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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   28328 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Most of the migrants went to just two metropoles, DFW and Houston. Somehow, this avoided triggering a housing crisis.

Thank zoning (or lack thereof).

1

Houston is often presented as a counter-example to growth-management planning [i. e., greenbelts and urban growth boundaries] because it has no growth management and no zoning. As a result, it has highly affordable housing and is one of the fastest-growing large urban areas in the country

Unlike Houston, Dallas does have zoning, but it has had little in the way of growth management. Zoning has responded to local residents’ desires to protect neighborhood values, which was the original intention of zoning when it was first conceived in the 1910s, rather than to planners’ desires to reshape suburban lifestyles. Dallas’s housing record is therefore similar to Houston’s except that Dallas is a bit less influenced by swings in the oil industry.

2

Ultimately, what is wrong with the White House toolkit is that it is focused on local zoning when it should be focused on regional growth management. If there are no regional growth constraints, local zoning won’t make housing more expensive because developers can always build in unrestricted areas. Dallas has zoning, Houston doesn’t; yet in 2014 both had value-to-income ratios of 2.4. Only regional growth constraints make housing expensive. Every major city in America except Houston has local zoning, yet only those cities that have growth constraints have become unaffordable.

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