Letter: Respect the research on infill housing

Editor’s note: This letter was written prior to Tropical Storm Helene and originally scheduled to appear in the Oct. 2 issue, which was canceled because of the storm.

In a letter earlier this year, local schoolteacher Sherrill Osborne Knight claimed that there are “a number of transparently erroneous arguments” in an opinion piece about affordable housing written by Andrew Paul, an organizer for the local Asheville for All group [“The Case for Infill Housing Falls Flat,” June 5, Xpress]. I have always found Paul to be a pretty smart guy, so you can imagine my distress to learn that he had messed up so badly on a subject dear to his heart.

The piece that drew Knight’s ire summarized new economic studies which show that urban infill development makes housing cheaper for struggling families, even if the new housing itself sells at market rates [“Why Asheville Needs Infill Housing,” May 15, Xpress]. The studies rebut a complaint commonly heard from otherwise well-meaning people — that reducing barriers to responsible development is a fool’s errand because more plentiful housing does not necessarily mean more affordable housing.

The first argument dispatched by our brave Knight is Paul’s “claim” (actually the findings of the studies reported by Paul) that “allowing more infill will reduce rent and home prices.” She demolished this transparently erroneous canard with a simple declaration: “It sure would.” Goodness. That doesn’t sound too erroneous. It almost sounds as if Knight agrees with Paul. I hope she doesn’t teach logic.

She next asserted that even if market-rate construction does have the “moving chains” effect that economists claim for it (that is, it frees up housing in less affluent parts of town when current residents move from there into more upscale neighborhoods), the newly available housing in less elite areas will deteriorate after “successive waves of low-income households” run down the neighborhood. Oh, my. I hope she doesn’t teach sociology.

Despite her concern over cross-city migration, Knight then denied that resistance to new housing, which she sweetly attributed to a “desire to maintain neighborhoods and green spaces,” has anything to do with race or class, ignoring the many studies documenting a connection between single-family zoning and Jim Crow (one of which was cited in the online version of Paul’s piece). I hope she doesn’t teach history.

Which, by the way, Paul does. Urban history, to be exact.

Finally, Knight opined that the “elephant in the room” is not rents but low wages. Well, now she’s getting a little closer to reality. It’s certainly true that low wages are a problem, though she’s scarcely the first one to notice.

But how is the City of Asheville to increase wages? It cannot simply establish a minimum wage for private employers.

An increase in the federal minimum wage, of course, would help. So would more generous subsidies for low-income renters. Unionization would be a step forward, too. And while we’re dreaming, we might as well go with an old idea once championed by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman — a minimum income distributed through a negative income tax. I’m all for that.

But none of those solutions, even if they were within the purview of city government, would solve the housing shortage (let alone address the environmental downside of low-density, car-dependent living).

Until a panacea comes down from the heavens, it serves no one’s interest to scoff like a petulant teenager when economic research does not yield the results one prefers. The simple truth is that unnecessary restrictions on supply push prices up. That’s what a commonsense understanding of supply and demand would suggest. That’s what studies show happens in the housing market.

And that’s a lesson our crusading Knight can take back to her students: Respect the facts, even if you dislike where they lead.

— Peter Robbins
Marshall