This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, February 11th, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. As state legislative sessions continue to churn, which states are emerging as leaders in giving property owners more power over housing? Christian Britschke is a reporter at Reason. We spoke last week about the impediments to

housing, the state power to get local governments out of the way. A few states have sort of

woken up to the very substantial housing crisis in the United States of America. It's been

it's increasingly difficult, it seems, on average incomes for people to secure homes that they own. And even renting is out of reach for some people who would like to live close to work or close to family or something like that. Where are states looking right now?

Sure, absolutely. So a number, you know, this is an odd year. So there's a lot of state

legislatures in session, a lot of different housing bills out there. Probably the most interesting

one that I've seen so far is this bill introduced in Montana called the

private property protection act, which would do two things. It would establish that state and

local governments, any unit of the government in Montana, couldn't enact or enforce a use

restriction on private property unless it was narrowly tailored and dedicated to

achieving some sort of compelling government interest like health or safety. And then it would also

allow private citizens to sue if they were subject, you know, either if one of these laws were

passed to challenge the law or if it was a law already on the books

wasn't forced against them if they were trying to maybe build a, you know, a small apartment

building or if they were trying to operate a home-based business in a residential area,

they could sue saying those restrictions are not necessary to further some health or safety goal.

And the government would have to prove that they are.

Wow. So it's more than just construction on a piece of property or an addition on a piece of

property. It is how you use your property in other ways as well. Yes. And so this is what's so

interesting to me about it. It's what Charles Gardner at the Mercatus Center in Mercatus Center describes as a rights-based approach as opposed to a regulation-based approach. So the regulation-based approach is to say you're allowed to build a single-family home on this property right now. We're going to let you build two homes instead. Or you can't operate a home-based business. We're going to change the

rules to say that you can't operate some sorts of home-based businesses there. This would kind of

flip that on its head and say all the regulations are kind of presumptively not allowed and you're

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