Consequences of housing allocation inefficiency (Sowell)
January 23rd, 2008 | Published in Economics, Quotes, Politics
It has been estimated that there are at least four times as many abandoned housing units in New York City as there are homeless people living on the streets there. Homelessness is not due to a physical scarcity of housing but to a price-related shortage, which is painfully real nonetheless. Such inefficiency in the allocation of resources means that people are sleeping outdoors on the pavement on cold winter nights—some dying of exposure—while the means of housing them already exist, but are not being used because of laws designed to make housing “affordable.”
–Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 45-6.