Recent Reading: Journal Articles on Environmentalism and Housing

Mark Pennington, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism," Independent Review 2005. One of several takeaways: environmental communitarians want to take decisions about what gets used where, when, and how out of the marketplace and put them in spaces that are democratic and deliberative--but what is the marketplace but a space that is both democratic and deliberative, with people voting with the fruit of their labor for different constellations of capital, labor, and output? Just because it isn't articulated--or can't be--doesn't mean it isn't informative and doesn't mean it can't be expressed in prices. This will be a major theme in Deirdre McCloskey's and my book tentatively titled The Obvious and Simple System of Natural Liberty, aiming for publication in early 2026.

Edward Pinto and Tobias Peter, "How Government Policy Made Housing Expensive and Scarce, and How Unleashing Market Forces Can Address It," Cityscape 2023. Abstract: "In 1922, the federal government began promoting the widespread adoption of zoning by municipalities, which particularly encouraged single-family detached zoning as a backdoor to achieving constitutionally prohibited racial segregation. This legacy of zoning and land use continues today: residential districts are economcially segregated as the original planners intended, with the vast majority of zoning codes reserving large areas of land exclusively for single-family detached homes. By freezing land use, government action--not builders or markets--has prevented the building of enough housing to sustain our growing population. To repair this broken legacy and enable more people to access the American Dream of homeownership, policymakers at the state and local levels must address the supply crisis at its core by implementing by-right light-touch density (LTD), which permits incremental increases to allowable density. LTD can potentially create up to an estimated 930,000 additional housing units annually (depending on the maximum allowed density) for the next 30 to 40 years. THis moderate density increase would expand the construction of more naturally affordable and inclusionary housing, thereby keeping home prices more aligned with incomes and keeping housing displacement pressures low. LTD policies appeal to a broad coalition, as they have found success in California and Washignton and the cities of Minneapolis, Minnesota and Arlington, Virginia. A model zoning bill that draws on lessons from numerous case studies is detailed in a following section. The model bills emphasize that the key to success for LTD is simplicity. We also demonstrate that adding affordable housing requirements would have the unintended consequence of greatly reducing or even eliminating the opportunity for LTD to add meaningful supply." It led me to this collection of policy briefs by AEI, Light-Touch Density.