I'm John Batchew with Professor John Cochran of Stanford University.

He keeps the grumpy economist site on Substack.

I recommend to everyone because it's not grumpy, it's witty.

Even when the subject is housing.

And most recently, John has written a column called 40 bad ideas and a couple of good ones.

I want to go with the bad ideas because once upon a time I lived in Manhattan for 50 years,

plagued by affordable housing called rent control.

Well, it didn't work.

What it did was freeze the market and make what was available without rent control

and exorbitantly expensive and didn't do anything

to maintain the quality of the housing that was rent control because there was no incentive

for the landlord. That was then. This is now. We're looking at the Canadian election where there

said to not be enough housing for the immigrants that have been welcomed by the government

these last years under Justin Trudeau. How did that happen? Well, because people had ideas about housing.

John has a column up of a lot of bad, well, let me put this way, a lot of virtuous ideas that turn

out to be troublesome. I like this one, John, because New York City is overwhelmed right now

with the migrant story and the shelters are full and they're always looking for room to put people

and there are hotels that are overrun with families that don't have a future and might be

deported anyway. Fund housing vouchers to shrink the shelter population.

And you talk about how much New York spends on homeless shelters and eliminate citizenship requirements for those vouchers.

Why are these bad ideas, John?

This was a column written.

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