Instead of repeating by well-understood failures, e.g. California's SB 9—so exhaustively documented that I always have students in my MPP seminar wanting to [re-]write about it for yet another final policy memo—ignoring under-discussed success cases, e.g. substantial recent increases in college town permitting, and running yet another advertisement for the as-yet theoretical street votes concept, I hope future pieces will chart some new territory, or at least meet advocates and practitioners at the actionable frontier of their work.
I'm all for replacing zoning with private, voluntary land-use covenants—I wrote a whole book about the idea. But the reality of hyperlocal land-use regulation is actually just a bit of a mess, for reasons I got into in my recent piece about dead mall. Even in the best of cases, such a transition is quite outside the bounds of the Overton Window. And it's just very simply not the case that state/provincial preemption has always and everywhere failed. (Without looking it up, test your knowledge: What's SB 684-1123? What does RICZ stand for?)
Here's an idea: One of the co-authors is based in Florida. The Live Local Act—a vanilla zoning preemption reform of the sort that is allegedly unworkable/unsustainable—seems to have entitled over 50,000 units since 2023, and has only been strengthened in subsequent sessions. Why? What does it mean for successful state preemption design? Were there broader differences in Florida governance that drove this success relative to e.g. California's AB 2011/SB 6? Is Florida legislative politics different in some respect that would help us predict where state/provincial preemption is more or less likely to result in "clean" reform?
Instead of more a priori theory about Coasian bargaining among neighbors, two complimentary theory projects that are actually puzzles for activists/practitioners: rather than (or perhaps alongside) state preemption of local land-use regulations, how do you solve the prisoner's dilemma of permitting in a fragmented metropolis? How do you shift the incentives facing local governments to make them want to issue more permits? The usual theory story—fiscal zoning—could be true, but it's not very well empirically grounded, and it's not clear how it interacts with other political pressures facing local policymakers and planners.
It is being resurrect by abundancers (woke reaganists) as a supply-side "tax-free" way to both enrich further incumbent landowners and to create the mirage of higher housing availability in areas in which government policy has concentrated the desirable jobs.
«I'm all for replacing zoning with private, voluntary land-use covenants — I wrote a whole book about the idea. But the reality of hyperlocal land-use regulation is actually just a bit of a mess»
I liked this amusing description of the reaganist privatization of zoning in a comment in a previous discussion which showed that they can be highly effective (for those who can afford to pay):
“Perhaps the issue’s been raised, but skimmed over by the Evelyn Wood Great Coast Socialists shocked by fertilizer proximities: Outside of a few cities, there ain’t no zoning in the grand land of Tejas. Oil fields next to middle schools, refineries next to residential cracker boxes.
Middle and upper classes know this and pay their premiums to become part of deed restricted communities, while the tired, huddled and poor get close-up views of the cracking stacks.
[...] Developers know only morons and moochers would live somewhere where there is no zoning. They make sure guv’mint stays off the backs of thems morons in the name o’ in-amiable rights, while being sure to peddle their de facto zoning (only petunias in the buffer zone) to the captive audience of above-average barely sensible homeowners.
[...] Moving from CA was quite an eye-opener; boil water notices for a month (private water), internet constantly down (private cable), two-hour log-jam commutes (toll roads and pay HOV lanes) – better services to be had in developing nations.”
None of your examples of “successful” Coasian bargaining address the core NIMBY problem, neighbors using zoning to block development on property *they don’t own*
Israel’s program is a tool to redevelop condo buildings with 2/3 majority rather than consensus; Japan’s program facilitates neighborhood-level redevelopment involving complex lot assembly. London’s program is a vote among resident about public housing. These examples are irrelevant to the problem you say you’re trying to solve, which is increasing neighbor buy-in for density on sites they don’t own or live on
State preemption is politically hard, you’re right! But successful examples like CA’s ADU law show the formula works. We have a lot of work to do continuing to build political consensus for housing. Giving all of America HOAs-tier veto powers won’t help
«We have a lot of work to do continuing to build political consensus for housing.»
But for what kind of consensus? The "abundancers" (socially progressive reaganistas) seem to me to want to solve a specific problem:
* The electoral success of reaganism has depended since Reagan/Clinton on delivering large housing profits to many/most middle-class property-owning worker so they vote on their property-owner interests rather than their worker interests.
