How Zoning Ruined the Housing Market in Blue-State America

For a century, progressives have been making it harder to build new homes in prosperous areas. Workers, immigrants and the economy pay the price

By Yoni Applebaum. Excerpts:

"The answer is that the rules were intended to make it all but impossible to build, not just in California but in much of blue-state America. The efforts of three generations of progressive reformers, seeking to address the problems of their eras, have created a regulatory regime in much of the country that has made it extraordinarily difficult to build new housing where it is needed most."

"As recently as 1970, one in five Americans moved each year. But after a half-century of steady decline, the Census announced in December that we had set a dismal new record, with scarcely one in 13 people relocating to a new home."

"That’s not just a problem for those who are stuck. It’s a big cost for all Americans—by one estimate, lowering GDP by $1.8 trillion each year."

"At the beginning of the 20th century, a young architect named Charles Cheney worried that the “well established homes in comfortable and quiet districts” of Berkeley, Calif., were being threatened by an “invasion of flats and apartments.” Cheney was a prototypical reformer of the Progressive Era—young, well-educated, affluent and eager to use the power of government to solve social problems.

In this case, the problem was right in his own backyard: Someone had built an apartment building just down the street. In public reports, Cheney worried about replicating the slums of eastern cities."

"The first zoning laws in the U.S. had been adopted by California cities three decades earlier, to force out their Chinese residents. Racial discrimination was unconstitutional, but these cities found a workaround: They could exclude laundries, the primary source of employment for the Chinese."

"He convinced Berkeley to adopt the nation’s first single-family housing district, barring any more apartments from being built in his neighborhood. And he wasn’t subtle. Only single-family zoning, he explained, could “firmly establish this great principle of protecting the home against the intrusion of the less desirable and floating renter class.”"

"Within a few decades, cities throughout the country were covered in a patchwork-quilt of land-use regulations"

"The New Deal brought a second generation of reformers, who decided that neighborhoods could only qualify for the highest federal credit rating, and the loans that came with it, if they adopted strict zoning codes. They also worried that racial integration would depress property values, imposing losses on the government—so they insisted that properties come with private restrictive covenants limiting their sale to “the race for which they are intended.”"

"In the 1970s, the state passed new laws mandating extensive review and permitting processes and giving the public broad rights to weigh in and challenge its decisions."

"they had made all private development subject to governmental approval."

"anyone with sufficient time and money could exercise an effective veto over new development."

"“We need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people,” Barack Obama told the Democratic Convention last year."

"Every year since 2000, the number of Californians moving out of the state has outstripped the number of Americans moving in, by a cumulative total of millions, and the lowest-income residents were likeliest to leave. More than 170,000 Californians now lack any housing at all, living out on the streets." 

"If paring back a century’s worth of rules and regulations is the right way to rebuild after a fire, it’s the right way to build—period."