In case you were wondering, the White House grounds are technically unzoned – as is a lot of federal property in DC. Screenshot from the DC online zoning map.

Zoning has been on the national stage in the past few weeks, starting with this paper (just hovering on a link to whitehouse.gov is good to see) based on remarks delivered to the Urban Institute on Nov 20 from Jason Furman, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors:

In today’s remarks, I will focus on how excessive or unnecessary land use or zoning regulations have consequences that go beyond the housing market to impede mobility and thus contribute to rising inequality and declining productivity growth.

For more in-depth commentary, I’d recommend the following:

• Joe Cortright at City Observatory: “these observations show the pervasive and powerful effects of what we’ve called the nation’s shortage of cities.”
• Matt Yglesias at Vox: “for younger people, for renters, and for the overall cause of social and geographical mobility it’s a disaster.”
• Gillian White at the Atlantic: Rent seeking “often means that changing zoning laws or other supply-constricting regulations is in the hands of those who stand to collect on those economic rents in the first place, which can make change slow and difficult, if it happens at all.”
• Paul Krugman at the New York Times: “Rising demand for urban living by the elite could be met largely by increasing supply. There’s still room to build, even in New York, especially upward.”

I had two immediate reactions to the paper: first, it’s great to see the White House recognize the importance of issues like this. Getting an issue like this on the national stage, linking it to a salient national political issue such as inequality is important. Getting someone like Paul Krugman to devote his NYT column to the subject is great to see (note that Paul Krugman is no stranger to urban economics: he won the Nobel Prize for his work on economic geography and agglomeration economies).

Second, given the scale and importance of the issue, the list of administration actions is underwhelming. Affirmatively working towards fair housing, offering incentives to localities to loosen zoning, and HUD’s program to lessen lending risk for multifamily housing development are all good ideas, but seem small in comparison to the scale of the issue.

It’s hard to say if there’s more that could be done administratively at the Federal level. In the absence of additional legislation, it’s hard to make the case for federal interference in an ostensibly local issue like zoning (no matter the national interest). Perhaps there are additional tools available that build on new rulemaking enabled by existing fair housing laws (perhaps involving litigation in the courts as well) in the same vein as New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine.

Even with the national scope of housing supply constraints and their clear impact on the national economy, Pete Saunders at Corner Side Yard is quick to point out that housing demand is far more varied across the US. This presents yet another issue in raising housing supply as a national issue – it’s not a uniformly national issue. Relaxing the restrictions on housing supply only matter in the face of demand pressure – and many markets in the US don’t have the kind of demand to drive up housing costs in the first place.