I don’t usually agree with Tom Moran, but he’s right about this: the extraordinary cost of housing is a question of supply and demand1 and the biggest bottleneck to supply is municipal zoning.2 Indeed, I said much the same thing almost a year ago.
The problem is home rule. Municipalities use their power to adopt land use regulations to implement standards that unduly restrict the ability of the market to provide housing. Often these regulations are justified by appeals to environmental concerns or “good planning,” but the biggest incentive is economic: housing equals schoolchildren equals higher property taxes.3 Therefore, the theory goes, if residential development there must be, the best kind is expensive housing that will at least pay for the increased cost of local services by its taxes.
Jay Bohn
July 21, 2022
- Moran also says “the crisis brought on by the shortage of housing is a blessing [for those who already own a home.] Aside from my belief that people should buy a house to live in it, not to make a profit, the inflated cost of housing blesses only those sellers who do not need a replacement purchase and perhaps downsizers, not growing families. ↩︎
- Moran, however, undercuts the seriousness of his argument by hurling insults; if editorialists believe that increasing polarization is bad for the country, they shouldn’t contribute to it by use of invective. ↩︎
- I am not so naive to think that social, racial or “prestige” concerns have or had absolutely no role in the development and continuance of exclusionary zoning, but I do think we’d have the problem without them. ↩︎