Non-Paywalled Version of My Washington Examiner Article on "Foot Voting, Housing, and Affordability"

The Cato Institute has posted one on its website.

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The Cato Institute has posted a non-paywalled version of my recent Washington Examiner article on "Foot Voting, Housing, and Affordability." I don't see a paywall blocking the article on the Examiner website. But some readers have told me they have encountered one. Regardless, you can now avoid any paywall by reading it at the Cato site. Here is an excerpt that summarizes the article:

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). We also published a shorter, nonacademic version in the Atlantic.

Comments

[hobie]

Heh, you got published in the Washington Examiner.

[thesafesurfer]

Ilya claims "tariffs" make housing less affordable. Please provide some facts, Mr. Somin, because your opinion is not worth spit. The reason for high housing costs is well documented and simple; housing is an investment commodity under current law instead of classification as abodes. If you want to bring down the cost of housing end the tax policies that make housing a more attractive investment than stock and bonds. This will strip exponential amounts of money from housing demand and drastically reduce prices, which of course home owners (65% of the population) do not support. Also end the commercial use of residential housing as lodging via Air BnB. Of course, Ilya mentions none of these factors because he fits everything to his agenda instead of the analysis to the facts. Ilya claimed in April and May of 2025 that tariffs would cause inflation. The inflation rate has been at 3.0% for 24 months as of December 2025. Tariffs were significantly higher in the last 8 months of 2025, but NO inflation accompanied them. Inflation was 4.1% in 2023. So much for tariffs causing inflation.

Then Ilya spreads the disgusting racist trope that "we needs blacks to picks our cotton" but in this case he substitutes "we needs illegals to builds our houses." Shame on you Mr. Somin! Shame!

Exclusionary zoning is the legal profession’s red herring to explain the cost of housing because it increases demand for legal opinions. There is no more self-serving argument in the housing debate than lawyers say that legal actions would solve the crisis.

The charlatan from George Mason marches on.

[bloocow2]

Maybe try reading the article? It's got links and quotes and everything, including one from the National Association of Home Builders about the effects of tariffs on the cost of building a home.

And that's not even the focus of the article! There's more stuff there than just tariffs!

[Roger S]

Russian Jew argues that Americans are too stupid to understand that they will somehow be better off if they are packed into dense housing projects with massive influxes of Third World migrants.

[John Rohan]

I see two problems here. Eliminating zoning entirely would create extreme instability in the housing market and probably force people into forming HOAs (which are worse IMO). For example, I buy a house in a nice neighborhood, my neighbors to the left and right have decent houses. Then someone new comes in, buys my neighbor's house, demolishes it, and builds a pig slaughtering plant right next door. That would totally tank my quality of life and my home value, putting me underwater on a mortgage in debt to a house that is now worthless.

And Ilya Somin being Ilya Somin, of course he finds a way to support illegal immigration. Even if importing slave labor makes housing more affordable, there's still a limit to how many people this country can reasonably support. And given that all our major reservoirs in western states are at serious lows, I think we are already past that limit now.