This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 30th, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

There may be no appropriate role for the federal government to be involved in housing, and yet here

we are.

So what are the prospects for the feds withdrawing somewhat from that arena?

I spoke with housing scholar Nolan Gray last week.

What are the primary ways that the federal government intervenes in housing markets in the United States?

Well, the federal government intervenes in housing markets in a thousand different ways.

Right? I mean, basically our entire housing finance system is in many ways a creation of new deal

interventions into the housing market, some that have been

less successful. On the issues that I write about in particular, namely zoning and other

local regulatory constraints on housing production, the federal government plays a pretty minimal role.

Now what's going on in DC right now is there's discussions around, hey, the federal government gives

out a lot of money, unlike in other countries, so for example, like in France or Japan where zoning is national,

in the US the federal government has no authority over this topic, but we do give out a lot of money,

and so what we can do is we can say, hey if you want to be eligible for certain federal dollars,

we would like to see some progress made on

liberalizing the zoning rules that are standing in the way of housing production.

And I think that I think that it's now to a certain extent of bipartisan issue, but

Biden's really feeling the heat because of course

housing is one of the remaining areas where inflation has not abated, and partly that's because it's just simply so

hard to build in many parts of the country. So it's become a national issue in a way that I think it historically hasn't been.

Zoning is overwhelmingly local. There are some state impositions on localities with respect to what

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