* Because house prices in many areas are now so high any further increases risk to make buying property only affordable to people who already own property, which reduces the electoral base of property owners, and low natality rates means that many people will inherit more than one property, further reducing the electoral base of property owners. Many papers and books have been written on the potential for as slow shrinking of the constituency for reaganism.
* Therefore the primary goal seems to be to increase the number of property owning voters by making entry level properties cheaper, but that conflicts with keeping the votes of existing property owners who do not want to see lower property prices.
* Densification as proposed in this blog port solves *both* problems: by increasing the number of rooms on the same amount of land it gives both a big gain to incumbent property owners (who own the land) in a given place and lower per-room costs to more people moving into the same place, thus it is a vote-winner. In England there is also the "HMO" (House Of Multiple Occupation) strategy where single-family houses are split into independent flats or into individual rooms with shared areas.
As myself and other commenters have pointed out that also dramatically increases congestion in the same area, but could be fixed with large increases in local government taxes and private services prices, but that comes after, or the fix can be omitted, as new tenants coming in will accept a lower quantity and quality of services for the sake of a shorter commute to their jobs.
Seen from a broader perspective densification is similar to "doubling up" (more people in the same number of rooms instead of more rooms in the same amount of land) and "doubling up" in much of England and other places has become the single largest driver of "productivity".
As with most discussions about housing, this article avoids two key problems which are not really about construction at all. They are beyond the scope of Coasian bargaining because not within the authority of bargainers to promise in any theoretical deal. The first big problem is what I call a fear of a lack of "conservation of infrastructural adequacy". Abstractly it's "congestion", and advocates of more building tend to have a very dismissive attitude about it, or think it proper for incumbents to simply absorb radical changes without recourse or right to object. If the region adjusts plans to double density in a certain area, but can't guarantee they will just as quickly double everything else like lanes, parking, transit, and the expectation is that they will most likely do nothing but just let congestion explode, then why should incumbents with any political ability to stop such changes elect not to exercise their effective veto? I personally witnessed just such a scenario play out in the Maryland suburbs of DC. At the very least, new home builders could be expected to pitch in for their share of what it will cost to augment existing infrastructure to bear the marginal increase in burden, but of course that would raise the cost of new units considerably (though justly, given that in the absence of plans to maintain infrastructure ratios, they are imposing a congestion externality on incumbents compared to their pre-densification reasonable, investment-backed expectations).
The second problem is more socially controversial and that has to do with concerns about public order, safety, security, nuisance, and criminality. It is similar to the first problem. If the regions could guarantee they would maintain current congestion levels without them getting worse, there would be little cause to object. But the regions won't and often can't make these promises, and often can't be trusted to reliably deliver on those promises for decades to come, even when they do have that authority. Likewise, if the regions could guarantee they would not let public order or school discipline deteriorate if the behavioral distribution of the local populations were to change, then there would be little reason for anxiety about it. But as it happens, regions don't have much of the necessary legal authority to make such promises, and in democracy can't guarantee political stability, especially if the additions to the community tend to vote differently on those issues than the incumbents.
So what has actually happened in many areas is that local areas give the housing incumbents no other way to defend their legitimate concerns on these matters *except* to exercise their political veto over new building, and local governments have no good way to promise to address these legitimate concerns as a way to mollify and assuage these concerns, trapping everybody in the current housing stasis.
Housing advocates often do not want to deal with these problems (because even more politically intractable) and so either go on with arguments that pretend these matters can be ignored (they can't) or try to disparage them as illegitimate (they're not). You don't see housing advocates say "let's pass a bill making building developments a lot easier, by saying the developer has to grant a strip of real estate to the city and pay to pave the first extra lane of road on our", or "let's make more affordable housing in this area, by promising to install lots of AI- security cameras or pay for three extra police units dedicated to patrolling the area." In America a discussion about housing which tries to treat it as purely a matter involving construction without also addressing the big social consequences is just hopeless.
If the concern is really about traffic, then build the new housing without any parking, or even with a covenant that residents won't own a car. Personally I think the traffic thing is a fig leaf, you see it even in dense parts of NYC where most commute by transit.
Traffic really is a concern - especially commute traffic - and exactly the compromise you mentioned has been proposed. Where I live - outside the densest part of the urban core that are often grandfathered in being established in eras with much less private vehicle ownership - 100% of the time, it is dead on arrival. Even when local law doesn't require parking, developers refuse to build without the option because there is very little market demand for such housing and people just won't pay high prices for it unless they are really near the center. If it *could* be done, there would be less resistance, but in effect insisting on such requirements would also be mischaracterized as a mere pretext for NIMBY. It shouldn't be surprising that modern US governments can't handle housing growth and densification adequately, and that incumbent residents reasonably don't expect them to either.
