This is the catered daily podcast for Thursday, December 26, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When it comes to housing regulation, local government's rule.

And the refrain from local people often is, we like local control.

To which Mark Miller of the Pacific Legal Foundation responds, the individual property owner is actually local control.

We spoke about state preemption to enable more housing production.

It's been spurred mostly by seeing states like California have this continued exodus, often from people who are

cashing in by selling homes and then using those proceeds to buy a much cheaper, often much more

expansive, nicer home in a different state, but a broad housing

shortage that has largely been driven by local governments, setting rules for who gets to

build, where they get to build, what they get to build.

And it's really hard to get at a problem like that without telling local governments,

you don't get to do this anymore because local governments are, we're fine with affordable housing or two-bedroom

homes or heaven forbid apartment buildings in our town, but the other town can do that.

And then the other town says, well, the same thing.

And so for, this has been a debate, I think, among libertarians for a while, which is, we like local control.

Sacramento or Helena or Frankfurt can issue their edicts, but is that right? Is it right for them to impose on local governments?

My response is, you know, local tyrannies every bit as bad as any other kind of tyranny. Yes, so at Pacific Legal Foundation, Caleb, we would say, first of all, local control should be the property owner.

They're the local.

That's the most local.

Exactly.

But we are also realistic as property rights advocates who recognize that the Supreme Court kind of set the tone for the way the local governments

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