Reflections on Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's Privacy Fence
Don't expect the celebrity couple's battle with local planning officials over a privacy fence to turn them into YIMBYs.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
This week, we have a few crowd-pleasing stories.
One covers the reasons and consequences behind the property tax revolt sweeping much of the country.
Another is an item on the latest fraud scandal to hit Los Angeles' primary homeless service provider.
Before we dive into those, however, we have a wonky deep dive into the most pressing land use policy issue of the day: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's fight for a privacy fence.
Why Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's Fight With Local Planning Officials Isn't Going To Turn Them Into YIMBYs
Last week, news broke that newlywed celebrities Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are in the midst of a planning dispute with planning officials in Bratenahl, Ohio, over a proposed addition to their sprawling mansion in the exclusive, lakeside suburb of Cleveland.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
Daily Mail reported last week that the couple's request for a permit to build an 8-foot-high privacy fence around their $5.35 million mansion was rejected by town officials because it violated code provisions requiring fences of that height to be at least 75 percent see-through.
After some back-and-forth with town officials, the couple now has a pending request with the Architectural Review Board for a shorter fence.
The need to navigate neighborhood complaints and discretionary review processes, all to make a simple home addition, is often a radicalizing experience for property owners.
Thus, news that the professional football player and pop singer are beefing with zoning officials produced some tongue-in-cheek commentary on social media about how Taylor Swift might soon be lending her celebrity to the YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") cause.
While she'd be a great ally for zoning critics to have, it seems unlikely that Swift will be spotted wearing a "legalize housing" shirt anytime soon.
For starters, Swift and Kelce's dispute with local officials is not one that neatly fits within YIMBYs' standard concerns.
YIMBY policy prescriptions tend to focus on legalizing more residential density in more areas, whether that's a single-family neighborhood or a commercially zoned strip. While the average YIMBY activist has no great love for architectural review boards, permissible fence heights are generally not something touched by zoning reforms they advance.
In fact, some zoning reforms praised or supported by YIMBY activists would make additions to Swift and Kelce's home more difficult, not less.
Zoning reforms in places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco often include additional restrictions on large single-family homes (pejoratively termed McMansions) as a way of incentivizing property owners to build triplexes and quadplexes instead.
It's conceivable that Kelce and Swift's back-and-forth with planning officials might make them more sensitive to restrictions on their own property rights.
The fact that they are trying to build a privacy fence in Bratenahl, of all places, however, suggests that they'd never be natural allies of a movement concerned with fewer restrictions on residential density specifically.
Since its founding as a separate municipality in 1905, Bratenahl has always been an exclusive enclave in the wider Cleveland area. For the past century, zoning has played an essential role in keeping it that way.
In the early 1900s, towns like Bratenahl were always at risk of losing their exclusive residential character to the apartment and industrial development emanating from the then-boomtown of industrial Cleveland.
Cleveland's suburbs were among the first communities in the United States to adopt zoning restrictions to keep that development at bay. It was in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, located just a few miles south of Bratenahl, where the Supreme Court case establishing the constitutionality of zoning originated.
(Bratenahl adopted its first zoning regulations only one year after Euclid.)
The zoning laws that ensure Bratenahl stays a tiny, wealthy town of lakeside mansions were likely a major draw for Kelce and Swift when choosing to buy a home there in the first place.
If the security precautions surrounding their wedding are any guide, the two celebrities value their privacy.
Their planned privacy fence would turn their home into a sheltered sanctum within an already ultra-exclusive community.
None of those facts would seem to suggest Swift or Kelce would be enthusiastic supporters of YIMBY policy reforms that would allow an apartment building next door to loom over their fence.
If they're not natural YIMBY allies, however, Swift and Kelce needn't be hardcore zoning fanatics either.
While private covenants proved too flexible to comprehensively constrain the densification and outward growth of America's Gilded Age cities before zoning, they still can and do allow property owners to opt in to communities with more restrictive rules.
Homeowners associations (HOAs) have an (arguably earned) reputation for zealously enforcing extremely petty rules about how high the grass can be and how many pink flamingos you can put on the lawn. Their authority to impose fines and sanctions on homeowners often intermingles with the state in ways that makes less than fully voluntary.
Even so, they do allow property owners to satisfy their preference for living in tightly controlled communities through contractual, mostly consensual arrangements.
(For this reason, I've previously called HOAs the most and least libertarian form of government.)
By creating a system of private neighborhood regulation, HOAs can forestall homeowners' demand for city-spanning zoning laws.
Some scholars credit Houston's system of neighborhood-level restrictive covenants with helping to keep the city unzoned. The would-be NIMBYs can opt out of the looser development rules that govern the rest of the city.
Houston's booming rate of home construction suggests these private covenants do not severely restrict the city's aggregate levels of housing supply.
In a world without zoning, odds are Bratenahl's mansion owners would create restrictive covenants that would keep much of the small, rich town a quiet, development-free enclave that would be attractive to privacy-craving celebrities like Swift and Kelce.
Odds are they'd still have to fight a board of busybodies about how high their fence can be, but that would be a private issue the rest of us wouldn't need to worry about.
Property Taxes GTFO
Is COVID-19 the real cause of the property tax revolt sweeping the country?
That's the one the ideas advanced in a new essay by Yale law professor David Schleicher on the backlash to property taxes, which he terms the Great American Property Tax Freak Out or GTFO.
