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.

Comments

[TJJ2000]

Why Are We Fighting?

One of the most predictable consequences of [Na]tional So[zi]alist Empire building. Throwing away Just-Trade (*EARN* what you want) and replace it with Gov - 'Gun' DEMANDS to the point no-one seems to think they have to *EARN* anything. All they have to do is get politicians with 'Guns' to go get it for them. Literally turning politics into Gangland wars over the last twinkie.

[Nobartium]

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.

Well, doesn't this describe your constant push for multi-unit housing?

[MasterThief]

That's what it is. I'll give him credit for at least partially presenting arguments against his urbanist screed. The problem is that he really says nothing that disputes their points.
I've mostly lived in the DC orbit of Northern VA. We moved 70 miles west to get away from the urban sprawl. I hate cities. The town we live in has been forcing a bunch of building projects against the will of the citizens. They are forcing historic properties to be demolished and replaced by a bunch of ugly town houses and condos. This town is based around agriculture, trucking, and some light industry. The farms are being replaced by solar farms and more condensed housing developments. We are being overrun by asshole government telecommuters who keep raising our taxes, clogging our roads, and destroying both the history and culture.
When you don't protect single family and urban lands then developers and greedy government officials are happy to slam high density housing and inflict all the problems that come with it on the population. I've seen people who have lived here for generations forced to move away because taxes have made their properties unaffordable and urbanites have driven up prices while killing all the mom and pop stores.
Fuck cities. I'm glad I live somewhere where my neighbors can't add onto or rebuild their homes in to multi-family housing.
I've watched Loudon go from a nice area full of farms and homes in wooded area. It's turned into a soulless area full of mcmansions, overpriced apartments, and expensive shopping areas. What does Britches say to those who don't want to be anywhere near urban sprawl hellholes? He couldn't give a fuck. His illusion of choice is really just his preferred choices inflicted upon the unwilling.

[CE]

Don't forget their favorite move: light rail stop, high density housing development (bonus points for low income housing), walkable neighborhood (it had better be, they give you 1 parking space per 2 bedroom apartment, which usually means 4 adults, each with a car), coupled with a road diet (4-lane street becomes 2-lane street), bike lanes (used by 2% of the residents now and then), and some landscaping on the median. All awarded to their cousin Fred's contracting firm, since he pays prevailing union wages and has the right diverse team to get approved.

Then they want to encourage microbrew pubs and food trucks, to make sure there is more traffic on the Ozempic-diet-victim roads.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

They want us all to live in a creepy mouse utopia.

[Bruce D]

"eliminating cars and personal space under the guise of environmentalism and a sense of community.

Well, doesn't this describe your constant push for multi-unit housing?"

No, because reason is not for eliminating cars. No one is trying to eliminate "personal space", whatever that is. Most libertarians have no problem with requirements to mitigate negative externalities, like requiring adequate on-site parking.

[Nobartium]

Most libertarians have no problem with requirements to mitigate negative externalities

Libertarians for regulations?

Just admit that you want to live in a overpopulated hellhole.

[See Double You]

Most libertarians have no problem with requirements to mitigate negative externalities, like requiring adequate on-site parking.

That is a terrible example. The average libertarian would eliminate parking requirements altogether in favor of private actors making decisions about how much parking they would need (if any).

[CE]

Have you been reading Reason's articles? They literally had one recently where they said parking space requirements are an unnecessary burden on developers.

[Ama Valde Intellectum]

You have then never read Jane Jacobs. Some libertarian you are.

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

[Mickey Rat]

So is Britschgi against the regulations proposed by the New Urbanists that are specifically social engineering to force people not to have personal motor vehicles because they hate the aesthetics of that lifestyle, or just against the reaction to it?

[CE]

But everyone has a car anyway, they just circle the block all day looking for parking.

[MWAocdoc]

All of these "fights" are meant to distract us from the one real elephant in the room: high density urban environments "just grew" under the social necessities of the various stages of history with some token overlay of "urban planning" and that they long ago escaped from any pretense of human control. Corrupt authoritarian government in the form of elected and appointed officials on the one hand and corrupt trade and craft labor unions on the other cooperate and occasionally clash in power struggles, while the denizens of big cities understand in no uncertain terms that the entire infrastructure is becoming increasingly impossible to maintain and that only the corrupt officials are able to prop it up as it slowly - and sometimes catastrophically - collapse out of antiquity and outdated design. There is no other option. Those who can bail out have bailed already and those remaining are either fantastically wealthy and don't care; or are unable to leave and have to continue their roles as hostages and victims.

[JFree]

high density urban environments "just grew"

No they didn't. More than 50% of URBAN land is zoned for single family in CA and the number is comparable/bigger in most every other city. Here in Denver it's over 60%. In NYC, it's 23% for 1/2 family - but there's another 22% set aside for streets which cover a much higher % in 1/2 res zones. The % of land in NYC zoned for multi-family or mixed res/comm is 10.6%.

The opposition dates way back. To the opposition to 'boarding houses' [single-family houses redeveloped into single-room rentals by a widow who wanted to remain in the house] in the 19th century when those were 25% or so of all housing stock. The same shit is pervasive today on Next Door where 'letting unrelated college students live in the same [single-family] house' will provoke a huge shit fest among neighbors.

