Former President Donald Trump had one of his cyclical changes of heart. In a recently published interview BloombergHe said he spent much of 2020 advocating for zoning regulations and supporting “killers” that drive up housing costs.
“Fifty percent of the cost of housing today is in certain areas, like environmental issues, bookkeeping issues, all these restrictions that are crazy,” Trump said in an interview conducted in June and published yesterday. Your permitting process. Your zoning, if — I’ve been through zoning for years. It’s a killer. But we’re going to do it, and we’re going to lower housing prices.”
As the nation’s first developer president, Trump may have more experience with zoning regulations than any other White House occupant — except Herbert Hoover.
He understands better than most public officials that minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, setbacks, use restrictions and countless other zoning restrictions can make life very difficult for those trying to build something.
his comments Bloomberg popular. They’re also an awesome turnaround. Trump campaigned in his final bid for the White House as the nation’s NIMBY leader.
Trump and then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson wrote: “A once unthinkable agenda, the relentless push to build more high-density housing in single-family neighborhoods, has become the focus of the left mainstream goals. wall street journal column, specifically criticizing policies in Oregon, Minneapolis and California that allow small multi-unit developments in neighborhoods that previously contained only single-family homes.
Carson and Trump concluded: “We will save our cities, the cities from which these horrific policies emerged. We will save our suburbs.” In a follow-up tweet, Trump promised to save “the American suburban way of life.” dream”.
It may be recalled that Trump’s message of support for district races in 2020 was itself an abrupt reversal of his administration’s own policies.
As of mid-2020, Trump’s HUD under Carson had been changing federal fair housing rules to encourage local deregulation. They proposed that HUD grantees might be rewarded with additional funding and regulatory relief if they could demonstrate that they allowed substantial housing to be built and made more affordable.
“I want to encourage mixed-income multifamily development everywhere,” Carson said. wall street journal 2018. “I would inspire people who really want to get generous government subsidies” to reform their zoning regulations.
Those programs were then abruptly canceled in July 2020, replaced by a new set of fair housing rules that placed essentially no strings attached on receipt of federal housing funds.
It’s always a bad instinct to yell at people when they agree with you on something, even if they’ve been wrong about the same thing in the past. On the other hand, when a person shifts so drastically from a position, it is wise to question his or her allegiance to that position.
By contrast, President Joe Biden’s administration has been consistent in its rhetoric that local zoning code changes need to be relaxed to allow for more development.
The problem with the current White House is that their policies in this area do not match their consistent rhetoric.
The Biden administration has repeatedly said it will use some discretionary federal housing and transportation grant programs to incentivize zoning reforms. Time and time again, these same grant programs provide funding to jurisdictions that have not relaxed their zoning codes, made their zoning codes more restrictive, or have not enacted zoning policies.
Trump and Biden’s disappointing policies on zoning reform demonstrate that the federal government is not the place to look for progress on this issue.
The fact is that even with the financial resources, the federal government can only play a limited role in getting local and state governments to deregulate land use. Adjusting fair housing regulations or discretionary grant programs can help move state and local policy in a positive direction, but it can only go so far.
Even if the government gets these adjustments right, the positive impact on real-world housing costs will be limited, as will any political goodwill it gains as a result.
In this case, other political incentives will play a greater role.
For Trump, the chance to score points with NIMBYs on the campaign trail trumped shaky revisions to fair housing rules that few voters had heard of. For all its positive rhetoric, the Biden administration is clearly more focused on handing out grants to political allies than incentivizing productive local reforms.
Regardless of the next administration in the White House, we shouldn’t expect these incentives to change much.
