Why Are We Fighting?

When regulations limit what kind of housing can be built, the result is endless arguments about what people really want.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.

This week's newsletter is a response to a recent essay in The Federalist that makes a conservative case against New Urbanism and its "assault" on property rights and the single-family zoning restrictions that protect them.

Contradictory as it may seem, the argument that choice and property rights are best protected by regulations that limit choice and property rights is not uncommon in housing policy discussions.

It's a byproduct of lots of varying ideologies and urban planning approaches trying to foist a particular vision on everyone else, all with partial success.

The result is a lot of unnecessary arguments about the type of housing people actually want and the regulations necessary to ensure they don't voluntarily buy or rent something they don't want.

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Why Are We Fighting?

Over at The Federalist yesterday, former first-term Trump administration officials Johnathan and Paige Bronitsky have a broadside attack on the "New Urbanist" plot to "bulldoze the suburban American dream" and the conservatives who've been hoodwinked into supporting it.

There are "two faces" of this ideology, they write:

On one end, you have high-density urbanism, where developers — in cahoots with machine politicians — cram as many people as possible into apartment blocks, eliminating cars and personal space under the guise of environmentalism and a sense of community. On the other, you have the faux-traditional, highly regulated enclaves of Seaside and Celebration, Florida, prohibitively expensive and ironically more artificial than the suburban developments they criticize.

Despite their aesthetic differences, both forms of New Urbanism share a common goal: reengineering American life by discouraging homeownership.

Conservatives, the authors continue, have been bamboozled into thinking this dystopia would be a positive improvement by an oddball collection of profit-hungry developers, leftists, and "crony capitalist" libertarians interested only in control and creating a permanent rentier class.

Right-thinking right-wingers need to reject this "high-density, corporatist nightmare" in favor of "spacious, family-friendly suburbs where liberty thrives."

You can read the whole thing here.

There are plenty of critiques one could make of New Urbanism on free market and property rights grounds. It's a movement that does indeed have a highly particular vision for how communities should look that is highly critical of post-war suburban sprawl. They're more than willing to use regulation to set everything right.

Yet, the authors of The Federalist essay can't decide if they want to criticize New Urbanism for constraining people's choices or for giving people choices beyond the standard post-war single-family neighborhood.

The result is a contradictory tangle of critiques.

The authors attack New Urbanists for discouraging homeownership. They also attack the New Urbanist–planned community of Seaside, which the Census Bureau reports has a 97 percent homeownership rate—well above Florida's overall homeownership rate of 67 percent.

To be sure, the authors support affordable communities of single-family owner-occupiers, whereas overregulation in tiny Seaside (which covers less than half a census tract) has made it prohibitively expensive. One might say the same of many non–New Urbanist single-family-zoned neighborhoods of equal size across the country.

We're told that New Urbanists are engaged in an "assault" on property rights. Through federal fair housing rules, they've also eroded "local control over zoning law" that happens to restrict people's property rights too.

"Machine politicians" are trying to force everyone into family-unfriendly high-density housing. Instead, we need "policies that encourage more single-family homes." That would also seem to involve politicians putting their thumbs on the scales of how people live.

Profit-seeking multifamily developers cynically pushed for the erosion of local zoning rules just to squeeze a buck. Do the builders of single-family homes operate their businesses as charities?

New Urbanist–planned communities are allegedly secular wastelands bereft of houses of worship. That would seem to ignore the pious urbanist planned communities like Florida's Ave Maria. Standard single-family zoning rules, it should be said, are often not particularly friendly to churches trying to operate soup kitchens and cold-weather shelters.

The list goes on.

The Federalist essay is just one entry into an ongoing back-and-forth on the larger fight between free marketeers who support liberalizing zoning rules and zoning defenders who use the language of freedom and localism to support keeping those limits on property rights in place.

These two factions were very much at war within the first Trump White House, when administration policy and rhetoric swung wildly between the pro- and anti-zoning poles.

More broadly, the Federalist essay is part of a blinkered discourse that's deployed by suburban partisans and urbanist advocates of all political persuasions.

Each side criticizes regulations that limit their preferred type of development and subsidies to development they consider second-best. (Typically, some weird constellation of partisan political foes and cynical capitalists are behind these nefarious regulations and subsidies.)

Each side also either ignores, or outright advocates for, regulations that limit the type of housing they think is second-best and subsidizes their preferred option.

The Bronitskys' essay is a good example of this hypocrisy being deployed in favor of the suburbs and standard zoning regulations.

But their New Urbanist targets do this all the time too.

New Urbanist "middle housing" reforms are pitched (correctly) as a way of expanding choice for buyers and renters. Often those reforms are paired with "McMansion bans" that restrict large single-family home development.

Transit-oriented zoning can allow new apartments and shops near bus and train lines. The same zoning reforms can also ban new drive-thrus, gas stations, and low-density development.

Odds are that in any decent-sized American city, you can find zoning districts that offend the sensibilities of both urbanists and suburbanists. With everyone trying to impose their prescriptive vision on society as a whole, everyone has some basis to claim that land-use regulations are threatening their preferred community and lifestyle.

Truly, it does not need to be this way.

Despite the Bronitskys' pot-shot at "doctrinaire libertarians"(a pot-shot plenty of New Urbanists might nod along to), a libertarian approach to land use would allow both sides of the land use wars to disarm.

Free markets give people want they want at the price they're willing and able to pay. It's a setup that respects people's freedom while sorting out their preferences in the aggregate.

Odds are free markets in housing would produce lots of single-family homes in low-density suburbs, lots of walkable communities full of middle housing that's missing no more, and lots of urban blocks where apartments and ground-floor retail go together like milk and coffee.

None of these neighborhood types are bad things to want. None inherently conflict with each other. If one type of housing ends up predominating in this new free market in land use, so be it.

By overregulating what people can build and where, we have put ourselves in a position of trying to reverse engineer people's housing preferences with white papers, charter documents, and confused, contentious opinion essays.

It's exhausting and inefficient. There's a better way.

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Quick Links

• Gothamist reports on the odd phenomenon of affordable apartments in New York City sitting empty for months. This isn't the result of landlords holding units off the market to drive up prices. Instead, it's the product of city regulations that put absurd limits on subsidized unit owners' ability to market to tenants.
• A zoning fight is getting personal in the community of Campton Hills, Illinois, where Village Trustee Janet Burson has been cited for operating a prohibited home-based massage business. The village's administrator says that Burson flipped him off when he confronted her about taking down language on her business website offering home-based appointments. Burson does not deny the accusation, telling the Daily Herald, "I do not deny I was uncouth. The ask was inappropriate. They had no business asking me to do anything with it."
• Portland, Oregon's citywide fourplex legalization is starting to take off. Michael Andersen of the Sightline Institute shared new data on Bluesky showing middle housing units enabled by the city's reform accounted for a quarter of new development last year.
  

  Hey guess what I have some good news! This is from data I got this afternoon.year 1 after Portland's fourplex legalization: 1% of new housing citywideyear 2: 7%year 3: ***26%***Some things take some time to pay off.These delightful 20-somethings bought one of them; told me they love it.

  — Michael Andersen (@andersem.bsky.social) 2025-02-07T23:30:43.849Z

• Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs and popularizing crusader against the high cost of free parking, has died.
• Former Texas legislator and first-term Trump administration official Scott Turner has been confirmed as the next secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
• Cambridge, Massachusetts, also voted to legalize four-story housing citywide.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency halts federal grants for migrant housing in New York.