The Conservative Case for Ending Single-Family Zoning
Image via Michael Tuszynski at Pexels.
Last week, Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, published an essay at the National Review in which he made the claim that presidential candidate Joe Biden and fellow Democrats are setting out to “abolish the suburbs.”
Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”
To abolish the suburbs, writes Kurtz, Biden and the Democrats will “require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.” What’s more, Kurtz concludes by saying that the “attacks on suburban zoning” will undermine the tenets that are the foundation of the American experiment. The suburbs as we know them will “pass from the scene”:
With them will disappear the principle of local control that has been the key to American exceptionalism from the start. Since the Pilgrims first landed, our story has been of a people who chose how and where to live, and who governed themselves when they got there. Self-government in a layered federalist system allowing for local control right down to the township is what made America great. If Biden and the Democrats win, that key to our greatness could easily go by the boards.
Kurtz’s article prompted a response four days later from Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn. Writing in The American Conservative, Chuck pointed out the paradox of a conservative commentator like Kurtz holding up the suburbs as a sacred symbol of local control, when the entire suburban experiment runs on federal subsidies. Chuck wrote:
What is allegedly at stake is the ability of cities to artificially restrict the development of property through zoning. If you’re conservative in your disposition but don’t know Kurtz or this line of reasoning, you might assume that he is against zoning regulations. After all, there is no greater distortion of the market than local zoning codes, and there are few bureaucracies doing more harm to property rights and freedom than local zoning offices.
That assumption would be wrong. What is at stake here for Kurtz is the sanctity of single-family zoning, the ability of suburban governments to deploy this repressive land regulation on America’s suburban development pattern.
The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance.
These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
So if you want federal support for your housing, build a single-family home. If you want to live in that downtown shop with the house on the second floor, convert your house to a two- or three-unit building and rent it out—or do any number of normal and reasonable things that humans had been doing with their property for centuries to build their own wealth and prosperity—don’t expect assistance from the government.
Yet now that we’ve lived with this artificial distortion for a couple of generations, and piled on others like the mortgage-interest tax deduction, some strange conservative instinct kicks in to defend this bankrupt institution. In reality, the Pilgrims built a traditional town surrounded by farmland. Our government paid us to move to the suburbs. Invoking the memory of the former to defend the latter is an historical absurdity.
Chuck goes on to make a conservative case for repealing single-family zoning. The suburbs—as with towns and cities of every size—need to be freed up to develop in ways that are adaptable, responsive to local needs, and economically resilient. You can read Chuck’s whole piece here.
Cover image via Michael Tuszynski at Pexels.
Officials in Ottowa, Canada, are showing that local governments don’t need to accept expensive and unproductive projects, even if they have a lot of momentum behind them.