. And every parent out there has to think: maybe I’m going to be the one who does this. There’s a field across the street from your house. Start a soccer league, bring food, run a grill. This is exactly what we did with T-ball. Throw in some money to pay for it. Buy the burgers at Sam’s Club or Costco and feed everyone. Bring your six-year-old to play soccer. This is not his or her path to a college scholarship. It’s a fun thing for the families to do. But you have to start it. We started it because we saw somebody else had started it. A lot of this is going to be on an individual level. On the policy side of supporting families, there’s a lot of debate about a child tax credit, a baby bonus, universal child care, and requiring employers to give parents parental leave.

Susan Pendergrass (22:58): Yeah. A lot. Leave.

Tim Carney (23:22): I write about that a lot at AEI. AEI scholars disagree about it. In the book, what I argue is we need a child tax credit, and it needs to be a little bigger. A family of eight making a hundred thousand dollars should not be paying the same taxes as a family of two or three making a hundred thousand dollars. That should be reflected in the tax code, because this isn’t just some consumer thing. It’s not like saying, I bought a Tesla, I deserve a tax credit. It’s saying, we’re eight people, we need to eat eight people’s worth of food, and the tax code should reflect that. But on the other programs, forcing employers to offer certain benefits or creating government-run childcare, I don’t think any of that works.

Susan Pendergrass (24:02): I mean, the Nordic countries do all of it and they have population decline.

Tim Carney (24:05): They have worse population decline than we did. There was a slight uptick, and one of the arguments I make is that subsidized childcare is not really a family subsidy, it’s a work subsidy. Notice who’s lobbying for it as these things bubble up. It’s going to be the Chamber of Commerce. I’m fundamentally a family guy. I think we need work. Part of fulfilling our human dignity is doing work. But that doesn’t always have to be paid work. In the book I defend stay-at-home moms and dads. I really think our society should be oriented around families. Now that’s a little heretical these days because, well, what if you choose not to have a family? Fine. There have always been people who chose not to have families. But that doesn’t mean families can’t be the central organizing principle of our culture.

Susan Pendergrass (25:04): More people now are choosing not to have families. And a lot of cities are pursuing those people, the childless professionals with Top Golfs and loft apartments.

Tim Carney (25:10): I quote a local official in Family Unfriendly saying families are a cost and businesses are an asset. Families come in, they pay income taxes and property taxes, but then they require sewage, they require schools, they complain that the playgrounds and the sidewalks are in bad shape. Businesses are mostly revenue. Washington, DC has explicitly said they don’t just want anyone to move in. They want the college-educated 22-to-28-year-old, meaning a person who gets to spend every dime of disposable income in the restaurants and bars and shops in DC. And if you look at the housing being built in Falls Church, right near me, it’s all studio and one bedroom, because that’s what the local government wants: more singletons who go out and spend their money. Sometimes we do things that are really bad for the economy. My wife makes homemade dinner. We almost never go out. A lot of our activity doesn’t involve paying anyone. The kids are just playing wiffle ball. All of that is horrible for the economy.

Susan Pendergrass (26:19): Yeah. Falls Church used to be such a big attraction for young families because of the schools. I’ve seen the shiny buildings going up recently, and I’m shocked by it. That’s interesting to me.

Tim Carney (26:44): I think it’s good to build more housing. But if it helps boomers sell their single-family homes to move into apartments, then it frees up family housing. This is a really complicated thing. We need more housing, but so many of the YIMBYs just want massive apartment buildings with as many apartments as possible, and that’s family unfriendly. What we really need, in my opinion, is slightly more dense suburbs,

Susan Pendergrass (26:54): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:14): a starter home that somebody can buy. That’s basically impossible to build, especially in a high-cost area like this, or in the nicer suburbs around St. Louis and Kansas City. You’re not going to build them because of the regulatory overhead. If I build a single-family house and sell it for two hundred thousand dollars, that’s not worth it. I’m either going to build a McMansion or an apartment building.

Susan Pendergrass (27:26): They’re not building them. No. They’re doing the six hundreds. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:41): Getting rid of a lot of the regulations that make it impossible to build a starter home is one of the best things that states and counties can do.

