The US has a lot of layers of government. Some would say too many. I would say too many. Here in Washington, DC, we mercifully only have a city government and a federal government, but you state-dwellers often have to juggle a state government, a county government, a municipal government, and sometimes school districts and other political entities that sit somewhere between these levels.

This diffusion of responsibility has been a disaster for housing in the US. When an apartment building goes up, that creates substantial benefits to those moving in (they have a home!); significant but more modest benefits to the broader metro area in the form of lower rents than absent construction, and long-run economic growth from geographic clustering of top industries. It also brings some concentrated local costs to neighbors in the form of increased foot and vehicle traffic and more noise.

In aggregate, the benefits almost certainly swamp the costs, but decisions are often made at the exact level where those bearing most of the costs have disproportionate sway. In cities with “aldermanic privilege,” for instance, members of the city council get effective vetoes over what housing gets built in their district. Their voters care more about the nuisance of traffic and limited parking from new construction than about the long-run economic health of the region, or the interests of newcomers, and they respond rationally by strangling housing development. New York Mayor Eric Adams put some very worthwhile measures on this November’s city ballot that would weaken this privilege in New York, and unsurprisingly, the council is screaming bloody murder.

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This helps explain why some of the most positive changes in housing policy in recent years have happened at the state rather than the local level. States are often able to capture more of the benefits from housing growth than individual cities, and certainly than individual city council districts, which has led some to overrule local zoning rules to mandate municipalities to allow more construction.

Tina Kotek, then speaker of the Oregon House and now the state’s governor, was a real innovator here, shepherding through in 2019 a measure requiring large cities in the state to allow at least two units of housing on all land parcels, effectively ending single-family-only zoning. San Francisco’s state Sen. Scott Wiener, with the occasional but inconsistent support of Gov. Gavin Newsom, has notched a lot of wins with this strategy too, most recently the passage of SB79 to legalize up to six-floor apartment buildings near transit. (The bill is still awaiting Newsom’s signature.) But

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