During the pandemic, large numbers of people fled cities for the suburbs, where they'd start families and work remotely. This caused a spike in property values and thus the property tax bills based on those values.
At the same time, more and more parents were feeling ill-served by public schools, whether because of prolonged shutdowns and masking, cultural conflicts over curriculum, or the more run-of-the-mill complaints about the quality of the education.
This has helped cause an exodus of students from public school districts, which absorb the majority of property tax revenues, to school choice alternatives that are more heavily funded by state governments.
Higher property tax bills for a less popular public service have fueled a backlash to property taxes in a long list of, mostly but not exclusively, Republican-dominated states in the South, West, and Midwest, argues Schliecher.
In 2024, eight states considered 10 initiatives to pare back property taxes, with all but two passing. This year, states are considering even more radical measures to exempt the vast majority of homeowners from some or all of property taxes.
People who don't like taxes generally might be pleased with this result. But Schleicher details a number of negative consequences of the turn against property taxes that should give small government fans pause.
Even with a drop in public school enrollment, local governments still provide a long list of services to their residents. Traditionally, property taxes on residential properties have been the primary way of paying for them.
The property tax revolt hasn't eliminated those government functions.
Instead, writes Schleicher, "the GTFO is moving the property tax away from a tool that allows homeowners to assess themselves to provide public services collectively and efficiently…and into a policy that makes non-homeowners pay for services enjoyed by homeowners and their families."
Rather than a quasi-user fee for government services consumed, exemption-riddled property taxes are becoming just another redistributive tax.
The consequences for housing production and housing affordability are complex but almost certainly negative, at least for anyone who does not currently own a home, writes Schleicher.
Lower property taxes mean lower costs of owning a home for incumbent homeowners, but higher home prices as the value of lower taxes gets "capitalized in the sale price" of housing.
Additionally, says Schleicher, "if local governments are cast adrift to rely on an increasingly narrow property tax base, allowing any kind of owner-occupied housing to be built will increasingly be a fiscal loser."
Cities thus have an incentive to impose more restrictive land use controls on new housing that, on net, costs the government money.
Tax revolts without spending revolts usually just mean pushing the costs of government onto someone else. In the case of a property tax revolt, efficient taxes levied to pay for services consumed are being replaced by less efficient taxes that have less of a connection between the supporter and beneficiary of tax-funded services.
Charges Fly in L.A. Homeless Spending Scandal
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed charges against three nonprofit employees for allegedly defrauding taxpayer-funded homelessness programs in the Los Angeles area of millions of dollars.
Two of the defendants are accused of taking public funds their nonprofits received and then spending them on a long list of personal expenses and investments, including Tahitian vacations, a new nightclub, and, in one defendant's case, bail for a domestic violence charge.
Another defendant is accused of taking kickbacks to steer grants to one of these fraud-riddled nonprofits.
Beyond the individual alleged crimes, these charges are yet another black eye for the scandal-plagued Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), the city-county agency that's the primary funding agency for homeless services in the area.
As I detailed in a piece for Reason last week, LAHSA continued to sign contracts with one of the nonprofits caught up in last week's fraud bust even after staff internally flagged it as a risk.
The Trump administration has chosen to suspend funding to the authority, citing its poor financial management. Both the city and county of Los Angeles have moved to divert more of their homelessness funding away from LAHSA and into their own agencies.
These latest arrests come on the heels of LAHSA reporting that homelessness is once again on the rise in the Los Angeles area. The spike in the overall number of people sleeping in shelters or on the street plausibly has a lot to do with the negative supply shock caused by last year's wildfires.
Nevertheless, poor administration of funds and outright fraud hardly help the city handle the consequences of thousands of homes burning down.
Both of Los Angeles' mayoral candidates have taken flak for LAHSA's failures. Mayor Karen Bass was, up until recently, a self-appointed commissioner on the authority's governing board. But she missed a majority of the commission's meetings.
Her opponent, Councilmember Nithya Raman, meanwhile, has attracted criticism for slow-walking the transition of L.A.'s homeless services away from LAHSA to a separate city agency.
A city that's generally considered to have found the secret sauce for reducing homelessness sustainably is Houston, Texas. In retrospectives on the city's successful efforts, officials often cite the consolidation of different homeless service programs and providers into a single, overseeing agency.
The ease at which the city adds housing units certainly deserves some of the credit too.
Ironically, LAHSA was similarly stood up to be that single agency that would coordinate a comprehensive response to homelessness. It's increasingly seen as an unfixable failure.
Structure only does so much. When it comes to reducing homelessness, there's no substitute for a steady addition of new housing and competent administration of programs for those who still find themselves without a roof over their head.
Quick Links
- In Northern Virginia, which hosts the largest concentration of data centers in the world, yet another county is moving to restrict data center development.
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, is now facing a second lawsuit over its inclusionary zoning policy that requires developers to include affordable units in their projects. Read Reason's coverage of the first lawsuit here.
- CityLab on the fight to save the "streatery" from city bureaucrats.
- The same Marin County where it took 50 years to approve a single subdivision?
More people whose work is based in SF live in LA County than in Marin County pic.twitter.com/imxefgEkTN
— Saad Asad (@realsaadasad) September 21, 2026
- A new report highlights the problems of discretionary permitting in Massachusetts.
