Scholars argue that the anti-zoning consensus hides other causes of the affordable housing crisis.
America is in the grip of a housing crisis. Nearly half of all renters and almost 20 million homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Recently, a bipartisan consensus has formed around a familiar remedy: getting government out of the way.
In a forthcoming article, Christopher Serkin and Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt Law School argue that this consensus—that less zoning will lead to more, and more affordable, housing—is misguided. The current drive to loosen zoning restrictions merely repackages the same market-first orthodoxy that has shaped housing policy for decades. Observing that “de-zoning is just the housing-specific word for deregulation,” Serkin and Sitaraman argue that deregulation is an unlikely solution to a problem that decades of deregulatory policy helped to create.
The anti-zoning case should be familiar. Zoning constrains density, imposes procedural hurdles on developers, and makes it easier for current residents to block new housing—restricting housing supply and driving up prices. And the prescription follows from the diagnosis: lift or limit zoning rules and let developers build.
Serkin and Sitaraman critique this account—and would-be housing reformers’ myopic focus on zoning—on three grounds.
The first is conceptual. Zoning need not restrict housing supply. Rather, zoning is a regulatory tool that can be used to encourage density, affordability, and sustainable development—or to frustrate those goals. Serkin and Sitaraman warn that any account that frames zoning as the chief or only cause of America’s housing crisis risks discarding a useful regulatory instrument. And abolishing or severely curtailing zoning may push restrictive land-use regulation into the private sphere—through homeowners’ association rules, for example—where such policies will be hidden from democratic oversight and outside regulatory control.
The second is diagnostic. Fixation on zoning leads to an overly narrow view of the problems afflicting the American housing market. Serkin and Sitaraman explain that the 2008 financial crisis—“undoubtedly the most important event for the housing market in the past half-century”—changed the shape of American homeownership, fueled the rise of institutional investors in the single-family housing market, and triggered a collapse in new construction. And corporate concentration in homebuilding and algorithmic price coordination in rental markets have significantly distorted housing and rental markets in recent years.
Finally, Serkin and Sitaraman observe that most anti-zoning reformers implicitly or explicitly accept a version of trickle-down economics in the housing market: the idea that building luxury housing will lower costs for everyone by increasing housing supply. But they argue that this approach has three fundamental flaws: It places too much faith in markets warped by concentrated corporate power, it ignores how government intervention shapes the structure of the housing market, and it assumes that increasing supply is the only legitimate goal for American housing policy.
Serkin and Sitaraman do not contend that zoning reform is always misguided. Where zoning impedes needed and economically feasible development, such as in the wealthy coastal cities where the anti-zoning groundswell began, loosening zoning rules may help to lower the price of housing. But generalizing from San Francisco and New York to cities like Phoenix and Kansas City is a mistake.
Rather than assume the market will deliver affordable housing if government steps aside, Serkin and Sitaraman propose a “post-neoliberal housing policy.” They call for an active approach based on four core principles: industrial policy for housing, including as workforce development for the building trades; public options, such as mortgage reform; targeted taxation of vacant properties, second homes, and undeveloped land held by corporate investors; and market-shaping public regulation, including as zoning rules that require, rather than merely allow, dense development.
Serkin and Sitaraman attribute the housing crisis to a set of interlocking structural failures that demand a broad and ambitious policy response. Crafting the housing markets that American communities need requires resisting the deregulatory instinct in its latest anti-zoning form.