Susan Pendergrass (27:49): I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it. It’s a thorny issue. Countries that have really tried their best to encourage people to have more children haven’t been successful. This is going to be one of the biggest policy conundrums of the next few decades. The earlier we start talking about it, the better. I’ve been talking about it for at least five years in Missouri. We just had our smallest high school graduating class two years ago. People ask, where did the people go? They didn’t go anywhere. The babies haven’t been born, and we need to get used to it so that we can start thinking about how to solve it. I love a lot of your ideas. We have to think about solutions to this because if it feels overwhelming to have children, then people won’t have them.

Tim Carney (28:41): That’s exactly right.

Susan Pendergrass (28:42): Family Unfriendly. And your other book was Alienated America.

Tim Carney (28:44): Family Unfriendly. And Alienated America, which is about the collapse of community, which is upstream from this problem.

Susan Pendergrass (28:53): Lack of social capital and all of that. I think these are going to be some of the most important issues we can think about going forward. I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it.

Tim Carney (29:00): Thank you, my pleasure.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Is America Family Unfriendly? with Tim Carney appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’ve argued for the removal of parking mandates, and the logic is straightforward: when cities require developers to build a fixed number of parking spaces, they raise costs, limit design flexibility, and often crowd out the very investment they say they want to encourage.

Kansas City has also taken steps to streamline development through its use of pre-approved housing plans—also something I have advocated. By offering a set of ready-to-use designs at no cost, Kansas City reduces one source of expense in the building process. For small builders and homeowners, eliminating the costs of repeatedly checking in with city staff can make the difference between a project moving forward or not.

These changes may not seem significant, but housing shortages are often the cumulative result of small policies. Pre-approved plans will not transform the market alone, but they can help at the margin by making it easier to build modest infill housing in neighborhoods that can benefit from it.

Kansas City’s pre-approved plan program is relatively limited, both in the number of designs offered and in its role within the city’s broader housing strategy. The city has not abandoned its interventionist framework that relies on subsidies, mandates, and planning requirements to shape outcomes.

Overland Park’s “Portfolio Homes” program, for example, is more ambitious. It pairs a larger number of pre-approved designs with zoning flexibility, fee reductions, and streamlined approvals. The emphasis there is not just on providing plans, but on reducing the regulatory barriers that make housing difficult to build in the first place.

Nevertheless, these changes are good news and suggest Kansas City’s leadership is beginning to absorb some important lessons. The city also stepped away from its cost-prohibitive energy codes.

Expanding housing supply will require not just targeted reforms, but a broader understanding of how regulation adds costs. City leaders still want to tinker with the market; they need to get out of the way altogether.

The post Kansas City Takes Steps Toward Better Housing Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Long-time readers of this site will not be surprised. I argued in 2018 that Kansas City’s “creative‑class” investments—downtown luxury apartments, entertainment districts, and infrastructure built for young urbanites—did not amount to a sustainable strategy for long‑term growth and retention. I observed that many millennials preferred the suburbs: affordable housing, space, good schools, and stable services.

Booth’s column helps explain why. The urban‑core housing boom may have been good at attracting people in their 20s and early 30s. But when that cohort started families, cities lacked housing and civic infrastructure suitable for children and long‑term residence. As a result, the creative‑class gamble has begun to backfire. Cities may keep a veneer of vibrancy and high rents, but underneath many are losing the people who once anchored stable communities—workers, taxpayers, parents, consumers.

That matters for Missouri cities such as Kansas City (and for other mid-size urban areas nationwide). A city’s strength does not come only from bars, nightlife, or trendy apartments. It comes from stable families, long‑term homeownership or stable renting, good schools, reliable infrastructure, and civic engagement grounded in predictable community roots. The creative‑class theory always rested on uncertain assumptions about life‑cycle stability.

As I pointed out in 2018, and as current national trends affirm, there is no magic bullet to make downtown living the default for most families. A better path remains broad and neutral: keep taxes reasonable, maintain infrastructure, support quality schools, and enable stable, moderately priced housing—suburban or urban—that families actually want.

Creative‑class strategies may look shiny on paper and flashy in media. But when they fail to adapt to one of life’s key transitions—from young adult to parent—their long‑term contribution to stable growth may have been nothing more than a short‑lived boom.

The post New Observations Confirm Skepticism of Creative Class Urbanism appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That result should raise alarms—but not eyebrows. Set-aside requirements like this often function less as solutions and more as stumbling blocks. Rather than spur construction, Kansas City’s policy has become something to work around. Developers have leaned on other incentive-granting agencies or opted for minimal in-lieu payments instead. Meanwhile, regulation continues to inflate costs and suppress supply. As I’ve written before, regulation can be a root cause of unaffordability.

