U.S. farm policy causes high home prices? Really?

I hate U.S. farm policy (particularly distortionary farm subsidies) as much as anyone.  But blaming it for high home prices?  Sharon Astyk says our "economic policies" are not only to blame for cheap food, but are also the root cause of . . . urbanization, which causes higher home prices:

[A]s Norberg-Hodge et. al point out, as the percentage of income spent on food fell, the percentage spent on housing skyrocketed. And these two things are entirely related. As the authors write,

This is a direct consequence of the same economic policy choices that supposedly lowered the cost of food. Those policies have promoted urbanization by sucking jobs out of rural areas and centralizing them in a relative handful of cities and suburbs. In those regions, the price of land skyrockets, taking the cost of homes and rentals with it.

Exactly which "economic policy choices" have promoted urbanization?  Here's a chart showing the growth in U.S. urban population since 1790:

Whatever "policy choices" we made were evidently put in place in 1840, and were enforced with an iron fist for the next 130 years.  Note that there has been only a modest increase in the urban population's percentage of total population since 1970 -- which is roughly when Nixon initiated the "keep food cheap at all cost" policy.

Growth in urban population did plateau briefly between 1930 and 1940.  One guess why.  Since depressions wipe out the economic opportunities available in cities, I suppose our refusal to self-impose depression-inducing economic policies is a "cause" of urbanization.  But who wants to campaign on the slogan, "The Great Depression:  the 'cure' for oppressive urbanization"?

Urbanization has indeed raised the price of land in cities and towns, but the increased opportunity, productivity and innovation created by cities have more than offset that cost.  (And while we are spending more on housing than the hearty yeomen of yesteryear, we may be getting a wee bit more for our money.)

I can't help passing on one other choice nugget:

The process of industrialization and urbanization then creates the need to compensate for the rise in price to meet needs that were not previously monetized. One way is to take more labor from either a single breadwinner or add more breadwinners. In Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American, she has documented that 19th century industrialization represented the longest hours ever worked by any people, despite our overwhelming perception that farmwork is unnecessarily hard. The next most overworked people in history are us -- we come right after the 19th century factory workers and coal miners, and well before any agrarian society. But the rising costs of meeting basic needs mean that we must work harder than many agrarian people have.

For example, in 1066: The Year of the Conquest, historian David Howarth notes that the average 11th century British serf worked one day a week to pay for his house, the land that he fed himself off of, his access to his lord's wood lot for heating fuel, and a host of other provisions, including a barrel of beer for him and his neighbor on each saint's day (and there were a lot of them). How many of us can earn our mortgage payment, our heat, and our beer on a single day's work?

And how many of us dump our waste in the street, drink feces-tainted water, and have a life expectancy of 33?

Comments

[bittergradstudent]

Now, this is a conservative. Let's all go back to the carefree days before artisans moved to the field and we were all tied to the land! A paper extolling the benefits of serfdom!

[Scooby]

Howarth can't keep his arguement straight even within the space of a paragraph. That one day per week (as he lays out in the first sentence), not per month (as he implies in the second sentence), paid for his shelter, a barrel of beer, and access to the trees (for fuel) and the fields (for food). That makes housing about 16% of his gross income. The other 87% of his time was spent working those fields and woods to produce his food and fuel.

I can pay my mortgage with little more than one day per week, although I can see that most people take two days per week to do the same. Unlike in 1066, we don't have to spend the remaining 4 or 5 non-Sabbath days to pay for food.

[AC]

"Conservative" is an apt description.

People who yearn for the good ole days of honest farm labor never seem willing to cut the broadband connection.

[Scooby]

I guess I should have attributed the faulty logic to Astyk, not Howarth, since she just got the factoid from 1066, not the stupid "How many of us can earn our mortgage payment, our heat, and our beer on a single day's work?" comparison.