Up a political creek, the Biden Administration has resorted once again to hitting policy buttons at random. The most recent sortie to intervene in the daily lives of Texans is particularly troublesome: A proposed nationwide cap on rent increases. You may be wondering in what due diligence the federal government has engaged to weigh the economic effects of such a decision; if you guessed “none at all,” you would be right.
Of course, the Biden Administration is no stranger to incurious investigation. I am proud to have helped defeat the impeachment charges against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the nation’s most successful, conservative legal bulwark against Joe Biden’s socialist agenda. Fortunately, justice prevailed, and the Texas Senate sent this effort to the ash heap of Texas history.
This experience helped me learn a lot about the weaponization of government and the use of the legal process to accomplish political ends. While Paxton was vindicated, that machine churns on. That’s one reason I’ve decided to run for the Texas House of Representatives — to put that power back under the control of the voters.
The cost and the availability of housing is a major political issue for this November’s presidential election, with the most obvious culprit for the cost increases being President Biden’s out-of-control spending and borrowing. To deflect attention from the consequences of his bad economic policies, the President, the hyper-politicized Department of Justice under Democrat Merrick Garland, and Democrats in Congress are attempting to affix blame to the private sector – the “big landlords,” as President Biden mentioned in his March State of the Union Address.
In the span of several months, the Democrat elites in Washington introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of algorithm software in rental pricing, initiated an investigation against a Texas property management software company, and announced a plan to impose rent controls.
Talk about a triple threat. None of these policies will actually deliver for consumers, but they will certainly create the illusion that Beltway elites are “doing something” about the problem. The truth is less intriguing. The real reasons behind the housing shortage are inflation, interest rates, and profligate government spending, all of which are causing rent prices to rise as high as they’ve been in recent history.
Texas has taken a different path. Instead of resorting to failed policies like rent control and tilting at private sector windmills, Texas has confronted this challenge with free market policies that incentivize housing construction. Rents in major Texas cities like Austin and San Antonio were out of control for several years. But the recent influx of investment and the construction of new units has resolved this problem. Rents in both cities are now falling as new units come online.
Rather than follow our lead, Washington, D.C. blames the private sector for the fiscal, government, regulatory, and environmental policy failures of the party in charge. Inflation has taxed everyone’s resources, landlords included. Rising insurance costs, maintenance costs, energy bills and property taxes have made rent increases a foregoing conclusion just to stay in business. All of these problems are the shrapnel of spending like a drunken government sailor.
Biden’s policies won’t make Texas better and won’t house more Texans. Capping rents means capping investment returns, which means fewer units gets built, which means less available housing. Government intervention in housing has historically increased housing prices — meaning that, if the Biden administration’s blame game campaign receives enough political backing, the lower rents Texas is benefiting from today will likely go up in smoke. If the reports of a forthcoming Department of Justice lawsuit against a Texas property management software company prove true, it will be only the next in a long line of failed federal intrusions into the residential real estate market.
I ran for office to keep this sort of thing out of our state. The coercive power of government regulation has a winless record in Texas. Fortunately, Texas has never had more conservative candidates available to fight the left’s radical agenda. We will do everything we can to enable more residential capacity and keep the Texas miracle alive for business owners and renters alike.
Mitch Little is a Republican candidate to represent House District 65 in the Texas State House
