Opponents of “YIMBY” (“Yes in my Backyard”) zoning reform often emphasize the need for “local control” of land-use decisions. The state and federal governments, they say, should not override local decisions on zoning policy. After all, people within the community know more about their needs than remote authorities do. And different communities have diverse needs. This oft-heard mantra runs afoul of the reality that YIMBYism means more local control, not less. You can’t get more local than letting each property owner control their own land.
The “local control” argument for zoning restrictions is deployed by both left and right. The housing chapter of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 avows that “It is essential that legislation provides states and localities maximal flexibility to pursue locally designed policies and minimize the likelihood of federal preemption of local land use and zoning decisions.” For this reason, among others, it emphasizes that “a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” Single-family zoning, of course, is the most restrictive type of exclusionary zoning blocking new housing construction in many parts of the country.
Yes, I know that Donald Trump has disowned Project 2025, and claims he “knows nothing about it.” But the author of the housing chapter is Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development in Trump’s first administration. During the 2020 election, Carson and Trump coauthored a Wall Street Journal op ed attacking efforts to curb exclusionary single-family zoning, and emphasizing the need to preserve local control. Thus it’s fair to say the Project 2025 housing chapter reflects a common view on the Trump-era right, even if Trump himself may not know much about what’s in it.
Left-wing NIMBYs also often emphasize “local control,” as well. It’s a common refrain among blue-state defenders of single-family zoning and other land-use restrictions in places like California. Blue-state NIMBYs may not agree with Project 2025 on much else; but they’re on the same page here.
Both left and right-wing defenders of zoning overlook the reality that abolishing zoning restrictions actually increases localism. Abolishing restrictions does not impose a single set of land uses on the entire community. Rather, it allows individual property owners to decide for themselves. You can build multi-family housing on your land. But you don’t have to. You can instead stick with a single-family home, or use the land for something else. I don’t control what you do with your land, and you don’t control what I do with mine. It’s hard to be more localist than that.
YIMBY zoning reform allows land-uses decisions be more diverse and localized than they would be if a centralized zoning board mandated them. If you think it’s important to take advantage of local knowledge, and account for diverse needs of different localities, letting property owners decide land uses for themselves is the way to go. The best use of my property may be very different from what’s best for the one next door or down the street. And each owner might have local knowledge that city authorities cannot readily access.
This is especially true if we remember that most zoning rules are not simply a matter of neighbors making decisions for each other. In large cities and suburbs, there is often a single set of zoning rules imposed by the local government on tens or hundreds of thousands of properties. Localism this is not: it’s a regional form of economic central planning.
Even if local-government zoning gets overridden by a higher-level government, such as the state, the net result is still an increase in local control, because the ultimate decisions about how to use a given piece of land is now in the hands of the property owner, not a state authority. And property owners are more decentralized and local than government zoning boards are.
It’s also worth noting that YIMBYism backed by strong property rights doesn’t preclude all local coordination. Property owners can still cooperate on a voluntary basis, and even form private planned communities if they want to coordinate on a larger scale. I have previously outlined why such private efforts are different from government-mandated zoning and do not share the major flaws of the latter. Voluntary private cooperation is more sensitive to local needs than zoning because property owners will only enter into such arrangements if they believe that’s what’s best for them and their land, utilizing local knowledge in making those decisions.
In sum, if you really believe in local control of land-use decisions, you should oppose zoning restrictions, and support YIMBYism. It’s as localist as you can get!
The better argument for zoning restrictions is not localism, but it’s opposite: the concern that excessive localism in land-use decisions can harm outsiders. If I build an apartment complex on my land, that might annoy neigbhors, overburden regional infrastructure, or have other negative effects I might not take account of precisely because my focus is too local, concerned principally with my own self-interest. Even if my neigbhors get a say in the decision too, we might not take account of potential impact of new development on people in other parts of the region.
I will not address such anti-localist defenses of zoning here, beyond pointing out that zoning restrictions themselves impose great harm on outsiders, by raising housing costs, preventing people from “moving to opportunity,” and lowering economic growth. Historically, they have also been used to maintain racial and ethnic segregation.
There are non-localist and even anti-localist rationales for various zoning restrictions. But if you care about “local control,” you should be a YIMBY!
I criticized localist and federalism-based rationales for restricting constitutional property rights in greater detail in my 2011 article on “Federalism and Property Rights.”
