State vs. Local, State vs. State
A popular revolt against state-led zoning reform in Colorado, Massachusetts' contradictory approach to housing supply, and how municipalities lobby to kill housing.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week, we look at a few stories that highlight the challenges and risks that come with attempting to reform local land use regulations at the state level.
Perhaps the major development in housing policy over the past five years has been state legislators' increasing willingness to intervene in heretofore mostly local zoning decisions, generally with the goal of making those zoning regulations less discretionary and less burdensome.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
It once seemed radical when a state lawmaker would propose eliminating local parking minimums or requiring cities to permit multiunit housing in single-family neighborhoods.
Now, such legislation is routinely introduced and increasingly enacted into law.
To give one example, the Parking Reform Network, which advocates for eliminating laws that require that developments come with a minimum number of parking spaces, reports that three state-level parking reform bills were introduced in 2019 and one passed. As of 2026, 89 parking reform bills have been introduced, and 33 have passed.
Yet passing reforms on paper at the state level does not guarantee that local governments and local residents will eagerly comply with state-level deregulation.
One reason advocates support evolving housing policy from the local to the state level is their belief that state officials are more naturally pro-growth, and thus will support more liberal housing regulations.
Yet even where state officials have found religion on zoning reform, they will still go to bat for localities' power to impose other regulations that reduce housing construction.
Municipalities also operate powerful state-level lobbying operations to prevent reforms from passing in the first place that would reduce localities' powers to regulate land use.
In Colorado, a Popular Rebellion Against Zoning Reform
Last Tuesday, voters in the Denver-area suburban community of Lakewood, Colorado, voted decisively to repeal a series of zoning amendments that had allowed denser housing to be built in more areas of the city, and with fewer required parking spaces.
As Denverite reports, the city's reforms had the support of the city's mayor, its city council, the local U.S. representative, and a long list of advocacy groups. But critics easily won the day with the argument that permitting more density citywide would "destroy" neighborhoods in the service of "corporate greed."
The preliminary results show that of the 35,000 people who participated in the special election, roughly 22,000 voted to repeal the city's reforms and return to the old, more restrictive zoning code.
The now-repealed zoning reforms were adopted by the Lakewood City Council in October 2025 and included a number of purely local initiatives, such as changes that allowed "middle housing" in single-family areas while capping the size of new single-family homes.
The reforms also brought the city into compliance with new state laws requiring, among other things, cities to repeal their limits on unrelated people living together and pare back their parking requirements.
With last Tuesday's vote, they are now out of compliance with the state's parking reforms at a minimum.
The enactment of those laws in 2024 and 2025 has since set off a war between hostile localities who oppose the state mandates, and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who's enthusiastically supported them.
Last year, the governor issued an executive order that gives jurisdictions in compliance with state housing law priority for state grants. His administration has also published dashboards tracking localities' compliance with the new state housing laws.
For their part, six municipalities sued Polis last year over his executive order and the state housing laws, all of which they argue are unconstitutional state usurpation of their home rule powers.
"[Lakewood's] vote shows the need for more statewide action to ensure all Coloradans have access to livable communities including quality, affordable and convenient housing," said a spokesperson for Polis in an emailed statement.
The Lakewood vote shows the difficulty of comprehensively enforcing state laws that preempt some local zoning policies while still largely leaving it to localities to set zoning policy.
The whole premise of state zoning preemption laws is that some localities aren't going to adopt sufficiently pro-growth policies on their own. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that some local governments, or in Lakewood's case, local voters, will use the control they retain over zoning generally to thwart state zoning preemption laws.
When localities do thwart state policy, state officials have limited, imperfect remedies. They can use fiscal incentives to encourage compliance or launch their own lengthy lawsuits to try to compel it.
Massachusetts Attorney General Joins Lawsuit To Defend Inclusionary Zoning
Earlier this month, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell moved to intervene on the side of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a lawsuit that challenges the city's "inclusionary housing" program.
Cambridge's policy requires that builders reserve 20 percent of the floor area of projects with 10 or more units for affordable housing units. In December 2025, Cambridge-area developer Patrick Barrett III sued the city, arguing that its requirement that he include money-losing affordable units in his projects amounted to an "unconstitutional condition" on his building permits.
City and state governments across Massachusetts, and the country as a whole, impose "inclusionary zoning" mandates similar to Cambridge's. Research typically finds that these policies raise market-rate housing prices while producing few affordable housing units.
Property owners across the county have filed similar lawsuits against inclusionary zoning. These generally argue that inclusionary zoning requirements violate Supreme Court rulings establishing that governments can't condition the approval of building permits on applicants surrendering their property, unless doing so mitigates some impact of new development.
Thus, property owners argue that governments can't force them to build affordable housing, because their housing projects are not making housing unaffordable.
As The Harvard Crimson reports, Campbell argues that inclusionary zoning is both constitutional and a key tool in addressing Massachusetts' housing shortage.
