🐘🔙🏘 The wrongheaded 'conservative' retreat from housing reform

America needs to make it easier to live in high-productivity, high-wage cities. But a new Heritage Foundation report is more proof that the populist right rejects the idea. Good grief.

Quote of the Issue

“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution.” - Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City.

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The Essay

🐘🔙🏘 The wrongheaded 'conservative' retreat from housing reform and urban density

The Heritage Foundation has published a nearly 1000-page book (or PDF, if you prefer) of public-policy recommendations for the next Republican president. The Washington, DC, think tank describes Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise as “an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country.” Given the document’s length (and my assumption that at least a smidgen of Reagan-style conservatism remains in the populist-evolving organization), there are probably at least a handful of ideas that could fit into my Up Wing (pro-growth, pro-abundance techno-capitalism) approach for building a more prosperous and opportunity-filled America and world.

But the following sentence from the book’s section on the Department of Housing and Urban Development raises a glowing neon red flag: “Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.”

Now at first glance, the line might seem like mere boilerplate. Residential zoning in the US is a process already managed primarily at the local government level, typically through city or county planning departments. Of course, a “conservative” think tank would be against Washington deciding land-use rules in, say, Keokuk, Iowa. Given these realities, it even might eem odd that zoning is worthy of reference in a document about federal policy. 

With a bit of context, however, the sentence’s inclusion makes plenty of sense. One of the big ideas on the populist right is the notion that Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs” as a way of turning suburban and exurban Republicans into Democrats. This from performatively populist thinkfluential Tucker Carlson of Fox News back in 2021:

The goal is to eliminate suburbs. So rather than improve the lives of people who live in crappy places, the goal is to destroy the lives of people who live in nice places. Why would you want to do that? There’s a very clear political reason. Suburbs are typically purple politically. … If your goal is to make the country a one-party state, you want to change this. You want to make suburbs into cities and if you did that, you’d win every time. Democrats win cities.

What got Carlson so worked up back then? In a reversal of Trump administration policy, President Biden’s housing department restored a HUD requirement that “communities take steps to reduce racial segregation or risk losing federal funds,” according to the Washington Post. As explained further by Eric Levitz of New York magazine: 

In some contexts, this means that affluent, white suburbs must tolerate the construction of apartment buildings so that disproportionately nonwhite, working-class families can afford to live among them (and to avail themselves of well-funded school systems and municipal resources). It was this prospect — of suburbs being forced to accept a slightly freer market in housing construction — that raised Carlson’s hackles. Democrats want to force suburban homeowners to tolerate “more hi-rise apartment buildings, maybe some drug-addicted vagrants living on the sidewalk, begging for change,” the pundit warned. He applauded the liberals of Westchester for standing their ground against federal efforts to expand their county’s housing stock, but he lamented that, “under pressure from federal ideologues, communities in Oregon and Minneapolis, for example, have abolished single-family zoning in recent years.”

The more conspiratorial view here is that what’s really going on is an ongoing globalist effort to herd Americans into superdense “15-minutes” cities where government elites can better monitor and control them. Or some such.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that Trumpy Republican seemed to think housing deregulation was a good idea.