That's one way (this is basically what pecuniary discrimination accomplishes passively, and what employee-parent selective screening does indirectly on military bases or US installations abroad large enough to have their own schools). And one could come up with a lot of other clever ways, like covenants insisting on AI cameras, or radically expand voucher / charter programs and deregulate them to permit strict discipline with no liability for disparate impact, or a thousand other possibilities. But the point is not that these measures are hard to invent, but that they have politically impossible to implement, and so regional housing regulators lack the legal authority to promise to prevent predictable harms to the quality of life in the neighborhood (which, duh, is what people are really paying for and think is an expectation they're entitled to reasonable rely upon at least into the medium term future). The point is that political resistance by local incumbents is like water that when dammed in one place finds the next path of least resistance to keep on moving downhill. In this case, when locals can't stop the possibility of things deteriorating if there are new residents in new houses, then they will just stop the new houses instead. The gelatine more acceptable political "solution" to the inability to give the incumbents the assurances they want is to just take away their one remaining ability to object.
Do you really not see how that might help with concern about school rigor and discipline? Consider an area with only public and private schools, and then put yourself in the position of an incumbent parent who likes the public school and can't afford private school. The county officials - enticed by federal grants and promises of a future at higher level office in the party - purposes rezoning a whole undeveloped area in your public school's catchment area for "affordable housing" for low income households, with most of those households coming from a nearby metro notorious for abysmal school conditions. The public school is obligated to take all comers, and, for political reasons, is reluctant to enforce strict standards for academics and discipline. Without vouchers and charters, the incumbent parent is basically stuck with the public government school monopoly and whatever the consequences are going to be. With vouchers and charters - and the legal flexibility of those alternative schools to enforce strict standards without worrying about being sued or prosecuted - the parents have a choice, and the public school now has some extra incentive to develop a backbone and hold the line on standards, because if they don't, all the best kids from the best families will balk and cream off the top in successive iterations until they become just as bad as those other abysmal schools. For incumbent parents, this state of affairs helps put them at ease, the public school is less likely to let things slip in the first place, and even if it does, there's an affordable alternative nearby with more desirable policies. Like I've seen with regard to infrastructure and congestion, I've personally witnessed the above process unfold in Maryland, which did not give incumbent parents generous educational alternatives, and the schools did get worse and more dangerous, leading to "bright flight" of families moving away. Families who, in retrospect, wished they had put up much more political resistance to the new construction in that affordable housing zone. And you can be sure other communities nearby saw what happened and learned the lesson that they should resist twice as early and ten times as hard. Consider also the perverse effect this has for those who were trying to acheive more density, which is that by frightening people away to even more distant exurbs, they were making net contribution to even more sprawl and private vehicle dependency.
The only flaw in taking all the controls off zoning is environmental, but not from the perspective of bats but does the area have enough water to support a population increase? I’m thinking in particular of Las Vegas and Phoenix, both of which allowed unregulated development, and now suffers from water shortages. I think the other reason why the public got so jaded is that they have heard many promises before, then seen those promises ignored (thinking of a school near us, which was zoned for a school, a new school took it over, promised they wouldn’t sell to developers, sold to them five years later, who raised it to the ground, put up what looks like 75 poor quality million dollar townhomes, then shortly afterwards there are complaints of over crowded schools. And the county no longer has local land to build them on.).
There is plenty of water for humans, the only reason we have a water shortage in these places is because we are growing alfalfa in the desert. Las Vegas has a river running through it!
An idea, how about local permitting authority coupled with an LVT wherein a significant chunk of that is explicitly earmarked for local development, interim housing arrangements for those who would be displaced by projects, or even a direct citizens dividend, for anyone who lives there, both renting and landowners (to align incentives for both groups). Development should make an in demand area more valuable, so one imagines that redistributing the proceeds from local appreciation to the people who live in the area would mobilize locals to want to maximize the land value in their area. Basically that the people who make an area great share in the benefits of it being great, are insured against the downsides of change, and as explained in the article, the demand coming locally gives it legitimacy.
Thunders Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson) in A Few Good Men (1992) when Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) casually asks for a document.
