To demonstrate how much the issue of housing affordability and zoning reform have permeated into our social and political day-to-day awareness, let me describe a recent personal anecdote.
Last week, I saw a news story about a new book (https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/05/17/american-middle-working-class-donald-trump/) that purported to explain the divide in much of American society of late. The book is “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women” by Batya Ungar-Sargon. It is described as being about working-class Americans and why they’re struggling to achieve the American dream. Of particular interest to me was the author’s description of the political divides created by this dynamic. The story was an interview with the author.
The author has a lot of interesting insights and thoughts about how and why things have developed as they have to create these divides, but to the point of what I stated at the beginning of this piece, the author was asked what she saw as potential remedies to the divide. Guess what her number one fix was? In the author’s own words:
“The second half of my book is full of totally non-partisan policy solutions that would immediately make life for working-class Americans much better. Getting rid of zoning laws. If we got rid of zoning laws tomorrow, we could build a million housing units a year and in a decade we would have solved our housing crisis.”