The Perils of Land Use Deregulation, my intervention in the land use/housing debate, has now been published by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. This article has already attracted some critical attention, including by others on this blog, and—as with all things housing-related these days—the disagreement can be sharp. No one will mistake an 80-page article on land use for a tweet. But I suspect hot takes are inevitable because I challenge the anti-zoning consensus by arguing that the current reformist emphasis on centralizing land use authority and deregulating land use markets is a strategic mistake.
Those arguments are well-rehearsed in the article. In this post, I want to make three ancillary points about the politics of land use reform, with some thoughts about anti-zoning’s future.