The Housing Issue We Don't Talk About

Last week, Edward Coristine went through every man’s nightmare.

The 19-year-old Department of Government Efficiency staffer was walking through downtown DC with his girlfriend when ten teenagers decided they wanted her car. Coristine shoved his girlfriend into the driver's seat, slammed the door, and took a beating from the gang while she called 911 from inside the locked vehicle. He was left bloody and concussed.

But this isn’t a standard inner-city beatdown. It turns out Coristine has powerful friends. He was hand picked by Elon Musk to work on DOGE and is well known within the administration. Within days of the incident Trump responded by tweeting that it is possibly time to federalize Washington DC. Firing the local government. Running the city himself. It's legally possible. He’s already announced he wants all homeless people to leave DC, and there are rumors he will put 1,000 national guards on the streets of DC.

It’s a very real likelihood he will pull an El Salvador in DC by attempting to eradicate crime in DC completely. This administration operates differently than the first time he was president. Tariffs are here, so is the immigration policies. He is more aggressive. More direct. No hesitation. The El Salvador option is likely.

Trump talks about street crime constantly, and it’s not new. This isn’t the first time he’s jumped into the middle of it. Back in the early ’90s, he stopped some guy mid–baseball bat attack on Fifth Avenue. One of the funniest things I’ve ever read in a newspaper.

Crime in America

Is DC dangerous? Yes. It’s an American city. Which means it’s dangerous. You figure this out after traveling, when you realize the safest place you can be is anywhere outside the United States. DC is no exception.

I lived there for a while. Worked there. you hear of odd incidents all the time.

You didn’t need to be a crime victim to feel it. It was just in the air. This clicks when you watch someone blast videos on subway speakers. Nobody else in the subway car moves. Nobody speaks. They're all running the same calculation, this person already broke the basic social contract, so what else will they break? Someone who forces thirty strangers to listen to their TikTok videos has already announced they don't follow rules or care about consequences. So when you think about tapping their shoulder, you're not wondering if they'll turn it down. You're wondering if they'll stab you.

The antisocial behavior works because everyone else does the math and decides their comfort isn't worth finding out where this person's boundaries actually end. It's soft terrorism. The threat never gets spoken, never gets recorded in any crime database, but it controls every interaction. This is why minor violations create major anxiety. This is why broken windows theory sounds right even when the data looks wrong. People aren't reacting to crime statistics. They're reacting to the constant, unspoken possibility that any random encounter could turn lethal..

But that is only one of the problems with high crime rates. There’s a bigger issue America needs to address. The issue is crime is concentrated in specific neighborhoods. This removes massive amounts of housing stock from consideration by anyone with options.

Nobody discusses this when they talk about the housing crisis.

The Thing Nobody Talks About in Housing Debates

Is there a housing crisis? Obviously. Housing has become genuinely unaffordable for working families. Not just expensive. Genuinely out of reach.

Everyone has their theory as to why, they point to zoning laws, interest rates, not enough new homes being built, regulations, they even write entire books on all the reasons. But they're all missing the elephant in the room: Half of every major American city is essentially off-limits to a reasonable person.

I lived in DC and Chicago. Rent consumed huge chunks of my paycheck in both places. However, in these cities sat massive areas with dirt-cheap housing that I would never consider living in. Not because the homes were bad (they were fine). Not because of commute times (they weren’t long). It’s because I preferred not getting shot. Simple calculation.

The localized crime in America creates a “parallel housing inventory", entire neighborhoods ruled out by anyone with options due to crime. Giant chunks of valuable urban real estate sit unusable because and are not priced by the market like other neighborhoods because the government doesn’t enforce the law.

You grow up in America and think this is normal. It is not normal. Americans have become so accustomed to writing off entire chunks of land in major cities that we've forgotten this isn't normal. In Madrid, Munich, Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Rome, you don't hear people casually say "Oh, you absolutely can't live in that district in the city." Even cities with serious challenges maintain middle-class families, functioning businesses, and basic services everywhere. The government doesn't just shrug and let entire postal codes become no-go zones.

But we as Americans do.

The Great American Real Estate Illusion

Let me show you what I mean.

Here's one-half of DC, the expensive part where everyone wants to live. Notice the prices. It’s high.

Here's the other half. Across the Anacostia River where you can get a place for half the price. In Washington DC the median home price west of the Anacostia routinely exceeds $800,000. East of the river it plummets to around $450,000. The price reflects police enforcement gaps. Safety deficits. The law isn’t being enforced.

Same exact pattern in Chicago. The North Side gets more expensive every year:

While the South Side sits there with bargain prices that no one with options will touch. In Chicago, roughly 40% of the city's land area trades at a 50%+ discount due to safety concerns. That's potentially 200,000+ housing units that middle-class families won't consider.

and in Philly too. The expensive part.

and here is north Philly the area where crime keeps housing values low.

This happens in so many cities in America. Everyone ends up bidding up the "safe" half of the city while the other half languishes with cheap rent. It's like having a city-wide game of musical chairs where half the chairs are on fire.

When we're already short millions of units nationwide, we can't afford to have entire neighborhoods sitting unused or protected by some invisible veil of death for any outsider.

The solution isn't rocket science, make the parallel inventory usable again. This means consistent police presence and swift prosecution that signals to criminals that an area is abandoned. It means treating public safety as infrastructure, not a luxury.

In This Newsletter

1) Many of These Places Are Beautiful. Crime accidentally preserved America's best architecture while "safe" areas got soulless condos. These neighborhoods have walkable grids, mature trees, and gorgeous bones from before white flight.

2) The Gentrification Argument Is Un-American. Everyone pays taxes and deserves safety, regardless of race or income. Opposing safety improvements to preserve "community character" is backwards. Cities should work for all Americans.

Crime Preserves Beautiful Architecture

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