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.

In 2019, I argued that Kansas City’s debate over “luxury” apartments missed a basic point: housing markets are connected. When higher-income households move into new buildings, they leave something behind. Those vacancies matter. New research now makes that case with concrete evidence.

A recent piece in The Atlantic detailed the study. Researchers studied a 43-story condominium tower in Honolulu and tracked what economists call “vacancy chains”—who moved into the new units and who moved into the homes they left. The results were measurable and citywide.

The building’s 512 units generated at least 557 vacancies elsewhere. On average, residents moving into the tower left homes that were 38 percent cheaper per square foot. One step further down the chain, homes were 44 percent cheaper than the new condos. Each new market-rate unit created roughly 1.6 vacancies elsewhere in the city.

This research builds on earlier national work, which found that new market-rate construction prompts substantial movement out of below-median-income neighborhoods. As households move up, older units filter down. The process is gradual but observable.

Kansas City is not Honolulu. Our housing stock is less geographically constrained, and our prices are lower. But the economics of supply do not change by region. When we restrict new multifamily construction—through zoning caps, parking mandates, or prolonged approval processes—we constrain mobility.

Mobility allows households to adjust to new jobs, schools, and changing family needs. Nationally, residential mobility has fallen sharply over the past half-century. Culture plays a role, but so does housing availability. Fewer vacancies mean fewer options.

Kansas City faces a quieter risk: complacency. Because our prices have not reached coastal extremes, it is easy to assume supply is sufficient. Yet rents and home prices have risen faster than incomes in recent years. If we make it harder to build—luxury or otherwise—we should expect fewer vacancies and higher prices over time.

Certainly, luxury housing construction should not be subsidized. Much of the local controversy over “luxury” projects arises when developers seek public incentives. But housing construction at all levels is welcome. Today’s Class A building becomes tomorrow’s middle-income housing. Aging is built into the market.

The real question is not who benefits from the first occupant of a new building. It is who benefits over the next decade.

If Kansas City wants more affordable options tomorrow, it needs more housing—of all kinds—today.

The post Luxury Housing Still Helps Lower-Income Renters appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It’s not often that there is good regulatory news out of Kansas City, but today there is.

Recently, the city council passed Ordinance No. 260144, repealing and replacing the city’s residential energy code provisions and loosening several of the most burdensome elements of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) implementation. Under the new ordinance, the code will allow lower insulation requirements, a more flexible performance compliance threshold (measured via Home Energy Rating System and Energy Rating Index scores), and the removal of mandatory duct leakage testing when ducts are within the building envelope.

These aren’t just technical tweaks. They speak to the central concern I raised in 2024: that rigid energy mandates can act as a hidden tax on housing supply, particularly at a time when the ability to build more homes quickly and affordably matters to families across the metro.

Dennis Shriver of Hearthside Homes told me the regulatory rollback could reduce new home costs by an average of $15,000.

The bill, sponsored by councilmember (and former Show-Me Institute intern) Nathan Willett, takes effect now that the deadline for Mayor Lucas’s veto has passed.

The original regulation should never have passed, of course, but it is no small victory that despite the damage done to housing construction in the interim, the council had the courage to reverse itself.

The post Kansas City Reverses Costly Energy Code Legislation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is a timely reminder for Kansas City officials: if the goal is to help renters and low-income residents, the most effective solution is to build more housing—not to add new layers of regulation.

Kansas City has wrestled with housing affordability and tenant protections for years. Activists often push for stricter rules on landlords. But these approaches treat symptoms, not causes. When developers can’t build efficiently due to restrictive zoning, long permitting delays, or uncertain rules, the supply crunch only worsens.

The Journal article shows what happens when supply catches up with demand: rents stabilize, landlords compete, and renters benefit. That’s the dynamic Kansas City needs more of.

Some argue regulation is necessary to prevent abuse. That is a fair point about some regulations in some circumstances. But policymakers must also weigh how each new rule might deter investment or slow construction. A better strategy is to remove barriers that prevent new housing from being built—especially infill development (building on vacant or underutilized land), duplexes, and apartments near transit.

If Kansas City is serious about affordability, it needs to stop chasing complex fixes and start enabling more housing.

