Biden’s worst idea yet

It is hard to tell which is more pathetic, President Joe Biden’s lurch left in a desperate but failed attempt to keep the Democratic Party's most avid activists from kicking him off the ticket or his descent into complete incoherence.

Speaking to the NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas on July 16, Biden said he would combat high housing costs by capping the amount by which corporate landlords could raise rent to $55 a month. It is hard to tell from the video if Biden failed to see the teleprompter or just failed to comprehend what was on it, but the actual policy released by the White House later that day was for a 5% cap on monthly rent hikes by corporate landlords, not $55.

Either way, $55 or 5%, rent controls of any kind have a long history of proven failure. As tempting as it is for politicians to make voters happy by freezing their housing costs, rent controls only discourage investment in new housing construction, thus preventing increased supply from meeting demand. The result is higher housing costs for everyone, even those in rent-controlled units, who eventually look for new options as their life changes only to find everything is much more expensive than what they are stuck in.

Contrast Biden’s rent-control solution to housing costs with former President Donald Trump’s. Asked what he would do to lower housing costs, Trump told reporters, “So 50% of the housing costs today and in certain areas like, you know, a lot of these crazy places is environmental, is bookkeeping, is all of those restrictions: building permits, tremendous restriction, your permits, your permitting process, your zoning. I went through years of zoning. Zoning is like ... it’s a killer. But we’ll be doing that, and we’ll be bringing the price of housing down.”

Trump is right. The problem with housing affordability isn’t corporate greed but environmentalism run amok. Permitting, zoning, and regulations are the top drivers of higher housing costs. Just compare California, which is burdened by the California Environmental Quality Act, to Texas, which does not have a law that empowers environmental activists to sue and stall every construction project in state court.

Thanks to a friendlier regulatory environment, one study found that Texas’s three biggest metropolitan areas (Dallas, Houston, and Austin) out-built California’s three biggest metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco/Oakland, and San Diego) by 300%. Another study found that the city of Austin is out-building San Francisco by a factor of 10. As a direct result of Texas’s willingness to prioritize new construction over excessive environmentalism, housing costs are far lower than they are in California, and hundreds of thousands of Californians flee their Democratic-run state for the Republican-run Texas every year.

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In theory, Biden would need Congress to pass a new law to implement his new rent-control scheme. But he has a record of not letting the Constitution or courts get in his way. When the Supreme Court struck down one of his plainly illegal college debt amnesties, Biden just tweaked it and passed another illegal amnesty. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t try another illegal work-around on rent control.

Californians frustrated by high housing costs are lucky they can escape to Republican-controlled states such as Texas. If Biden wins, the same bad housing policies that make California unlivable will be forced on people nationally.