You Have the Right to Make People Homeless—or Do You?

It might surprise you to find out what has become an important factor in homelessness.

The tendency to define policy issues as rights issues leads to all sorts of absurdities—and often tragedies. A current example of conflicting rights claims is the removal of a homeless encampment from Deschutes National Forest in Oregon.

To keep the forest from burning down and spreading wildfires, the U.S. Forest Service was forced to close down what The Washington Post described as “a sprawling encampment”:

Forest Service officials arrived early Thursday morning at Deschutes National Forest south of Bend, Oregon, and closed the gate that led to the encampment, according to advocates who were helping campers relocate.

The forest maintenance project, which will take steps to protect Bend and the popular national forest from wildfires, has been in the works since 2017. A group of the homeless campers had asked a federal court to halt the closure with a temporary restraining order, but a federal judge denied the request this week, allowing government officials to move forward.

Advocates for the forest squatters point out that having to move will create additional hardships for them:

On Thursday morning, groups of campers were making their way out of the Deschutes encampment hour by hour, said Eric Garrity, an advocate and a plaintiff in the campers’ lawsuit. He said he was worried about where they would head next.

“I feel like we very much have left people with nowhere else to go,” Garrity said.

Unfortunately, failure to clear the forest would endanger … homes, the Post reports:

The area in question is “immediately adjacent to the city of Bend and subdivisions, so reducing fire risk there—[it’s] a really critical place to do so,” said Deschutes Forest Supervisor Holly Jewkes. “Having a resilient forest helps prevent large-scale catastrophic fire, insects and disease.” …

The clearing of the campgrounds, however, is part of a much larger project to reduce fire hazard in a 34,600-acre swath of the national forest. The Forest Service is slated to thin trees, mow brush, carry out prescribed burning and reduce vegetation that can fuel fires. Work began in 2023, when the final decision to undertake the project was issued, and is ongoing now, said Jewkes, the Deschutes forest supervisor.

“Factors” are responsible for the squatters’ inability to find more-conventional housing, the Post observes:

The nationwide housing shortage, rising costs and other factors have pushed people into cars, trailers and encampments—with U.S. homelessness reaching a record level by January 2024. Rates are particularly high on the West Coast, and last year Oregon logged one of the highest rates in the nation, based on data collected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

One of those factors in the present case is a lack of housing in the area:

Bend, a riverfront town in central Oregon by the Cascade Mountains, has long been a destination for its outdoor recreation and natural beauty. But it has faced a homelessness crisis, particularly as the population has grown to more than 100,000 and home prices have risen—the median surpassing $700,000 last year after sitting around $577,000 in 2022.

People want to live in scenic areas, and once they get there, they want their surroundings to remain picturesque (and keep their housing values rising), so they make sure that only equally wealthy people can move in—neighbors who can afford to sustain the local aesthetics. Bend is one of those places, Central Oregon Landwatch proudly proclaims:

Throughout Bend’s Urban Growth Boundary planning process, LandWatch was the leading public interest group advocating for a limited expansion to prevent urban sprawl, encourage cost-effective growth, protect wildlife habitat, and foster affordable housing.

By “foster affordable housing,” the LandWatch people mean crowding people into the city’s lowest-value neighborhoods: “By focusing density and redevelopment in several efficiently located ‘Opportunity Areas,’ the plan avoids impacting established neighborhoods,” the organization states on its website.

People living in high-value, beautiful places tend to think that their big investment in their own property entitles them to decide what other people nearby can do with theirs. Thus we have increasingly restrictive zoning laws, anti-sprawl ordinances, NIMBY rules, and numerous other restrictions on what people can do with the property the ostensibly own.

I use the word “ostensibly” because if someone else can tell you what you can and cannot do with your property absent direct damage to their own, they are operating as a co-owner at least. You don’t really own it.

These restrictions are not morally justifiable. If a neighbor is polluting your property or otherwise damaging it, you have a right to redress. That person’s property, however, is just as much theirs as yours is yours, and you do not have a right to limit another’s right to use it as he or she sees fit, even if the other person’s aesthetic values, say, are not as refined as you believe yours to be.

If you want to make sure that the properties around yours are aesthetically pleasing and do not reduce the potential value of your property, you have a simple option: buy them. If you prefer not to do that or cannot afford to, well, welcome to the human race.

Despite their obviously dubious foundation, government-imposed limits on urban growth are common across the nation, and they severely suppress much-needed expansion of the housing stock, thus driving supply down and prices up. Demographer Wendell Cox has written extensively on the enormous harm these government policies of “focusing density and redevelopment” do. Here is an example from a piece he published a couple of weeks ago at New Geography:

Over the last half-century, more restrictive urban planning policies have been associated with undermined housing affordability for the middle class. Given the primacy of housing costs in household budgets, this also means that these restrictive policies, especially urban containment, have been associated with greater overall poverty. Some research even suggests that rigid regulation has taken a heavy toll on the economy.

Unfortunately, much of the present housing affordability discussion profoundly misses what is probably the biggest issue—metropolitan area (market) restrictions on urban fringe development (the theological term is “urban sprawl.” Instead we [hear] about smaller lot sizes (as if lot size matters much), parking (as if people will give up their cars and walk), historic preservation and a host of minutia that cannot hold a candle to the effect of blocking development in the one part of the market) that defines the land value base for the entire enclosed area—the urban fringe.

It is a very simple process, Cox notes, and is it visible everywhere, including a particularly vivid comparison from Canada:

Generally, land values in the physical city (built-up urban area) increase toward the urban center and stronger commercial centers (all else equal). Urban containment disrupts this pattern, causing abrupt land value spikes at urban growth boundaries and greenbelts—as well as higher land prices throughout the encircled area, including the inner city. This drives up land prices, which tend to become the most expensive factor of production where there is urban containment (Figure 1), as is indicated in Vancouver and Toronto, compared to Winnipeg.

“It’s rather like eggs,” writes Cox. “When there is a shortage of hens, the prices of eggs rise. When there is a shortage of land the price of housing rises, often at very high rates.”

It is one thing to be eggless, quite another to be homeless. Those who proclaim sympathy for the homeless while pressing for anti-sprawl land-use restrictions bear much responsibility for the plight of those who cannot afford permanent places to live.