The post Want Cheaper Housing? Create More Units, Not More Rules appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Researchers at the University of Denver found that parking mandates significantly limited multifamily housing. Removing them could increase housing output by about 12.5%—roughly 460 additional units per year in Denver. Each mandated space often adds tens of thousands of dollars in construction costs, inflating rents or home prices. Give developers flexibility, and more money goes into housing, not concrete.

The economics are straightforward. Requiring parking regardless of demand drives up costs, reduces flexibility, and wastes land. A one-size-fits-all rule—one space per unit, no matter the neighborhood—locks inefficiency into the system.

Missouri has already started down this road. St. Louis exempts its Central Business District from parking minimums, showing that alternatives work here too. Still, much of the state relies on rigid, outdated rules rooted in mid-20th-century, car-first planning. These no longer reflect how people live or commute.

What would change if Missouri relaxed parking mandates statewide? Development would get cheaper. Land would shift toward housing instead of empty lots. Supply would grow—and housing would also become more affordable. Cities would also reduce red tape, giving builders room to respond to actual demand.

Some concerns are valid: What about spillover parking? Transit deserts? Residents who rely on cars? Eliminating mandates isn’t a ban on parking—it simply lets developers decide. Local governments can still manage parking through pricing, permits, or optional caps, without locking in costly minimums.

Missouri cities should audit zoning codes, identify outdated requirements, and revise them accordingly, while monitoring neighborhood effects.

In St. Louis, Kansas City, and beyond, this change could be a cornerstone of affordable housing policy. It would cut regulatory burdens, shift spending toward housing, and allow the market to work.

Denver shows it can be done. Missouri should take the cue: Scrap parking minimums, unlock housing supply, and let developers meet real demand.

The post Missouri Should Scrap Parking Minimums to Reduce Housing Costs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Then, interest rates went up.

In a well-functioning market, the process should have reversed itself. The higher interest rates pushed the total price of purchasing a home back up, which surely lowered demand. At the same time, with house prices still far above the pre-pandemic level, builders should have been building like mad to bring homes to the market. These two forces should have resulted in a housing price correction. But this is not what happened. The higher interest rates have cooled demand, but prices remain high. Below is a chart I created using the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) system. It shows the trend in the median U.S. home price since February 2020, just before the pandemic. The average price of a home in the United States grew by roughly $120,000, or about 38 percent, from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2022. It has declined modestly of late, but not much.

The bizarre thing is that builders haven’t responded to the higher prices. In fact, FRED data show new housing starts today are lower than before the pandemic. Meanwhile, many existing homeowners are “locked in” with low-rate mortgages and reluctant to move, further constraining supply. Even with tempered demand due to the combination of high prices and high interest rates, the lack of supply is keeping prices elevated.

But what are the builders doing? They should be falling all over themselves to bring new houses to the market. Think of it this way: If it was profitable to build homes in Q1-2020, it should have been even more profitable by Q3-2022, continuing until today.

A recent issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) brings together several groups of economists to weigh in on the housing market. I read the issue with great interest. One of the most striking findings is that in many major markets, the price elasticity of housing supply is very low, which means builders barely respond to rising prices with new construction. This is odd. Normally, suppliers should respond strongly to higher prices, which put more money in their pockets. In fact, the invisible hand of the free market depends on it.

The articles discuss several reasons builders have responded so weakly to higher prices. With respect to the recent situation specifically, one might initially blame it on rising construction costs, but the articles suggest this is not the primary explanation. Rather, they emphasize the role of regulations and zoning. Local land-use rules, approval processes, and other restrictions make it slow and costly to build, even when market prices suggest that building more housing should be profitable.

Another interesting finding from the research is that we don’t need to focus on building low-income housing to make housing affordable. If we build higher-end homes, people will move into them from less desirable homes, which will then become more affordable. The effect of building homes at the higher end of the market cascades down.

In short, we just need to get out of the way of the market.

So, the next time you hear complaints about high home prices or a shortage of low-income housing, remember the biggest obstacle is the rules we’ve chosen for ourselves. Deregulating housing construction, and thereby expanding supply, offers the clearest path to putting homeownership in reach for more Americans.

