If a government’s taxes and regulations are making shelter ever more expensive, what should that government do instead?
Stop pushing the disastrous policies, perhaps?
Unlike some other governors who shall remain nameless (one of them rhymes with “DeSantis”), Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin understands that you don’t make things better by making them worse.
In August, Youngkin bluntly told a state senate committee that Virginia homes are too expensive and that a major cause is government interference with the market: “unnecessary regulations, over-burdensome and inefficient local governments, restrictive zoning policies, and an ideology of fighting tooth and nail against any new development.”
The many bottlenecks include low-density zoning rules that permit only a single house per property. Arlington County, Virginia, is one local government working to reform zoning so that more houses can be built on a property.
In November, Youngkin proposed a Make Virginia Home plan to unravel many regulations. City Journal notes that although the plan is “short on details,” it’s a good start.
Under the governor’s plan, the state would streamline environmental reviews, investigate how to liberalize the state’s building codes and land-use and zoning laws, impose deadlines on local governments to speed up approvals of development, and give local governments incentives to adopt their own market-liberating reforms.
This agenda is indeed only a beginning. But it does recognize a major cause of sky-rocketing housing costs and what must be done to begin to reduce those costs.
That’s just Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with DALL-E2
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
5 replies on “First, Stop Doing That”
Virginia is a large state. Is it all Virginia homes that are too expensive or primarily those located near DC and Richmond? Counties in northern Virginia are among the richest in the country. Surely their proximity to DC lawmakers and government largesse makes them a magnet for the wealthy and the connected, further driving up home prices.
The costs are far higher outside the Washington, DC area, in northern Virginia, but high relative to elsewhere all across the state. And these regulations and policies certainly contribute.
This smells of Blackrock moving in to build multi-family housing interspersed with single family housing. The problem is two fold.
The housing adjacent to the multi-family apartments will lose value.
The other is infrastructure, that will have to be totally replaced in existing single family housing areas to account for the increased demand. It sounds like another of the old Agenda 21 Scam.
The absence of laws and regulations to prevent free development of some sorts is not equivalent to the legal or regulatory imposition of development of those sorts. Those who want to live in neighborhoods in which development is required to be low-density should do so not by conscripting other property owners but by forming or selecting neighborhoods with deed covenants.
Most or all of us would like the world to make choices that caused our persons and our other property to hold or to build market value; but we don’t have a right to their making those choices as such.
Obviously, to the extend that infrastructure is technocratically managed by the state, we should seek not to have its costs off-loaded from favored persons to unfavored persons. But that point is not an argument for further management of other resources. It is instead an argument for a transitition to an economic order in which management of infrastructure is returned to the private sector.
I very strongly support property owners’ rights to use their property as they wish. However, their use can’t interfere with other owners’ rights! Virginia (like I’m sure many states) has been dealing for years with multiple families living in a single family home in suburban and urban areas. Those multiple families have cars all over their yards and you have neighborhoods where you can’t park even if you live there. To drop a multi-family building into a space in a community with infrastructure to support single family homes does in fact deprive other owners of their rights, diminishes their quality of life, and hurts their property values. I’m all for freedom, but supposedly libertarians believe that one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins.