This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 17th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The incentives for homeowners, politicians, tax collectors, and would-be homeowners are largely aligned against the kind of growth that could produce real benefits for average people.

And land use regulation lies at the center of it all.

Ryan Yank is senior faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research.

In June, we talked about the fights that we'd have and the fights we could avoid if we didn't have central authorities planning

how we use our own property.

I recently spoke with Nolan Gray, author of the very good new book, Arbit we talked about zoning and the difficult

takeaway there is zoning is overwhelmingly local and almost no one has any incentive to fix some of the

enormous problems that it causes.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's one of the core sort of pervasive and never-ending questions in local government in particular is,

why allow planners who are the ones that create the zones to do the sort of things that they do.

So much of our lives are determined by decisions that are made in unelected rooms,

typically in the county courthouse by folks drawing a map and then deciding what's going to be allowed to go where.

And it's amazing how many times these problems pop up over and over again only to be tied back to how zoning decisions and planning decisions

of the local level are made.

And people own that property.

They do.

People own that at least that's the claim that's made, is that they own it. And yet they have no real say.

Yeah, they have only a sort of secondary say because they're well they own it and they can have influence into the process so there are almost always public hearings about things like zoning and planning

at the end of the day my own research one of my very early projects as an academic

was looking at what's the determinant in zoning matters and it turned out the

...