Two Cheers for Zoning

The fight over zoning in America has created odd bedfellows. Self-declared socialists have allied with big developers and railed against regulatory burdens on business. Self-professed conservatives have allied with radical environmentalists to fight development. Now that housing prices have surpassed their 2006 peak, mortgage rates have risen, and discussions of a housing crisis have become common, these fault lines are increasingly salient.

At first glance, the current struggles of “yimbys” (Yes-In-My-Back­yard), or advo­cates for denser housing, against “nimbys” (Not-In-My-Backyard), or opponents of it, would seem to follow the new drift of politics in the nation. There is a young, cosmopolitan, urban class that identifies with the Left yet advocates for markets, and there is an old, parochial, suburban or exurban class which identifies with the Right yet sides with anti-market forces.

Yet America has engaged in battles over local zoning for decades, and, for most of that period, conservatives have defended zoning against progressives. Furthermore, the history, economics, and political science of local communities demonstrate that those who ascribe to free market beliefs should not despise zoning. Even passionate libertarians would not deny the ability of people to form or join a local government with some say over their property. Most zoning in America is of such a local and consensual nature.

American federalism promises a diversity of policies and allows people to express preferences by choice and movement instead of collective votes. The same principle should apply to local governments, which must compete fiercely with each other for residents, businesses, and voters. In most of the nation, thanks to this local competition, zoning doesn’t have a significant impact on housing prices.

Yimbys are right that a lack of housing is the reason that housing prices in some areas are high. Americans can and should embrace reforms that open these areas for more housing, ameliorate the most stringent local zoning laws, and align the incentives of local governments toward growth. But we should not embrace a categorical attack on zoning or local governments in general, or the canard that single-family zoning is the cause of our housing woes. We can demand increased housing without demanding that all housing becomes denser or that all housing decisions get made at the state or federal level. While supporting some reforms to allow more housing, we do not have to sabotage the one type of government that most Americans still support—their local government.

A Bottom-Up History of Zoning

Progressives argue that the impetus for zoning, and for traditional conservative defenses of it, is obvious: zoning is based on racist motiva­tions and has been a means to keep minorities from wealthy neighborhoods and suburbs. Everyone from Vox to the Biden administration argues that the 1917 Supreme Court case of Bu­chanan v. Warley, which struck down explicit racial zoning, led cities to adopt zoning against low‑income housing as another means of excluding minorities.¹ The subsequent case of Euclid v. Ambler (1926), in which Justice George Sutherland upheld the ability of local governments to zone for different densities, and in which he referred to suburban apart­ments in single-family communities as “parasites,” blessed these new exclusionary efforts.

Yet zoning was not the result of racism. Cities like Los Angeles had earlier versions of zoning that the Supreme Court upheld in 1915. New York City imposed its first comprehensive zoning plan in 1916, before Buchanan, and the goal was to separate commercial, industrial, and resi­dential uses, not races.² When Chicago adopted its first zoning ordinance in 1923, Charles Duke, a prominent black developer, was a member of the zoning commission, and he made sure it did not have racially objectionable results. The Chicago Defender, the main black newspaper in the city, supported the zoning effort.³ Although zoning has been used for racist ends at times (few government programs in the twentieth century weren’t), claims that zoning is inherently racist or racially motivated are inaccurate.

The vast majority of states, including those with few racial minorities, passed laws to allow cities and suburbs to zone in the 1920s. Many local communities, again including cities and suburbs with few nearby minorities, embraced them. A study of the Boston suburbs in this period by Edward Glaeser and Bryce Ward found that there was little correlation between the number of black residents or immigrants and the strictness of town zoning rules. By contrast, increased nearby density led towns to strengthen zoning regulations in order to maintain single-family housing.⁴

