Housing Policy

Contra J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, Housing Should Be a 'Commodity'

Housing is unaffordable because regulations have prevented its commodification.

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J.D. Vance and Tim Walz | Li Rui / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom
(Li Rui / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom)

Tuesday's vice presidential debate included a surprising amount of agreement between the two candidates on stage. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) competed on who would produce more oil, keep the border more secure, and support Israel the most.

They also were both in alignment on the notion that housing shouldn't be "a commodity."

"The problem we've had is that we've got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity," said Walz, criticizing the influence of Wall Street on the housing market.

"We should get out of this idea of housing as a commodity!" concurred Vance, saying that the way to make it not a commodity would be to crack down on illegal immigration.

The most generic definition of a commodity is something of value that's bought and sold. A not insignificant segment of the left uses this generic definition when they say we should "decommodify" housing—it should not be something that's bought and sold like a normal product.

Hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) decry the "privatization" of real estate development at a recent event promoting her Homes Act. That bill, jointly authored with Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.), would get the federal government back into the business of building and operating public housing units.

Their debate remarks notwithstanding, there's no indication that Vance and Walz want to go so far as to completely end private housing markets.

Rather, they want to stop certain types of people from buying and selling housing—corporate speculators in Walz's case, illegal immigrants in Vance's. (In past remarks, Vance has also said we should squeeze corporate investors out of the housing market.) Once we get rid of the demand of Wall Street and illegal immigrants for housing, there'll be more left for normal, decent Americans, the thinking goes.

As I wrote on Tuesday, that's a mistaken attitude. There's plenty of evidence that corporate investors and immigrants lower the cost of housing. The former provides the capital, the latter the labor, to get needed housing built.

There's also no reason to think that a free market would transmute rising demand into ever higher prices. There's not some fixed number of housing units. Increased demand might raise prices in the short run. But higher prices also encourage more homebuilding. That brings prices back down.

If it was profitable for developers to sell homes at $300,000 a unit and then more immigrants or speculators swoop in and buy houses, pushing the price up to $400,000, developers will respond by building more housing until the price falls back down to $300,000. If they were making money producing homes at that price, there's no reason they'd suddenly stop just because demand increased.

Over time, capitalist innovation will lower production costs such that more and more housing is available at a lower price. This is what it actually means to make something into a "commodity" and we see examples of it everywhere in the economy.

There are more people and more demand than ever. Yet, somehow the price of common commodities and mass-produced consumer products keeps falling.

Real prices falling in the face of ever-rising demand is what it actually means to "commodify" something.

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter was describing this process of commodification when he wrote that "the capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."

In his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (from which the above quote is taken) Schumpeter predicted that the mass production of prefabricated homes would soon lead to affordable commodified housing as well.

In the couple decades following the publication of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, it looked like Schumpeter's prediction of abundant, affordable, mass-produced housing would become a reality.

In the post-war era, innovative builders like William Levitt slashed production costs and increased production rates by applying assembly line-like practices to the construction of massive new suburban subdivisions. This was the future of homebuilding.

Soon enough, however, the growth machine came to a crashing halt. Brian Potter charts this history at his Construction Physics Substack. Market conditions eventually led to a bust in mass-produced housing. Then came the rise of growth controls, land use restrictions, and environmental regulation.

With zoning codes limiting how much new housing can be built at one time, the size of home-building firms has fallen, reducing economies of scale and construction productivity. Building codes dictating how homes have to be built has further helped to close off innovative construction methods.

Those regulatory restrictions on new supply never went away, with the result being that the price of housing has risen in tandem with rising demand. Additionally, new technology that promised to automate construction tasks has repeatedly failed to take off.

Rather than becoming a commodity, home-building has stayed a cottage industry (no pun intended). Real prices continue to rise and housing affordability has become an issue of national concern debated by candidates for federal office.

In this context, Walz and Vance have decided to double down on the zero-sum nature of the housing market. They say we need to decommodify housing by preventing the wrong people from buying a fixed stock of housing.

This is exactly backwards. Housing supply is fixed by regulation, not nature. If we stripped away regulations on homebuilding, supply would rise and prices would fall.

We've failed to make housing a commodity and that's exactly the problem.