This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 21st,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's been a remarkable year for state-level housing reformers.

Several state governments have taken big swings at making housing more affordable and available.

They've done so by largely just getting out of the way of those people who want to buy and build.

Nolan Gray is author of the book Arbitrary Lines,

we discussed why 2023 was such a strong year for housing

and why next year looks just as good.

Nolan, it wasn't that long ago that we looked at housing reform as, well we, me, anyway, looked

at housing reform as essentially an impossible lift that the incentives look like, hey, local

communities, they get to make decisions about what kind of housing goes into an area and economic consequences more broadly be damned.

And that was sort of, I just almost accepted that that's how things were going to be.

But this year, 2023, has been, I don't know, would you call it a banner year for

making housing broadly more affordable and more in line with the desires of the people who own that land?

Absolutely. As Salim Firth and I characterize it in Bloomberg City Lab, this is really the year that zoning reform went national.

You know, housing affordability has long been an issue in coastal states like California, Massachusetts,

but over the course of the pandemic with supply chain shortages, interest rates on a roller coaster, housing affordability problems went nationwide.

And what we're seeing all across the country is state legislators taking up this issue,

realizing that for exactly the reasons you articulated,

in many cases, local governments are not going to act on reform, and if we really want to remove

regulatory barriers to new housing production in a way that will get a lot of new units built.

This activity has to be at the state level.

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