"While scaling back government incentives encouraging risky development is essential, it cannot happen in isolation. To ensure enough housing remains available, state and local governments must also remove unnecessary barriers to building in safer, less sensitive, more desirable locations. That’s why state and local governments must reform restrictive zoning, housing, building, and historical preservation rules, and mandates placed on landlords. While there is a government role in ensuring that uses of land don’t cause huge problems for their neighbors, the basic principle of private property means that people who own land should enjoy a very strong legal presumption in favor of building what they want where they want to. Real-world models show that this can work: cities like Houston that have minimal regulations provide a full-spectrum of urban amenities — great art museums, big-league sports teams and top universities — with rents that are half and home prices that are a quarter of those in regulation-happy cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. These policies aren’t perfect — Houston has real flooding problems, for example — but they point a way toward better policies and safer cities. Eli Lehrer #zoning #climate #publicpolicy
