Government policy reports usually don’t get a lot of attention, and so it was with a recently released document about housing affordability. That’s too bad, because many of the Trump administration’s recommendations could easily win bipartisan support.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development can only do so much to affect home prices. Yet its three-page brief, published last month, includes several reform ideas for governments at the state and local level, where excessive regulation drives higher prices.
The document suggests capping permitting fees, eliminating duplicative reviews and chopping down the timelines for local agencies to review plans. Such reforms will inevitably draw complaints from degrowth environmentalists and not-in-my-backyard activists.
Yet those voices have increasingly been hushed by political reality: Rising housing prices are unsustainable, and both parties understand that fixing the problem requires more construction.
Such momentum has notched important wins in Congress. Both the Senate and the House passed bills to ease federal barriers to home building, and negotiators from each chamber announced Tuesday that they reached a compromise to reconcile the two versions.
More than three-quarters of registered voters support streamlining federal housing regulations, including 77 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats, according to a Bipartisan Policy Center poll in April. More than 60 percent of both parties also said they wanted the federal government to encourage communities to change their local zoning and land-use laws for new construction.
Meanwhile, state and local leaders across the country have joined the cause to ease regulations. Encouragingly, it’s a broad coalition that even includes progressive politicians such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Since 2017, more than half of states have adopted polices to boost the supply of housing, such as by legalizing “middle housing” — townhouses or starter homes on smaller lots — or by making it easier to build high-density residences near transit hubs.
In Portland, Oregon, for instance, reform sparked a surge in development of stacked duplexes and triplexes — so much so that prices for such housing started to fall. In Austin, where rents nearly doubled from 2010 to 2019, similar reforms allowed developers to increase the city’s housing stock by 30 percent, allowing median rents to fall in recent years.
Even relatively simple changes could have a big effect. For instance, Minneapolis eliminated requirements for off-street parking, which contributed to a housing boom.
All this boils down to a simple idea with broad political appeal: Building new homes should be easy. State and local officials have no shortage of policy solutions to make that a reality.
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