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465 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1983)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0465 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Housing is an artifact. Some families in Calhoun County, West Virginia, inhabit very rough homes with dirt floors and tar paper where window panes ought to be, according to a mid-1982 Wall Street Journal report. Most of the residential inventory in the United States is much better than that, but it is physically diverse. Housing is also a matter of location. Industrial and office employment in San Francisco is moving perceptibly to the suburbs, away from city resi- dents who can afford neither suburban homes nor the cost of the longer commute. And housing is a capital good. For the past 30 years, most American households were able to attain the security and opportunity of homeowner- ship by virtue of tax subsidies and artificially improved access to credit markets. The capital market begrudges housing's large share of savings because housebuilding is so-called nonproductive investment. It does not increase the nation's productive capacity. These three basic characteristics of housing evoke different types of public response, and the pattern of response varies considerably among nations. The United States does little with housing as an artifact except to condemn seriously deficient dwellings-that is, to prevent buildings from being used. We have compounded the problems of location, perhaps inad- vertently, and only recently have put some modest programs in motion to address this issue. As to the third attribute, the terms on which housing may be acquired, this nation assembled an extraordinary mesh of infrastructure and effec- tively manipulated the marketplace for over 30 years. Indirectly, the physi- cal inventory was dramatically improved, but problems of location were exacerbated. This financial infrastructure began to crumble at the begin- ning of the current decade. The housing sector of the economy, in the role of a nearly innocent bystander to the nation's inflation-interest debacle, saw its horizons shrink as economists and policymakers argued that it should be cut adrift in the marketplace. Why have any form of public intervention? Some hard-nosed economists regard this as an almost rhetorical question, but there are many answers in the long literature of housing. Seriously deficient housing-in the physical or dirt floor sense-has been held responsible for disease, crime, and social- political malaise; it is hazardous to the rest of the community, the logic runs. Another argument likens a physically unsuitable dwelling to a bad apple: if left alone, it will infect others. Then there is simple egalitarianism, or revulsion at squalor. Low-density, owner-occupied houses discourage crime, the local police will tell you. Homeowners are more conscientious than are renters about civic responsibilities. Housebuilding creates jobs, and communities must have housing inventories in order to attract and keep other kinds of employ- ment. From the macroeconomist comes the view that housing construction provides a nearly spontaneous balance wheel for an inherently cyclical pattern of business. A nice list of pluses. It adds up to a political constit- 9