As people yell about the lack of “affordable housing” I see an interesting difference between my good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him in real life! — Architectolder, who posts a lot of pictures concerning houses interiors and exteriors, and Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, whom I have previously mentioned. Each have differing ideas about what makes a fine home, Architectolder favoring single family dwellings, while Alicia likes European-style courtyard housing. Alicia likes the idea of being able to walk downstairs and down and around the block to the local pharmacy, bodega, interesting shops and the like; who would not like to have a French boulangerie or pâtisserie just a few steps outside your door to grab a croissant for breakfast? Architectolder, on the other hand, is not afraid of people having to get into their cars to drive to a bakery. He believes that relatively small houses like the one in his tweet shown at the right ought to be affordably built: nice craftsmanship, a small but decently-sized yard appropriate to the house.
But then there was this, in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
The cost of housing in Pa. is too high. Here’s what Josh Shapiro will need to overcome to fix it.
Administration officials spent the past year taking feedback from advocates, experts, and local officials.
by Charlotte Keith, Spotlight PA | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | 5:00 AM EST
HARRISBURG — Rents are soaring, homelessness is rising, and homeownership is out of reach for many families in Pennsylvania. As the state grapples with a serious housing shortage and affordability dominates the national political conversation, Gov. Josh Shapiro is preparing to release a long-awaited plan to tackle the crisis.
The plan, first announced in late 2024, will draw on months of outreach to advocates, developers, and local officials. Supporters hope it will offer a clear path forward and build momentum around proposals that can win support in Pennsylvania’s politically divided legislature. But significant obstacles stand in the way.
“The housing crisis has risen to the level such that none of the four caucuses can ignore it,” said Deanna Dyer, director of policy at Regional Housing Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm.
The housing shortage is a nationwide problem, but Pennsylvania has been particularly slow to build new units. The shortfall leaves families squeezed by rising costs, pushes recent graduates to take jobs in other states, and makes it harder for companies to expand.
There’s more at the linked original.
It seems that everybody seems to believe that the government needs to somehow fix the problem, but I’ll point out the obvious: virtually all of the housing in our country was built by private enterprise, by builders contracted by someone, whether an individual or a developer, to build houses, and that’s how our country began and grew to where we are today. Why should the government have to get involved?
The Inquirer fully supports the illegal immigrant population. As we have previously reported, the newspaper itself has reported an illegal immigrant population of between 47,000 and 76,000 people. Just deporting the illegal immigrant population should free up a lot of housing in the City of Brotherly Love, but naturally the newspaper wants to protect the illegals rather than see the law actually enforced, primarily because it is President Donald Trump who is finally enforcing our immigration laws, and the people at our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper hate the President with a white-hot passion.
Other states are passing laws to loosen local zoning restrictions and encourage new development — despite often fierce opposition from groups representing local governments.
Well, of course: local communities want to protect their typical American single-family home neighborhoods from having people build five-story apartment buildings which permanently shadow neighboring houses and change the character of neighborhoods. Zoning laws grew up to protect the American people, and to protect their investments in housing from being trashed by other development.
However, local governments can micromanage, and over manage things. When I lived in Hockessin, Delaware, our house, which was on a small farm, was surrounded by not one, not two, but three expensive house subdivisions. New Castle County, to combat overcrowding, reduced the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre parcel. Great! People could get larger yards, right? But it also meant that developers had to build more expensive individual homes to achieve the same profit, and so Hockessin Chase, Hockessin Green and Hockessin Something-or-other were full of McMansions, driving up the costs of housing in the whole county.
On the opposite side of that coin are newer houses off Leestown Road in Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah, they’re the fancier new builds as well, but they’re so close together that you could hear your neighbor open his refrigerator, and if the houses were nice when they were built, most are now occupied by renters, not homeowners.
The best thing for government to do to address the ‘affordable housing’ problem is nothing at all. Every time the government tries to micromanage part of the economy it fails.
