MTS
IFP infrastructure policy director Will Poff-Webster on the housing shortage: "We have the biggest shortage of smaller, cheaper houses in America. If you want to build a huge McMansion in the exurbs, it's not hard to do that. The problem is those houses aren't affordable to a normal person." "Now, if you're a janitor, you actually make more take-home pay in Mississippi than you do in New York or San Francisco. Because you make less money, but your housing is so much cheaper, you're actually better off." "If we feel like we've run out of land, like in a place like San Francisco, it's actually really easy to create more land for housing. You just build another house on top of the existing house. It's a solved problem. We've done it for hundreds of years. We just need to make it legal to do it again. It was legal 100 years ago, and then we invented zoning, and we made it illegal again." "Only 0.6% of the housing stock in America of single-family homes is owned by large companies like Blackstone. Almost all of them are owned by either small landlords or individuals." "It's a common boogeyman people like to bring up when they don't want to talk about how really the problem is regulation and housing costing too much." @willpoffwebster
Will Poff-Webster
This is one of the most impressive and surprising parts of ROAD to Housing's journey to become law. By the time it was enacted, the bill included almost every bipartisan pro-housing bill anyone had introduced It's so different from other congressional processes that whittle down good things into nothing