There are two main ways to address a housing shortage. The first way is to build your way to a solution. Build so many houses and so many different types of houses that you can over serve the market. Having an abundance of housing supply in places people actually want to live will then drive down the price of different types of housing across the board. Building is the solution favored by almost every economist of worth, every housing advocate of worth, and most people who tend to think clearly about housing solutions. Generally building a diverse supply of housing is good for local economies, good for job growth, and good for renters and homebuyers.
Build more of these!
But there is another way. A government could make a place so undesirable that enough people move away. A government could imprison enough people that the population that needs housing goes down. Less people in the state but the same amount of housing would theoretically solve a housing crisis.
It is an insane path to tread with some very obvious pitfalls. Among those are a rejection of core tenants of humanity coupled with a massive loss in jobs, businesses, money, and knowhow. Selling your soul to lose money is a stupid proposition.
This is what the state of Florida has chosen. The state has imprisoned immigrants in high profile and gross concentration camps. The state is ending all vaccine mandates for children to attend schools, vastly increasing the likelihood that the next epidemic will be centered in Florida and will be of a disease or illness we’ve already long beaten. The end to vaccine mandates will almost certainly kill some people in the state. Some immunocompromised people or even just some people with sense and the means to leave will do so. Would-be newer residents might choose to center their lives in a state that doesn’t seek to throw its residents into the dark ages. The state has chosen to aggressively attack and undermine the major colleges and universities of Florida, making them less of a destination for new potential students both in and out of state. The state has gone out of its way to make sure that marginalized people feel unsafe by forcing cities and counties to rip up symbols of inclusion, no matter how big or small they might be. The state has aggressively told children what they are and aren’t allowed to read, aggressively tried to police thought and gatekeep content while spinning low grade propaganda about the freedoms enjoyed in Florida, pure nonsense to anyone with a working brain. Meanwhile, the real problems of climate change, of hurricanes and rising sea levels, of endless summers of the worst kind and all of the insurance industry problems that come with all of that remain. Of course a problem won’t go away if you can’t be bothered to even acknowledge it’s a problem. Multiple administrations in Florida now have tried to erase certain words and phrases like climate change and global warming in an attempt to wishcast the problems out of existence. Taken altogether, a broader goal emerges: driving certain people out of Florida and discouraging more people from moving in. Now where have I heard that line of thinking before?
A lot of in-state NIMBYs have long advocated for shrinking Florida’s population, but they dared not speak about how that could happen. How did they think population loss was going to play out? Would people just choose not to come to a place that you believe is good enough to stay? Did they really think that Florida could remain a great place to live while also not encouraging people to live here? Did they believe there was a humane way to drastically reduce the population of a given area? In truth, a lot of them did not think it through at all, but instead they relied on a sort of wishful thinking. Good news for them then that, more and more, wishes are coming true for the small-minded. Here now is a man who dares to give voice to their long held desires, a man unafraid to take the ugly path to housing solutions through population loss, a man who is among the most repugnant politicians of the 21st century, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and under him, Florida is becoming the ultimate not in my backyard state by shipping people out and turning others away.