The $1M Gorilla in the Room: Housing and Observant Affordability
To tackle the spiraling costs facing observant families in America, our community should remember that housing costs aren’t unchangeable
In a recent Times of Israel article, Zev Stub wrote an article that covers the breath of the financial difficulties plaguing Orthodox Jews in America. Stub focuses on tuition as the largest cost of observant life in the US. He discusses other costs more briefly, such as weddings, kosher food, summer camps, and, of course, housing. Some of these are complicated and require analyzing our communal values to decide where money is best spent. Solutions to housing costs are a small part of Stub’s article, but this is an area where the solution is relatively straightforward.
For the big ticket items, Stub suggests moving “out-of-town” as a possible solution for housing costs, while explaining why many do not. Stub describes advocacy efforts under way to reduce tuition with government assistance. What this article takes as a given is that housing costs are inflated in frum communities, and assumes the only solution is for individuals to move to other areas
This situation need not be taken for granted. Houses near shul always costing $1M+, as the article asserts, is the result of a housing shortage. This shortage is the result of local government policies around housing. If many observant Jews are highly motivated to live near shuls, why not allow more building more houses for them? Broadly speaking, most Orthodox communities are located in suburbs where zoning is extremely restrictive, and no new housing is legal to build. If housing supply in a neighborhood is fixed, a family who can afford to buy a $1M home buying a house near shul necessarily means that someone who can’t afford that won’t be able to. Once most of the surrounding population is Jewish, it becomes impossible for the community to grow in any significant way. New people only can move in when someone else leaves, and the results are bidding wars for the remaining properties. And the number of people paying property tax also can’t increase, leading to ever-higher property tax bills as aging municipal infrastructure needs to be replaced with the same number of people footing the bill.
The zoning laws making new housing impossible in Jewish communities are not set in stone. They can be amended by local governments. In places where frum Jews are a substantial part of the population, this group of voters motivated to allow more housing for the health of their own community could change the laws in relatively short order, and over time housing construction would blunt the shortage. Unlike tuition assistance, which requires overcoming constitutional challenges and assuaging concerns about it reducing funding for public schools, more housing is a cause that has no interest group it harms.
Adding more housing could look different in different communities. It could be apartments for families, located around a central courtyard, where people can easily watch each other’s kids and share shabbos meals. Or it could be a small accessory dwelling unit, which might be a backyard cottage housing grandparents who can’t live on their own or rented out to a young couple trying out a new community. Or it could be attached houses or duplexes, so two families can each have a home on a single lot.
Although communities generally see “affordability” as an issue, they don’t see it as an issue with a political solution outside of tuition vouchers. Yet this is an area where motivated and organized Jews could make a significant difference in the life and health of our communities, so people aren’t pushed out due the cost of housing. This key political issue that affects the future of American Jewish communities is barely on the radar. In a community that is often at odds on key political and religious issues, we can’t afford to push people away because they can’t afford extremely expensive housing.
Perhaps if some of the communal effort being expended in different political areas were directed to this area, there would be progress on this issue. Frum families could stop spending ever-increasing amounts of money on housing, and there’d be some relief for the frum world in one of the largest areas of expenditure. If we want our communities to grow and thrive, and our shuls and yeshivos to be vibrant places that are full, we need more housing for people to live in the community in the first place.