The post What’s Wrong with the Housing Market? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In New York, the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act took effect on June 11. Within a week, average listed rents jumped 15 percent, from $4,750 to $5,500. Many landlords, faced with absorbing fees once paid by tenants, simply raised rents to cover the difference. Others introduced vague “management” or “technology” fees—charges that resemble the old broker fees in everything but name. At the same time, the number of apartment listings fell, suggesting some landlords were withholding inventory to preserve pricing power.

This cost-shifting dynamic isn’t unique to New York. In Kansas City, for instance, landlords must pay a $20-per-unit annual inspection fee—and are legally barred from passing it on to tenants. Yet few believe it doesn’t show up in the rent. As with most expenses in housing, the end user ultimately picks up the tab.

Even if renters are no longer writing separate checks to brokers or city departments, they’ll still bear the cost indirectly. Landlords operate in competitive markets and adjust pricing in response to total expenses, no matter how those costs are labeled. The illusion of savings may please voters, but it won’t lower rents.

Such policies also obscure the true cost of housing. When fees are baked into rent rather than itemized, it’s harder for renters to assess value. And as seen in New York, shifting fee obligations may reduce supply if landlords delay listings or forgo using brokers entirely, which limits choice for renters.

Some argue landlords are better positioned to negotiate broker fees, or that renters shouldn’t face steep upfront costs. That may be true in theory. But it assumes landlords won’t pass on those costs—an assumption contradicted by New York’s immediate market response.

If the goal is housing affordability, policymakers should focus on fundamentals: zoning reform, faster permitting, and reducing regulation to increase supply. Reassigning fees won’t create more apartments. But it can inflate rents.

Missourians—and Massachusetts residents—should be skeptical of promises to cut costs by simply shifting who pays them. As Kansas City and now New York have shown, policies that ignore how markets behave rarely deliver the relief they promise.

The post Massachusetts Joins NYC and KC in Shifting Fees to Landlords appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found that small apartment buildings with one stairwell are just as safe as those with two. But Missouri’s biggest cities—Springfield, St. Louis and Kansas City—use building codes that require two stairways in buildings taller than three stories. That rule drives up construction costs and makes many projects financially unworkable.

These two-stair rules are based on the International Building Code, the widely adopted national standard. But they block a housing type common in Europe and now gaining traction in U.S. cities such as New York and Seattle.

The data challenge the logic of the two-stair mandate. In New York, none of the 4,440 single-stair apartment buildings built since 2012—each equipped with fire sprinklers—has been tied to a fire death caused by blocked exits. Seattle shows the same pattern: no increase in fatalities for single-stair buildings.

What’s changed? Modern safety systems such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, and fire-resistant stairwells have significantly improved safety in multi-unit buildings. The redundancy of a second staircase adds cost without increasing safety.

That trade-off matters. A second staircase means longer hallways, less usable space, and fewer units—especially in tight or oddly shaped lots. For developers trying to build mid-size, lower-cost housing, the extra stairwell often kills the project.

Critics may argue redundancy is good policy. But the evidence shows single-stair buildings, built to modern standards, are safe. Other states are already adapting. Washington and California have created carve-outs or pilot programs allowing single-stair buildings under certain conditions—typically height limits and requirements to use safety features like sprinklers.

Although Missouri is one of a handful of states without its own statewide codes, if our cities want to expand housing options without major subsidies or rezonings, removing outdated design rules is a practical place to start.

The post Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found that small apartment buildings with one stairwell are just as safe as those with two. But Missouri’s biggest cities—Springfield, St. Louis and Kansas City—use building codes that require two stairways in buildings taller than three stories. That rule drives up construction costs and makes many projects financially unworkable.

These two-stair rules are based on the International Building Code, the widely adopted national standard. But they block a housing type common in Europe and now gaining traction in U.S. cities such as New York and Seattle.

The data challenge the logic of the two-stair mandate. In New York, none of the 4,440 single-stair apartment buildings built since 2012—each equipped with fire sprinklers—has been tied to a fire death caused by blocked exits. Seattle shows the same pattern: no increase in fatalities for single-stair buildings.

