The cost of housing has increased, and it’s hard for builders to respond to demand for affordable homes. In many cities, all but the most expensive kind of housing has been banned. M. Nolan Gray, research director for California YIMBY — that’s Yes In My Back Yard — talks about the challenge of building modest housing for the Overton Window podcast.

“Until recently, housing affordability was a coastal problem,” Gray says. “It was a California problem, it was a Northeast problem. Over the course of the pandemic, the California-style housing crisis went national. You had an extreme run-up in rents and home prices, with rock-bottom vacancy rates all across the country.”

Gray’s answer is to make it legal to build more housing. He says that too often it’s only legal to build large single-family homes on large lots instead of more dense and more affordable housing.

“Local regulations on the books either make it outright illegal to build housing or force the housing that is built to be even more expensive than it might otherwise have been,” Gray says. “Or force housing that we theoretically allow to go through this long, difficult, cumbersome permitting process.”

He focuses on zoning rules because that’s where a lot of housing development is prevented. “In your typical U.S. city, 75% to 90% of residential areas are reserved exclusively for detached single-family homes. So that means you legally cannot build a townhouse, you legally cannot build a small apartment building, you legally cannot build a duplex, etc.” Gray, says.

There are height limits, rules on how far back a building has to sit from the lot line, how much area can be built, rules that require parking spaces, environmental reviews and more.

“And so these rules collectively have made it, if not illegal, very difficult to build housing in many U.S. communities,” Gray says.

People have been planning cities, laying out roads, and installing other forms of infrastructure for centuries, Gray says. Zoning restrictions, however, are a relatively new phenomenon. Zoning started in six cities in the 1910s. “It’s a new project where planners sat down and defined the permitted use and density for every single parcel in the city. And as I argue in my book, I think it’s a project that’s unambiguously failed on its own terms.”

“My full-time job is research director at California YIMBY where we work hard to pass laws to make it easier to build housing here in California. Now that the issue has gone national, we spend a lot of time working with our colleagues in other states — younger groups, newer groups that are trying to tackle this issue,” Gray says.

“We look at zoning rules and identify where they might be preventing the types of development that would actually enrich your community,” Gray says. “We have a lot of conversations about lowering these minimum parking mandates that require developers to build huge amounts of off-street parking. There’s no such thing as free parking, as the great urban economist Dan Shoup likes to say.”

He also recommends lowering minimum lot sizes to allow more units to be built on the same amount of land. He’s worked on processing and permitting reforms to shorten the time needed between planning and building, as well as to provide certainty that builders can build.

It used to be that state and local officials were reluctant to address housing restrictions. “Nowadays, there’s typically a local or a state elected official who says, ‘Every time I go back to my district I hear about housing constantly. I don’t know what to do; we don’t have a ton of money to spend on subsidies but I’m still hearing we need to act on this,’” Nolan says. “It costs nothing to remove bad rules. It costs almost nothing to speed up your permitting process and streamline projects through.”

Regular residents can have a big say in the fight for less restrictive housing policy. “If you care even a little bit about local housing policy, you can almost certainly shift the policy in your city, if not your entire state,” Gray says. “This is a local fight and if you go out and put the work in, you can shift policy for the better.”

He is working on shifting the Overton Window so much that cities rethink zoning. “The idea that technocratic planners and politicians are going to be able to assign the permitted use and density on every single lot is — I think that project has basically failed. My goal is to invite advocates and policymakers and practitioners to start thinking about what a good land use planning system looks like,” Gray says.

“What would it look like to have a system of land-use planning that can deal with negative externalities, that can deal with quality of life, that can coordinate growth with infrastructure but without locking our cities into a straitjacket?” Gray asks.

Check out our conversation at the Overton Window podcast.

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