This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 11th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. As many cities face housing crunches, we should

remember that housing policy reform is overwhelmingly a task for state and local governments.

Leo Biasucci is the Republican majority leader of the Arizona House of Representatives.

We talked about how the state has addressed housing policy

and how to strike the balance between more abundant housing

and political realities.

When I fly in to Phoenix, which I did recently just for this podcast, you

notice everything's pretty spread out and it doesn't seem like there's any real

shortage of land for building houses.

So why would the state want to get involved with the process of rejiggering or giving property owners the ability to rejigger their commercial properties to convert them to more than just commercial use.

Right and it's, you know, the idea of like we said you came into to Arizona into Phoenix you see all this land everywhere and something a lot of people don't know is

I think we have a 13% of our property is actually owned

privately or the state everything else is federally

Owned right this is a big difference between the West Coast and the East Coast east coast you have you know everybody you know tons of property that's that's but you come out west, you have national parks, and you have everything that's owned by BLM and the feds. And so we do really have a problem. You have a lot of land, but a lot of that's not usable.

And so then you come to this issue of how do you find the properties

that we can utilize for multi-use,

you know, whether it's housing, condos, apartments

because our prices right now are absolutely through the roof.

I mean, you try to get an apartment here, you're talking, which is wild to think, right?

You're in Arizona and you're paying 2,000 a month for a one or two bedroom apartment. Those are things you heard about in New York or

San Francisco, right? You don't even think that that would happen in Arizona. So in a time when we see all these commercial buildings

...