As a practical matter, the attorney general's intervention changes little, says Paul Johnson, an attorney with the Pioneer New England Legal Foundation, which represents Barrett. "The City of Cambridge continues to be represented by highly capable counsel, and we expect its legal team to remain in a leading role as the case moves forward," he says.
There is nevertheless some symbolic significance to Campbell's intervention. Her defense of inclusionary zoning contradicts other lawsuits she's filed attempting to eliminate city-level barriers to home construction.
Earlier this year, the attorney general sued nine municipalities for failing to allow apartment housing near transit stops as required by the state's MBTA Communities Act. At the time, Campbell said that lawsuits were not her first choice, but the "urgency of our housing shortage" compelled her to act.
One way Massachusetts communities can, and have, come into paper compliance with the state requirement to allow apartments near transit, while still preventing many from getting built, is by imposing inclusionary zoning requirements that undermine the financial feasibility of new apartments.
Campbell has put herself in the position of suing to overturn "exclusionary" zoning laws that prohibit apartment construction, while also defending "inclusionary" zoning laws that make it impractical.
Massachusetts is far from alone in taking this mixed approach of encouraging and discouraging housing production simultaneously. It is emblematic of an unfortunate reality where more and more policymakers are seeing the light on zoning while doubling down on other supply impediments.
New Records Confirm Arizona Municipalities Enlisted the Military To Fight Housing Reform
New records obtained by Reason confirm that Arizona municipalities enlisted the Department of Defense (DOD) in their efforts to help kill a state-level "starter home" bill.
In March 2024, Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed H.B. 2570, a "starter home" bill that would have allowed smaller homes to be built on smaller lots, despite bipartisan support for the measure in the Legislature.
In her veto message, the governor cited opposition from the DOD that the bill would allow dense housing to encroach on military facilities and runways.
The governor's blame shifting to the DOD raised a lot of eyebrows at the time, given that the department had been silent on the bill until after it passed the Legislature. It was also asking for minor, technical fixes.
At the time, I filed a public records request with the governor's office for its communications with the DOD involving the bill. Two years later, the governor's office has at last fulfilled that records request.
It provides more detail on how some last-minute lobbying from the DOD in the service of municipalities opposed to the starter home bill helped convince Hobbs to kill it.
In a March 14, 2024, email, two days after H.B. 2570 had been transmitted to the governor, Wendy Ostapuk, the government affairs representative for the DOD in Arizona, emailed Kennesha Jackson, a policy adviser for Hobbs, and another staffer expressing concern about the bill.
"While the DOD has not been tracking this bill, it was brought to our attention this morning by the municipalities surrounding our military installations," wrote Ostapuk. "There are encroachment protections that municipalities provide our military installations in the form of development and density restrictions that we are concerned could be negatively impacted by this bill."
Ostapuk said that while she understood there is "pressure" to sign H.B. 2570, a "pause" on the legislation could provide the military the time necessary to determine its full impacts.
Jackson acknowledged receipt of the email and said she'd forwarded it to Hobbs' housing staffer.
The following day, the DOD issued a more formal letter to Hobbs declaring its opposition to H.B. 2570 as written. Hobbs cited that letter in her veto statement that came three days later.
In response to inquiries from Rep. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.) later that year, the DOD confirmed it had been unaware of the bill until the city of Glendale, which borders Luke Air Force Base, alerted the department to it on March 14.
The emails obtained by Reason confirm this story. They show that the DOD flagged its initial outreach to Hobbs as coming at the behest of local governments in the state and that the DOD wanted to provide some countervailing force on the pressure Hobbs was feeling to sign H.B. 2570.
Indeed, at the time, housing advocates and lawmakers who'd supported the bill were urging Hobbs to sign the legislation. The governor had consistently expressed mixed opinions on the bill, given that it was opposed by local governments.
As Reason covered at the time, the taxpayer-funded Arizona League of Cities and Towns was a major lobbying force against the bill, citing its erosion of local government autonomy.
At a minimum, the DOD's late-breaking opposition to H.B. 2570 gave Hobbs convenient cover to veto the bill. It's likely Hobbs would have vetoed the bill without the department's intervention, however.
When advocates ran a substantially similar bill the following year that included amendments addressing the DOD's concerns, Hobbs continued to resist the legislation.
In most states, tax-funded lobbying leagues for municipalities are a powerful interest group that advocates against any state-level efforts to encroach on local land use regulation. As the Arizona episode shows, they can be pretty crafty in protecting their interests.
Quick Links
- A California court decides that state accessory dwelling unit reforms don't apply to condo HOAs.
- The Institute for Progress has a comprehensive brief on how investor restrictions in the Senate's pending housing bill undercut housing supply.
- Another local uprising delays yet another data center.
- A Kansas town really does not want to let a burger restaurant have a burger mural.