What’s changed? Modern safety systems such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, and fire-resistant stairwells have significantly improved safety in multi-unit buildings. The redundancy of a second staircase adds cost without increasing safety.

That trade-off matters. A second staircase means longer hallways, less usable space, and fewer units—especially in tight or oddly shaped lots. For developers trying to build mid-size, lower-cost housing, the extra stairwell often kills the project.

Critics may argue redundancy is good policy. But the evidence shows single-stair buildings, built to modern standards, are safe. Other states are already adapting. Washington and California have created carve-outs or pilot programs allowing single-stair buildings under certain conditions—typically height limits and requirements to use safety features like sprinklers.

Although Missouri is one of a handful of states without its own statewide codes, if our cities want to expand housing options without major subsidies or rezonings, removing outdated design rules is a practical place to start.

The post Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post A Free-Market Guide for Missouri Municipalities, Part Three: Planning and Zoning appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post A Free-Market Guide for Missouri Municipalities, Part Three: Planning and Zoning appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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These are average values, of course, and not everyone can afford an average mortgage or rent payment. However, the United Way also ranks St. Louis second in the nation (tied with Pittsburgh and trailing only Cincinnati) for the highest number of affordable rental units (80) per 100 households.

It’s good to see St. Louis earn a high national ranking in something other than crime; nevertheless, 80 rental units for every 100 households that need a place to live still isn’t enough housing. So, what can St. Louis do to meet the remaining affordable housing demand?

First, local governments need to get out of the way and let the free market work its magic. My colleague Patrick Tuohey has highlighted the harm that misguided government intervention has done to housing markets in both St. Louis and Kansas City:

Kansas City’s adoption of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) stifled new home construction by inflating costs. Builders, facing steep regulatory burdens, simply stopped building. In St. Louis, a reliance on tax credits and incentives for flashy developments has left vast swaths of the city with vacant lots and dilapidated buildings. In both cities, the results are clear: policies that ignore basic market principles fail to deliver desired results.

Second, the demand for low-income housing can be met indirectly by constructing more expensive or luxury housing. More housing, whether low-income or luxury, is beneficial and will positively impact the availability of affordable housing. Even if the construction of luxury housing occurs when there is a greater demand for profitable low-income housing, the filtering effect will help address the need.

Andrew Cline of The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy extrapolates on the positive effect of luxury housing construction, describing the filtering effects of new apartment development:

Building luxury or higher-end apartments draws higher-income renters out of yesterday’s luxury apartments and into the new luxury apartments. Increased vacancies in yesterday’s luxury apartments attract higher-income residents who’ve been living in mid-level apartments. As new construction creates more vacancies, rents come down. That effect filters throughout the housing supply, lowering rents all the way down. 

It is precisely because of this filtering effect that projects like the one in Town and Country are good news even for those looking for something in a lower price range. While a new luxury condominium development may seem irrelevant to someone seeking a more affordable place to live, it nevertheless represents an increase in supply and exerts downward pressure on housing prices.

The post For More Affordable Housing We Need More Housing, Period appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The fundamental issue here is supply and demand. There is a tight housing market in many places in the country where supply is already constrained—though that is generally not the case in Kansas City or St. Louis. Housing policies that focus on boosting demand rather than increasing supply tend to backfire. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Clinton administration’s National Homeownership Strategy both drove temporary housing booms followed by market crashes. These policies didn’t solve affordability; they exacerbated it.

The same flawed logic has shaped housing markets in Kansas City and St. Louis, where misguided interventions have made housing less affordable. Kansas City’s adoption of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) stifled new home construction by inflating costs. Builders, facing steep regulatory burdens, simply stopped building. In St. Louis, a reliance on tax credits and incentives for flashy developments has left vast swaths of the city with vacant lots and dilapidated buildings. In both cities, the results are clear: policies that ignore basic market principles fail to deliver desired results.

Kansas City and St. Louis offer cautionary tales. We don’t need more interventions that drive prices higher. We need policies that foster more housing construction, deregulate land use, and let the market work. Housing affordability won’t improve with more government spending—it will improve when we stop putting obstacles in the way.

