Can Philosophy Help to Articulate Fair Principles for Low-Income Housing?

The need for more “low-income” housing—a now-standard label—in many parts of the United States has become a major issue during the 2024 presidential campaign, with Vice-President Harris promising to work with Congress to provide more if elected. European politicians also frequently respond to the need, expressed by many constituents, for more “affordable” housing. The Irish government, for example, has set a target of building 33,000 more homes annually to reduce “undersupply,” which economists in many nations say is responsible for steep rises in housing costs.

But do we know what we’re talking about in this area? Despite all the confident and sometimes righteous lip service paid to low-income housing—whatever that amounts to—philosophical work on justice has not provided enough specific guidance. Several major philosophical treatises on justice published since the 1950s, from the most right-libertarian to the most egalitarian, say little about access to housing. Thankfully that has started to change during the last 15 years (for a roundup of recent work, see Halliday and Meyer’s 2024 article, “Justice and Housing,” in Philosophy Compass).

Arguably, just housing could come under fair equality of opportunity in several conceptions, Rawlsian or otherwise. Practices like racial or ethnic “redlining” are easily condemned as unfair even on purely meritocratic grounds—much as with racial bias in hiring. Going beyond merits, we can deploy civic republican principles to argue for the importance of demographic diversity in local populations (along with the wider dissemination of social capital that this can bring). We can also explain why some level of stability in communities is also vital for human well-being. If you doubt this, speak with anyone who had to move homes six, seven, or more times before their 18^th birthday. This point is also sometimes pressed by more socialist-leaning philosophers concerned about the vast bargaining advantage that major capital owners get from the greater mobility of investment capital, which can even be transferred quickly across national boundaries, compared to human labor.

Accounts of human rights or justice grounded on basic needs also plausibly refer to stable shelter in safe living environments as a fundamental necessity. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions housing, among other needs involved in “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of [a person] and of [their] family;” and Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights lists rights to “adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions”—which implies viable pathways to secure tenure and some level of choice and real mobility among housing options. An opportunity-right is more than a mere negative liberty.

Prolonged homelessness—unless one is part of a nomadic tribe—or having to live in areas under bombardment or near toxic wastes are classic violations of the basic human right to safe housing. For example, few people in Gaza have had even minimally safe shelter for at least ten months or more. But what might be required for just housing opportunities beyond the baselines mentioned above remains woefully unclear. Philosophy has important work to do in this area.

At least it seems evident that free market forces alone will probably not meet whatever ethical benchmarks plausible conceptions set, because markets do not produce efficient (Pareto-optimal) outcomes when some crucial “factor” or input into the production of a desired commodity is scarce or not easily substituted by similar factors. Classically, economists considered land to be such a factor leading to “rent effects,” and today, we might say that it is physically livable land near urban centers high with infrastructure, institutional capital, and types of human capital that are too scarce—forcing people to pay too much of their income on housing costs. Thus, the emerging field of “spatial justice.”

Based on a common human birthright to the Earth’s natural resources, one left-libertarian conception of justice dating from Henry George over a century ago argued that all land rents, or returns to natural capital, should be equally shared with everyone. But it is not obvious how to apply such an egalitarian principle to contemporary cities or other “desirable” residential areas: one would have to distinguish the cost attributable to the physical buildings and their amenities, the raw land itself, and the sometimes-very-large value of positive “externalities” that the owner gets from the surrounding communal, infrastructural, human, and environmental goods in the vicinity. In layperson terms, how much did the dwelling cost to build, and how much of its rental value is attributable to the sweet smell of the bakery nearby, the train line to high-employment areas, the quality of the schools, the green spaces, shores, or wilderness within easy reach, the low crime rates and solidarity or goodwill among people in the community, etc.?

As this brief review suggests, while philosophical accounts can provide beginning steps toward a conception of just housing, they support nothing like the very strong and incautious claims often made for affordable housing in popular political discourse today. In particular, at least three important conceptual confusions seem to cloud much of these recent debates.

First, can “affordable” be defined? One measure that looks promising at first would be what someone can afford on roughly a third of the income they could reasonably be expected to earn, given their history, prevailing economic conditions in the area, training easily available to them, etc. But notice that this “earnable” income might be significantly more than what they are, in fact, presently earning in a full-time job—which is another possible baseline. Assuming they work in a sector not dominated by fraud or monopoly, shouldn’t 30% of the prevailing wage for their type of job or business be enough? The US Department of Housing and Urban Development thinks so. Yet, unfortunately, this could entail that anyone must be able to purchase “affordable” and decent housing working as a poet or portrait painter (even though they are a terrible poet or painter), or selling junk they grab from curbside trash (even though they could go back to being a successful software engineer), or as a horse-and-buggy driver (even though the market for this service vanished with the rise of automobiles). And this is only the tip of the iceberg of absurdities that will follow.