Most progressive stories about zoning focus on top-down impositions, or decisions by a handful of policymakers, jurists, and racists. These are the “supply-side” stories of zoning. But as economist William Fischel of Dartmouth points out, these ignore the “demand-side” story of zoning, in which zoning emerged as often from the bottom-up and from numerous voters and residents. Even in states like Georgia in 1926 and New Jersey in 1927, where state supreme courts struck down zoning statutes as takings of private property or as beyond the power of local governments, voters passed constitutional amendments to override the courts and return zoning powers to local communities again.⁵

A rejection of zoning, therefore, entails not just a rejection of one or two policy mistakes made by central planners or scheming racists, but a belief that the same mistake has been made thousands of times, by every state and by most of the nineteen thousand local municipalities in the United States, over periods of decades. If zoning, and especially single-family zoning, is a mistake, it’s an abnormally common one. Opponents of zoning need to explain not only why local governments keep making the same mistake, but why people of all races keep moving to areas that make that mistake. More likely, zoning is common because people want it.

Zoning Supports Local Government

If forced to offer a defense of zoning, most Americans would argue that it is a means to exclude factories, strip clubs, or towering apartment blocks from quiet residential neighborhoods. Although this is one func­tion of zoning, it has other, more abstract, benefits that are overlooked. Economists have shown how zoning ensures the fiscal independence of local governments and encourages more payments for public goods.

In 1956, the economist Charles Tiebout proposed what became known as the “Tiebout hypothesis.” He argued that local governments competed for businesses and residents, and thus an area with many local governments should approximate a private marketplace for public goods such as roads, parks, schools, and public safety. Competing governments allowed people to select the mix of public goods and taxes they wanted by “voting with their feet.” Competition forced these governments to increase the quality of services and reduce their costs. Property taxes ensured that people living inside a local government paid for its public goods. Decades of research have confirmed this hypothesis.⁶

Yet without some means of restricting entry, local governments would have a “free-rider problem,” by which people could get high-quality services by skimping on low-quality property with lower taxes. While progressives might celebrate the redistributionist effects of such efforts, the economic literature shows that allowing more free riders causes voters to reduce the total amount of public goods instead of redistributing them.⁷

Zoning, as economist Bruce Hamilton pointed out, solves the free-rider problem. It allows local governments to have some control over their housing mix, and thus some control over their mix of property taxes and services.⁸ Contra some critics, zoning does not lead all cities to exclude poor people, since some cities can offer cheaper services and lower taxes. These cities then create a surprising kind of integration. In “fiscal zoning,” where cities zone to attract the right mix of property taxes, poorer cities embrace new development, of both businesses and residents, since they don’t mind the increase in congestion and crowding as much as wealthy areas, but they have a greater appreciation for new fiscal revenues. Since new housing tends to attract a higher income class than existing housing, this encourages wealthier people to move into poorer areas. Instead of forcing rich people to accept more poor people into their neighborhood, as with typical government efforts to densify the suburbs, zoning for revenue has poor people invite rich people to live in their midst. Fiscal zoning creates integration through carrots instead of sticks.

Opponents of zoning often identify Houston as the exception that proves that zoning is unnecessary for local governments. Yet it is important to note that the Houston metropolis, the fifth largest in America with over seven million people, is not just composed of Houston the city. Houston proper, with no zoning, has 2.3 million people. Central cities, which have lots of fixed advantages as well as a strong property tax base downtown, don’t work like most local govern­ments. Their semi-monopoly status causes them to answer more to powerful interests rather than footloose residents, and thus it is less important for central cities like Houston to control their housing and fiscal mix through zoning.⁹ That explains why even though Houston itself is unzoned, much of the metropolitan population lives in zoned suburbs like Sugarland, Katy, or Baytown.

Houston is by all measures a growing, affordable, and successful city, but it is not as distinct as many believe. According to recent estimates, housing costs in the Houston metropolitan area are not noticeably different from those in zoned Dallas, which also has seen equivalent, rapid population growth in recent decades. Rather than demonstrating that politicians and higher-level governments should struggle against zoning, Houston demonstrates that cities and suburbs can select the amount of zoning that is right for them.

Sprawling Cities Are Affordable Cities

The yimby critique of zoning, and especially of single-family zoning, relies on the idea that suburban homeowners are preventing dense new development and are thus the main barriers to housing affordability. Yet the yimby movement must face an odd paradox. The movement is based in coastal states, where housing prices are the highest. Yet these states are already the densest parts of the country. California has the densest cities of any large state, with its largest metropolitan areas having around six thousand people per square mile, over double the urban density in the rest of the country. California has been the only major state to see significant increases in density since World War II.¹⁰ And yet its housing prices have increased the fastest and have become by far the most unaffordable in the nation.

The usual measure of affordability is the ratio of a median home price to median income in a metropolitan area. In much of the nation, that ratio has held steady at around three to one, both during and after the early 2000s housing bubble. In other words, an average house cost about three times an average family’s income in most cities in the United States (although in the recent housing price explosion after the coronavirus, it has increased to about four to one). Yet Los Angeles and San Francisco, by most measures the second- and third-densest metropolitan areas in the nation, have homes that cost over ten times median income. Their price-to-income ratios have increased just as their density has.¹¹

In other states, sprawling, low-density suburbs are not a barrier to affordability. Expanding Middle American metros, like Dallas, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee, are low density, largely zoned for single-family housing, and yet have a price-income ratio that is less than half of California’s large cities. In other growing metros like Oklahoma City, the ratio is almost a third. When compared to other nations, these sprawling American cities with extensive single-family zoning have some of the most affordable housing prices on earth.¹²

The connection between low-density housing and affordability is global. A recent article in the Journal of Housing Economics compares countries in Europe on sprawl and housing prices. The most sprawling or low-density countries, often in central Europe, had almost no increase in their housing price-to-income ratios in the last two decades, while the least sprawling (such as the United Kingdom and Sweden) saw housing price-to-income ratios climb by up to 40 percent in the same period, and that from an already higher baseline.¹³

Despite these obvious counterexamples, the yimby movement and its allies are focused on demanding denser “infill” housing inside of America’s existing urban footprints. There is a need for such housing, but infill will remain a small part of all homebuilding in America. According to an Environmental Protection Agency study, infill account­ed for only one-fifth of new housing construction in the ten years leading up to the financial crisis.¹⁴ Although we have limited estimates for more recent years, in the previous decade, and especially since the coronavirus, we have seen further population increases in sprawling suburbs relative to existing urban areas.¹⁵ The current small proportion of infill in America is not due to strict land use regulations, since the areas with the strictest development laws, such as California, New York, and Massachusetts, have seen the most infill growth. SB 375, passed by California’s legislature in 2008, requires every city and region to focus on dense infill for all future development.¹⁶

The reason that most American cities have affordable housing is not that they require dense infill or ban single-family zoning, but that they encourage the approximately 80 percent of development that happens in “greenfields,” the undeveloped land outside of existing urban areas. Yet this type of housing has attracted little attention from supposedly pro-housing activists. One reason is that yimby activists have tied their affordability critiques to the supposed climate dangers of sprawl and cars—dangers that are increasingly anachronistic considering the vast reductions in car emissions and increases in electrification.¹⁷

The main problem with California and many other coastal areas isn’t low density or lack of infill, it’s forbidding greenfield growth. California cities are surrounded by “urban growth boundaries” that prevent any growth on the outskirts of towns, scrubby pastures that are protected as “open space reserves,” and “slope density ordinances” that prevent building on hills, even though the actual city of San Francisco shows how charming developed hills can be. California and other coastal states impose environmental restrictions, subdivision requirements, and site planning require­ments, and often deny the extension of city utilities such as water, sewer, and power lines to greenfield developments. These barriers are far more stringent than typical use and density zoning in existing neighborhoods. These barriers also explain why, even though the dense San Francisco–San Jose metropolitan area has the highest housing prices in the United States, almost 40 percent of the nine-county Bay Area is pastureland.¹⁸

The foremost goal of a pro-housing policy should be to open more new land for development. The evidence is overwhelming that such development is the best way to lower housing costs and to create the kind of single-family housing most Americans want. By contrast, attempts by yimbys to mandate only dense infill are unlikely to drive significant reductions in housing costs and could be counterproductive.

Who Benefits from Land Use Regulation?

The yimby movement and its allies assume that one of the main goals of zoning is to increase property values by preventing new development. They argue that existing single-family homeowners are blocking devel­opment to keep their property values high, and that the goal of the pro-housing movement should be to lower such property values.

Yet the appropriate goal of a city or suburb should be to maximize the value of its land, as the economist Jan Brueckner noted decades ago.¹⁹ The type of zoning that maximizes land values does lead to higher prices for existing property-owners, but it also encourages more housing development on their properties, which reduces the price of new homes. Pro-housing advocates should embrace an inclusive vision of land-use regulation and demonstrate how the right kind of growth can bring benefits to everybody.

Bad regulation can raise some housing prices by restricting the supply of other houses, just like a monopolist does in a private market for a good. But the result of such efforts is to lower the value of housing overall, since these regulations prevent converting land to its highest and best use. This is most clear in the regulations against developing green­field property. For instance, the sale of a fifty-thousand-acre East San Francisco Bay ranch property for about $1,500 an acre, approximately a fourth of the price of equivalent land outside Dallas, shows how much antidevelopment laws in California destroy property values. If the state allowed more development, this would increase the price that similar property owners could get for their land even as it increased housing production and lowered housing prices.²⁰

Good regulation can raise property values by improving amenities within a community. Zoning can keep out inappropriate development (say, a noisy bar in a quiet neighborhood) and excessive crowding and congestion that lowers the value of nearby homes. It can also ensure the right fiscal mix for the local government and thus make a community fiscally stable and more desirable. These positive amenities get “capital­ized” in the increased value of houses and land. Public policy should encourage zoning that raises such amenity values.

Recent estimates of housing prices in built-up areas show that current zoning regulations increase the value of property against a base­line with no zoning, but these regulations are too strict to maximize that value. This means there is a pro-property-owner argument for some amount of increased density.²¹ The result of such increased density would be higher sales prices for the existing homeowners who could sell to developers, not a hit to homeowners’ pocketbooks. When critics think of the supposed benefits of zoning for the owner of a $3 million single-family house in Palo Alto, they don’t often think how that same homeowner could earn even more if she could sell her land for four single-family homes at $1 million each.

The goal of a pro-development housing policy should be to show how both homeowners and developers can get more value by encouraging the right amount of new growth. By contrast, many anti-zoning advocates portray the movement as an attempt to take away a “privi­lege” that homeowners have received from restrictive zoning. When 65 percent of the population are homeowners, and when even 90 percent of millennials state that they would prefer a single-family home, attacking single-family housing and its putative privileges does not make allies for growth.²²

The Failures of State and Federal Housing Policy

Pro-housing groups have long sought to limit the power of local governments, since they argue that such local governments are exclusionary and drive up housing prices. They hope that, by mandating more centralized control, the state or the federal government can overcome suburban resistance and ensure denser housing. Yet the evidence is strong that local governments are better at creating affordable housing than more distant governments. Previous attempts to centralize housing policy have either been ineffective or have discouraged building.

Globally, those countries with the most decentralized government tend to have more affordable housing. The same Journal of Housing Economics study about sprawl and affordability in Europe found that the common determinant of both was decentralized local governments. Countries that had lots of local government power, like Switzerland, had slower housing price increases than countries like the UK and Sweden, which centralized power to approve building. The reason is that in countries like Switzerland, local governments kept larger per­centages of the fiscal upside to housing, through locally raised revenues and property taxes. In centralized countries such as the UK, local gov­ernments only dealt with the negative consequences of growth and became inveterate opponents of it.²³

The history of centralized residential planning in America shows that, far from increasing development, it has tended to create more barriers to building. In 1971, Fred Bosselman and David Cailles noted what they called the “The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control” over the previous decade, in which local governments lost power over land use to regional or state bureaucracies. With an assist from federal mandates and grants, more land-use control moved to groups like regional metropolitan planning organizations as well as regional trans­portation and water and air quality boards. The goal of these groups was to force the suburbs to open up for concentrated development and to help plan this development. Yet since localities still had to approve numerous aspects of development, these new organizations ended up creating what became known as a “double veto”—yet another place to raise objections to growth after local cities had granted approval.

For decades, state governments and courts have tried to mandate more inclusive suburban development. The failure of these efforts has been universal. In 1969, Massachusetts passed what was known as the “Anti-Snob Zoning Act,” which allowed local permitting decisions to be appealed to a state body. There was almost no impact, as demonstrated by the state continuing to have among the highest housing prices in the nation. In 1975, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the suburb of Mount Laurel, and other high-income suburbs in the state, had to open its land for low-income and dense development. This case spawned a Mount Laurel II, III, and IV, and countless intermediary cases. Accord­ing to studies, those suburbs subject to the mandates produced no more low-income housing than those not subject to them.²⁴

California has made the greatest efforts to force suburbs to open up local zoning. In 1967, the state required every city and suburb to participate in what became known as a “regional housing needs alloca­tion” plan to encourage more low-income housing. In 1978, the state passed a Density Bonus Act to allow housing with enough affordable units to bypass zoning requirements. In 1982, the legislature passed the Housing Accountability Act to require “by right,” or automatic, ap­proval of housing that conformed to the regional housing needs plan, and in 2017 it strengthened the law. By all measures, these laws have not succeeded in reducing housing prices in the state or even slowing the growth in prices.

Attempts to push more housing at the federal level have also failed. In 1969, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Rom­ney, previously governor of Michigan (and father of Mitt Romney), proposed an “Open Communities” initiative, which tried to use federal grants to force more economic and racial integration in suburbs. The same day as Romney’s announcement, the Department of Justice sued the small St. Louis suburb of Black Jack for refusing a dense and integrated housing development. The phrase the government used at the time wasn’t “yimby” but “opening the suburbs.” Within a year, after political backlash in Black Jack and in some Detroit suburbs, President Richard Nixon asked Romney to pause all efforts. By 1973, Nixon had put a total moratorium on federal housing grants, partially to stop Romney from pushing integration and density.²⁵ The failures of the Nixon administration efforts meant the federal government did not make a significant attempt at opening the suburbs for decades. The Obama administration made a small effort with its “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule, which required local governments to fill out reports to HUD on their efforts to encourage multifamily development and promote racial integration. Although a lawsuit about one “inadequate” report in Westchester County led to a settlement which mandated more density, HUD later dropped the effort without achiev­ing any results.²⁶

Donald Trump’s efforts followed a similar trajectory as Nixon’s. In June 2019, President Trump, the first housing developer ever elected president, issued an executive order that said the federal government would work towards “Eliminating Regu­latory Barriers to Affordable Housing.”²⁷ HUD secretary Ben Carson tweeted that he was “taking on the #nimbys,” and proudly wore the yimby label.²⁸ But in 2020, the administration made a by-then-characteristic volte-face. The president attacked what he called the Democrats’ “low income suburbs plan” to use federal funds to fight zoning in suburbs. Carson wrote an op-ed about the “Obama-Biden dystopian vision of building low-income housing units next to your suburban house.”²⁹ The administration’s new goal, they said, would be “Preserv­ing Community and Neighborhood Choice.” There were no seeming effects of the administration’s short-lived “yimby” efforts.³⁰

The Biden administration’s new plan to use federal funds to break open the suburbs, announced in May 2022, is likely to have no better results, and in some ways will stymie building. The plan says it aims to “promote density” and it uses the term “density” six times in its announcement, yet it has no discussion of opening new land for devel­opment by limiting environmental or other rules. The plan also demands “inclusionary zoning,” or requiring developers to include more low-income housing in each new development. Such mandates deter housing production by raising the costs of new development.³¹ Due to pleas from environmental groups, the plan mandates more energy efficiency for mobile homes. The result of this effort, according to the government’s own analysis, will be to increase the cost of mobile homes by up to 10 percent and lead to 150,000 fewer mobile units over the coming years, a massive hit to affordability for the very lowest rung of the housing market ladder.³² In this case, as in others, centralized control has given more power to interest groups that prevent growth.

