Greetings from Guatemala City, where (I’m told) the weather is unseasonably warm—high 80s today. This is my first visit to Guatemala, and I’ve had a full few days already with more to come. But before I elaborate . . .
What I’m Writing
Last weekend I submitted my review of Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges’s Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis to the Law & Liberty website. L&L’s editorial team did a very quick turnaround, and I have already responded to the request for edits. I don’t have the publication date for the piece yet, but of course I will link to it when it appears. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from my original draft:
“We need housing prices to fall; we also cannot afford for them to fall. Thus, we are trapped.” With these words, Charles “Chuck” Marohn and Daniel Herriges summarize the quandary of U.S. housing policy. At bottom, they say, we have “a broken market that is more responsible to capital flow than to local demand.” Thus, for example, the overwhelming majority of new homes built today have three or more bedrooms even though two-thirds of American households consist of one or two people. This diagnosis might seem like the setup for an anticapitalist screed, but in fact Marohn and Herriges issue a welcome call for market-friendly reforms to increase both the quantity and variety of the housing stock while also making it more affordable. . . .
Beginning in the 1970s, America experienced a series of financial crises connected to the housing market and the way in which it is financed. From the mortgage system’s distress during the years of stagflation up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress reacted in predictable ways with legislation that doubled down on the system first created during the Great Depression. Along the way, Wall Street and large banks, who accurately discerned that the housing market had an implied federal backstop, developed all sorts of investment vehicles intended to populate the “safe” levels of the risk pyramid. This process both brought more capital into the mortgage market to drive up home prices and made the health of nearly every financial institution dependent on that market. Marohn and Herriges recount these episodes in methodical fashion to establish the conclusion that the federal government simply cannot allow the housing market to fall by any significant degree. To do so would be to allow all sorts of “too-big-to-fail” institutions to collapse.
The corollary of this policy is that housing in most markets is more expensive than ever when compared to median household income. Not only federal policy, but restrictive zoning and NIMBY (“Not-In-My-Back-Yard”) activism keeps housing supply tight in many major metropolitan areas. The authors predict we are heading for federal approval of a 50-year mortgage as the logical next step in the decades-long policy of keeping housing prices high, even as levels of household indebtedness reach record levels; “[i]n the 1930s, financially sound homeowners sought short-term loans from fragile local banks. In the 2020s, national too-big-to-fail banks seek long-term mortgages from fragile homeowners.”
Feedback from The Liberating Arts
As you will probably remember, last week I published the final post in my series discussing and evaluating Plough Publishing’s The Liberating Arts. Earlier this week, the volume’s editor, Jeff Bilbro of Grove City College, responded to the series with a tweet thread, which begins at this link.
Prof. Bilbro expressed appreciation for my “careful engagement” with the book and went on to explain why the editors decided to devote more attention to liberal arts education outside the academy, a move I critiqued in the series. Thanks, Jeff!
Update
You might think that the end of the spring semester provides a time to stop and take a breath, but in fact that usually isn’t the case because of the way Faulkner’s calendar works. This has been finals week, and graduation happens on Saturday, but all my summer websites are supposed to be published next Monday, one week in advance of the beginning of the summer term. Teaching online means your term begins a week early every time. This summer I am doing one undergraduate survey and one graduate seminar on my own and co-teaching another graduate seminar. So there’s plenty to do in the next few days, even though I have already graded ~700 pages of graduate students’ term papers and submitted all my final grades for the spring.
To complicate matters further, I ended up in Guatemala this week after being asked to serve as a chaplain for a surgical team from Health Talents International on a one-week trip. The team is scheduled to arrive in Guatemala on Saturday, at which point I’ll join them.
But I came down a few days early in order to pay a visit to Universidad Francisco Marroquin (UFM), about which I’ve heard so much from various quarters over the past several years. Dr. Lenore Ealy, a longtime friend who is part of UFM’s upper administration, kindly arranged several speaking engagements for me.
Thursday morning, I spoke to two different sections of a course called Critical Thinking. The students were first-year undergraduates who are part of UFM’s institute for political science and international relations, which happens to have a Great Books component to its curriculum. The Critical Thinking course is really about intellectual virtue, and the topic for this week was “intellectual tenacity.” I enjoyed pretty wide-ranging discussions with the students about intellectual virtue and the Great Books more generally. My Spanish is muy malo, and many of them weren’t confident speaking English at first, but in the end they became very talkative. Afterwards I was hosted at a luncheon with some of the institute’s faculty and students to discuss how a Great Books education can contribute to professional success.
Thursday afternoon I paid a visit to Instituto Fe y Libertad (Institute for Faith and Liberty) not far from UFM. The institute publishes a peer-reviewed journal and produces media content to promote classical liberalism throughout Latin America. Its small staff was very welcoming. I was interviewed about the current state of the conservative movement in America for the institute’s podcast. Then they asked me to consult on some questions related to academic publishing, and we had an interesting conversation about that.
On Friday I visited another group of students, this time in UFM’s Michael Polanyi College, which also has a substantial Great Books component to its curriculum. Again, I had to prime the pump a little to get the students comfortable talking in English, but after a few minutes they loosened up, and we had a good conversation about the importance of the Great Books. Afterwards I was given a campus tour by one of the professors. UFM has a small but impressive museum of Mayan artifacts, and I was able to spend about 30 minutes there learning about the culture.
Saturday afternoon I rendezvous with the surgical team from Health Talents International and head west for a week of medical missions. I’d appreciate prayers for the team’s safety and successful work.