The arguments against more housing, including nine I can't answer

By Russell Mann — Post Falls, Idaho

This page is only useful if it's right. If you find a mistake, tell me and I'll fix it.

There was a public thread about housing around here a couple of weeks ago, the kind where somebody asks what we should actually do about young families not being able to afford a place. One of the answers was this: if you make housing cheaper here, everybody will just move here, and then it won't be cheaper anymore.

I read that and had nothing.

Not "I disagreed and needed a minute." Nothing. I've spent a month building a website that argues we should let people build more homes, and one of the most common objections to that whole idea went past me and I couldn't answer it. I still can't. It's the first thing on a new page I just put up, and it's marked open, because that's what it is.

What I did about it

I started writing them down. Every argument against building an ADU, and every argument against the bigger claim underneath it, which is that more homes make housing more affordable.

There are twenty-two of them now. Five I think I've handled, and I can point you at the post that shows my work. Eight I'm partway through. Nine I have no good answer for.

The page is here: Deal breakers. It's a list of every reason this might not work.

The rule I gave myself

Write each one the way the person making it would write it. Not the version that's easy to knock over.

That sounds obvious and it isn't. The natural move is to state somebody's argument just badly enough that answering it feels like winning. I've read plenty of pages that do it. You can tell, and the second you can tell, you stop believing the rest of the page.

So the sprawl argument on that list isn't "some people worry about growth." It's that every new unit eats open space and pushes the town further out, and the taxpayer pays for the roads and pipes that go with it. The one about my own project isn't softened either. I found out that an ADU in Post Falls owes no capitalization fee because it shares the water and sewer already on the lot. Good news for my budget, and it is exactly what somebody means when they say growth doesn't pay for itself. That one points right at me and it's on the list in those words.

The nine

I want to be specific about what "open" means, because a list of objections is worthless if every one of them conveniently has an answer.

We're already full. Stop building. This is the one I hear most in Kootenai County. It isn't a prediction about prices. It's a statement that people don't want more people, and the evidence people give is the drive. Ask anybody who comes down 95 from Hayden into Coeur d'Alene at five o'clock. I'm not going to answer that with a chart. A chart doesn't touch it, and pretending it does would be an insult to somebody who sits in that twice a day.

Renting is fine. At today's rates, renting here may well beat buying month to month. I think thirty years of it comes out different. But that's a thing I believe, not a number I've checked. Until I run it for Kootenai County, telling a young couple to buy is advice I can't back.

I don't want an ADU next door. Renters you didn't pick, a car on the street, somebody behind your fence. And Idaho's new short-term rental law (Idaho Code § 67-6539, also effective July 1) means a city can't require a permit to rent it nightly, so the Airbnb worry is more realistic now, not less. That's an honest cost of a law I'm mostly for.

The other six are on the page. One of them is the one I opened with.

Why any of this is public

I could have kept the list in a file on my computer. Two reasons I didn't.

The first is that I'm about to spend real money on a building in my own back yard based on what I've been writing here. If one of these is right, I want to find out now and not halfway into a foundation.

The second is that I don't think you should trust a site that only publishes the case for its own conclusion. I wouldn't. Every ADU site I've read has a page listing the benefits. I have yet to find one that will tell you the strongest argument that it's wrong.

There's a version of this page that would be worse than nothing, and it's the one where the inconvenient entries quietly don't make it on. The short-term rental one is my test case. I'd like to argue that renting an ADU nightly is no loss to the housing supply, and the research mostly runs the other way, so that's what the entry says instead of what I'd prefer it to say. If entries like that ever start disappearing, stop reading me.

Two things I want from you

Send me one that isn't on the list. I'll add it whether or not I have an answer, in your words, and I'll credit you unless you'd rather I didn't. If you think an ADU is a bad idea, or that building more housing won't do a thing for affordability, you're exactly who I'm asking.

Or tell me an answer of mine stinks. That one's worth more. It's harder to hear that the reasoning is bad on something I've already called handled, and there is almost certainly a number wrong somewhere on this site. I'd like to know which one.

This is the third post on why I'm doing this. Leave a comment below, or message the Facebook page. If you'd rather keep it private, use the contact form. Then go read the list and find the one you were already thinking.