Legislature harms affordable housing, disregards local control and disrespects voters | Opinion
Once again, the majority in the Idaho Legislature has shown that it is not committed to the principles of federalism.
On Monday, the Senate passed House Bill 545, a bill that Deanna Watson, executive director of the Boise City/Ada County Housing Authorities, warned could leave some Boise families homeless, as Rachel Spacek reported. The bill bans a set of ordinances enacted in September to help address the lack of affordable housing in the city.
This is a regular pattern stretching back decades. Idaho cities are banned from regulating plastic grocery bags, limiting where people can carry knives, setting their own minimum wages, regulating natural gas and just about everything else you can think of.
Idahoans are losing out because of this disregard for local control.
The major virtue of federalism is that it allows policy experiments. Texas can try out policies that wouldn’t fly in other parts of the country. If they work, that encourages other states to follow suit. If they fail, no one else has to repeat Texas’ mistake.
The idea, which Justice Louis Brandeis described as laboratories of democracy, works for cities within a state just as well as for states within in a country. Orlando can try out policies that may not work in Miami.
And Boise had some very good reasons for experimenting.
The Treasure Valley, where a massive population spike has led to a housing crunch much move severe than in other parts of Idaho, is an ideal location for such policy experimentation. Boise did so by banning landlords from refusing to consider applicants using federal Section 8 vouchers, meant to help low-income families afford housing.
Was Boise’s experiment failing? There’s absolutely no indication of that.
Rents in Boise remain expensive — the effect of massive population growth that for years outstripped new housing construction, which still hasn’t caught up — but they are trending downward, according to data from Zillow, Rent Cafe, Rent.com and Apartment List. That is entirely inconsistent with the situation that proponents of the bill warned of: One in which landlords flee the market and low-income renters are facing a severe shortage. Shortages cause rapid price increases, not decreases.
So if the market is spooked by these regulations, well, somebody better tell the market.
Gov. Brad Little likely agrees with the free-market rationale of the bill, but he should veto it to preserve some minor remnant of federalism in Idaho.
Because in Idaho today, there are no laboratories of democracy. If a city tries to do anything innovative, it won’t be long before the state intervenes to ban it. There’s really no point in trying to solve problems at all in an environment of such pervasive state overreach.
As our editorial board wrote two years ago about a similar bill: “when Idaho Republicans speak of federalism, what they mean is that all powers properly belong to the state legislature.”
In other words, their commitment to federalism is superficial and purely instrumental. Their real commitment is to collecting and exercising as much power as they can. When federalism can be used as a means toward that end, it’s a sacred founding principle. When it can’t, it goes straight in the garbage can.
If Little’s commitment to federalism is any deeper than the Legislature’s, he’ll veto the bill.