Despite the mobility crisis we’re in, we have recently had new boom towns, like Nashville, Austin, and a whole tier of mid-sized American cities where they have this renaissance, suddenly gaining this influx of population, and then very quickly not being able to maintain that sort of growth and affordability. What does that tell you?
People often feel as if good places to live ought to be luxury goods, like a designer handbag or something that’s really affordable only to the wealthy. It’s an odd perspective, because for the overwhelming majority of American history, that wasn’t true. When some place was growing and thriving economically, people rushed to move there, and other people rushed to build housing for them. There was often a difficult period of adjustment, but prices didn’t stay high.
California was doubling its population every couple decades from the Gold Rush to about 1970 without the median price of housing, adjusted for inflation, rising. It was possible to do. And now what we see is that when places start moving economically, they almost instantly run into a housing crisis.
There’s been a lot of action at the local level to try and change this. Minneapolis helped start a movement toward citywide upzoning in 2018, and New York just passed its “City of Yes” package of zoning changes. Are there cities starting to do things right?
There are cities which have built enough that they’re now seeing their rents fall, like Austin, which validates the principle, but doesn’t exactly give a roadmap for everyone else to follow. Ultimately, I am skeptical that a legal regime that vests the power to control new construction fully in the hands of local governments is ever going to produce enough new building to rectify the crisis that we’re in. All of those local governments had that power delegated to them in the 1920s. It was a big national push under Herbert Hoover to adopt these and to create new powers and delegate them to localities.
There are lots of other approaches out there in the world to regulate land use. In countries that have not seen housing prices escalate as much, they tend to take broader regional or national approaches — imposing fairly standard designations over entire metropolitan areas, so that rules aren’t in favor of wealthy neighborhoods at the expense of poor ones. It’s a hard thing to ask an individual municipality to do. If you really want to see systemic change, you’re probably talking about changing the rules at the state level and not just at the city level.