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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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She can promise (though not actually deliver) all of those things, but the only one of the three she's likely to want is upzoning existing suburbs (since doing so would encourage movement from deep blue cities to purple suburbs, turning them blue). She won't promise that either because the existing suburban residents don't want it, and she wants their votes.

Obviously she can’t fix local zoning. But if she was interested, she could do a bunch of things that make larger developments cheaper (eg reduce EPA regulations, OHSA, etc)

Are there any carrots or sticks that the federal government can wave in front of state governments to make them change their zoning laws?

They have enormous carrots and sticks that can be applied to Fannie and Freddie's purchases. If there's a condition that the GSEs won't buy mortgages that aren't on properties with certain zoning characteristics, that greatly limits financing options currently!

The big obvious one is boosting or restricting federal funding for related (or unrelated for that matter) stuff, which is how they went about sidestepping the 21st amendment and forcing every individual state to raise their minimum alcohol purchase age to 21.

In that case they withheld federal highway improvement funding on the order of dozens of millions of dollars per state until the state raised their purchase age to 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act

This is easier to apply to state level than local level obviously, but there are still plenty of federal dollars going to programs carried out at municipal levels. In fact such programs are probably concentrated in the unaffordable cities.