The post Missouri Shows that More Government Doesn’t Equal More Housing appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Since September 29, 2023, Kansas City has required new home builders to adhere to the most recent energy code standards, labeled 2021 IECC. In doing so, Kansas City leaped over a few previous iterations of the code, updated every three years. The result has been a drop in the number of new construction permits sought due to the dramatically higher cost of construction the new standards require.

As a recent article in the Kansas City Business Journal points out, “Through May — the most-recent data available — Kansas City approved 132 single-family permits across the three counties it covers. By that time last year, it had granted 480. The year before that, builders pulled 346 permits through May.”

Even that number is high, because it includes applications submitted before the new energy code standards were put in place. The actual number of single-family permits issued in Kansas City under the new energy code is 32.

Proponents of the new regulations argue they are necessary to increase energy efficiency and lower energy costs. Fair enough. But those savings come with their own costs of construction. It’s a trade-off. Public policy almost always presents us with such trade-offs. If policymakers want to increase energy efficiency without abruptly killing new home construction, they need to work on some sort of compromise. Ordinance 240434 is one such effort, but its consideration is being repeatedly put off. Regardless of the exact solution, Kansas City leaders need to show some urgency to fix this problem.

The post Kansas City Must Weigh Cost of Housing Regulations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The request to amend the zoning map was approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission in May. The request was submitted in order to accommodate the development of a new subdivision, the Highlands at Busch Wildlife. The bill is revised from an earlier proposal called Tall Tree. The Tall Tree zoning amendment request, which was denied by the Planning and Zoning Commission in June 2023, was a 556-lot proposal on about 355 acres. The new development is for only 120 lots, cutting down the number of homes in the development by over 75% while reducing acreage by around 60% compared to the original proposal.

The St. Charles County Council chambers were filled with disapproval from St. Charles residents and nearby O’Fallon neighbors. Residents expressed concerns about negative environmental impacts (see the Missouri Department of Conservation’s comments on p. 42–43 of the amendment request) and increased traffic along state highway DD. Nonetheless, the bill passed by a vote of 5–2. Interestingly, the councilman of District 3—the district where the Highlands at Busch Wildlife will be built—voted in favor of the bill. Following the bill’s passage, a portion of the dissenting public in attendance left the room, and some even shouted their displeasure at the council while doing so. It is not uncommon for current residents of a community to be opposed to new development in their area. However, is this new development really something the citizens of St. Charles and the surrounding communities should be so upset about?

A 2018 paper titled Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability from NYU’s Furman Center addresses many of the concerns commonly expressed by residents about new development. The paper discusses how development­—at any price point—can help improve overall housing affordability. Furthermore, development can also increase productivity and signal that the given community is a place where people want to live. This does not necessarily suggest that development should always happen anytime or anyplace. However, restricting housing supply is associated with numerous problems including increased racial segregation, decreased mobility, and slower economic growth.

While some St. Charles citizens may be dismayed by the passage of Bill No. 5300, hopefully the benefits of increased housing supply will become more evident over time. Who knows—maybe other communities around the state will even look to St. Charles as an example of how allowing the market supply of housing to move more freely can help meet the needs of their community.

The post St. Charles County Council Approves Zoning Change for New Housing Development appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This playbook has been released at a convenient time for the City of St. Louis—the city is currently overhauling its Strategic Land Use Plan (SLUP). The current SLUP was adopted in 2005 and has seen 23 amendments since. It suffices to say that the document is dated. The city intends for the new plan to be adopted by the planning commission by the end of 2024.

There are some benefits of having strategies in place to guide future land use and development of a city. However, cities also must be careful about avoiding central planning. The city outlines its guiding values for the SLUP, the first of which is “quality of life.” Are there ideas in the HSAP guide that St. Louis could use to realize this goal?

To improve quality of life, the goal should be to make the city a place where people want to live, work, and build. Increasing the supply and diversity of housing available can help work toward this goal. How can this be achieved? By simplifying the regulatory landscape. While the SLUP will not change the zoning code on its own, it will inform future updates to the zoning code, and these updates should incentivize development and lower costs, not the opposite.