How to Increase Housing Supply

There are reforms that can increase housing production and protect property rights without overturning local control. First, instead of attempting to break up local zoning, states and the federal government should work on removing the many barriers to growth created at the state and federal levels. Reducing or even eliminating the stringent federal manufactured and mobile home standards, which were first passed in 1974, are an obvious place to start.³³ States and the federal government should repeal existing environmental regulations that pre­vent development on any land that is a little damp, or that require long-winded “environmental impact reports” for any new building. As Salim Furth and Kelcie McKinley have argued, the twenty states that have additional “petition processes,” which require special votes or super­majorities on city councils to override concerns of neighbors in a rezoning, should repeal or amend these laws. They are the result of state mandates and not a true type of local control.³⁴

There are some ways for states to limit the most egregious examples of local land-control abuse. For instance, states should restrict the ability of local governments to institute growth boundaries or impose complete housing moratoria, since those are means for urbanites to expropriate the land value of undeveloped properties, rather than to equalize costs and benefits of public goods. Other reasonable state reforms, such as allowing a limited number of “granny flats” in single-family neighborhoods, streamlining local building codes and inspections, or even requiring some increased density in new state transportation corridors, can improve affordability without undermining the most important aspects of local control.

Pro-development localists and yimbys can and should ally on these reforms. But in contrast to those who think the state should focus on densifying the suburbs, direct state intervention into zoning and other local decisions should focus on large cities. Thirty municipalities in America have populations larger than our smallest state. These cities, usually the central city in a metropolitan area, face little competition due to their myriad advantages. Beyond their massive size, they have immense and property-tax-rich downtowns focused on business-to-business services and a concentration of heritage “eds and meds” that pull the educated and wealthy into cities. According to studies, these cities are less likely to listen to majorities than small suburbs and more likely to cater to the demands of interest groups.³⁵ Instead of “opening up the suburbs,” states can prevent these already flush cities from abus­ing their advantages, such as by increasing costs to developers or downzoning territory that is ripe for redevelopment.

Courts can also supervise zoning better than they’ve done in recent years. In the post–World War II period, courts did not try to mandate a certain amount of density or demand equal shares for different income groups in the suburbs. But they were more attentive to property owners and more willing to overturn zoning decisions if they destroyed prop­erty values. Courts demanded “upzonings” to allow more density when local governments kept them “unreasonably” low, or whenever zoning was too restrictive relative to the “character of the neighborhood,” or when an imposed zoning category would leave property unimproved for a long time.³⁶

Courts should recover this focus on property values and remember that the appropriate goal in zoning is to maximize the value of land. If a zoning rule results in lowering the value of land overall, courts should be suspicious of it, since it is likely that the community is unjustly transferring value from one group to another and inhibiting development. But if a zoning decision appears to improve the overall value of property in a community, then courts can be comfortable that the zoning is providing for the general welfare.

Most importantly, states can reform their property tax and fiscal rules for local governments, which have distorted the local incentives to build. In many states, school equalization lawsuits and legislation have caused local districts to lose up to 50 percent of their school property tax revenue to the general state fund. This has had deleterious consequences. The first successful school equalization case in the nation, Serrano v. Priest (1976) in California, directly led, two years later, to the property-tax limitation measure, Proposition 13, since the case convinced most voters that there was no benefit to raising local revenue. Both Serrano and Proposition 13 took away the local incentives for development and exacerbated California’s housing crisis. They also demonstrated how attempts at forcing local redistribution can lead to fewer public goods overall.³⁷

Economists Gregory Burge and Keith Ihlanfeldt have shown that when local governments have more fiscal incentives to allow building, they, not surprisingly, build more.³⁸ Instead of attacking local property taxes or “impact fees” on new development as a means to exclude newcomers, states should ensure that local governments get most of the upside to growth. The whole reason why America’s decentralized system works is simple: although locals must bear the burdens of growth, they also get the benefits. Tightening the connections between costs and benefits will help local governments embrace growth again.

