Inflation keeps pushing costs higher and higher. Anger is rising, too.
By Conor Dougherty
Economics Reporter
The New York Times
Here’s a list of places you might imagine seeing an argument over housing policy. A city council meeting. A late-night zoning hearing. Maybe a ribbon-cutting to christen a new affordable housing complex.
Instead, there was Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., on a stage dressed as the pope with a half-dozen hecklers in yellow T-shirts berating his new housing plan from the audience in front of him. Mr. Lucas had arrived at the outdoor Starlight Theater on a warm August evening for a cameo appearance in a local production of “Sister Act.” Just before he walked onto the stage, the demonstrators, who belonged to a group called KC Tenants, unfurled a banner that read “Mayor Lucas: Developing Displacement.”
A pack of uniformed security guards promptly smothered the scene. During the slow procession to the exit gates that followed, members of KC Tenants chanted, “The rent is too damn high!” while the audience tried to focus on the mayor/pope and the dancing nuns.
Such is the state of housing in America, where rising costs are flaring into pockets of resistance and rage. Take two-plus years of pandemic-fueled eviction anxiety and spiking home prices, add a growing inflation problem that is being increasingly driven by rising rents, and throw in a long-run affordable housing shortage that cities seem powerless to solve. Add it up and the 44 million U.S. households who rent a home or apartment have many reasons to be unhappy.