“Decommodification” of Housing Is Agenda of Big Civil-Rights Group

Zuckerberg-backed paper touts “decoupling access to housing from ability to pay”

A sign in a bank advertises mortgage rates, July 2013.

The Urban Institute, one of the five major civil rights organizations that led the 1963 March on Washington, is making a new push to get profit out of the housing business, floating instead a plan for the federal government to spend $7.3 trillion over ten years to build new housing projects.

“Commodification, which enables and incentivizes the treatment of housing as an asset to profit from rather than an essential good to be used, exacerbates housing unaffordability and housing insecurity,” a May 28 summary posted on the Urban Institute website says. “In contrast, decommodification, which entails decoupling access to housing from ability to pay, can contribute to a more equitable housing market by ensuring that low-income households, households of color, and other historically marginalized groups have access to safe, stable, and affordable housing.”

The summary links to a 40-page research paper, “funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” the charity of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

The paper cautions that “The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.”

The paper tracks “three main strategies by which housing decommodification efforts are occurring: (1) efforts to create publicly owned, permanently affordable housing, (2) efforts to limit speculation and profit-making in the housing market, and (3) efforts to bolster community and collective ownership.”

The research notes that the legislative crackdown on housing profits hasn’t been limited to Democrats but also includes at least some prominent Republicans: “In March 2024, Texas governor Greg Abbott called on state lawmakers to address the ‘corporate large-scale buying of residential homes’ that was ‘making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home.’”

The paper advocates moving away from a mindset of encouraging homeownership by individuals, recommending instead “alternative vehicles for wealth building” such as “baby bonds, matched savings accounts, or neighborhood trusts.” “More should be done to support a large-scale shift toward treating housing as an essential good to be used rather than an asset to profit from,” the paper says. 

As for the federal role, “it may be necessary for the federal government to first identify a ‘north star,’ or an overarching goal for federal policy in this area. One potential north star might be to ensure that all currently unhoused people have access to stable long-term shelter,” the paper says. “Creating 22.4 million permanently affordable housing units, assuming a cost of $329,000 per newly developed unit (the national average cost to build a home in 2023), carries a price tag of $7.3 trillion; spread over an ambitious 10 years, this is still less than the $840 billion appropriated for defense spending in FY 2024.”

The paper is by Samantha Fu, Kathryn Reynolds, and Sam Atherton. Fu worked on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and has a master’s in public administration from the London School of Economics and Political Science, according to the Urban Institute website. Reynolds worked on a White House council during the Obama administration and has a master’s in public administration from NYU’s Wagner school. Atherton has a bachelor’s in political science from the University of Amsterdam.

The paper says President Biden proposed a $20 billion fund in his 2025 budget to advance these goals.

An earlier Urban Institute paper on housing decommodification, published in February 2023 with funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and Trinity Wall Street Philanthropies, began with a quote from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton and a contributing writer to the New Yorker magazine: “As long as there is a price on shelter, it will be inaccessible to millions of people.” In a 2019 book, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” Taylor wrote about what she called “the failures of racial liberalism and its premise that inclusion into American democracy through the vehicles of citizenship, law, and free market capitalism could finally produce fairness and equality for its Black citizens.” 

Mark me down as extremely skeptical that “collective ownership” in 21st century America would work any better, or be implemented with any more regard for rule of law and property rights, that it was under Stalin. Look at the crime-ridden public housing projects that trapped generations in poverty in cities like New York and Chicago and St. Louis. If Zuckerberg thinks decoupling access from ability to pay is such a great idea, let him stop charging money for ads on his tech platforms, or turn them over to “community and collective ownership.”

There are free-market-oriented solutions to housing affordability. They involve easing regulations and reducing barriers to building. Rent stabilization laws in New York City and capital gains taxes in other places leave elderly residents overconsuming housing and “locked in place,” disadvantaging newcomers. But the idea that it’s going to somehow help Black people or anyone else (other than government employees and unionized construction workers) to spend $7.3 trillion to build new collectively owned heavily subsidized housing seems highly improbable. The attack on profits is particularly counterproductive. What better way to scare capital away from the housing industry than by making a public policy push for smaller profits? It’s as if the people who wrote the paper have no appreciation of incentives, or the laws of supply and demand.

The Urban Institute does some fine work on education policy and has had a reputation as less extreme and more mainstream than other civil rights groups. Who knew it had gone this far off the deep end?

Speaking of housing: A New York Times obituary of CVS co-founder Stanley Goldstein includes this passage: 

Stanley Goldstein was born on June 5, 1934, in Woonsocket, R.I., one of four sons of Israel and Etta (Halpern) Goldstein. The family home was the ground floor of a three-family building known in working-class New England at the turn of the last century as a triple-decker, a structure that largely housed immigrants, who had been arriving in waves.

This seems like a case of the Times being a little too precious or provincial. Is the term “triple-decker” really so obscure that the Times needs to mansplain it for its non-working class, non-New England readers? It didn’t take $7.3 trillion in government spending to build triple-deckers, it just took the profit motive and a regulatory regime that didn’t require an elevator and endless environmental impact reviews and traffic impact studies for every new building.

Northeastern gains New York City foothold with Marymount Manhattan College: Columbia and NYU, watch out: fast-growing Northeastern University now has a foothold in Manhattan with the announcement that it is merging with Marymount Manhattan College on East 71st Street.

Back in April, covering Vanderbilt’s plan for a new campus in Florida, I wrote:

As higher-ed strategy, the “satellite campus” approach is not without tradeoffs. The upsides are growth and, potentially, some fresh and new energy. The downsides include the risks of brand dilution and the challenge of maintaining consistent standards of excellence across geographic distances. Cornell has a medical school in Qatar, NYU has campuses in Shanghai and in the United Arab Emirates; Northeastern University has operations in Arlington, Va.; Charlotte, N.C.; London; Miami; Seattle; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Maine; and Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. For some faculty, it can be an attraction—spend the winter teaching in Miami instead of in Boston. There are also political risks, especially overseas in unfree countries but also even within the United States; there would be pressure on Vanderbilt to evacuate Florida every time Governor DeSantis or one of his successors enacts some law that doesn’t fit some student or professor’s idea of enlightened government.

Plenty of other industries have seen national or international consolidation. In retail, for example, instead of Filene’s and Jordan Marsh in Boston and Garfinckel’s and Hechts in Washington and Burdines in Florida and Robinsons-May in California, there were Macy’s everywhere. Why that mostly hasn’t happened yet in higher education or in academic medicine is a topic for another day.

Anyway, it’s a newsworthy development on the higher education front and a reminder of how that is a competitive market. It’s also worth noting that Marymount Manhattan was founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, an order of nuns, and that the Northeastern merger will effectively end whatever remained of that tradition. There may be a place for reinvigorated religious purpose and influence in higher education, but it doesn’t look like that will be happening here.

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