“Money doesn’t solve the problem. Supply is the problem,” he said. “There’s no shortage of investors looking to invest in housing. The biggest bottleneck isn’t the financing, it’s the government process. If it takes five years to approve a project, no amount of capital from Wall Street can fix that.”
He said the fix requires modernizing zoning, streamlining permitting, and cutting through environmental reviews that stretch projects by years, and he pointed to Texas as compared to California and New York to make the case.
“Look at states like California and New York — it’s impossible to build there,” he said. “Compare that with states like Texas and markets like Austin. There’s not a housing shortage in Austin. It’s actually the opposite. Housing prices and rents are coming down because they’ve let builders build. In California, it takes five, ten years just to get through the permitting and approval process.”
Cassidy said the public-private model is the right framework, but only when the government’s role is to reduce barriers rather than replace the market. He pointed to FHA itself as an example.
“FHA has been around since 1934. It doesn’t lend a dollar — all FHA does is guarantee a loan that a private lender makes,” he said. “The goal should be to use every federal dollar to attract multiple dollars of private capital. You can’t subsidize your way out of a housing shortage. You have to build your way out of it.”
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