Conservatives occupy a strange peripheral space in the debate about zoning in the United States. The country’s housing shortage and resulting affordability crisis is most acute in central cities and coastal states where the Republican Party is almost entirely out of power. The argument tends to be contested between people whose political self-identification spans from liberals to leftists, all under the umbrella of Democratic Party politics.
Yet it’s not realistic to ignore conservative views on the subject—as much as some might try. Significant swaths of the United States are governed by conservatives. At the municipal level, this is true in small towns, which are not immune from land use issues, and in exurban communities, which are fast-growing components of metropolitan housing markets. Conservatives also wield the bulk of power in statehouses across the country. In much of the United States, it’s not possible to address problems like the housing crisis or job sprawl on the metropolitan and regional scale without coming across, understanding, and accommodating a conservative perspective.
But what is that perspective? What do conservatives actually believe about land use? About zoning and regulation? About affordable housing and housing affordability? About segregation and fair housing?
On the occasions in which conservative governments have had opportunities to take a central role in the debate, they have not answered the question. Early in the Trump administration, the new HUD Secretary Ben Carson made some noises about supporting an anti-exclusionary zoning policy. Then nothing happened and by the end of the term the President was running for re-election on a platform of defending exclusionary zoning regulations from all attacks. After his defeat, the issue dropped out of sight entirely in conservative media.
Yet housing affordability issues still remain and so conservatives will still be called to account on zoning questions. In Minnesota, residential zoning reform may be a central topic of the coming year’s legislative session. Pro-housing laws are also being debated in statehouses around the country. At this moment, it’s more important that ever to look into why it is so difficult for the right to think coherently about housing issues.
Notable Recent Failures Of Conservative Coherance
This summer, we got a good glimpse at the conservative confusion on housing issues.
First, the Minnesota Reformer went out to a Habitat For Humanity build site where a bi-partisan group of state legislators were participating and asked them questions about housing policy. In particular, the Reformer tried to pin down several of the Republican legislators on whether local zoning conflicted with the party’s traditional embrace free-market economics, and the result was several conversations inflected with total nonsense. The exchange with Rep. Donald Raleigh (R-Circle Pines) was particularly surreal, and I’ll quote just a portion of it:
Raleigh: …I want the market to dictate what’s going on.
Reformer: But local zoning ordinances interfere with the free market do they not? How would that interfere with the free market? You said local communities should be able to decide what kind of housing is built?
Raleigh: Yes.
Reformer: And so a lot of communities make rules that make it almost impossible to build affordable housing. And does that not interfere with the free market?
Raleigh: No, I think the free market will dictate what’s going to be built in each one of the locations.
I think the key takeaway from this conversation is that there is no takeaway. Reformer reporter Max Nesterak tried a couple times to get Raleigh to accept the premise that individual property owners acting on their own to improve their property was an example of the workings of the free market. In response, Raleigh didn’t argue a different view or even dispute the premise. He just didn’t seem to comprehend it at all.
A week later, the Star Tribune published a big frontpage report about how onerous zoning regulations play a big part in keeping the Twin Cities segregated. In response, Lakeville Councilmember Luke Hellier essentially short-circuited live on Twitter:
When you’re having a normal one.
@lukehellier
Constructing one size fits all policy for housing is a mistake. Local leaders can make local decisions. Full stop.
Whether it’s Lakeville, Lakeland, or Lake Elmo the local officials know better how to chart our future than politicians in St. Paul.
Any attempt at imposing Minneapolis style zoning for Lakeville by the legislature will be met with full resistance
I don’t want to miss noting how explicitly Hellier’s thread echoed the language of Southern efforts to oppose school desegregation. But apart from that reprehensible coda, the rest of his response was pretty boilerplate. The pretzel-logic that zoning reforms to allow multiple types of buildings to be built on any given lot constitute a “one-size-fits-all” policy is completely baffling on its face. Yet it is an exceptionally common line, you hear this all the time. It makes sense only if you view zoning as a matter of the number of colors on a map, and not what those colors actually permit. It doesn’t register that the status quo, which prohibits anything besides single homes on single lots on the majority of land in towns like Lakeville, is far more prescriptive.
Applied to any other subject, the situation would be obvious to everyone. Imagine if Lakeville passed an ordinance mandating that residents in 95% of the town could only buy SUVs. Seeing this, the State of Minnesota responded with a law saying that regardless of where they live, all residents of the state should be able to buy either SUVs or sedans. It would be incomprehensible for anyone to call that state law a “one-size-fits-all” policy, especially in relationship to the local ordinance. Yet that’s precisely what happens with housing.
I think what’s happening here is that for conservatives like Raleigh or Hellier, questions about land use regulation pit two basic conservative instincts against each other in ways that are incompatible and so the natural result is gibberish.
