No Muslims In My Backyard?

Plus: Kamala Harris doubles down on rent control, Gavin Newsom issues a new executive order on housing, and the natural tendency to keep adding more regulation.

Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's stories include:

• Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is rushing to moderate her former progressive position—except on rent control.
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order intended to speed up the development of infill housing. Will it do any good?
• A study looks at the tendency to just keep adding more regulation.

But first, our lead story about a development moratorium in Minnesota motivated by standard NIMBYism, and potentially something much darker.

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A Town Revolts Against a Planned 'Muslim-Friendly' Community

On Sunday, The New York Times published an in-depth look at a development battle in Lino Lakes, Minnesota, where a local farmer's plan to sell his land to a developer hoping to build a "Muslim-friendly" community with shops and a mosque provoked a backlash from residents worried about overdevelopment and, in more than a few cases, more Muslims moving to town.

The town has since passed a development moratorium pretty plainly aimed at stopping the planned community—a decision that project supporters chalk up largely to bigotry.

The leader of the slow growth opposition to the development stressed to the Times that he's not opposed to Muslims moving town but is concerned about the creation of a "segregated" community and overdevelopment generally.

Folks can read the Times story and decide for themselves how big of a factor bigotry played in prompting the town to adopt a building moratorium.

What's striking about the story is just how ordinary it is. But for the anti-Muslim backlash the planned community received, the Times story could as well have been about countless other efforts to stop new development in exurban America.

Just last year, I wrote about a startlingly similar case in Caroline, New York, near Ithaca. A local farmer wanted to sell some of his land for a new Dollar General store. Residents worried about overdevelopment organized and got the town government to impose a building moratorium. This then sparked a wider fight over whether the then-unzoned town should adopt a zoning code to check future suburban sprawl. (Spoiler: the pro-zoning forces eventually won.)

In Caroline, the slow-growth crowd wasn't anti-Muslim bigots, but rather largely liberal staff and faculty from nearby Cornell University worried about the environmental and aesthetic impacts of more commercial development.

Regardless of motivation, slow-growth politics ended up producing the same result in both towns. Farmers were stopped from selling their land and retiring. Developers weren't allowed to proceed with building something new. Average residents (or would-be residents) lost out on new homes and new places to shop.

Obviously, aesthetic concerns about chain stores are not as odious as outright racial or religious prejudice. Civil rights law and the U.S. Constitution offer people protection against such discrimination.

Yet, so long as local governments retain a veto over new homes and new businesses in the name of shaping the character of their community, they're going to use that veto.

Property owners are left guessing whether the rejections they've received from city hall are merely arbitrary or something more sinister.

It would be better to protect landowners' rights to develop their land as they see fit, and limit regulations to controlling nuisances and other major externalities caused by new development.

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A Moderating Kamala Harris Doubles Down on Rent Control  

At her first major campaign rally last week, Vice President Kamala Harris re-upped her support for rent control as part of a strategy for bringing Americans' cost of living down.

"On day one, I will take on price gouging and bring down costs. We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits. We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases," said the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Harris previously endorsed President Joe Biden's proposal to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent for existing buildings owned by landlords who own 50 or more units, for two years. In 2019, she also endorsed Oregon's passage of the nation's first state-wide rent control policy.

The fact that she's sticking to this position is conspicuous.

Since the start of her 2024 campaign, Harris has rushed to disavow her most progressive stances. The new Harris no longer supports banning fracking, single-payer health care, and a mandatory gun buyback program.

But on rent control, she's sticking to her guns. It's evidence of a remarkable shift of the Overton Window.

Rent control once had (and among economists, still does) a rock-bottom reputation. The policy might provide lower rents and more stability for some existing tenants but at the cost of new housing supply, housing quality, and (for anyone who doesn't get a rent-controlled apartment) higher housing costs.

A supermajority of economists surveyed by the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business agreed that the Biden administration's rent control policy would "substantially" reduce the availability of apartments.

Nevertheless, Harris is making federal rent control—a policy the U.S. hasn't had since World War II—a centerpiece of her allegedly more moderate 2024 presidential run.

Perhaps that's good politics.

Inflation and persistently high rents and home prices have made housing costs a more salient national political issue. The electorate has been willing to tolerate increasingly aggressive regulation of the rental housing market, from new state-level rent control policies to a Trump-initiated, Biden-continued nationwide eviction ban.

Still, good politics doesn't equal good policy. Rent control has been widely derided as a terrible, counterproductive idea for good reasons. If a future Harris administration succeeds in adopting rent control, those reasons will become painfully clear.

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Newsom's New Executive Order on Infill Housing

This past week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a new executive order to streamline the production of infill housing in existing urban areas.

The executive order includes a range of ideas, some more fleshed out and potentially productive than others. Most promising is the governor's direction to state departments to comb over the state building code to find opportunities to lower building costs and increase flexibility for developers.