The KCBJ analysis looked at 114 development incentive applications since 2021. None resulted in affordable units under the set-aside rule. Many projects qualified for exemptions—using low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs), being historic rehabs, or receiving incentives from agencies outside the city’s economic development corporation (EDCKC).

Examples:

• Of six qualifying EDCKC projects since August 2022, just one plans to meet the 20% set-aside (16 of 78 units at 60% MFI).
• Larger developments often went through the Port Authority of Kansas City (Port KC) or other entities, thereby sidestepping the requirement entirely.

The result is a policy with good intentions but poor results—and plenty of incentive for developers to seek workarounds.

Two themes stand out.

First: Incentives, not mandates, are doing the real work. Port KC has become the go-to agency for developers. Since mid-2023, it’s reviewed 17 housing proposals totaling over 5,000 units and $2.6 billion in investment. Because Port KC isn’t bound by the set-aside ordinance, many developers simply pay a lower in-lieu fee and move forward. A city spokesperson even admitted that some of these workarounds were done “at the request or with the blessing of city leaders.”

Second: Regulation continues to push costs up. Developers cited permitting delays, costly energy codes, and other burdens as key barriers. As one put it, requiring reduced rent on top of high costs is a “double negative.”

This tracks with previous findings: When regulation increases costs, it restricts the market’s ability to deliver lower-priced housing. If the goal is more affordability, then cities must lower the baseline costs—not just impose mandates.

The post Shocker! Kansas City’s Affordable Housing Set-Asides Nets Zero Housing Units appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Soltas takes a close look at New York City’s 421-a tax incentive, a voluntary program meant to coax developers into adding affordable units to new construction. His conclusion? The marginal cost of delivering just one of those “affordable” units is about $1.6 million. Not per building—per unit.

To put that in perspective, housing vouchers or programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) can often serve a family for a fraction of that price. In fact, Soltas finds that the 421-a program is about six times more expensive than either LIHTC or Section 8 on a per-unit basis.

Supporters of these policies often say the premium is worth it because it moves low-income households into higher-income neighborhoods, opening up long-term opportunities. But even that goal comes with trade-offs. We can’t pretend money is infinite. When we choose to spend $1.6 million to house one family in a high-rent ZIP code, we are choosing not to house five or ten families elsewhere. Every dollar we overpay in one neighborhood is a dollar not spent reducing waitlists, repairing existing housing stock, or investing in other services.

The more we subsidize these costly outcomes, the more we distort the market—and not in subtle ways. Developers are rational. When inclusionary mandates make a project unprofitable, they don’t build. When they can get tax breaks for minimal public benefit, they take the deal. Soltas’s paper even shows that developer “windfalls” aren’t the biggest issue—it’s the simple fact that it costs far more to make units “affordable” in already expensive neighborhoods.

What this all points to is a deeper issue in housing policy: the unwillingness of lawmakers to prioritize. Inclusionary housing tries to solve everything at once—cost, segregation, opportunity—but ends up creating a system where we pay top dollar for minimal benefit. It’s the public policy equivalent of spending a fortune on a single winning lottery ticket while others go hungry.

We don’t have to take that path. There are more cost-effective ways to support housing affordability that don’t rely on distorting incentives or showering subsidies on high-income developments. Targeted vouchers, flexible zoning reforms, and letting supply meet demand are all better places to start.

Policymakers should stop asking, “How can we mandate more affordable housing?” and start asking, “What’s the most effective way to help the most people with the dollars we have?”

The post The Real Price of “Affordable Housing” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Source of Income Rules for Rental Property appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why Is This Proposition Being Brought to Voters?

This proposition is intended to address concerns about STRs affecting housing affordability. In fact, a St. Louis City alderman had this to say about Proposition S:

As we’ve seen a proliferation of short-term rentals, we’ve also seen rents and mortgage rates also climb as a result of that. . . . This [Prop S] is kind of a drop in the bucket to try and offset some of that.

Concerns about the effect of STRs on the housing market are not unreasonable, as some studies have indicated that STRs drive up housing costs by decreasing the supply of owner-occupied housing stock and long-term rental units. However, other studies have found that STRs bring increased tax revenue, supplemental income, residential renovation, business growth, and tourism to underdeveloped areas.

