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Alliance for Housing Justice

@aforhj

2 months ago
Preview card for an article from The New York Times (nytimes.com), by Christopher Serkin and Daniel J. Sharfstein. The publication’s logo is shown. Headline: “We Know How to Solve the Housing Crisis. We Just Have to Remember.”. Photo credit: Graphic: Xi Li / The New York Times. The text is shown over the article’s featured photograph: The card is set over the article’s featured photograph: A black-and-white mosaic of images of homes that appear to be several decades old. The images appear to be taped together by bright green squares.
We forget that America once confronted a housing crisis with far more urgency and ambition. As World War II raged across the globe, millions flooded into industrial centers to build ships, tanks and airplanes. Workers slept in trailers, cars and overcrowded rooms, and rents skyrocketed. Housing shortages became so severe that they threatened the war effort itself. So the federal government responded by treating housing as critical national infrastructure.
And, crucially, the government directly built housing itself. It converted hotels and school buildings into apartments and partnered with leading architects and planners to design new forms of housing to foster community engagement and improve workers’ quality of life. Reformers advocated designs that could have had an enduring impact on postwar housing, planning entire neighborhoods with new kinds of homes that offered models for the future.
Today we face another crisis. Researchers estimate that we have a nationwide housing shortfall of at least four million homes, twice what was created for the war effort, and more than Roosevelt ever sought to build during the war. Yet we continue to rely overwhelmingly on a single policy response: deregulation.
Zoning reform can fix some problems, but it will not solve this crisis. Developers do not always build enough housing even in less regulated places. Many other factors — like the cost of new roads, power and water, of financing, labor and building supplies, not to mention the effects of a housing market that is often driven by Wall Street investors instead of homeowners and tenants — all shape what gets built and for whom.
The problem today is not simply a failure of policy. It is a failure of political imagination. During World War II, the country understood that housing was not just another commodity. It was essential infrastructure for a functioning society.
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Posted On: August 31st 2026, 10:04 pm
We can’t solve a national housing crisis through zoning reform alone. The federal government has built housing at scale before, and we can do it again.

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Comments (7)
s.t.u.u.n.m 2 months ago

s.t.u.u.n.m

This is propaganda

flosbacha 2 months ago

flosbacha

Need fewer people

garden_stated 2 months ago

garden_stated

While I fully agree that we need to approach this issue with more mixed income public housing, the main reason why zoning is a key issue is because regardless if the developer is public or private, it can block an otherwise good project. Which isn’t to say we should throw the baby out with the bath water, but that we need smart zoning reform.

emmetcosten 2 months ago

emmetcosten

Supply vs demand and enforce competition is a very simpler concept that's broken in the housing market due to political regulatory capture of zoning which was created as a response to desegregation and the great migration post WWII. It wasn't simply to regulate good behavior among developers. No one is calling for building unsafe housing, people are just calling to legalize building enough housing.

atharhacton 2 months ago

atharhacton

#Agree

brian.5123 2 months ago

brian.5123

Oh. I’m actually shocked I assumed this was going to be the billionth article written about how we just need more market power and freeing developers. Who who who post about housing? That actually suggests something different and understands there’s more to it color me impressed.

futureurbanistclub 2 months ago

futureurbanistclub

Moretti > Glaeser

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