The iconic line is a core lesson in human psychology and policy design: call it "behavioralism in reforms." Based on Maslow’s description of esteem needs.
It perfectly captures the difference between state preemption and resident-developer bargaining.
When land ceiling laws attempted to confiscate excess farmland in India, large landholders resorted to benami (proxy) transfers and land reclassification to sabotage the state's top-down mandate.
Preemption in housing acts the exact same way, inspiring retrenchment and endless legal sabotage from NIMBYs.
Contrast this with the staunch Gandhian Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan (Land Gift) Movement. Instead of legislating confiscation, Bhave walked from village to village and asked large landholders to voluntarily donate land. By respecting their agency and appealing to their morality, he collected roughly 4.5 million acres.
Bhoodan Movement simply "asked them nicely."
Resident-developer bargaining resembles the Bhoodan Movement. And it mirrors the 17th-century Glorious Revolution, which succeeded precisely because it reformed property rights with the consent and for the benefit of the affected parties (https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-smashing-the-nimbys-created-modern).
Institutional inertia is basically friction in social systems. Once zoning laws turn into veto gates, no amount of economic theory fixes the supply curve. Discussed dynamical constraints and natural systems in our English section: https://gzambrano.substack.com/s/english
«The British government has legislated to introduce street votes. These renderings illustrate the huge increase in density that a street vote could enable on a suburban street.»
«By enabling local residents to benefit from development, this strategy can transform moderate skeptics into reliable supporters of new housing.»
The basic premise of this article is the usual reaganist "abundance" argument that house prices are kept high by merely *local* opposition to increased supply and the solution is always a "huge increase in density" which has some important counterarguments:
* Higher house prices and rents redistributed from the lower classes have been since since Reagan/Clinton and Thatcher/Blair the main motivation for middle-class voters to vote for globalist reaganism/thatcherism instead of national social-democracy, and keeping in power globalist reaganist politicians has made tremendous amounts of money for the vested interest groups that support it (finance, tech, ...). Local preferences for higher or lower density have no direct role in this national policy.
* Overall in most countries that have had policies to increase house prices and rents to redistribute upwards to the incumbent middle class there has never been a housing shortage, and consequently in many areas prices and rents have fallen: there has been instead a policy to concentrate the "good jobs" in a few high population areas to buy the votes of incumbent property owners in those areas. That is the issue is excessive density of desirable jobs in some areas, not insufficient density of housing in those areas.
* Incumbent homeowners by and large expect big risk-free tax-free work-free increases in prices and rents redistributed to them from the lower classes every year even without densification and often will vote against densification just because they are afraid it might backfire and are already satisfied.
* Densification proposals like in this post invariably under-estimate or omit to consider that higher living density is not a simple problem of turning suburban single family properties into much more profitable (for the incumbent owners) HMO town-houses that can be solved with the facile device of a street vote: densification requires expanding massively the supply of services (water, electricity, gas, transport, shops, healthcare, schools, ...) in the same area which is already built up and often congested and therefore the cost will be super-linear, and that will both require large local tax increases to fund public service expansion and will result in much higher prices form private services because of increased demand. Obviously the street votes will not mention how increased density will require big tax and price increases, but after a few incumbent property owners vote for densification in their street and local governments and private suppliers hit them and their neighbors with large tax and price increases they will learn their lesson, especially their neighbors.
Given what I write the housing situation seems shaped to me by these considerations:
* It is politically essential for the continuity of globalism reaganism/thatcherism to keep buying the votes of middle class property owners. There is simply no substitute to that even if the mass immigration of non-voting lower class residents has helped too.
* If there were the political will to reduce housing profits the obvious policy would be to undensify desirable jobs rather then densify workers, by helping many businesses move to areas with plenty of cheap housing; many business have already moved to areas far away offshore with plenty of cheap workers, so it is certainly possible. But this would crash prices in areas of high density (as they did in Detroit and the Rrust Bel when businesses were moved to offshore low wage areas) and thus cause a huge mortgage debt crisis as mortgages in high-price areas are backed by high density.
Instead of repeating by well-understood failures, e.g. California's SB 9—so exhaustively documented that I always have students in my MPP seminar wanting to [re-]write about it for yet another final policy memo—ignoring under-discussed success cases, e.g. substantial recent increases in college town permitting, and running yet another advertisement for the as-yet theoretical street votes concept, I hope future pieces will chart some new territory, or at least meet advocates and practitioners at the actionable frontier of their work.
