America's Housing Shortage Won't Be Fixed With 'One Weird Trick'
Highlighting individual wonky rules that drive up housing costs is good. But getting America building again is going to require more than a few marginal reforms.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. As I mentioned last week, I'm on vacation and out of the country. So this newsletter, like the last, will be a bit shorter and less pegged to the news.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
Instead, I wanted to write a column about the problem of using "one weird trick" to fix the housing crisis.
The Problem With 'One Weird Trick'
In a July installment of his Why Shit Not Working video series, New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé and actress Ilana Glazer took a swing at a few wonky regulations they say are making the city excessively expensive, like floor area ratios that govern the shape of buildings and sections of the building code that require two staircases and larger elevators in apartment buildings.
"The more you dig, the more bizarre rules you find making housing more expensive," says Ossé in the episode. To end New York's million-unit housing shortage and make the city affordable for aspiring artists and creatives, Ossé says, "we need to be intentional by ending weird rules."
WHY SHIT NOT WORKING: EPISODE 11 pic.twitter.com/mghA4LUfLo
— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) July 3, 2025
As far as short-form videos about housing policy go, this one is pretty good. It nails the basics by blaming high rents on an insufficiency of housing units and blaming that insufficiency of units on government regulation.
Painting obscure zoning and building code requirements contributing to this insufficiency as "weird" and "bizarre" helps to excite the viewing public's interest in getting rid of this regulatory minutiae, which they otherwise wouldn't care about.
All the same, there's a way in which the rhetorical tactic taken by Ossé and Glazer's video is generally unhelpful and even dishonest.
Theirs is an example of the "one weird trick" to housing policy: identify a rule that is helping to drive up housing costs, stress its obscurity, then hype the impact of its repeal on bringing costs down.
There are indeed many weird rules that drive up the cost of housing that could be safely eliminated. Yet it's inaccurate to say, as Ossé and Glazer imply in their video, that the elimination of a few weird rules will meaningfully combat the yawning shortage of units they identify as making New York City unaffordable.
Much broader deregulatory reform that goes beyond the elimination of a few "bizarre rules" would be required to eliminate that shortage.
The staircase rules Ossé and Glazer mention are a great case in point.
In most cities and states, the building code currently requires that residential buildings over a certain size (typically three stories) have two staircases. Critics of this requirement say it does little to achieve its stated purpose of increasing fire safety but does often make it infeasible to build smaller apartments on smaller lots.
Reformers have proposed letting buildings of up to six stories have just one staircase.
New York City is actually more liberal than most major cities by already allowing single-stair buildings of up to six stories for buildings with a 2,000-square-foot floor plate. The City Council considered an additional reform, promoted by the Center for Building in North America, that would allow 4,000-square-foot buildings to have just one staircase.
The Manhattan Institute's Eric Kober wrote in a policy brief last year that the adoption of single-stair reform, plus reform to the elevator and floor-area-ratio rules mentioned in Ossé and Glazer's video, would "encourage construction of point-access-block apartment buildings up to six stories on relatively small sites."
Kober says it would be "another necessary step" toward Mayor Eric Adams' moonshot housing goal of building 500,000 units over a decade.
And yet necessary does not mean sufficient, even for Adams' moon shot, which is half of the one million units Ossé wants to see built in the city.
Indeed, Kober's mention of single-stair reform comes in the final "Additional Reforms" section of a very long brief that proposes major reforms to everything from rent regulation and zoning to the entitlement process and the tax code.
Adams' moon shot "will not be achieved without far-reaching changes to the many laws and regulations that impede housing construction," writes Kober. If that's the case, a few "one weird tricks" certainly won't get the city to build an additional million units either.
Pitching "one weird trick" as the way of eliminating America's high housing costs can easily lead policymakers and the public to focus on more marginal reforms that ultimately disappoint.
Indeed, we've gone through this already with "middle housing" reforms adopted by several cities and states that allow duplexes, triplexes, and the like in formerly single-family-only neighborhoods.
Reformers are right to argue that single-family-only zoning has done much to drive up housing costs and price people out of desirable neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the "one weird trick" of allowing a few additional units per lot has produced relatively few additional units where it's been tried.
Many other liberalizing reforms, from greater density allowances and shrinking minimum lot sizes to eliminating permitting and parking requirements to cutting taxes and reducing impact fees, are required as well.
That's a lot of "one weird tricks." Each one might be necessary to boost housing production, but none are going to be sufficient.
Examples of proposed necessary but not sufficient "tricks" in the housing space abound.
Getting rid of the federal requirement that manufactured housing permanently sit on a steel chassis is all well and good. A lot more will likely be required to significantly increase the production of manufactured housing.
Exempting infill housing from environmental review requirements, where they exist, is important. It doesn't address the zoning limits, union wage requirements, green building codes, and affordable housing mandates that also render new urban apartments infeasible.
The "one weird trick" approach can also be unproductively focused on allowing a particular type of housing, when a broadly deregulated housing sector would build something else instead.
Some supporters of single-stair reform, for instance, argue that the benefits of the reform can be oversold. Builders will continue to construct a lot of larger apartment buildings with double-staircases, provided the zoning allows for it.
Liberalizing infill housing doesn't do anything to enable greenfield development where that's most in demand.
Meanwhile, the public likely has only a limited appetite for the next regulatory tweak that will solve everything. Critics of deregulation will often point to the marginal benefits of individual reforms to argue that the real solution to the high housing costs is aggressive government intervention.
A focus on "one weird trick" also allows politicians an easy out from supporting the broad-based deregulation necessary to get America building again. If a few simple rule changes are all that's necessary, there's no need to push for more general liberalization.
And if "one weird trick" can produce a lot more homes, policymakers might assume that the cost of adding a new bizarre rule here or there surely can't be that high either.
In a now-canonical column, The New York Times' Ezra Klein wrote about the problem of "everything-bagel liberalism," where a piling on of seemingly desirable rules and mandates renders the production of new housing, new transit, and more, infeasible.
Each rule or mandate might seem like a good thing individually, but each one adds to an increasingly burdensome tangle of red tape.
The inverse of this view is that peeling off these rules one by one won't fix the fundamental problem.
To stick with Klein's metaphor, if you don't like an everything bagel, the solution isn't to individually pick off every single poppyseed, sesame seed, and chunk of onion. It's to get a new bagel that doesn't have any of those things to begin with.
We need a new, much more fundamentally liberal set of rules to bring down America's high housing costs. There's reason to have some skepticism that the slow, steady repeal of individual regulations might not get us there.
To be sure, revolutionary liberalization of housing policy in one fell swoop isn't particularly realistic either. Omnibus zoning reform bills tend to do poorly in the state legislatures where they're proposed.
As we've seen with recently introduced bipartisan housing legislation in the U.S. Senate, bills that include lots of little tweaks can bring together lawmakers who wouldn't otherwise sign up for each other's more ambitious proposals.
Fighting righteous battles that can be won is still good, even if the larger war will drag on regardless.
Nevertheless, the goal is winning the war and ending America's housing shortage.
In Montana this year, one lawmaker proposed a bill that would have created free speech–strength protections for private property owners. It didn't pass, but it did put on the table what the end goal of zoning liberalization should look like: broad, robust protections for people's property rights.
It would be interesting to see more people interested in zoning liberalization propose similarly ambitious policies.
If transformative change is required, then it would be helpful for people to propose that transformative change.
