How to Fix Housing: The Pivot from Localism to Regionalism and Rule of Law

The American planning system’s guiding principle is localism. The commerce clause of the Constitution limits the federal government’s authority over state land use rules, the states themselves largely empower local jurisdictions to handle their own zoning and permitting, and some cities even slice and dice control over land use into smaller subunits, ceding some of their permitting power to neighborhood boards or councils. To generations of reformers, this fractal segmentation of power was a boon for democracy: The smaller the political unit making land use decisions, the more democratic those decisions would be. Local control is an inherent good, and the more local the better.

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of this philosophy, particularly when we’re still living with the consequences of mid-century planning’s worst abuses: the freeway expansions and urban renewal projects that destroyed entire neighborhoods and displaced hundreds of thousands of mostly Black or brown people. These people were given no say in the decisions that flattened their communities. And so policymakers and planners of a more progressive bent have tried to correct for that disgrace by placing local voices at the center of many local development decisions.

But localism creates its own problems for democracy. This became obvious during the Civil Rights era, when “states’ rights” was the rallying cry for segregationists who wanted to insulate the South’s Jim Crow regimes from federal oversight. But it is even true when it comes to the seemingly more benign, race-neutral doctrine of local control over land use planning.

For one thing, untrammeled local control over land use leads to massive collective action problems in major metropolitan areas. Housing markets and labor markets are regional: The tech boom that created tens of thousands of new jobs in San Francisco raised demand for housing across the entire Bay Area. And while the city government deserves much of the blame for not authorizing enough new housing to match that demand spike, the fault does not lie with San Francisco alone. Even if the city had completely abolished local zoning, it could not correct a region-wide housing shortage on its own—not as long as its outlying suburbs kept their own restrictive zoning codes intact.

Further, local voice is itself unequally distributed: A growing body of research confirms that the people who deliver public comment at planning commission meetings are disproportionately white, male, affluent, and near retirement age.¹ It just so happens that all of these traits also correlate with opposition to new homes. Well-meaning efforts to democratize local planning have too often tilted the balance of power even further in the direction of the propertied and powerful.

The results speak for themselves. The major metropolitan areas of the West Coast and Northeast are years into a severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis; more recently, even some growing Sunbelt cities have begun following the same trajectory. Meanwhile, localism has stalled the country’s progress toward racial integration. Since the end of legal Jim Crow, as political scientist Jessica Trounstine has shown, segregation within cities has significantly declined, but segregation between cities has continued unabated, as more exclusive jurisdictions in major metropolitan areas use their zoning and permitting rules to lock out less affluent households.²

The scale of the harm this has done to American democracy is difficult to comprehend. Hyperlocal control over land use planning has facilitated the growth of economic inequality and the racial wealth gap, restricted freedom of movement, and bred cynicism and pessimism in the face of the government’s seeming inability to bring down housing costs or reduce street homelessness. The main beneficiaries of this system have been wealthy homeowners, rentiers, and far-right demagogues like Donald Trump, who memorably declared in 2020 that Joe Biden was going to “abolish the suburbs.”³

As part of a broader mission to salvage the American republic, we need to reenvision how we do planning in our cities. But a move away from localism does not mean a move away from democratic control over land use; in fact, reforming land use planning can produce both a more democratic process and better outcomes.

There are two components to an effective, democratic planning regime. The first is regionalism: Because labor markets, housing markets, and transportation networks are regional, many planning decisions should happen at the regional level. The United States already has hundreds of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), a product of the 1962 Federal-Aid Highway Act, but MPOs tend to have limited authority and are often poorly governed. A new generation of muscular and democratically accountable MPOs could overcome the collective action problems created by localism.

The second component is the rule of law. When the decision over whether to entitle a proposed building is discretionary—that is to say, when local officials have full arbitrary power over the project—planning naturally becomes a more opaque, irrational, and corrupt process. Entitlement decisions should instead be ministerial: Whether a project moves forward or not should be based on whether it complies with clear, objective, and consistently applied statutes and regulations. While this would reduce the role of public meetings in land use planning, it would not make planning itself less democratic; instead, it would ensure that planning is based on the laws enacted by the people’s duly elected representatives.

The guiding principle that unites these two components is not localism but planning. Instead of making land use decisions on an ad hoc, project-by-project basis, governments should develop and stick to comprehensive plans that take the needs of an entire region into account. While there could still be plenty of room for community input in the plan-making process, planners would need to ensure the input was representative of the whole region: Surveys and focus groups that feature representative cross-sections of the local population would likely produce better outcomes than unstructured public meetings.

The resulting plans would more equitably distribute the benefits and trade-offs from homebuilding and public infrastructure development, to make sure that no community suffers from another’s refusal to build housing or reduce car pollution. And projects that comply with these plans—along with all other relevant laws—would be automatically subject to approval.

A land use system that followed this approach would likely produce a lot more housing and do it in a more transparent, accountable, equitable, and environmentally sustainable way. In doing so, it wouldn’t just correct many of the pathologies that currently ail America’s high-cost metropolitan areas; it would also bolster small-d democratic communities and shore up a critical civil society bulwark against authoritarianism.