At the same time, insisting that people earn their maximum feasible salary—for example, as a cell biologist working for Big Pharma if they have the rare aptitude, rather than working in a job they love with the Bureau of Fish and Wildlife—would also be morally nuts. In nations with developed market economies, this dilemma has been managed de facto by a combination of people having to move to more affordable areas if they insist on working in jobs that do not pay enough for their prior location and employers having to pay more if (a) they do not already pay enough for employees to live (say) within 30 minutes of their location, and (b) not enough employees are willing to commute more than 30 minutes for the jobs they offer.

This brings us to the second key lacuna in recent popular debates: surely the right to “decent, accessible, and affordable housing”—in the words of Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center—cannot mean just “anywhere one wishes to live.” For example, imagine Joe making about $60,000 a year as a stonemason. Surely he may not simply demand to live somewhere in an eight square-block area of the Upper East Side of Manhattan and insist (with great moral gravity) that if his family of four cannot live there for $20,000 a year, then his human right to affordable housing is being grossly violated. Vagueness on this key question of “where” or “how close to your desired location” is fatal to any defensible ideal that gives any significant role to free markets in housing. It is not even physically feasible, let alone economically or morally, possible, to put everyone wishing to live there in the Upper East Side. Yet I get the feeling that this omission is not always an honest oversight: sometimes it feels like an intentional obfuscation on the part of various housing advocates.

So the concept of affordability as part of just housing is meaningless until we specify norms for expectable income and what range of geographic options the dweller must have. These two variables make big differences to such concrete and serious issues as how to bring an end to large encampments of homeless persons in several west-coast cities. Suppose we agree that every homeless person in these makeshift camps should have access to decent and “affordable” housing. Now imagine that the federal government promises everyone documented to have been homeless in one of these cities for longer than (say) six months all of the following: (a) travel costs to a much less densely populated area with job openings where (b) they will receive a basic income for six months to get on their feet and (c) substantial job training, internship, and/or help in securing a job with income sufficient for decent housing in this area, plus (d) help getting on Medicaid.

Could encamped homeless people justly reject this offer and claim that they deserve decent, affordable housing within downtown Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area? Is just wanting for personal reasons to live somewhere that is massively overcrowded enough to justify imposing large costs on others to subsidize your housing and further overwhelm the local carrying capacities of infrastructure and human services? Some intellectually careless housing advocates certainly sound like they defend such a position, but on what conceivable grounds?

Perhaps a plausible alternative is to insist only that some percentage of housing units in every vicinity of a certain density be low-income. This would serve reasonable income-diversity aims in an economically manageable way. But, it might not meet the total or collective national need for affordable housing units. More accurately, it might not meet that total by providing enough units in (say) 30% of most desired locations, so the question of “where” again becomes paramount. Perhaps meeting the total need should involve creating new towns in underpopulated areas through massive government investment. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has promised to do this, repeating to an extent the experiment with massive “council housing” estates of earlier decades. Still, as both British and American experience shows, such large “projects” can become mini-slums if they are not planned well to ensure income diversity, good economic prospects, and viable pathways to ownership (as opposed to endless rental).

Here we come to a third basic mistake or myopia in popular discussions and ill-conceived policy: it bizarrely excludes by arbitrary fiat the commonsense idea that an area can be “maxed out.” Rather than reviving dying towns in many rural areas, or revitalizing deeply impoverished or even abandoned areas in some cities and city-bordering towns—such as parts of Saint Louis and East Saint Louis, southern parts of Chicago, portions of southside LA, or Camden NJ and NJ towns just west of the Hudson—some cities, states, and their political leaders have focused on local zoning in suburban small towns as the root of all evils. The contention is that residents in middle and high-income towns selfishly hoard the good thing they have going; they immorally aim to block subdivision of lots, prevent smaller houses from being turned into larger multi-unit rentals, or stop buyers from putting up seven or eight-story condo buildings where two-or-three story homes or apartments-over-shops now sit. It is as if the politicians and activists imagine there are no other places that a “growing population” could also live well enough—especially with intelligent redevelopment initiatives.

