The American Conservative: It’s Time To Abolish Single-Family Zoning

[M II A II R II K]

It’s Time To Abolish Single-Family Zoning


JULY 3, 2020

By CHARLES MAROHN

Read More: https://www.theamericanconservative....family-zoning/

.....

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.

- So, suburban governments, you won’t get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then. And we oppose this today because we are conservatives? — The Highway Trust Fund has run billion-dollar deficits for years. There is a net transfer of transportation dollars from blue states to red states, from big cities to suburbs. Suburbs use federal transportation dollars for growth in a Ponzi-scheme financial arrangement. Suburban development patterns are ridiculously expensive to sustain, with more infrastructure per living unit at much lower financial return.

- The suburbs run on federal subsidies. Without them, America’s suburbs would have to become more financially productive. They would need to get greater returns per foot on public infrastructure investment. That would mean repealing repressive zoning regulations, allowing the market to respond to supply and demand signals for housing. — The conservative thing for suburban leaders to do here is to not wait for the federal government to tempt us with more handouts, but to go ahead and show those progressives running the big cities that we live by our principles, that we embrace vibrant markets and free people, by preemptively repealing single-family zoning.

.....