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**JUNE 28, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

No Housing, No Recovery

****

TRURO, MASSACHUSETTS - I've been enjoying a working vacation on Cape
Cod, and the big local issue here is how the shortage of housing is
undermining the recovery from the pandemic. Not the housing shortage for
tourists-the housing shortage for workers.

Restaurants are having trouble reopening because they can't get
workers at any wage, because there is no place for workers to live.
There are proposals to build worker housing, or summer dormitories, or
even to dock an old cruise ship to house summer workers.

You'd think that local merchants in a tourist economy would have a
fair amount of political clout, but guess who has even more political
power-the NIMBYs. Even many well-off liberals who have summer homes in
these hills and shores don't want the working class nearby, especially
if worker housing might further tap the precarious local water supply.
The number of new affordable-housing units approved so far by local
towns is in the two digits.

And this housing crunch affects not only summer restaurant workers; it
affects tradespeople who are being priced out of their homes. The local
workforce of plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics,
housepainters and so on is just not replicating itself, because the
wash-ashores, as people from off-Cape are called in these parts, have
bid up the price of housing sky-high.

So summer people: If you don't want to support affordable housing,
you'd better learn a trade and fix your own damned toilet, and forgo
those oceanfront restaurant clambakes in favor of home cooking.

To use a fancy word, the housing crisis here on the Outer Cape is a

**synecdoche** for the housing crisis nationally-a part that depicts a
larger whole. Housing costs have totally gotten away from us, and the
market's responses are irrational and insane:

Build housing in deserts that don't have enough water; have workers
commute two and three hours from where the affordable housing is to
where the jobs are; build on landfills like North Miami and stint on
inspections. Or just live in your car.

Biden's infrastructure plans have some funds for housing, details to
be determined, but they are a drop in the bucket; and they are likely to
subsidize housing for the officially certified poor-which is
desperately needed but doesn't address the larger challenge of
affordable housing for the working middle class. (And I haven't even
mentioned housing reparations.)

When we get one or more versions of the big physical infrastructure bill
through Congress (and we will), and we complement that with trillions
more for caring human infrastructure (and we will), the next giant
challenge is housing.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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