Sep 16, 2025
Right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk said that solving America’s housing crisis starts with cracking down on crime and jailing more people.
“One of my hopes is to turn the Republican Party into a resolutely stronger party on crime,” Kirk recently said during an episode of his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. “We are not harsh enough on crime in this country… and this is not just about stopping criminals. If you enforce the law, housing will be cheaper because more of the country will be livable.”
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Is he right? By most mainstream estimates, the U.S. simply doesn’t have enough homes.
In 2022, Brookings reported a housing shortfall of 4.9 million.
At the same time, investor activity in the market has grown. In Q1 2025, investors purchased nearly 27% of homes sold — the highest share in at least five years.
This rising investor presence is one reason entry-level buyers are being priced out.
What crime has to do with prices
The U.S. already incarcerates nearly 2 million people — the highest rate among developed nations. That translates to 580 inmates per 100,000 residents, according to federal data.
While crime can influence housing demand, the economic relationship is often misunderstood. One study found that a 1% drop in violent crime corresponded to 0.2% to 0.6% increase in home prices in affected neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, safer streets attract more buyers, boosting demand — and typically raising prices.
In other words, safer communities don’t make housing more affordable; they make certain areas more desirable.
That’s where Kirk’s theory — that jailing more people would lower housing costs — begins to fall apart. Incarceration is one of the most expensive tools in public policy.
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Annual per-prisoner costs vary widely range from $23,000 in Arkansas to more than $307,000 in Massachusetts, with a national median of $64,865. Alabama’s new 4,000-bed prison, for example, carries a $1 billion price tag. Those dollars aren’t building homes — they’re building cells.
And there’s a deeper economic issue. Aggressive incarceration and immigration enforcement can shrink the available construction labor pool, driving up building costs and timelines. In a country already facing a severe housing shortage, that’s the opposite of what the market needs.
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) notes that current regulatory and labor conditions function like a tax. It taxes U.S. builders, buyers, and consumers and drives up housing costs.
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What the government is doing
Real solutions to America’s housing shortage don’t come from provocative headlines — they come from policies that increase supply and reduce the cost of building.
On the federal level, Congress is weighing bipartisan legislation aimed at easing restrictive local zoning laws, which often stall or block new housing construction. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is backing research and pilot programs designed to support faster, more innovative local reforms.
Lawmakers are pushing to expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) — the nation’s largest source of federal support for affordable rental housing. If enacted, that expansion could finance hundreds of thousands of new units over the next decade, helping to close the estimated multi-million-unit housing gap.
While safer neighborhoods do increase property values, they don’t reduce housing costs. At scale, mass incarceration drains public resources, consumes land that could be used for housing, and removes productive labor from the economy.
Proven solutions may not make headlines, but they work — streamlining zoning, unlocking funding, and building where people want to live.
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Monique Danao is a highly experienced journalist, editor and copywriter with 8 years of expertise in finance and technology. Her work has been featured in leading publications such as Forbes, Decential, 99Designs, Fast Capital 360, Social Media Today and the South China Morning Post.
