OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

Something striking happened last week: the Obama White House released its Housing Development Toolkit and Obama's economic advisor, Jason Furman, wrote a follow-on op-ed about land use regulation's negative consequences. While White House reports tend to be geared toward partisan political objectives, these two publications could have been written by non-partisan economists. Nevertheless, although the honest application of economic theory is welcome, libertarians will still find points of disagreement.

What's good? The report highlights zoning policies' influence on increasing housing prices, immobilizing workers in job deserts, creating costly uncertainty for developers, increasing inequality and racial segregation, and suppressing economic growth. These negative outcomes were attributed to "excessive barriers," "unnecessarily slow permitting processes," and "arbitrary or antiquated" zoning and land use regulations.

The White House even went so far as to say that "even well-intentioned land use policies" can have negative impacts. 

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