University of California, Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf said on X that this could kickstart efforts to speed up the adoption of single-stair reform—that is, allowing new apartments to be built with only a single-stair case. Existing building codes require most multi-family construction to come with two staircases. Critics argue this requirement increases building costs and limits developers' ability to build family-friendly floor plans with more bedrooms and less common space.

New @GavinNewsom directive to his team: let's clear path & reduce cost of infill housing development.

Good idea! But what does/should it mean in practice? A short ????.
1/8https://t.co/ljB0ozlDnV pic.twitter.com/SF285DCXWB

— Chris Elmendorf (@CSElmendorf) July 31, 2024

Elmendorf is more wary about Newsom's plan to create a task force to explore "the use of infill housing as a mitigation strategy for transportation and housing projects with significant environmental impacts."

That could result in cities getting a powerful fiscal incentive to allow new apartments. Or it could see builders subjected to additional taxes when creating new greenfield development.

As with all California housing policy, the devil is in the exceedingly complicated details.

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The One-Way Regulation Ratchet

Middlebury professor Gary Winslett has an interesting thread on X about a 2021 Nature study that finds a tendency to try to fix problems by adding features instead of taking them away.

There's an article from Nature a few years ago that I think about a lot when it comes to why there's so much over-regulation.
People have a strong bias in favor of adding features over removing them to solve a problem. Consider this Lego problem…
@scottlincicome @EricBoehm87 pic.twitter.com/WEfhmtmo0S

— Gary Winslett ???????????? (@GaryWinslett) August 2, 2024

This pops up time and time again in land use regulation, says Winslett. When zoning and other requirements raise the costs of building housing, policymakers don't respond by paring back regulation. Instead, they pile new mandates and restrictions on builders in the hopes that they produce more affordable housing.

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Quick Links

• Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson asks where all the urban families went.
• San Francisco's futile encampment sweeps.
• Los Angeles hopes they'll be more successful at getting tents off the streets with more state resources.
• Michael Lewyn on Project 2025 and housing policy.
• The American Enterprise Institute has a new short documentary on the "forgotten solution to the housing crunch."

Comments

[Don't look at me!]

No Muslims In My Backyard?

Hell no.

[mad.casual]

It’s interesting that, in Britschgi’s narration, opposition apparently lends itself to the idea of anti-Muslim bigotry but support isn’t, in any way, seen as support of a Caliphate or intertwining of religion and state even if the developer will explicitly have to obtain literal approvals from municipal and regional governance in order to build the thing.

That is, Christian’s narrative seems to be that the issue can only be framed as anti-Muslim bigotry or NIMBYism/xenophobia. The idea that a developer wants to build a “Muslim-friendly” community in rural Minnesota couldn’t possibly have to do with the fact that the developer hates rural Minnesotans or Americans and wants to be disruptive rather than frictionlessly profitable (like corporations from Disney to Marvel to InBev to Tractor Supply have been doing, getting caught, and walking back/abandoning for the better part of a decade at this point).

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Yep, government is a double-edged sword. I don't like zoning in any form, or any form of government intervention. But I don't have much sympathy for people getting shafted by the same government sword they previously relied on. And I don't have much sympathy for claiming only one side is bigoted.

[Mother's Lament]

But Muslim exclusive communities in the West have always worked out so well in the past. Just ask the indigenous British living in Rotherham, Luton or Bristol about what a hotspot of freedom and tolerance they are.

The gay Muslim disco will be right next to the Muslim women's shelter. It will be so tolerant.

At least they're not violent bigots pushing themselves on outsiders like the Amish are.

[damikesc]

Dearborn is a lovely place, I've heard.

As long as you're not Jewish...or numerous "special groups" that the Left is so fond of.

[docduracoat]

letting a large population of Muslims into your town is a huge mistake.
Look at how well it worked out for the little girls in England, raped by muslim grooming gangs, or murdered by Muslims.
Now that the native people of England are protesting, the Muslims are gathering with swords and machetes, and the police with facial recognition, both of whom plan to attack the locals.

Minnesota already has experience with Muslim majority towns, and they have all turned out awful.

So reason can go ahead and clutch its pearls, but the religion of intolerance is a terrible neighbor

[Longtobefree]

Fascists are going to do fascism.

[Nardz]

Funny hoe yall still think according to the left's prescription.
Always using fascism as your go to villain and letting communism off the hook.

[Beezard]

By that same metric you’re white knighting for fascism with this comment.

The differences are fairly slight. I tend to use them interchangeably. But the corporatist angle of big tech, Blackrock, vanguard, MSM etc often makes “fascist” a slightly more accurate term.

[I, Woodchipper]

Rent control, when promoted earnestly, is the perennial litmus test for mental retardation. Rent-control is the flat-earth theory of economics.