Specifically, two potential reforms are decreasing or eliminating parking minimums and authorizing accessory dwellings. Parking minimums are mandates that require a set number of parking spaces in a new development. Many U.S. cities are reducing their parking minimums and finding that decreases the cost of new housing and offers other benefits, including making their cities more walkable. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs)—additional living spaces or dwellings on the lot of a larger home—are also gaining traction. Take for example the City of Seattle, which has allowed ADUs since 2019 and is experiencing strong growth in this form of housing. Both changes have the potential to increase the housing supply to meet residents’ needs and support the city’s goal of increasing quality of life.

Anyone can provide public input regarding the City of St. Louis’s plan by completing a survey on the SLUP website. This is an opportunity for residents to emphasize the importance of not stamping out market forces that will spur housing supply. Hopefully, the plan will advocate simplifying codes and decreasing costs.

The post What’s Up, SLUP? 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.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on why it happened. If rents are up due to increased demand to live, work, study, and invest in Missouri, then it is a good thing. If rents are up because we are not allowing enough housing to be built, it is a bad thing. Which is it? Well, we don’t know for sure, and it certainly could be both. It might be the former—increased demand—and it might be the latter—restricted supply. I think it’s unlikely that it is primarily the latter. Overall, Missouri does not have especially strict zoning rules, environmental rules, or building restrictions to limit housing. For example, the Institute has published papers on the lack of centralized planning and resulting affordable prices in the St. Louis and Kansas City housing markets. But we can always be better as a state. Our cities have made mistakes in this regard and our counties have made some questionable choices, too.

There is a downside, of course, with higher rent costs—the rent for your apartment or office is higher. For landlords, that may result in higher property taxes. Similarly, there are benefits and downsides to increases in housing prices. But, overall, I think the increases in rental rates in our two major cities are a beneficial sign. It’s important to remind people that housing throughout Missouri is affordable, including in our big cities. Perhaps some of this increase is simply that there is more “room to grow” here than elsewhere. Perhaps we haven’t done anything at all, but limited housing supply and high housing costs elsewhere have driven some people to Missouri. We don’t really know for certain.

I do know for certain that some groups will take this “fastest rental increase in the country” news as an opportunity to try to add more government mandates in the name of “affordable” housing. That is the last thing our state needs. We don’t need more “source-of-income” rules or attempts to initiate rent control (which is, thankfully, illegal in Missouri). We don’t need affordable housing mandates on developers or further expansion of the low-income housing tax credit. (Although, to be fair, developers can avoid most of that by simply not asking for a tax subsidy in the first place.)

If you think housing or rental costs are too high, one can trust the free market to help lower the cost of housing in St. Louis and Kansas City if we let it. One of the reasons housing costs (buying and renting) in the United States have risen so much recently is constraints on supply, primarily via zoning limits. In recent years, Minneapolis and Austin have both made a point to increase the housing supply by substantially reducing their zoning rules. Housing costs and rental rates have significantly decreased in both cities as housing supply has increased. If we want rental and housing costs to decrease in Missouri, zoning reform is the way forward for St. Louis and Kansas City, not new government regulations or mandates.

The post Ask Famous Missourian Bob Barker if the Price Is Right? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis already has a ridiculous “source of income” rule that forbids landlords from rejecting Section 8 housing vouchers from applicants. Keep in mind that Section 8 is a federal program, and the federal government has no such requirement for landlords. The program is supposed to be voluntary, yet the city is making participation mandatory. Clayton, Webster Groves, and Maplewood also have this terrible policy on their books.

Missouri has a state law forbidding rent control rules, so at least St. Louis can’t pass that next.

Housing in St. Louis is very affordable. Passing laws that limit how and to whom landlords rent their property limits supply and makes housing more expensive. (Obviously, there are anti-discrimination rules for housing that everyone supports.)

Using City of St. Louis tax dollars to assist tenants in their civil disputes against landlords is an inappropriate use of tax dollars. I know, I know, city officials will say they are just paying for “representation,” not taking sides, but if you hire a lawyer for one party and not the other you are clearly taking sides.

The eviction moratorium during the pandemic did plenty of damage to landlords, even if it may have been an unfortunate, short-term necessity. Using city tax funds to oppose landlords in court is just another bad decision by elected officials who likely claim they want more affordable housing. This move will give them less.

The post Landlord Island appeared first on Show-Me Institute.