My New Washington Examiner Article on "Foot Voting, Housing, and Affordability"

We can make housing more affordable and empower people to "vote with their feet" by curbing exclusionary zoning. Left and right should support that instead of counterproductive snake oil like rent control, tariffs, and deportations.

Andrii Yalanskyi/Dreamstime.com

Today, the Washington Examiner published my article on "Foot Voting, Housing, and Affordability" (non-paywalled version here). Here is an excerpt:

Affordability was the biggest issue in the 2025 off-year elections.

In various forms, affordability played a major role in the winning state campaigns of center-left candidates such as Govs.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA). It also propelled a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, to the leadership of the largest U.S. city, a major global financial hub. A year earlier, the affordability issue played a crucial role in President Donald Trump's 2024 win.

A central element of the affordability problem in recent years has been the high cost of housing, to the point where many people are prevented from living in the communities where they would like to be. Housing shortages increase the cost of living, prevent millions from "moving to opportunity," and curtail people's ability to "vote with their feet."

The problem of housing affordability is attracting increasing public attention. But many politicians in both parties continue to promote policies that make it worse: rent control in the case of many leftists, such as Mamdani, and tariffs and deportation of immigrants when it comes to Republicans, led by Trump. Both parties would do better to drop the counterproductive snake oil and instead focus on eliminating exclusionary zoning and other regulatory restrictions, which are the main causes of the crisis.

The rest of the article develops these points in detail, explaining the benefits of curbing exclusionary zoning, and also why rent control, deportations, and tariffs all actually exacerbate the housing crisis instead of alleviating it.

I cover some of these issues in greater detail in my recent Texas Law Review article, "The Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning" (coauthored with Josh Braver).

UPDATE: The Cato Institute has posted a non-paywalled version of the article here. I am not sure if the Washington Examiner site has a paywall over the article (I don't see one myself). But some readers have told me there is one.

Comments

[M L]

"counterproductive snake oil like rent control, tariffs, and deportations"

LOL. Nice try grouping those three things together.

I've typically thought of Somin as a very wrongheaded and extremely ideological globalist, and a propagandist, notable for openly abandoning any pretense of academic objectivity and engaging in biased advocacy - yet, doing so in a forthright way, and basically honest in his own mind. But to argue that enforcing immigration law, or NOT having open borders, is to blame for exacerbating rising housing costs, is extremely dishonest. On the contrary, the (globally historically unprecedented) mass immigration agenda and de facto open borders policies over recent decades are to blame for exacerbating rising housing costs.

[Roger S]

Yes, Somin is extremely dishonest. He advocates flooding USA with Third World migrants. He calls it voting with feet, but it is really replacing Whites with foreigners. It is not enough to bring them in. He wants to destroy nice communities by abolishing zoning. He should be deported back to his home country.

[David Nieporent]

On the contrary, the (globally historically unprecedented) mass immigration agenda and de facto open borders policies over recent decades are to blame for exacerbating rising housing costs.

Is this as true as your birthright citizenship historical recitation?

[Roger S]

Supply and demand. Millions more people. They have to live somewhere. They demand housing. Housing prices go up.

[Boston Commenter]

There is no way, ever, that we will put up with living side by side with the Third World, the poor, the uneducated, the ignorant, the violent.

We will fight for the right to live with our own class, our own kind, until the death.