Conservatism Doesn’t Have an Easy Answer For Zoning
One of the bedrock principles of conservatism is an aversion to rapid change. The traditionalist likes things just as they are, is suspicious of anything labeled “progress,” and works towards an idyll based on a apocryphal past in which Americans lived happily in close knit communities based on faith, families, and mutual affinity.
Another bedrock principle of the conservative political movement, especially in the United States, is a conception of liberty that is deeply rooted in respect for private property. The libertarian celebrates free markets, rejects government regulation, and affirms that the best society is one where individuals are free to act according to their own self-interest.
Zoning forces these two impulses in completely different directions. One ideology says “I get to veto changes in my community’” and the other responds “it’s none of your damn business what I do with what I own.” For a traditionalist, zoning laws are a way to block or slow changes that might threaten prized social structures. For a libertarian, zoning laws are a clear violation of property rights.
When Minneapolis passed its 2040 plan, which reformed single family zoning districts to permit triplexes (among other changes), the libertarian website Reason lauded the move. But then two years later, then-President Trump turned a strong defense of exclusionary zoning rules into a major campaign issue. Ordinary legislators and activists are caught in the middle because there is a genuine conflict among the bedrock values of American conservatives when approaching zoning. This issue is not an easy for that movement to answer.
How Conservatives Tend To Square The Circle
Zoning presents a genuine intellectual challenge to the conservative movement. It it noteworthy that conservatives who have thought most deeply about the topic, like Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns, have been able to construct traditionalist and libertarian arguments in favor of zoning reform. However they are the exception.
The vast majority of conservative adherents are not as thoughtful and instead turn to a couple of tried-and-true shortcuts to bypass the thorny intellectual questions and arrive at a political position without having to work too hard. These mental shortcuts mostly point in the same direction. For one, the increasing consensus among progressives about the need for zoning reform gives conservatives a clear signal to “own the libs” and tack in the opposite direction. For another, the case for zoning reform tends to pit younger and less wealthy groups against older and wealthier groups, and conservatives have a natural affinity for the latter. I think that as a consequence of these rules of thumb, the traditionalist perspective on zoning tends to have the advantage over the libertarian perspective as a natural reflex. The statements discussed above by Rep. Raleigh and Councilmember Hellier come down on that side and support this view.
But arriving at a position is one thing and constructing a post hoc explanation for it is another. As those examples make clear, conservatives still have difficulty in explaining themselves in a way that doesn’t obviously betray significant chunks of their ideology. One popular escape hatch is to ignore the issue and concern troll the left instead. But there’s nothing really worth saying about that, it is what it is.
I think a more interesting way to cobble together a plausible-seeming stance is to subtly shift the holder of property rights away from the individual and towards the community. One dissenting commenter on the Reason article about Minneapolis 2040 put it in this way:
WC Varones
December.10.2018 at 4:46 pmAnd yet there’s plenty of room for libertarians to be pro-zoning.
When you buy a house in a single-family zone, the existing zoning is part of your property rights. You don’t want a giant apartment block built next door. Drastically relaxing the zoning is a violation of existing residents’ property rights.
You can see this same impulse as well in the answers that Rep. Jon Koznick (R-Lakeville) gave to the Reformer in the same article discussed earlier:
Reformer: You know there’s been an effort in California to abolish single family home zoning as Minneapolis has done. Should the Legislature consider something like that?
Koznick: No, because I think the market and people should have the options to build the house or live in a neighborhood that they kind of prefer to and aspire to without the Legislature telling them … you know … It’s bad enough we tell them how to live sometimes. We should be cautious on telling them what kind of houses they have to live in as well
Reformer: But isn’t that what single family home zoning ordinance does? The city is dictating what kinds of homes people are allowed to live in there.
Koznick: Yeah, the communities are dictating what types of homes that they want. The home buyers and the communities are driving what options are permissible.
In the most basic understanding of a housing market, there are buyers and there are sellers. The good being bought and sold is real property, enshrined in surveying language on a deed. But the commenter in Reason and Rep. Koznick make an argument that complicates that framework by inserting a third party—the community. In this conception of the housing market, there are buyers, there are sellers, and there is the community that will gain the former and lose the latter and rightly has a stake in the matter. The good being bought and sold is the real property on the deed and also all of the attendant privileges, burdens, and opportunities that come with owning it and living on it.
This traditional American neighborhood (in Providence, RI) was built without a lot of government regulation with a wide variety of sizes and shapes of housing and commercial uses. Conservatives don’t really live here, but the liberals who do rely on conservative tools to maintain it.