The City’s Previous Efforts on Short-Term Rentals

Last year, concerns with STRs arose following numerous horror stories of out-of-control parties. A slew of regulations (some reasonable and some harmful) were enacted through Board Bills 33 and 34, on which my colleague David Stokes and I testified.

Here is a list of the regulations added to STRs in the City of St. Louis last year:

• Annually, STR Agents must acquire an STR permit, with a $150 fee.
• Minimum stay of 2 nights.
• No STRs in a place benefited by tax-increment financing or tax abatements.
• In structures between 5 and 23 units, no more than 25% of units can be STRs.
• In structures with 24+ units, no more than 12.5% of units can be STRs.
• No single owner can receive a permit for more than 4 units.
• The owner must be a natural person.
• An STR Agent must be physically present at the address within one hour if required.
• Three-strikes rule for bad conduct within 24 months (suspension can last for one year).

Adding a new tax on top of the numerous regulations from Board Bills 33 and 34 is likely to make things more difficult for the STR industry, which could in turn make it harder for the city to bring in substantial tax revenue from STRs. Alleviating rising housing costs is a worthy goal, but is this approach the right solution? It also raises the question of whether STRs should be taxed more than hotels in the City of St. Louis. These are issues for voters to consider as they decide on Proposition S.

The post Short-Term Rental Regulation May Again Be Changing in The City of St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Single-room occupancy units, otherwise known as SROs, are small, furnished rooms that are rented out. SROs are definitely not five-star hotels or luxury apartments, but they do provide the homeless with a roof over their head, a bed, and a hot shower until they can afford a better living situation. St. Louis, and many other municipalities, severely restricts the construction of SROs. On the other hand, some cities such as St. John entirely prohibit the construction of such facilities.

An alternative to SROs is building more multifamily dwellings. By increasing the supply of multifamily dwellings, the price of these housing units will decrease, making housing more affordable for the homeless (and anyone else interested in these units) and providing them with an alternative to SROs or a homeless encampment. Unfortunately, cites such as Sunset Hills have shot down efforts to change the zoning code to allow for the development of more multifamily dwellings. However, Kansas City has seen a growth in housing options.

You may ask, “How can the homeless afford SROs or multifamily dwelling units?” SROs or multifamily housing become affordable through employment and through housing and utility assistance programs such as Beyond Housing.

There is no silver bullet for solving homelessness, but making housing cheaper is a great place to start. By changing zoning regulations to allow for the construction of more SROs or multifamily dwellings, we may be able to provide housing for many who need it.

The post How to Help the Homeless with Housing Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Judge Glock, the Director of Research and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal, about the ongoing attempts to address homelessness through housing policy. They explore the effectiveness of current housing initiatives, the challenges in implementing effective policy solutions, innovative approaches to reduce homelessness, and more.

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Homelessness and Housing Policy with Judge Glock appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, about his latest book Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. They discuss reducing housing regulations to address the housing shortage, the broader impacts of housing policy on urban development and affordability, how to talk about public policy, and more.

Order the book here.

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Build More Housing with Bryan Caplan appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis was ranked as the fourth-most affordable housing market in the country in one survey, and Kansas City ranked 13th. Another study ranked St. Louis as the third and Kansas City as the 11th-most-affordable metro area out of 94 major metros internationally.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of things those cities—and all cities across Missouri—can do to keep costs low and encourage housing construction. The Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook, a collaborative effort by the American Planning Association (APA) and the National League of Cities (NLC), provides some solutions. It is designed to support local governments and community planners in developing effective strategies to increase the quantity and quality of housing.

Key recommendations (with some of my own thoughts) include:

Model Practices and Ordinances: The playbook provides detailed policies that support housing construction. These include zoning reforms, land use policies, and development regulations aimed at reducing barriers to development.

Innovative Financing Solutions: The playbook encourages public–private partnerships for using federal funds to finance housing projects. Any approach like this would need to be well defined and limited—too often we’ve seen these so-called public–private partnerships devolve into either crony capitalism or operate in a way that protects developers from market forces.

Regulatory Reform: Existing regulations impede housing development and drive up costs. The playbook recommends removing barriers through reforms such as streamlining permitting processes and revising outdated ordinances.

Collaboration and Partnership: The authors place a significant emphasis on the importance of collaboration among local governments, community planners, builders, financial institutions, and housing policy associations. Of course, collaborations should not undermine market forces.