[CE]

As it should:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14259091/illegal-frat-houses-san-luis-obispo-california.html

[JFree]

We fight because that was exactly the purpose of zoning in the US. To exclude the wrong people from being in our neighborhood. So we set all zoning - everywhere - up on that basis. Local control of zone descriptions, extremely detailed micromanaged zone descriptions that require variances/exceptions/hassle. That results in excluding building that doesn't fit exactly what was intended when the zone was first set up.

Other places do it different. The French have a focus on low/medium/high density - but generally the particular use of the building is not controlled. The Japanese don't allow local control of the zoning descriptions - so there are 12 zone descriptions in Japan (v say 38 in Seattle and thousands in Washington) - and residential can be built in any zone (to keep housing costs overall from being controlled by zoning area decisions).

We won't change because we still don't want the wrong people in our neighborhood. So we fight.

[Don't look at me! (No longer muted!)]

We should all be forced to live with the wrong people.

[Bruce D]

The "wrong" people? We're all the "wrong" people. Libertarians are the "wrong" people.

[Liberty_Belle]

Freedom to discriminate? That's very ...

[VULGAR MADMAN]

Libertarian?

[JFree]

Freedom to prevent someone else

[TJJ2000]

So we fight ... with Gov - 'Guns'

Because everyone wants to control other people's *EARNINGS* without having to pay for them. Want a collection of 'this type' of neighborhood? Setup an HOA and pay the PRICE.

The bottom-line to 'Government provides me with" is always an act of THEFT on someone else because some group didn't want to *EARN* what they wanted.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

Go kill yourself sarc.

[Bruce D]

No, he's right. No need for insults.

[Bruce D]

^^ Agreed. Conservatives and housing restrictionists wrongly seem to think that their property rights extend beyond their property lines to their neighbors' property.

[Ama Valde Intellectum]

But we have far more 'wrong people' Trans, gay, unmarried violent males between 18-32, drug addicts, illegals --- they are all rightly 'wrong people' if you are raising a family and don't believe 'anything goes'

Nor do you analyze correctly. You are afraid to say anyting normative about family. yet divorce is direclty linked to urban sprawl

Among the findings:

In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.
In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.
The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.
The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.

THIS STUDY IS NOW 18 YEARS OLD and unversally ignored by Libertarians.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

Americans don’t want to live in some science fiction brutalist nightmare. Lefty shits can live like that if they want.

[Bruce D]

Whatever the free-market produces after adequate remediation of negative externalities is right. That's fact.

[mad.casual]

LOL: These delightful 20-somethings bought one of them; told me they love it.

"I'm not a mid-century Dutch Clown, I'm clearly more of a Pacific Northwest Urban Hipster Lumberjack!" [Insert "they're the same picture meme" here]

[Alphonse Gaston]

I moved to a single family neighborhood because that is where I wanted to live. There are two-story apartment buildings a few blocks away, and duplexes closer than that.
But the city wants to line all the main streets with six-story monoliths, displacing duplexes and SFH alike.
I don't live in deepest suburbia -- I have a walkscore of 77.

[damikesc]

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

Why don't you try going and fucking yourself?

[Ama Valde Intellectum]

But he is right and you are dead wrong

Among the findings:

In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.
In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.
The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.
The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.

[CE]

People are fighting because some people bought homes in nice, quiet, uncrowded areas and hoped they would stay that way. And some other people have different ideas and agendas and want to change all that.

[Ama Valde Intellectum]

That is pure OBAMA
Not as stupid and hateful as Biden's National Rent Control but still an amazing foolish move

Specifically, Mr. Obama’s AFFH rule seeks to radically reinvent local zoning laws in the United States – reengineering America neighborhoods based on racial and ethnic quotas. Under the rule’s assessment tool, local governments are required to “identify neighborhoods or areas in the jurisdiction and region where racial/ ethnic groups are segregated.”

[See.More]

People are fighting because some people bought homes in nice, quiet, uncrowded areas and hoped they would stay that way they want to impose their conflicting preferences on others via government force.

FIFY

[Ama Valde Intellectum]

SImply, this means that nobody can depend on any neighborhood being the place they want to bring up children.

Obama and the always-foolish Biden both chose to live in completely isolated controlled racially homogenous neighborhoods.

[See.More]

SImply, this means that nobody can depend on any neighborhood being the place they want to bring up children.

Cry me a fucking river.

1.) Their preferences on where they want to bring their children up do not grant them any particular authority over how anyone else manages their property.

2.) They can join an HOA or similar covenant community.

[AT]

The result is endless arguments
The result is a lot of unnecessary arguments
The result is a contradictory tangle of critiques.

Who taught you how to write, Christian - and is it too late to demand your money back?

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.

Nobody cares about urban planning. Put the pod people in the pods. No actual humans care about them.

Just leave suburbia and rural America alone. And keep the addicts, derelicts, LGBT pedos, prostitutes, asylum escapees, illegals, and otherwise property-value dropping garbage out of their zip codes.

[Roberta]

It's a lot like arguments over laws regarding self-service gasoline and non-returnable bottles. Sometimes when a choice is legalized where it'd previously been illegal, the market goes so overwhelmingly to that choice that people feel the only way the minority choice is preserved is to ban or restrict the majority choice.