Andrii Yalanskyi/Dreamstime.com

Yesterday, I participated in the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention panel on “Socialism or Sensible Protections? Zoning, Rent Control, and the Housing Crisis.” Although I proposed this topic to the Federalist Society Executive Committee on Property Rights (of which I am a member), I did not pick the title. The panel wasn’t really about socialism, except tangentially. But it certainly was about zoning, rent control, and housing! The other participants were James Burling (Pacific Legal Foundation, author of Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis), Prof. Peter Byrne (Georgetown), and Prof. Sara Bronin (George Washington University, author of Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World). My own presentation was partly based on my recent article “The Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning” (coauthored with Josh Braver). We also published a shorter, nonacademic, version in the Atlantic.

For such an ideologically diverse group, there was considerable consensus on a variety of issues, especially the extent to which exclusionary zoning and other regulations are major factors. Obviously, there was also disagreement on such questions as the extent to which judicial review should be used to break down regulatory barriers, and whether zoning deregulation should be combined with housing subsidies for the poor and lower middle class.

Below is a video of the panel. Viewers may wish to skip over parts of the first 15 minutes, where the moderator spent more time than necessary recounting the participants bios.