I'm all for replacing zoning with private, voluntary land-use covenants—I wrote a whole book about the idea. But the reality of hyperlocal land-use regulation is actually just a bit of a mess, for reasons I got into in my recent piece about dead mall. Even in the best of cases, such a transition is quite outside the bounds of the Overton Window. And it's just very simply not the case that state/provincial preemption has always and everywhere failed. (Without looking it up, test your knowledge: What's SB 684-1123? What does RICZ stand for?)
Here's an idea: One of the co-authors is based in Florida. The Live Local Act—a vanilla zoning preemption reform of the sort that is allegedly unworkable/unsustainable—seems to have entitled over 50,000 units since 2023, and has only been strengthened in subsequent sessions. Why? What does it mean for successful state preemption design? Were there broader differences in Florida governance that drove this success relative to e.g. California's AB 2011/SB 6? Is Florida legislative politics different in some respect that would help us predict where state/provincial preemption is more or less likely to result in "clean" reform?
Instead of more a priori theory about Coasian bargaining among neighbors, two complimentary theory projects that are actually puzzles for activists/practitioners: rather than (or perhaps alongside) state preemption of local land-use regulations, how do you solve the prisoner's dilemma of permitting in a fragmented metropolis? How do you shift the incentives facing local governments to make them want to issue more permits? The usual theory story—fiscal zoning—could be true, but it's not very well empirically grounded, and it's not clear how it interacts with other political pressures facing local policymakers and planners.
«running yet another advertisement for the as-yet theoretical street votes concept»
The rise and demise of this concept is entertainingly described here: https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/twilight-of-the-mansards/
It is being resurrect by abundancers (woke reaganists) as a supply-side "tax-free" way to both enrich further incumbent landowners and to create the mirage of higher housing availability in areas in which government policy has concentrated the desirable jobs.
«I'm all for replacing zoning with private, voluntary land-use covenants — I wrote a whole book about the idea. But the reality of hyperlocal land-use regulation is actually just a bit of a mess»
I liked this amusing description of the reaganist privatization of zoning in a comment in a previous discussion which showed that they can be highly effective (for those who can afford to pay):
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/04/john-galt-kills-texans-in-massive-fertilizer-plant-explosion.html#comment-1227292
“Perhaps the issue’s been raised, but skimmed over by the Evelyn Wood Great Coast Socialists shocked by fertilizer proximities: Outside of a few cities, there ain’t no zoning in the grand land of Tejas. Oil fields next to middle schools, refineries next to residential cracker boxes.
Middle and upper classes know this and pay their premiums to become part of deed restricted communities, while the tired, huddled and poor get close-up views of the cracking stacks.
[...] Developers know only morons and moochers would live somewhere where there is no zoning. They make sure guv’mint stays off the backs of thems morons in the name o’ in-amiable rights, while being sure to peddle their de facto zoning (only petunias in the buffer zone) to the captive audience of above-average barely sensible homeowners.
[...] Moving from CA was quite an eye-opener; boil water notices for a month (private water), internet constantly down (private cable), two-hour log-jam commutes (toll roads and pay HOV lanes) – better services to be had in developing nations.”
"abundancers (woke reaganists)", no dude wanting to get rid of stupid regulations is not the same as trickle-down economics jesus christ
None of your examples of “successful” Coasian bargaining address the core NIMBY problem, neighbors using zoning to block development on property *they don’t own*
Israel’s program is a tool to redevelop condo buildings with 2/3 majority rather than consensus; Japan’s program facilitates neighborhood-level redevelopment involving complex lot assembly. London’s program is a vote among resident about public housing. These examples are irrelevant to the problem you say you’re trying to solve, which is increasing neighbor buy-in for density on sites they don’t own or live on
State preemption is politically hard, you’re right! But successful examples like CA’s ADU law show the formula works. We have a lot of work to do continuing to build political consensus for housing. Giving all of America HOAs-tier veto powers won’t help
«We have a lot of work to do continuing to build political consensus for housing.»
But for what kind of consensus? The "abundancers" (socially progressive reaganistas) seem to me to want to solve a specific problem:
* The electoral success of reaganism has depended since Reagan/Clinton on delivering large housing profits to many/most middle-class property-owning worker so they vote on their property-owner interests rather than their worker interests.
* Because house prices in many areas are now so high any further increases risk to make buying property only affordable to people who already own property, which reduces the electoral base of property owners, and low natality rates means that many people will inherit more than one property, further reducing the electoral base of property owners. Many papers and books have been written on the potential for as slow shrinking of the constituency for reaganism.