Community Engagement: The playbook stresses the importance of engaging with community members to ensure that housing policies benefit all residents. As with financing, this can be a thorny issue. Community engagement should not be used to limit anyone’s property rights or blunt the market forces that spur innovation and bring prices down.

Kansas City and St. Louis do not have many of the housing challenges other cities have, thankfully. But where barriers exist, this report can help identify opportunities to improve housing policy.

The post New Policy Playbook May Help Cities Realize More and Better Housing appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Various ideas are being tried in other states, including eliminating single-family zoning, requiring the allowing of smaller units, and overriding the authority of local zoning boards.  

We have seen efforts to amend zoning recently in Missouri, though in different ways. State government actually took away the authority of local governments to address concentrated animal feeding operations through zoning. In Webster Groves, the city passed an ordinance allowing duplexes in most single-family zoning areas, but residents put that law up for a referendum and it was voted down. As I wrote at the time about the issue of zoning reform in Webster Groves (and elsewhere):

The rubber will meet the road in debates about equality in housing policy when people — including suburban liberals who claim to passionately support more diversity and inclusion — are forced to consider changes that could affect their own home values and community makeup.

I think the larger questions of zoning reform will eventually come to St. Louis and Kansas City. Right now, our cities and suburbs aggressively mandate lot sizes, setbacks, parking requirements, family limits (homes versus duplexes versus apartments or condos), and much more. The revealed preference of suburban growth is that many people like those policies. I happen to think we should make some adjustments to them.

I understand homeowners’ objections to zoning changes. You make likely the largest investment of your life (your house) under a certain set of rules, and now people want to change the rules on you. I understand the frustration. But strict zoning rules limit people’s ability to use their own property as they see fit, and perhaps more importantly, may create housing shortages that squeeze lower-income residents out of certain markets and raise costs for everyone. That’s a serious tradeoff that homeowners ought to consider.

Until those larger debates happen, what are some zoning reforms Missouri cities and counties could benefit from now?

• We can remove building height restrictions in our urban areas.
• We can reduce or eliminate parking requirements, particularly near transit facilities.
• We can limit or end the authority of advisory boards, such as historic preservation commissions, to reject development proposals themselves.

Those are three ideas worth acting on in St. Louis and Kansas City, and probably other parts of the state.

The post Let’s Talk About Zoning appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Our results in the previous blog post indicate that Kansas City may have an affordable housing problem, but one that doesn’t affect most residents. These findings don’t seem to match public perception on the issue. According to a recent national poll, approximately 90% of respondents stated they believe housing affordability to be a major issue where they live. According to the table below, using data from the same American Community Survey as used previously in this series, many households in Kansas City say they are spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Does that confirm there’s an affordability problem or is there more to the story?

Using household income as our primary measure for housing affordability may make the most sense based on the data our government collects, but it is not a perfect measure for gaining insight into what households find affordable, especially for those with lower incomes. For example, if you don’t have a car or another means of transportation, housing that’s miles away from your place of work that costs 30% of your income is likely not affordable once daily commute costs are taken into account.

In times with record-breaking inflation like we’re seeing now, and rising home prices, it’s easy to feel like there’s a housing affordability problem. Because for many people, the place they live or want to live has become more expensive to them. And as long as all Kansas Citians, regardless of income, are allowed to freely choose where they live and pay how much they feel they can afford to pay to live there, these same data will show some level of housing unaffordability that is not reflective of a need for government intervention, but a result of consumer choice.

That’s also why when discussing housing affordability and the public policies that are aimed at combatting the issue, we have to be careful and say specifically what we mean or the policies that follow will be sure to miss the mark. As I hope my posts have made clear, affordable housing policy is hard. Moreover, with house prices, rents, and interest rates rising more rapidly than incomes, the debate over housing affordability is likely to grow, and with it, the potential for misleading analysis and counterproductive policy solutions. In particular, any one-size-fits-all policy that aims to improve housing affordability in Kansas City by treating households with varying incomes the same would likely not be successful at achieving the desired results.

The post Part 8: Does Kansas City Have and Affordable Housing Problem? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First, there’s the question of what makes housing “affordable.” Academic research on housing (and this report) typically defines “affordable” as housing where the resident spends less than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. This is a key point, because instead of affordability being solely measured by the price of housing, it is also dependent on the income of the people who live there.

