Localism and the Limits of Regulating What We Love
When the perceived emotional harm from new development becomes a justification for state intervention, the law gets really arbitrary really quickly.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
As we approach the Christmas holiday, the wheels of housing policymaking are grinding to a halt. While that means there's a little less news to cover, it does open up an opportunity for this newsletter to cover some bigger ideas associated with housing.
To that end, this week's issue is a response to a recent essay by writer Kat Rosenfield, who defended neighborhood character and the regulations meant to protect it from development-hungry YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") advocates, who'd allegedly demand every charming home be converted to a five-over-one.
Localism and the Limits of Regulating What We Love
A couple of weeks ago, Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont signed into law a sprawling piece of housing legislation that is intended to encourage, and in some cases force, local governments to permit more types of homes.
Rent Free covered the details of the bill, and you can read that write-up here.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
Given the fraught political process that led to the passage of the new law, one shouldn't be surprised that it continues to engender controversy.
When Lamont promoted his signing of the bill on X last week, novelist, Free Press writer, sometimes Reason contributor, and Connecticut resident Kat Rosenfield responded with a quote tweet implying that no one supported the legislation.
safe to say a theme is emerging in the replies https://t.co/wPka10VLVX pic.twitter.com/QK3HMnkeAJ
— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) December 9, 2025
This provoked a familiar cycle of YIMBY advocates criticizing Rosenfield (sometimes obnoxiously), followed by a variety of pushbacks from Rosenfield on X, which eventually morphed into a longer essay on her Substack laying out her mixed feelings on the political push for new development.
While she is a self-described advocate of "thoughtful development" who is more in favor of new apartments in her town than many of her neighbors, Rosenfield nevertheless defended the "grief" people feel about changing aesthetics, character, and streetscapes as legitimate. Their perceived loss should inform how much housing localities permit (or don't permit).
(That's my summary at least. I'd recommend people read the whole essay here.)
I don't question that Rosenfield is sincere when she disavows the NIMBY ("not in my backyard") label, although some lines in her essay might give more skeptical readers pause.
(At one point, she says that the YIMBY approach to housing applied to art would permit grinding up the Mona Lisa and redistributing the dust.)
While it's light on policy specifics, Rosenfield's essay is a helpful illustration of the widely held view that housing policy should fundamentally be a bargain struck between the tastes of local residents and economic demands for growth.
There's a tradeoff between affordability and charm that local officials, with the input of local residents, should work to balance.
Indeed, this view is so widespread that it is one of the core justifications for extending the reach of zoning codes far beyond the domains of health and safety regulations.
Popular as this view is, it's also wrong on both a conceptual and a practical level. People should reject it even if they, like Rosenfield, have more than a few reservations about seeing their neighborhood turned into the opening scenes of Up.
For starters, while you might have strong feelings about your neighborhood, the fact is that you don't own your neighborhood. The area where your feelings should get to dictate what gets built and what doesn't should stop at the property line.
This is an easily understandable principle outside of the real estate development context.
To paraphrase an analogy from George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, people can feel great loss at the dissolution of a romantic relationship. No one seriously sees in the grief caused by a breakup a reason for state intervention.
People have agency over themselves and who they want to date. In our free society, respecting that agency takes precedence over the hurt feelings of a spurned partner.
The fact that we regulate property development more than romantic partnerships has a lot more to do with changing legal doctrines and social attitudes than any inherent difference between homes and marriage.
Dial the clock back a hundred years or so, and you'd find that states had a lot more regulations on who you could marry and a lot fewer regulations on what you could build on your land.
There's an intelligible, timeless principle behind the idea that you should be allowed to do as you wish with your property and your person. Once you start considering more ephemeral emotional harms as a legitimate reason for government regulation, things get very arbitrary very quickly.
In her essay, Rosenfield contrasts her view of shelter as a home, loved and warm, with the YIMBY view of shelter as mere housing: undifferentiated, replicable "inhabitable pink slime."
Yet the belief that a home is more than an austere living unit would seem to support more property rights, not fewer.
The view that everyone else gets a say over what your home looks like, or whether you turn one home into many homes, would seem to involve a lot more cold-hearted interest balancing than a libertarian respect for property rights as generally inviolable.
Ultimately, what Rosenfield is romanticizing is not so much the concept of "home" but rather the regulatory processes that dictate development decisions.
This romance for the local planning process has innumerable practical downsides. Decades of evidence should show that giving local governments carte blanche to set local zoning policies and to vote up or down on individual development proposals doesn't lead to "thoughtful development" so much as it leads to less development, period.
In 2024, the entire state of Connecticut permitted a little under 6,000 homes. Contrast that with the city of Austin, Texas, which permitted closer to 10,000 homes. On a per-capita basis, Austin is building around five times as much housing.
Connecticut's home price growth continues to greatly outpace national price growth.
The Constitution State's deference to local planning and public input might have protected local character. That same deference is pricing people out of the state at a rapid clip.
This is unsurprising. Survey data show that voters generally are vaguely in favor of building new homes. Meanwhile, research from folks like Boston University political scientist Katherine Levine Einstein finds that planning hearings are dominated by a very small set of residents with very anti-development views.
If public input at these hearings is given great weight in deciding what gets built (and what doesn't), it's unsurprising that the people with the most restrictive preferences win out.
A process that's supposed to balance various views on new development ends up being lopsidedly in favor of people who'd rather see almost nothing get built at all.
Rosenfield says on X that if YIMBYs want to be successful in encouraging more housing production, they should take people's concerns about beauty and character seriously and support regulations that require new homes to look nice and in scale as well.
Experience suggests there's just no way to require new homes be pretty without giving people a powerful veto over what gets built, pretty or not.
To remedy this situation, the Connecticut Legislature passed legislation that will require local governments to permit smaller housing projects in commercial zones and let developers build them without new parking spaces.
The legislation will also require localities to plan for additional housing and give them state grant money if they follow through on those plans.
All things considered, it's a pretty modest reform. One might consider it a state-level push for "thoughtful development." It's nevertheless being described by its critics as ushering in a development apocalypse.
Given Connecticut's track record of housing development, one might forgive YIMBYs for being a little dismissive of people who catastrophize the impact of the new law.
Rosenfield writes that she's "in a seemingly existential conflict with people who not only don't share my values, and who don't understand what home means to me, but who think the way I feel about my home is a problem."
Respectfully, it's not Rosenfield's view of her own home that's controversial, but rather her view of how much say she and her neighbors should get over the homes other people build on their own property.
Quick Links
- The Institute for Justice is representing a soup kitchen in its lawsuit against Wenatchee, Washington, which is trying to shut down its charitable activities.
- The New York Apartment Association estimates that New York City's rent-stabilized housing stock will need a $4.65 billion bailout to prevent widespread mortgage defaults.
- The Wall Street Journal covers the tale of the Twin Cities. St. Paul went all in on rent control. Minneapolis adopted liberalizing zoning reforms. One can only guess which has produced better results.
- President Donald Trump's AI executive order frustrates states' efforts to restrict landlords' use of algorithmic pricing software to set rents.
- St. Petersburg, Florida, is allowing homes to be built on church land. The city's namesake would no doubt approve.