* Therefore the primary goal seems to be to increase the number of property owning voters by making entry level properties cheaper, but that conflicts with keeping the votes of existing property owners who do not want to see lower property prices.
* Densification as proposed in this blog port solves *both* problems: by increasing the number of rooms on the same amount of land it gives both a big gain to incumbent property owners (who own the land) in a given place and lower per-room costs to more people moving into the same place, thus it is a vote-winner. In England there is also the "HMO" (House Of Multiple Occupation) strategy where single-family houses are split into independent flats or into individual rooms with shared areas.
As myself and other commenters have pointed out that also dramatically increases congestion in the same area, but could be fixed with large increases in local government taxes and private services prices, but that comes after, or the fix can be omitted, as new tenants coming in will accept a lower quantity and quality of services for the sake of a shorter commute to their jobs.
Seen from a broader perspective densification is similar to "doubling up" (more people in the same number of rooms instead of more rooms in the same amount of land) and "doubling up" in much of England and other places has become the single largest driver of "productivity".
As with most discussions about housing, this article avoids two key problems which are not really about construction at all. They are beyond the scope of Coasian bargaining because not within the authority of bargainers to promise in any theoretical deal. The first big problem is what I call a fear of a lack of "conservation of infrastructural adequacy". Abstractly it's "congestion", and advocates of more building tend to have a very dismissive attitude about it, or think it proper for incumbents to simply absorb radical changes without recourse or right to object. If the region adjusts plans to double density in a certain area, but can't guarantee they will just as quickly double everything else like lanes, parking, transit, and the expectation is that they will most likely do nothing but just let congestion explode, then why should incumbents with any political ability to stop such changes elect not to exercise their effective veto? I personally witnessed just such a scenario play out in the Maryland suburbs of DC. At the very least, new home builders could be expected to pitch in for their share of what it will cost to augment existing infrastructure to bear the marginal increase in burden, but of course that would raise the cost of new units considerably (though justly, given that in the absence of plans to maintain infrastructure ratios, they are imposing a congestion externality on incumbents compared to their pre-densification reasonable, investment-backed expectations).
The second problem is more socially controversial and that has to do with concerns about public order, safety, security, nuisance, and criminality. It is similar to the first problem. If the regions could guarantee they would maintain current congestion levels without them getting worse, there would be little cause to object. But the regions won't and often can't make these promises, and often can't be trusted to reliably deliver on those promises for decades to come, even when they do have that authority. Likewise, if the regions could guarantee they would not let public order or school discipline deteriorate if the behavioral distribution of the local populations were to change, then there would be little reason for anxiety about it. But as it happens, regions don't have much of the necessary legal authority to make such promises, and in democracy can't guarantee political stability, especially if the additions to the community tend to vote differently on those issues than the incumbents.
So what has actually happened in many areas is that local areas give the housing incumbents no other way to defend their legitimate concerns on these matters *except* to exercise their political veto over new building, and local governments have no good way to promise to address these legitimate concerns as a way to mollify and assuage these concerns, trapping everybody in the current housing stasis.
Housing advocates often do not want to deal with these problems (because even more politically intractable) and so either go on with arguments that pretend these matters can be ignored (they can't) or try to disparage them as illegitimate (they're not). You don't see housing advocates say "let's pass a bill making building developments a lot easier, by saying the developer has to grant a strip of real estate to the city and pay to pave the first extra lane of road on our", or "let's make more affordable housing in this area, by promising to install lots of AI- security cameras or pay for three extra police units dedicated to patrolling the area." In America a discussion about housing which tries to treat it as purely a matter involving construction without also addressing the big social consequences is just hopeless.
If the concern is really about traffic, then build the new housing without any parking, or even with a covenant that residents won't own a car. Personally I think the traffic thing is a fig leaf, you see it even in dense parts of NYC where most commute by transit.
Traffic really is a concern - especially commute traffic - and exactly the compromise you mentioned has been proposed. Where I live - outside the densest part of the urban core that are often grandfathered in being established in eras with much less private vehicle ownership - 100% of the time, it is dead on arrival. Even when local law doesn't require parking, developers refuse to build without the option because there is very little market demand for such housing and people just won't pay high prices for it unless they are really near the center. If it *could* be done, there would be less resistance, but in effect insisting on such requirements would also be mischaracterized as a mere pretext for NIMBY. It shouldn't be surprising that modern US governments can't handle housing growth and densification adequately, and that incumbent residents reasonably don't expect them to either.
