Don’t California My Arizona
For all the marketing hype, the Governor doesn't have a real plan to avoid it.
Down on his political luck and ever the charmer, Governor Doug Ducey has placed a letter in the Orange County Register, engaging in the time-honored Arizona tradition of California-bashing, and reminding those leaving the state for Arizona not to forget why they left.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a spot of California-bashing as much as the next Arizonan, and people are certainly leaving California. Unfortunately, Ducey hasn’t done much to address the key reason why and set Arizona on a different path.
Several issues in the article are pulled straight from the grabbag of conservative grievance politics. It seems unlikely that many Californians are leaving the state because of “nonstop political correctness.” That aside, there are legitimate issues mentioned, and the most legitimate is the high cost of housing.
Polling of Californians who have considered leaving the state finds the high cost of housing to be the biggest issue, even more respondents cite that than high taxes. Currently, we are doing better here: Housing in Arizona is substantially cheaper than in big California cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco. The median one-bedroom apartment goes for $967 a month in Phoenix versus $1,511 in LA, according to data from ApartmentList.
Still, the trajectory of Arizona doesn’t look good when it comes to housing. The metro Phoenix area, while cheaper than LA, is leading the country in rising rents.
Someone should break it to the Governor’s social media team that the plan isn’t to become California. As the article he retweeted mentions, Phoenix led the top 35 metro areas in rent increases, with 8.4 percent annual growth. If the plan isn’t to become California, we should probably try avoiding their biggest pitfall.
Addressing A Shortage
California’s housing crisis is caused by a housing shortage. Demand has far outstripped the supply of housing, causing prices to rise. Some estimates say the state will need to construct millions of new homes to solve the crisis.
In large part, overregulation of land-use is to blame. Zoning laws, like single-family zoning, are in effect a ban on housing that could use land more efficiently. Local control of zoning means that city governments often defer to NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) pressure, halting new developments over concerns about “neighborhood character” which also restricts the supply of housing.
While zoning laws and the NIMBYs who abuse them have been particularly bad in California, failing to produce enough homes is a problem nationwide. As the Bloomberg article on the California housing shortage lays out:
As severe as this sounds, the rest of the country is becoming more—not less—like California. During the longest economic expansion on record, the U.S. has been building far fewer houses than it usually does, pushing prices further out of reach for a vast portion of the population that has barely seen incomes rise.
Obviously, there are good reasons to have regulations. We don’t want toxic sludge dumped in our rivers, rats in our food, or cars without seatbelts. We’ve decided it is reasonable to create regulations that will prevent death and other such unpleasantness.
When I talk about the overregulation of housing, I don’t mean safety regulations that prevent building homes that are essentially death traps. I mean allowing the construction of more and different types of housing anywhere zoned residential and streamlining the development process.
Let The People Build
People keep moving into Arizona and they are driving up housing costs as a result. I have heard it suggested that people should just stop moving here, a very silly idea which is impossible to enforce even if it were merited.
Instead, we need to make it so more housing can be built in the places people want to live. Cities will need to loosen their zoning codes to stop restricting new housing if we want to bring down prices, a policy change made difficult by the sheer number of localities and the unwillingness of those with the most political influence in cities to end housing bans.
Instead, we need to make an end-run around localities and force them to end restrictions on our housing supply. Luckily, we have a governor and legislature who loves using preemption to overrule regulations passed by cities. From banning cities from banning natural gas to banning my city from banning plastic bags, the governor has been quite willing to do so in the past for far more trivial matters.
If we are going to overturn bans on bad things like plastic bags, we should also overturn bans on good things like housing. The state should preempt local zoning law and allow the construction of denser “missing middle” housing on lots zoned for single-family homes.
If Ducey is serious about preventing us from going down the California-route, he needs to address the single biggest problem causing people to leave California. Housing affordability is already a problem for a growing number of Arizonans, and yet a governor who prides himself on cutting regulations doesn’t seem to have a plan to roll back some of the worst regulations in present in the state today.
Ending regulations that prevent people from affording homes should be a far bigger priority than keeping cities from banning plastic bags. Unless this is dealt with, Ducey has done very little to prevent us from becoming California.