The timing couldn’t be worse. The American housing market is already seriously out of sync. Experts estimate there are anywhere from 4 to 7 million too few homes in the United States, while one analysis says U.S. home prices have surged by about a third since just 2020.
The results have been especially felt among the young, with 30-year-old Millennials almost 10 percent less likely to own a home than Baby Boomers were at the same age. But it’s not just young adults: everyone looking to buy a house is feeling the pinch.
This is what makes Sen. Blessing’s price control proposal so dangerous.
Rather than acknowledge that inflation and government spending are the cause of Ohio’s high rent prices, he believes that it’s the private sector’s fault. In particular, he is blaming software that landlords use to help inform their pricing strategies.
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The Biden Administration did the same. Its Department of Justice even filed a lawsuit (which remains open) against this software as an attempt to blame the private sector for the housing crisis and distract from the White House’s own failures of overspending and overregulation.
In Ohio, those failures are especially stark. The average Ohio home sales price is up 8.5 percent just over the last year and close to $50,000 since January 2020. Ohio has a serious housing shortage, with a fifth of the state’s housing stock built before 1939 and half before 1974. All of this is predictably driving residents out of state and into more affordable homes elsewhere.
AG Yost has wisely not signed onto that DOJ suit. And that’s precisely Sen. Blessing’s rub. His resolution requested that he do so.
Ashley Herzog is a freelance writer for the Heartland Institute. She writes from Ohio.