PLANNING WATCH - The United States is in the midst of a severe housing crisis that is of its own making.  This crisis results from several generation

The Perfect Storm That Created the Housing Crisis

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2023-06-04 05:30:03

PLANNING WATCH - The United States is in the midst of a severe housing crisis that is of its own making.  This crisis results from several generations of awful housing policies, some of which date back a half century to the Nixon Administration (1968 -1973). 

The housing crisis’s most obvious feature is homelessness, but it also includes overcrowding and rent-gouging.  Nationwide 600,000 people are homeless on any given night.  In Los Angeles alone there are 42,000 homeless people, and this homeless population continues to grow despite the hand-wringing.  The local programs advocated by Mayor Karen Bass, with full City Council support, only down this trend.    

This is because the national and local housing crisis did not, inexplicably, fall from the sky.  It has been created by a perfect storm of long-term and counterproductive housing policies.   These neo-liberal (i.e., unregulated capitalist real estate markets) programs are promoted by the financial beneficiaries of the housing crisis: private developers and the local, state, and Federal officials who accept their support and then dish-out favors to them. 

1)  Economic inequality began its slow rise in the United States over the past half century, especially over the past two decades.  Social scientists Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster summarized these economic trends as follows: 

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