So how does one offer a guarantee that public order or school discipline won’t deteriorate? Screen prospective homeowners?
That's one way (this is basically what pecuniary discrimination accomplishes passively, and what employee-parent selective screening does indirectly on military bases or US installations abroad large enough to have their own schools). And one could come up with a lot of other clever ways, like covenants insisting on AI cameras, or radically expand voucher / charter programs and deregulate them to permit strict discipline with no liability for disparate impact, or a thousand other possibilities. But the point is not that these measures are hard to invent, but that they have politically impossible to implement, and so regional housing regulators lack the legal authority to promise to prevent predictable harms to the quality of life in the neighborhood (which, duh, is what people are really paying for and think is an expectation they're entitled to reasonable rely upon at least into the medium term future). The point is that political resistance by local incumbents is like water that when dammed in one place finds the next path of least resistance to keep on moving downhill. In this case, when locals can't stop the possibility of things deteriorating if there are new residents in new houses, then they will just stop the new houses instead. The gelatine more acceptable political "solution" to the inability to give the incumbents the assurances they want is to just take away their one remaining ability to object.
So we can reduce the impact of new homes on schools just through vouchers?
Do you really not see how that might help with concern about school rigor and discipline? Consider an area with only public and private schools, and then put yourself in the position of an incumbent parent who likes the public school and can't afford private school. The county officials - enticed by federal grants and promises of a future at higher level office in the party - purposes rezoning a whole undeveloped area in your public school's catchment area for "affordable housing" for low income households, with most of those households coming from a nearby metro notorious for abysmal school conditions. The public school is obligated to take all comers, and, for political reasons, is reluctant to enforce strict standards for academics and discipline. Without vouchers and charters, the incumbent parent is basically stuck with the public government school monopoly and whatever the consequences are going to be. With vouchers and charters - and the legal flexibility of those alternative schools to enforce strict standards without worrying about being sued or prosecuted - the parents have a choice, and the public school now has some extra incentive to develop a backbone and hold the line on standards, because if they don't, all the best kids from the best families will balk and cream off the top in successive iterations until they become just as bad as those other abysmal schools. For incumbent parents, this state of affairs helps put them at ease, the public school is less likely to let things slip in the first place, and even if it does, there's an affordable alternative nearby with more desirable policies. Like I've seen with regard to infrastructure and congestion, I've personally witnessed the above process unfold in Maryland, which did not give incumbent parents generous educational alternatives, and the schools did get worse and more dangerous, leading to "bright flight" of families moving away. Families who, in retrospect, wished they had put up much more political resistance to the new construction in that affordable housing zone. And you can be sure other communities nearby saw what happened and learned the lesson that they should resist twice as early and ten times as hard. Consider also the perverse effect this has for those who were trying to acheive more density, which is that by frightening people away to even more distant exurbs, they were making net contribution to even more sprawl and private vehicle dependency.
So the same private school is supposed to absorb twice the students, all on coupons, and maintain the same quality?
The only flaw in taking all the controls off zoning is environmental, but not from the perspective of bats but does the area have enough water to support a population increase? I’m thinking in particular of Las Vegas and Phoenix, both of which allowed unregulated development, and now suffers from water shortages. I think the other reason why the public got so jaded is that they have heard many promises before, then seen those promises ignored (thinking of a school near us, which was zoned for a school, a new school took it over, promised they wouldn’t sell to developers, sold to them five years later, who raised it to the ground, put up what looks like 75 poor quality million dollar townhomes, then shortly afterwards there are complaints of over crowded schools. And the county no longer has local land to build them on.).
There is plenty of water for humans, the only reason we have a water shortage in these places is because we are growing alfalfa in the desert. Las Vegas has a river running through it!
An idea, how about local permitting authority coupled with an LVT wherein a significant chunk of that is explicitly earmarked for local development, interim housing arrangements for those who would be displaced by projects, or even a direct citizens dividend, for anyone who lives there, both renting and landowners (to align incentives for both groups). Development should make an in demand area more valuable, so one imagines that redistributing the proceeds from local appreciation to the people who live in the area would mobilize locals to want to maximize the land value in their area. Basically that the people who make an area great share in the benefits of it being great, are insured against the downsides of change, and as explained in the article, the demand coming locally gives it legitimacy.