The Success of American Local Government

As early as 1966, the zoning researcher Richard Babcock noted that “no one is enthusiastic about zoning except the people.” The same is true today. While most elites, whether on the progressive left or the libertar­ian right, despise it, the vast majority of Americans accept it as a good and just social measure. Instead of railing against popular ignorance, zoning’s widespread acceptance should give critics pause. As Babcock said, “I become tired of the planner’s cry that zoning is a failure. By the test of acceptance in the market place, zoning has been a smashing success.”³⁹ While some would quibble with the characterization of zoning as “the market place,” by any reasonable understanding of how people have both created and moved to new zoned cities and suburbs, Babcock’s characterization is accurate.

A diverse group of local governments, with some control over the housing and property rights of their inhabitants, can satisfy even the staunchest libertarian. Robert Nozick, the dean of libertarian philosophers, in his classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, imagined what he called a “meta-utopia,” where a central power enforced peace and basic rights, but most power resided in voluntary local communities, each of which could make its own rules and each of which could enforce them as it chose, as long as people had the ability to move to and from them. This libertarian utopia is actually not too distant from the reality of modern American local government in some respects. There are wet and dry counties, pro- and anti-gambling cities, places where drugs are practically legalized and places where they are strictly banned, and of course places where there are many tall buildings and places where housing and jobs are more spread out. Since only 3 percent of the American landmass is urbanized, we have in no way exhausted the possibility of founding new communities that can express the immense variety of American preferences.

In a polarized and dynamic age, it is good to remember that there is a virtue in supporting such voluntary communities and suburbs. Contrary to arguments that far-flung suburbs breed anomie and disaffection, suburbs have more social connections and social capital, higher levels of voting, and more cohesion than areas with equivalent incomes in the central cities.⁴⁰ To many activists, such communitarian language can only be a code word for racial exclusion. Yet as Jacob Vigdor and Edward Glaeser have shown, the all-white suburb has almost disappeared in America.⁴¹ As Joel Kotkin has reported, “Over the past dec­ade, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than 4 percent of growth in suburbs and exurbs, while Latinos accounted for nearly half, with Asians, African Americans, mixed race, and other groups making up the balance.”⁴² American suburbs are successful, affordable, and impressively diverse. The main threat to American local governments is not their variety, but that one group or another will try to impose its policy preferences across over 330 million people, and thus collapse an admirable diversity of lifestyles onto a battlefield in Washington, D.C.

The question of what Europeans call “subsidiarity,” or assigning each task to the lowest possible level of government, but no lower, is never easy. But the general truth James Madison identified helps: small and local governments tend to favor majorities, while large and distant gov­ernments tend to protect minorities. Thus, it is good that the federal and state governments protect basic rights and prevent majority factions from riding roughshod over smaller groups or individuals. State and federal supreme court rulings on local “takings” of property caused by excessive zoning and regulation can and should forbid the most egre­gious examples of zoning abuse against individuals. But most zoning authority is the result of a broad agreement among the populations of suburbs or cities that embrace it, often behind the equivalent of a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” before the particulars of a zoning plan are known. Such majoritarian regulations need no higher level of government overturning them.

Polls show that Americans like their local governments and that they like them more than distant and less responsive governments. After all, most Americans chose to live under their particular government. They voted with their feet, and their local vote has vastly more impact than votes for more distant officeholders. These local governments have what many political scientists crave, democratic legitimacy, and undermining their independence will only prove counterproductive.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 4 (Winter 2022): 36–52.

Notes