New Jersey, where I reside, is one such state. From 1975, in a series of decisions known colloquially as “Mount Laurel,” the NJ state Supreme Court has increasingly forced townships to provide a “fair share” of low-income housing (and eventually banned towns from paying other townships to take their share). Like many New Jerseyians, I originally supported the Mount Laurel program to protect the rights of low-income families to adequate housing. The spirit and motives were laudable: we should promote integration rather than insular havens of elitism. But over time, the court directives decayed into little more than a weapon used by big developers to force townships to sell them any buildable lot on which they put up a large apartment building. In these buildings, maybe 15 or 20 percent of the units will “low-income”—which could include 1-bedroom units that are over $1500 a month in rent. In economic terms, these builders are just privatizing the collective capital built up over many decades in these towns and selling it for a steep profit, like the Onceler’s firm pirating all the trees in The Lorax.

However, while these perversions of the rulings’ initial intentions get all the press, my aim here is to understand the conceptual mistake at the root of NJ’s Mount Laurel regime and similar ones in other states. The central fallacy is the implicit assumption that any area—whether a city neighborhood, medium-density township, or smaller suburban town—can never be full (call this NBF). The contrary view is that (a) people may legitimately prefer various types of living environments, and (b) some (most?) of these legitimate options imply a maximum density (call this LCF for “legitimately considered full”).

NBF is literally the present NJ law: in the “Garden” state, there is no point at which any township can meet its quota permanently or be finished providing what low-income housing it can as a fair percentage of any maximum total number of housing units for that type of town. Under new legislation, the state has just ordered around 500 towns to add almost 85,000 “affordable” units between 2025 and 2035. If about 150 units per town on average does not sound like much, remember that the builders will insist on at least 750 – 800 units to net 150 “low-income” units in the mix. That is a huge amount for a small suburban community—coming on top of previous rounds of quotas. It could, for example, require adding 500 students or more to the local school district. And in principle, the ante could be upped without end until a township of 10,000 residents is forced to become 100,000 over a few decades.

This NBF mindset can be detected in many recent political attacks on local zoning and the attributions of ill will to residents that go with such attempts to hijack local control of building. Yet, when baldly stated, NBF is absurd. If taken seriously, it would entail that local roadways, sewer lines, schools, and other infrastructure can never be at capacity—physically or socially: we could build skyscraper elementary schools if it came to that. In practice, it suggests that there is no moral room to preserve dwelling areas of different density levels and structure so that people have low-density suburban options. For NBF implies that no one has the right to (a) buy a single-family home in a town made up mostly of single-family homes and (b) be able to rely on their township remaining this way for even ten, let alone thirty years. Yet that is precisely the stability of expectations needed for viable housing markets, given many people’s actual preferences.

NBF is an astonishingly arrogant claim: its defenders are telling us that the only non-bigoted preferences about types of residential communities are living in remote rural or dense city settings. Never mind the fact that many people—of all ethnicities and income levels—feel very unhappy in densely packed areas with lots of traffic, noise, neighbors in the same building, little to no green space between lots, and Main Streets that look like deep canyons between towers blocking the sky. The message of Mount Laurel, and NBF more generally, is that if you are like that, you must be a racist—as NJ Governor Phil Murphy has said on radio call-in shows.

That reasoning is not just fallacious; it is shamefully insulting and unjust. The targeted suburban townships are not lifeboats; there is space in other seaworthy ships. And even lifeboats have a capacity limit.

Unsurprisingly, many people of all ethnicities would like to find a truly low-income apartment in a small suburban town limited to moderate density. They see the great value in this kind of township—which, of course, is why the builders can make a killing by putting up large condos there. But even the builders face a collective action problem (due to negative externalities from crowding) when in aggregate they let too many people exercise this legitimate preference at the same time in the same place.

Nothing in my argument opposes commonsense legislation to promote home ownership, revitalize run-down areas, increase ethnic diversity within towns and neighborhoods, prevent landlord firms from owning too many properties, crack down on predatory mortgage lending practices, or incentivize builders to provide affordable units when apartment complexes are put up. But NBF and destroying local zoning authority are another matter entirely.

As I said, philosophical analysis has its work cut out in this area. Articulating and defending just housing principles will require navigating a minefield of slogans, aspersions, empty self-righteous posturing by the wokest, old-fashioned racism, unfounded faith in free markets, and honest conceptual confusion. This is a challenge in which careful philosophical work can help. But on this perilous quest, I advise bringing your hemlock with you.