A progressive's perspective: Why the Left should champion de-zoning

Henry Grabar's Slate interview with YIMBY advocate Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz highlights the need for bipartisan support for deregulating local housing construction. Abolishing onerous zoning codes, says Schatz, can address nationwide housing shortages, allow for a variety of new units created (not just high end), and preserve a vibrant free market—without the hassles of top-down gov't interference (looking at you, SB 9).

Sen. Brian Schatz: […] As a Democrat, I come from a long tradition of progressivism based on helping people. But one of the areas where I think the Democrats have it wrong, traditionally, is that we’re actually creating a shortage of the thing that we say we want. We are making it incredibly difficult to create housing, and then we sort of puzzle through what to do about it. And the solution is very simple, in fact. We need to make it legal to build housing of all kinds.

This should be attractive to people who are progressive, because we have a massive nationwide housing shortage. But also, people who are right of center should be attracted to the basic property rights argument, which is that, hey, it’s your land—you own it.

What are the policies at the local level that are preventing us from building the housing we need?

[Sen. Brian Schatz:] It’s minimum lot sizes, it’s restrictions on use, it’s bans on apartments, height restrictions. All of it. There are lots of programs that need federal subsidy, but there’s not enough subsidy in the world to solve this problem. We simply need to make it legal to build the thing that we all say we want.

This article originally appeared in Slate. Read the whole thing here.

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