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Short thread/thoughts about Trump and suburban housing. For many decades, but let's say starting somewhere around the mid-1960s, suburban governments have moved toward using terms like "neighborhood character" as a proxy for class and race.
And as a matter of policy, these rules are codified through dreadfully boring and impenetrably technical rules that dictate things like how tall a house can be, how close it is to the sidewalk, how many acres it has around it, and how many unrelated people can live there.
These rules are decided hyper-locally, but they're mostly the same everywhere, which is why low-density suburbs look mostly the same everywhere. In my book talks I call it a "national local policy problem."
The shorthand is zoning or land-use rules, and these rules make for some seriously twisted politics that cannot, do not, will not hue to a red/blue split.
Because the bipartisan prescription for how to get around these rules is to deregulate land use regulations – which means, in essence, to enhance private property rights and make life easier for real estate developers.
On the surface, these sounds these sound like Republican talking points: Should the government be able to dictate what you can build on your own land? Is it the government's business if you want to build a little shack in your backyard and rent it out?
But of course, once you get local, ideology and partisan politics collapse, which is why you'll see people trot out the neighborhood character lines just as eagerly in the reddest parts of Texas as they will in the most liberal parts of California.
Defined politically, suburban governments are, in essence, small pools of voters who gather around issues of housing and land use.
There's a whole theory by an economist named Bill Fischel called "The Homevoter Hypothesis," which posits, in essence, that when we moved to mass suburbanization we created an entirely new kind of voter that cared about home values above all else.
And by organizing those voters into very small voting units that are near-impossible to penetrate without money, we gave them outsized power over how cities develop.
Robert Ellickson, a legal scholar at Yale, referred to this as "Plans of Oppression" in reference to Federalist Paper number 10: https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-10/
The race element here is obviously huge, but because it has historically been codified into property rights, it is easy to find way around making it about race.
Hard to pinpoint when this started, but one of the first great examples was in 1964, when California voters passed an initiative that enshrined the right to NOT sell or rent a home to someone based on race into the constitution – in effect, a statewide segregation bill.
But the backers framed it as a fight over property rights. As Robert O. Self writes in his amazing history of the period and Proposition 14:
Anyway, to finish what is now becoming long-winded (hey, I gotta be me), I realize that rational analyses of politics are not aways rational.
But if there is a moment here, a moment that has building with the past few weeks of Tweets/Stories/Columns about Obama-era fair housing policies, it's that the decades-long era of being able to talk about zoning in race neutral terms is closing.
If nothing else, the spectacle of a real estate developer president Tweeting furiously against quasi-Libertarian policies that by any analysis will increase profits for real estate developers, is something to behold.
Realize I gotta work on those Twitter typos.