Tying affordability to resident income also helps researchers explain how a region can be affordable for some but not all income groups, which is exactly what the report shows for St. Louis. For the wealthiest in the region, finding an affordable place to live is easy—St. Louis earns an “A” grade for this demographic. There’s also sufficient affordable housing for those making around and somewhat below the area’s median income (AMI). The same cannot be said for those making less than 30% of the AMI, which represents a family of three making less than $23,000 per year in total.

One problem with tying affordability to income is that it’s yet another imperfect measure for gaining insight into what residents find affordable, especially for those with lower incomes. For example, if you don’t have a car or another means of transportation, housing that’s miles away from your place of work that costs 30% of your income is likely not affordable once you account for daily commute costs. Or, if your income is low enough to qualify for other government programs (food stamps, housing vouchers, etc.) paying more than 30% of your monthly income may still be affordable for you despite what the income guidelines suggest.

So, what does it mean for a region to have an affordability problem? According to the report, you have to look at the number of people earning different incomes and compare that to the number of housing options that would be affordable for them. For example, the wealthiest St. Louisans have an enormous surplus of affordable housing options. But the poorest (<30% AMI) face a shortage of approximately 35,000 units, which is why St. Louis received an “F” for this group. To put this in context, affordable housing for the family described above would mean a 2–3-bedroom residence that costs (with utilities) less than $560 per month, which is understandably hard to find. Given the limitations of the income figures provided above, it’s hard to tell whether this estimated shortage is under or overestimating the housing affordability situation in St. Louis.

Perhaps the toughest question is what should be done given all this information. At the very least, before our elected officials start talking about solutions, they should get a better grip on the extent of the problem.

The post Does St. Louis Have a Housing Problem? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As I’ve written before, the LIHTC program awards tax credits to housing developers to offset construction costs. In exchange, the developers are required to rent a fraction of their units to low-income tenants. Missouri’s program is a supplement to the federal LIHTC and has a long history of poor returns on investment. When Missouri’s version of LIHTC was revived last year after a three-year hiatus, LIHTC boosters promised reforms to address some of the program’s much-discussed shortcomings. This pilot program was one of those reforms.

The purpose of the pilot program is to increase the sales price of LIHTCs by allowing housing developers to claim them more quickly. One of the biggest problems with these credits is that they’re awarded to developers over ten years—but upon being rewarded, developers often immediately sell the credits to investors to raise the capital necessary to fund the project’s construction. When something is sold today that can’t be claimed for a decade, it has to be sold at a discount, in part because of the time value of money. In many cases, Missouri’s LIHTCs have sold for as little as forty cents on the dollar. This means is state taxpayers are basically guaranteed a bad return on investment, because the thing they’re paying $1 for is being immediately sold for less.

The new pilot program allowed 20 percent of the state’s approved projects to claim their credits more quickly over the first five years, and more slowly the final five. The total cost to state taxpayers remains the same, the value of the credits for investors is increased because of the time value of money. Initial reports suggest this change worked and increased the market value of each credit by roughly $0.10. However, if credits were previously selling for $0.40 and now are selling for $0.50, that still means taxpayers are still losing half of their investment immediately.

Going into next year, the number of projects eligible for this pilot will be bumped up to 50 percent. And with more projects receiving accelerated redemptions, that should mean more credits are sold for higher prices, which in turn could slightly improve the dismal return on investment for state taxpayers. Supporters of the pilot also say that higher sales prices will allow the MHDC to subsidize more projects, because each developer will request fewer credits. It remains to be seen whether these claims will hold true with additional years of data.

Make no mistake, I still think the LIHTC program is a bad deal for Missouri. It is truly remarkable that such a meager improvement in credit sale price is being celebrated as a big win for the troubled program, when taxpayers are still expected to lose so much of each credit sold.  Much more needs to be done before LIHTC even comes close to being considered a worthwhile investment for our state.

The post LIHTC Pilot Finds Permanence appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Zoning can be a complicated issue for people who believe in limited government and market-based policies. There is the conflict between the rights of people to organize their community how they want it, the rights of people to develop their own property as they see fit, and the issue of how local governments will prioritize those rights.

Usually, any discussion of reducing or ending zoning immediately leads to nightmare scenarios of a chemical plant opening up right next door to your house. (This actually happens in rural areas with concentrated animal feeding operations, but that is another issue.) But what if the concerns and questions are about much smaller changes to zoning?