[Jerry B.]

I always figured that rent control was a politician’s method of buying votes with other people’s money. And besides, the politicians don’t have to worry about the outcome.

[JohnZ]

Just ask the former residents of Dearborn, or Hamtramck, Mi. how well muslim incursion worked out.
Then there's Minneapolis aka little Somalia, and who knows where else the Obiden administration smuggled tens of thousands of ILLEGAL ALIENS to small towns and cities in order to overwhelm the locals ie: white voters.
The people have spoken and they have said, they do not want a violent religion anywhere near them.
The situation in Britain is a good example of how the government there has turned against the Brits themselves.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Well then, the people are wrong. And if they don't repent they will get democratized right out of town.

[Brett Bellmore]

The problem with declaring this "bigotry" is that it kind of demands that people ignore the evidence of their senses in favor of ideology.

It just happens to be a brute fact that having more than a tiny percentage of Muslims in your community act actual, real world negative consequences. They're like, oh, U235: A little bit is largely harmless, put too much together and you get a giant mushroom cloud. For instance, where are the majority Muslim liberal democracies? Any come to mind, at all?

Anti-"bigotry" ideology has a tough time dealing with a real world group that is actually behaving badly, not just behaving badly in somebody's imagination. They end up demanding that you ignore the real world.

[Rick James]

On Sunday, The New York Times published an in-depth look at a development battle in Lino Lakes, Minnesota, where a local farmer’s plan to sell his land to a developer hoping to build a “Muslim-friendly” community with shops and a mosque provoked a backlash from residents worried about overdevelopment and, in more than a few cases, more Muslims moving to town.

What’s the balance of “overdevelopment” and “My rainbow flag could be threatened” ideologies?

[Jerry B.]

Good question. Have you checked the latest version of the intersectionality ladder?

[Don't look at me!]

Muslim-friendly” community
Segregation is cool now!

[mad.casual]

You would think, between the slavery, the violent protests, the rape culture, the prohibition on not just 'hard' drugs but weed and alcohol, the open enforcement of religious law in large swaths of the world, the diktats said law has about interest-bearing loans and lending, etc., etc.... all of which could be openly or implicitly folded into "Muslim-friendly community", Reason could at least muster a more even-handed or at least a more even-handed-to-be-sure narrative.

We're beyond Rand parody in several dimensions. Like the notion of "Robinhood must die.", this take is like having consumed all the popular depictions of Frankenstein and his monster first and then, reading the book, coming away thinking that the NIMBY family who fled their cottage rather than live with the monster are the truly evil antagonists of the story. Because that's the actual story of Frankenstein and his monster. Not that an elitist, lacking hubris, stitches together a diverse monster that winds up beyond his control and destroys both of them (and a few other innocent lives in the process), but that torch-and-pitchfork wielding mobs always chase off benevolent, newcomers for their differences out of unjustified fear and hatred.

[Beezard]

“Who are the real monsters?!”

[Chipper Chunked Chile Con Congress (ex NCW)]

Reason could at least muster a more even-handed or at least a more even-handed-to-be-sure narrative.

Dream on, my friend, dream on.

[Roberta]

If only there were a way to scatter Muslims evenly across the globe, so there was no concentration of them anywhere.... Keeping them out of "here" causes them to pile up "there". And every "here" is someone's "there".

[Chipper Chunked Chile Con Congress (ex NCW)]

Furnaces?

Yes, fuck you all, I'm suggesting the Crusades, explicitly.

Make Istanbul Constantinople Again.

Once they're a religious minority, perhaps they'll stop being psychopaths. And if not, they can become as common as Mithrans.

[Joe]

"Existing building codes require most multi-family construction to come with two staircases."

That's a life-safety requirement, so that there are redundant means of escape if one means is blocked or destroyed.

[AT]

The town has since passed a development moratorium pretty plainly aimed at stopping the planned community—a decision that project supporters chalk up largely to bigotry.

The irony.

The entire plan was bigoted from the beginning, self-describing as "Muslim-friendly." Not Christian friendly. Not Jew friendly. Not atheist friendly. Specifically and intentionally Muslim. (Though, I'll bet the gays would be welcome there, what with their love and support for genital mutilation these days.)

You know, you don't just intentionally build Chinatown or Little Italy or the Barrio. It happens naturally by virtue of the people who largely make up the area. And nobody ever describes them as "Chinese friendly" or "Hispanic friendly" areas. They just are what they are. America is already Muslim-friendly.

This, however, is planned. And implicitly exclusionary.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

My understanding is that you can’t practice religious discrimination in *either* direction – no discrimination against Muslims and no discrimination in their favor.

Is this development an example of the latter? What, specifically, does “Muslim-friendly” mean? Does it merely mean, say, equal opportunity as between mosques and synagogues? If that’s what it means, why not just say “multireligious” or some such?