AI regulatory issues are the same for housing

I had the opportunity several years ago to be part of a movie called Big Cities and Belts: The search for affordable housing This was part of Federalist Society Regulatory Transparency Program. The film was created and directed by Media. The regulatory transparency project has a new order, Figure: Innovation, Control and Freedom. The series is hosted by Adam thiererA senior partner at the R Street Institute in Washington DC in the Technology and Innovation Team. The series is related to housing because it is perhaps one of the most adjustable consumer products purchased, sold and rented in the United States. Whether one believes that housing is a right or a commodity, there is no doubt that the rules governing its production have a profound impact on economic access. I had an email exchange with Thierer for the series.

“DOCUSERIES are early,” Thierer told me, “because it examines the hidden ways in which regulation shapes the results of innovation in real world in areas of enormous importance to individual Americans and our nation as a whole.”

It is important to consider it according to the United States Census Office“Of the 328.2 million people of the nation, it is estimated that 206.9 million (about 63%) lived in a built -in place from July 1, 2019.” There are about 19,500 built -in cities and cities, jurisdictions that are most of the rules and regulations that govern what can be constructed, how it is constructed and where it is constructed. States and counties also have a role, but since The decision of the volcano From nearly 100 years ago (1926), cities have a huge influence through land use and land use codes.

I agree with Thierer that “it is important that regulations do not maintain the life of technologies” and so does housing. I mentioned the Agenda of Ezra Klein’s abundance, which I wrote for not long ago. Thierer discusses Klein’s work in a longer article called, Defending technological dynamism and freedom of innovation in AI era.

People are quite obsessed these days with questions about how to regulate artificial intelligence. The principles and ideas Thierer apply to technology also apply to housing regulation. One of the main terms in the article is “the regulatory inactivity: the established interests and the protection of mentality favor stability in progress.

This is absolutely true for housing, where concerns such as height, volume and scale of a building are driven by rules that are sometimes arbitrary. For example, ask any designer in America if a 10-historical building should be built in a family neighborhood. Their answer would almost always be that such a building would be “off -scale” with the surrounding buildings. What does that really mean? Does the building of such a structure for housing endanger the health and safety of neighbors? Would it lead to a disease outburst? Of course not. But such concepts, as the scale, have a serious impact on housing supply, which, when weakened by these rules, can create rarity and higher prices.

I told Thierer the tendency of regulatory authorities and those on the left and the right to focus on trying to control the outcome of everyone. a Firing line Interviewer, Hayek delivers what I called a Burkean evaluation of the dominant thinking about social institutions, that, that,,

“We can do everything for our pleasure, that we can design social institutions in their work. Now, this is basically wrong.

Hayek rightly claimed The use of knowledge in societyThat there is not a single mind that can be aware of the marginal rates of replacement among all the goods in an economy to create policies and inputs that would perfectly satisfy both buyers and sellers. Economies are messy and imperfect and innovation usually occurs despite the rules and trends when prices rise well enough to reward an innovative so that they can bring a more economical project to the market.

“Hayek has taught us that the fundamental problem with government planning is the so -called knowledge problem,” says Thierer, “and our inability to ever fully understand the full range of complex phenomena that drive markets.

I would say that the same applies to housing. But the government is using the most blunt tools to regulate such a complex market.

The regulatory standard used for “financial access” is that no one has to pay more (or less because it would mean that someone who could pay more is in the cheaper unit) than 30% of their gross, pre -tax housing income. When I ask the “technocrats” if everyone in the United States paid exactly 30% of their housing income, it would be the “crisis” of housing. This makes them very upset. Economic access is truly a quality measure, not a quantitative, but is widely used to determine politics. You can talk to this kind of thinking and measuring and the way it deforms and shapes the results. I have written about it often when it comes to housing

“Government interventions have already deformed the results in curious and expensive ways here, but designers often fall into the trap of thinking that even more technocratic interventions can solve all the problems created by previous interventions.”

That is exactly why I have supported for more than a decade that we need to change the way we measure “economic access”. The measure, when used retroactively in the cost of costing costs, leads to terrible results. The number of households that pay more than 30% of gross, pre -tax monthly monthly housing suddenly becomes the number of units to be constructed using low -income tax credits (LIHTC), a funding method that provides constant housing that is overpriced. The landscaped series will be another important analysis of the similar ways in which the government can make a problem worse by trying to solve it.