The City of Webster Groves is undergoing such a debate right now. Recently, the city council passed changes to the city’s zoning code that will increase housing and development options in parts of the city. In short, the city will allow more small, multi-family homes (i.e., duplexes) in parts of the city previously reserved for single-family zoning. The stated reason for the change was to provide greater housing options that might allow people from different backgrounds to move into Webster Groves. However, a group of residents opposed to the changes has collected enough signatures to put that ordinance change up for a referendum on the ballot on August 3. Those residents, like many suburban residents in our country, prefer single-family zoning for their communities. Needless to say, the upcoming vote has stoked a great deal of interest in Webster Groves. I don’t think the town has been this riled up since the premier of Sixteen in Webster Groves 55 years ago.

The debate over allowing more duplex housing could be academic enough, with good arguments on both sides, but from discussions with residents, letters-to-the-editor, and more, it is pretty clear this debate is closely related to issues of public housing as well. Two years ago, Webster Groves added “source-of-income” to the anti-discrimination rules of its housing ordinances. That means that a landlord in Webster Groves can’t refuse to rent to a person or family who will use a federally funded Section 8 housing voucher to pay the rent. This goes far beyond Obamacare simply requiring everyone to buy health insurance; this law says that a landlord is now compelled to participate in a welfare program whether they want to or not. Bake the cake, landlord! (Keep in mind that Section 8 is a federal program, and there is no federal requirement that landlords accept it). Taken in combination, it is not unreasonable for some people in Webster Groves to think that this rezoning is a first step towards much greater use of multifamily housing and Section 8 vouchers in their city.

Should a community ban the use of the camel because it occasionally sticks its nose under the tent? I guess it depends on what you think about the tent. If your community is based on one-tent per family per lot and you and your neighbors like the community you have built that way, changes in zoning to allow for more tents per lot can be concerning. But if you think tent prices are too high and people need more options, then a simple allowance for two smaller tents on a parcel instead of just one makes sense. (And make sure that camel is not a nonconforming pet under the animal code.)

The rubber will meet the road in debates about equality in housing policy when people—including suburban liberals who claim to passionately support more diversity and inclusion—are forced to consider changes that could affect their own home values and community makeup. I don’t claim to know what the people of Webster Groves should do in the long run. (Though they should definitely use another referendum to get rid of the terrible “source-of-income” rule). However, people have a right to create and abide by zoning laws that maintain the type of community they want to live in, even if not everyone would make that same choice. It is going to be very interesting to see debates play out like this across Missouri’s suburban communities in the coming years.

The post Webster Groves Addresses Hard Issues in Zoning appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Online sales taxes in Missouri
• Ending the earnings tax in St. Louis and Kansas City
• Overregulation in St. Louis city
• The cost of not maintaining roads
• How to address housing costs

To read the newsletter, click here.

The post Show-Me Institute’s April 2021 Newsletter appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some were quick to argue last year that the greatest threat to affordable housing is the ending of low- income housing tax credits (LIHTC). This is demonstrably wrong. The program was fully funded up through the end of 2017; any current affordable housing shortage in Kansas City has nothing to do with a lack of state tax credits. And the data from the Missouri Housing Development Commission show that the number of housing units in the construction pipeline has not decreased since state funding for LIHTC was zeroed-out.

The simple problem in Kansas City, St. Louis and elsewhere is in part due to the high cost of housing regulations and city bureaucracy; it is simply too expensive to build so-called affordable housing.

A 2018 paper issued by the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) and National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) concludes that:

Regulation imposed by all levels of government accounts for an average of 32.1 percent of multifamily development costs, according to new research released today by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC). In fact, in a quarter of cases, that number can reach as high as 42.6 percent.

The table at the top of this post shows the impact on housing costs of several types of government-imposed costs such as changes in building codes or requirements over and above common standards. The NAHB paper goes on to say: “Over 90 percent of multifamily developers also incur costs of delays caused by sometimes lengthy approval processes.”

A study released in 2016 concluded: “. . . on average, regulations imposed by government at all levels account for 24.3 percent of the final price of a new single-family home built for sale.”

Sometimes, exactly because the government is trying to help solve a problem, the problem becomes worse. Seattle for Growth, née Smart Growth Seattle, published in 2015:

Affordable housing projects have many unique costs, and often cost more because of financing, construction, and labor requirements. Affordable housing projects can be more expensive than market-rate due to some of these unique costs.