“You gotta ask me nicely!”
Thunders Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson) in A Few Good Men (1992) when Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) casually asks for a document.
The iconic line is a core lesson in human psychology and policy design: call it "behavioralism in reforms." Based on Maslow’s description of esteem needs.
It perfectly captures the difference between state preemption and resident-developer bargaining.
When land ceiling laws attempted to confiscate excess farmland in India, large landholders resorted to benami (proxy) transfers and land reclassification to sabotage the state's top-down mandate.
Preemption in housing acts the exact same way, inspiring retrenchment and endless legal sabotage from NIMBYs.
Contrast this with the staunch Gandhian Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan (Land Gift) Movement. Instead of legislating confiscation, Bhave walked from village to village and asked large landholders to voluntarily donate land. By respecting their agency and appealing to their morality, he collected roughly 4.5 million acres.
Bhoodan Movement simply "asked them nicely."
Resident-developer bargaining resembles the Bhoodan Movement. And it mirrors the 17th-century Glorious Revolution, which succeeded precisely because it reformed property rights with the consent and for the benefit of the affected parties (https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-smashing-the-nimbys-created-modern).
Institutional inertia is basically friction in social systems. Once zoning laws turn into veto gates, no amount of economic theory fixes the supply curve. Discussed dynamical constraints and natural systems in our English section: https://gzambrano.substack.com/s/english
«The British government has legislated to introduce street votes. These renderings illustrate the huge increase in density that a street vote could enable on a suburban street.»
The failure of this has been recently discussed here: https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/twilight-of-the-mansards/
«By enabling local residents to benefit from development, this strategy can transform moderate skeptics into reliable supporters of new housing.»
The basic premise of this article is the usual reaganist "abundance" argument that house prices are kept high by merely *local* opposition to increased supply and the solution is always a "huge increase in density" which has some important counterarguments:
* Higher house prices and rents redistributed from the lower classes have been since since Reagan/Clinton and Thatcher/Blair the main motivation for middle-class voters to vote for globalist reaganism/thatcherism instead of national social-democracy, and keeping in power globalist reaganist politicians has made tremendous amounts of money for the vested interest groups that support it (finance, tech, ...). Local preferences for higher or lower density have no direct role in this national policy.
* Overall in most countries that have had policies to increase house prices and rents to redistribute upwards to the incumbent middle class there has never been a housing shortage, and consequently in many areas prices and rents have fallen: there has been instead a policy to concentrate the "good jobs" in a few high population areas to buy the votes of incumbent property owners in those areas. That is the issue is excessive density of desirable jobs in some areas, not insufficient density of housing in those areas.
* Incumbent homeowners by and large expect big risk-free tax-free work-free increases in prices and rents redistributed to them from the lower classes every year even without densification and often will vote against densification just because they are afraid it might backfire and are already satisfied.
* Densification proposals like in this post invariably under-estimate or omit to consider that higher living density is not a simple problem of turning suburban single family properties into much more profitable (for the incumbent owners) HMO town-houses that can be solved with the facile device of a street vote: densification requires expanding massively the supply of services (water, electricity, gas, transport, shops, healthcare, schools, ...) in the same area which is already built up and often congested and therefore the cost will be super-linear, and that will both require large local tax increases to fund public service expansion and will result in much higher prices form private services because of increased demand. Obviously the street votes will not mention how increased density will require big tax and price increases, but after a few incumbent property owners vote for densification in their street and local governments and private suppliers hit them and their neighbors with large tax and price increases they will learn their lesson, especially their neighbors.
Given what I write the housing situation seems shaped to me by these considerations:
* It is politically essential for the continuity of globalism reaganism/thatcherism to keep buying the votes of middle class property owners. There is simply no substitute to that even if the mass immigration of non-voting lower class residents has helped too.
* If there were the political will to reduce housing profits the obvious policy would be to undensify desirable jobs rather then densify workers, by helping many businesses move to areas with plenty of cheap housing; many business have already moved to areas far away offshore with plenty of cheap workers, so it is certainly possible. But this would crash prices in areas of high density (as they did in Detroit and the Rrust Bel when businesses were moved to offshore low wage areas) and thus cause a huge mortgage debt crisis as mortgages in high-price areas are backed by high density.
I don’t get how this is different
Strong Towns talks about the need for local organizing, not just state preemption. I think these policy ideas would be useful in that discussion.