There’s an element of truth to this. Say that I am considering buying a home in Lakeville and moving there. Aside from the attractiveness of the property and the structure that sits on it, I would probably also consider where the home is located relative to my workplace or where it is relative to things I like to do. I might consider whether it has a nice view or whether other neighbors might have too nice a view of it. I might consider whether I can park my car easily on the street. If I have children, I would likely consider the quality of the local schools that they would attend. Having made the decision to purchase this property based on these community-specific factors, I might then feel that I have a right to their continuance in the future.
Say that having purchased a home in Lakeville. I now want to subdivide this home into a duplex. I will live in one of the units and the other will be rented out at fair market rent. In all probability, because this is a rental property with half the square feet of a standard home in the area, it will be rented out to someone who could not afford to purchase this property from me. Some communities might argue that it is their legitimate financial or social interest that only people of the means to buy or rent the same type of housing as everyone else be able to live in it.
What It Means To See Communities As Free Market Actors
Conservatives can claim to uphold both their traditionalist impulse to oppose change with a libertarian defense of property rights by placing communities at center stage in the housing market.
In this framing, towns or neighborhoods act like firms that offer different products. Lakeville offers one flavor of community, Landfall offers another, and Lowry Hill offers a third. In turn, property owners may lose individualized rights to do whatever they want with what they own, but they become like members of a country club, gaining a vote on how that community’s product changes (or doesn’t) over time. If you accept this framing then it suddenly seems like an inappropriate intrusion for a higher level of government to intervene and force your club to—say—schedule a bunch of new tee times so that the riffraff can play golf on your course without paying for full membership.
American law does not usually support a communitarian take on property rights. In general, American law (including portions strongly supported by conservatives like the castle doctrine) tends to be fairly deferential to the private property rights of an individual. To an extent this applies to real property as well. In most places I can paint my house whatever color I want without being sued by a neighbor who does not like it.
Historically, I could also build what I wanted on my property without being sued over it (this is not the past that traditionalists want to return to). But over time, Americans developed a far more communitarian perspective when it comes to land use in particular. More to the point, Americans have developed institutions that consistently interpret these laws in the communitarian direction.
The underlying premise of zoning is that what happens on one property can impact nearby properties as well. When the business next door is an abattoir, that premise is clear enough. But the intention of the vast majority of real-world zoning laws has been to separate people from each other on the premise that the type of person who lives at one property can impact the types of people who live nearby.
These laws were originally written to separate different races until that explicit approach was ruled unconstitutional. Cities then seamlessly pivoted to writing zoning laws that separated different styles of housing as a proxy for social classes, which in turn were a proxy for race. Not everyone is willing to say it out loud, but the central purpose of much of American zoning remains the preservation of spatial income segregation. That idea is then smuggled into the public conversation under the guise of “protecting property values” or “preserving community character.”
These sentiments are mediated by groups, such as neighborhood organizations and planning commissions, that are often staffed by well-intentioned people who consider themselves to be politically left of center. But the conceits under which they operate are recognizably manifestations of the traditionalist and libertarian thrusts of conservatism. For generations, some of the deepest blue districts in America have upheld a status quo that is plainly against their supposed political values.
Conservatives End Up With Progressives In weird alliances
Cognitive dissonance about zoning afflicts progressives (I’m using this as a blanket term) but for different reasons. On the left, progressives are not really split into opposing factions by a conflict between base principles about the nature of property. On the contrary, progressives share the same communitarian perspective on land use as traditionalist conservatives. Both agree that when property is bought and sold, the good at issue is both the real property on the deed and all of the attendant privileges, burdens, and opportunities that come with it.
Progressive language giving cover to a conservative viewpoint. In this case, the signs argue that this communities should be able to dictate who lives in it, but instead of inveighing against an invasion by the poor, they attack an invasion by the rich. (In reality, this specific proposed development contains affordable housing.)
But while a traditionalist conservative might see this fact as important in order to maintain segregated communities, most progressives would see it as important in order to create new diverse ones. The primary progressives divide is on questions of mechanics. Can more equitable communities be created by working with or opposing market forces? Can more equitable communities be created by working by neighborly consensus or by using state power to overrule it?
The ultimate political alignment looks confusing to an American political observer. On one side, a coalition of technocratic progressives and a rump faction of true-believer libertarians is taking aim at strict zoning regulations for totally divergent reasons. On the other, a bootleggers-and-Baptists alliance of overtly and covertly segregationist homeowners and anti-capitalist activists defend the principle of local control with completely different expectations of the outcome.
The least you can say of it is that it’s a rich tapestry!
It’s impossible to really get a firm grasp of the full spectrum of positions and postures in the American zoning and land use debate. But we can paint in broad strokes to at least find our footing. So much of the argument is consumed by groups on the left painting out their differences with ever-finer brushstrokes. The conservative perspective is far less discussed. But is essential to understand, because conservatives hold real power in the United States and winning coalitions in much of the country will include at least some of them. Understanding the very real divides and the bridges that cross them is an important piece of progress.