Regulations regarding health and safety are necessary, and one does not need to argue that housing construction should go unregulated to suggest that some obstacles are not worth the expense. Some of these obstacles, such as time spent waiting on permits and approvals may simply be due to city offices being overworked and understaffed. Cities ought to understand the barriers to housing construction and the additional costs of regulation before they act to add even more regulation or spend limited tax dollars on subsidies.

The post Want More Housing? Get out of the Way appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

If a market is truly failing, there can be economic justification for government policies in response. Though in practice, government intervention rarely hits the mark. For example, Missouri’s state and local governments would have you believe the housing market is failing. Their argument is that the market is failing to provide a sufficient supply of affordable housing. In 1996, the state’s elected officials decided that they should intervene. But is Missouri’s housing market any better for the state’s low-income residents today than it was 23 years ago?

More than two decades have passed since Missouri implemented the state’s version of the federal low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC). In that time, billions of dollars have been devoted to building new housing with 30-year rent protections, yet the program’s wait list is supposedly longer than ever. If that is really the case, it’s time to question why policymakers would consider continuing a government intervention that is failing to solve the problem it was intended to address.

LIHTC is predicated on the idea that subsidizing the development of housing will increase access to more affordable places to live across the state. But this is only true if there is currently not enough housing because it’s too expensive to build, and if subsidizing new developments will spur further housing investment by private entities. Without both of those conditions being met, the program can’t be effective—which matches the academic research on the subject and more importantly, Missouri’s past experience.

If the market is failing and there is an insufficient supply, policymakers should look into what may be causing the inefficiency. Restrictive regulations and zoning laws add to project costs, which discourage investment in neighborhoods where an increase in housing supply may be needed. Or if there is already enough housing but it is simply unaffordable, demand-side fixes such as housing vouchers or other measures that effectively lower the cost of already existing housing may be more appropriate.

It’s extremely unlikely that the issues plaguing the housing market in St. Louis are identical to those being faced in Pilot Grove. Policymakers shouldn’t expect broad-stroke statewide policy actions to be equally successful in both Missouri’s metropolitan and rural areas.

The fact of the matter is that very little has been done to establish whether Missouri’s supply of housing is actually lacking or why that may be the case. Without that information, it’s nearly impossible for policymakers to successfully intervene. Two things they do know are that many of their constituents would appreciate greater access to less expensive housing, and that developers have told them that issuing tax credits is the only way to make that construction worthwhile.

For some reason, policymakers continue to act as though the LIHTC program is their only tool for “fixing” housing in Missouri, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead of doubling down on an already-failed policy, why don’t Missouri’s elected officials take a closer look at the underlying causes of the supposed market failure to find a new path forward for Missouri; or better yet, step back and let the market take care of itself.

The post The Myth of Supposed Market Failures appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last week, I wrote about how Saint Louis County was considering a bill that would require landlords in unincorporated parts of the county to apply for licenses in order to rent out property. Proponents of the measure claimed that this bill will only affect those landlords who don’t keep their property up to standards. However, due to push-back on the bill, the sponsor has made amendments to make it more palatable. Yet these changes do little to actually improve the situation for landlords in the county.

The main problem with this bill is that it still makes landlords responsible for the actions of their tenants. If a renter received a felony conviction for one of a long list of offenses (selling drugs, gambling, and prostitution are included), and if even one of these incidents happened on the rental property, the landlord would be obligated to evict the tenant. If the landlord failed to do so, his or her license would be revoked.

Such a provision harms both landlords and their tenants. It harms landlords because it denies them flexibility in dealing with tenants. For example, what if a tenant is convicted of dealing drugs, but his wife was not guilty of any felony? Is the landlord supposed to evict the entire family because of the actions of one person? The law is unclear, but it seems to me that as long as the rest of the tenants keep up their end of the lease agreement, the landlord should have the option of letting them stay.

This bill would also harm some renters because this provision encourages landlords to discriminate based on the possibility of some future illegal activity. Why enact a law that gives cover to this sort of discrimination? It doesn’t make sense.

Putting aside this provision, the fact that landlords need to jump through yet another bureaucratic hoop in order to lease property makes it less likely that landlords will enter the market, thus hurting consumer choice. Nobody wants substandard housing, but licensing landlords is not the way to address this problem in Saint Louis County.

The post The Latest with Licensing Landlords appeared first on Show-Me Institute.