The Starter Homes Act, a bipartisan bill which would’ve made it easier to build new housing here in the Valley, was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, citing concerns from the Department of Defense.
Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer for the Atlantic, was among the first to reveal the DoD’s unusual intervention. As Demsas wrote, opponents of the bill sought input from the DoD only after the legislation had been sent to Hobbs’ desk. To Demsas, that suggested that this was an attempt to kill the bill, rather than modify it to address DoD’s concerns. This, she wrote, is symptomatic of what happens to housing reform efforts all over the country: broadly popular zoning policies getting torpedoed by back-room political maneuvers.
With housing policy featured prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic platform, Demsas says there’s hope that things may finally be shifting. Demsas joined The Show to talk about how it will take serious leadership to rescue policies like the Starter Homes Act from the vagaries of local politics.
Full conversation
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: You know, people can lodge their complaints at various levels. You can do lawsuits, you can send veto letters, you can block things at the local level, at the county level. At the state level, we would never devolve our climate policy to the local level, right.
We would understand this is a national emergency and the real problem is that no one is doing this top level thinking going, OK. It's important that we protect our environment. It's important that we have military preparedness and it's also important that we build a lot of affordable housing. How can we make all of these things happen?
SAM DINGMAN: Well, one of the ways that it's beginning to seemingly become more of a political priority at the national level is reflected in the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. And that as you have reported is sort of a notable departure for the Democratic Party, right.
DEMSAS: Yes, I mean, I think that this is, you know, it remains to be seen exactly how this will all play out if Harris were to be the president. She set a target for her hypothetical administration to build 3 million new homes. But housing policy experts are, are well aware that if you really want to resolve the housing crisis, you have to attack the local regulations that are binding constraints on housing supply.
And what we would want to see from a Harris administration that was serious about increasing supply of housing is encouraging Democrats down the ballot to get with the program essentially. And I think right, now it's like, you know, very murky what the Democratic line on these regulations is. Like when you look at these local restrictions on housing supply, they are most binding in Democratic states and cities. And that's the place where you see the housing crisis is the most severe.
DINGMAN: Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the Starter Homes Act here in Arizona because it seems like the exact sort of policy that supports Harris' vision here, but here in Arizona we have a Democratic governor who vetoed that policy.
One of the other things that, that is interesting to me from reading your reporting on this though is that it seems like housing has the potential to be a bipartisan issue and that, that might be part of the reason that the politics around it have gotten so tricky, right.
DEMSAS: Yeah, I mean, there's so many arguments that kind of transcend traditional right-left thinking. So, of course, from, you know, the, the right, there's a lot of people who are concerned about property rights and these regulations sort of prevent individuals from being able to, you know, convert their garage to an apartment for their, you know, 26-year-old who can't afford to live in their area or build a mother-in-law suite in the backyard so that your grandmother could help with your kid. Like these things are illegal in large swaths of the country on your own property that you own. And so on the right, there's a real concern about this from a kind of property rights perspective.
And on the left, there's a lot of arguments about how the legacy of zoning kind of comes from this intense desire to segregate people. And basically every state that has, has taken this on has, has done this in a bipartisan manner. And so these kinds of coalitions are possible, but I, I think it also makes for kind of weird politics. It's not a coalition that's you're usually used to seeing, I mean, within Arizona, you see [Donald] Trump supporting Republicans with very progressive Democrats coming together here. And you know, it can be a good thing but it's also very unfamiliar for a lot of our leadership.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, what do we know from the evidence that exists in, in places where programs like say the Starter Homes Act have been put into effect? Like are there any success stories which indicate that if the politics around this could be figured out, it would be a way to address the housing crisis?
DEMSAS: Yeah, I mean, we have lots of economic evidence showing that building new housing increases affordability and also liberalizing zoning laws makes it easier to build more housing. Like in Minneapolis where you saw a building boom and you see rents drop in Austin, Texas, which has experienced a real difficult problem with having to accommodate a bunch of new growth really, really quickly. They have been able to build significantly more than their peers and you're seeing much better outcomes in Austin on terms of affordability relative to what you would expect if you had kept that market really tight.
DINGMAN: Hearing you talk about this it, it almost makes me think that regardless of how practical it would or wouldn't be for a theoretical President Kamala Harris to implement her specific strategies around this. Just the establishment of this pro-development sort of philosophy at the highest levels of government would create sort of a permissioning structure at the local level to pursue more legislation like this, right.
DEMSAS: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think this is one of the biggest things that's underappreciated is that there's just not a ton of pressure right now for local and state governments to take this on coming from the top, right? And so there's a huge potential here for the federal government to say, hey, state and local governments, you need to figure this out. Or it's taking a more affirmative step. I mean, there's some proposals that the Biden-Harris administration have made for an innovation fund, for instance, in order to kind of incentivize with a carrot, providing local governments dollars to figure out how to increase supply of housing at the local level. And it's an outcomes-oriented policy, which I think is a great idea.
And then if that doesn't work, it's to take it to the next step and say, OK, if you're not going to do this on your own, then we need to make sure that federal dollars aren't going to places where people are refusing to take action on this national problem.
DINGMAN: What does your reporting suggest about how this conversation is unfolding on the right? We've mostly been talking about Democratic policymakers.
DEMSAS: I think it's a very interesting conversation to get on the right too. For traditionally, this has not been a problem in Republican states, right? Those are not the places where you see these extremely unaffordable cities. But there is like sort of a weird politics developing, where on the ground, you know, in local and state politics, Republicans are generally more amenable to development. They're more pro business and so they end up kind of having more of a hostility to some of these regulations.
But at the national level, you see former President Donald Trump kind of reversed his party's position here. So when he was president, you know, his HUD secretary, Ben Carson had come out and said, you know, these regulations are really harmful, the standard Republican line about pro business, everything. But then you saw Sen. Corey Booker, who is a Democrat, come out and suggest that we should tie federal dollars to zoning reform at the, at the ground level. And Trump thought, you know, he thought this might be a place for a wedge issue that he could create in the 2020 election.
And he attempted to really make this a big deal, this idea that the Democrats were come and destroy the suburbs, right. So he kind of reverses his own administration's thinking on this. And I think that really makes the, the issue a little bit confused at the national level, even though at the state and local level, I think Republicans have largely been kind of in favor of a lot of these reforms.
