This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 25, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The American system of housing production isn't performing well and hasn't performed well for quite a while.

But it's the kind of system that exists overwhelmingly at the local level.

In Auburn, Maine, local policy makers got out of their own way and started opening the door to new housing.

Greg Brooks of the Better Cities Project describes the political and policy stories

that can be replicated elsewhere.

A lot of people who like their communities just the way they are, thank you very much, no reform

needed here. A lot of those people don't really seem to appreciate that a hundred years ago this maybe an idyllic time

when they look back on it of these were the good days of this town and it was beautiful it was bustling yet and all those things a lot

in many cases a lot more kinds of stuff could be built in a wider variety of locations that can't be built today.

So getting from here to there, it's a long slog quite often and you know, the people standing in the way are often the people

who once again like things just the way they are.

Well, I love how you cued that up because the reality is you couldn't build the towns of 100 years ago today.

You can't build that anywhere.

In most, most of your basic post-war suburbs that exist today and that are beloved by people who don't

want their neighborhoods to change.

You can't build those homes anymore. A design review committee might stop you.

The City Council might demand inclusionary zoning and low-income housing and all of that,

that backdrop of no, is what makes what they're doing in Auburn, Maine so interesting.

It is what Mercatus, Dan Rothschild, referred to as perhaps the yimbiest city in America.

And what's great about it is that it's not a giant metropolis that's being driven by activist, you know, professional Yimbi's, right?

...