Happy Tuesday and welcome to yet another edition of Rent Free. This week’s stories include: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott bizarrely cites TikTok falsehoods while calling for a crackdown on investor-owned housing. Austin, Texas, builds a lot of homes and sees home prices drop. Scientists are baffled. Sacramento, California, experiments with leasing public land to the homeless. But first, our lead story about the darker side of housing bipartisanship.
As most of the coverage of the 2024 YIMBYtown conference detailed, housing is one of those issues where Republicans and Democrats—while generally more polarized than ever—can still work across the aisle to pass zoning reform. The flip side of this dynamic is that Republicans and Democrats work against their own co-partisans to undermine zoning reform. For an example of this, witness what happened in Arizona yesterday.
In Arizona, Starter Homes Are Finished Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has earned herself a place in housing history/infamy by vetoing H.B. 2570, aka the Arizona Starter Homes Act, on Monday. Hers is the first gubernatorial veto of a major YIMBY bill. The bill aimed to make smaller, owner-occupied housing easier to build by limiting local governments’ abilities to ban smaller homes, require new housing to sit on larger lots, enforce purely aesthetic design requirements, force new housing to be covered by homeowners’ associations (HOAs), or mandate community amenities that would require an HOA to manage.
H.B. 2570’s deregulatory means in the service of more traditionally liberal ends of housing affordability produced unusually bipartisan votes in the Arizona House and Senate, with Republicans and Democrats pretty evenly represented in both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ columns. Want more on urban issues like regulation, development, and zoning? Sign up for Rent Free from Reason and Christian Britschgi.
“We had very progressives like myself partnering with very strong conservatives, who saw this as a proper rights issue, whereas people like myself look at it as a basic equal opportunity issue,” Rep. Analise Ortiz (D–Glendale) told Reason last week. A majority of legislators from her own party voting in favor of the Starter Homes Act wasn’t enough to bring Hobbs around.
“This is unprecedented legislation that would put Arizonans at the center of a housing reform experiment with unclear outcomes,” said the governor in a veto statement. “This expansive bill is a step too far and I know we can strike a better balance.”
Hobbs’ veto statement cited only the opposition of the U.S. Department of Defense—which complained the bill didn’t exempt areas around military bases—and firefighters, who said limitations on local setbacks regulations and required amenities like swimming pools could increase fire hazards. (The Starter Homes Act bill expressly protects local health and safety regulations.)
Conspicuously, the governor did not mention the primary organized opposition to the Starter Homes Act: Arizona’s cities. As Reason reported last week, Arizona’s influential League of Cities and Towns—a publicly funded association of municipalities that lobbies the state legislature—was dead set against the bill from the beginning. The league had refused to negotiate on it or propose amendments.
After the bill passed, Hobbs told reporters that she was undecided on the bill and that she would have preferred housing bills that also have the support of local governments. In Arizona, Democrats have long been the party of local control. As the usual minority party in control of the state’s largest city governments, Arizona Democrats have been constantly fending off Republican efforts to preempt local, liberal regulations and taxes. Of all the elements of local control, cities are the most jealous guardians of their land-use powers.
The rising salience of housing has upset this dynamic somewhat. Among the champions of H.B. 2570 were a number of progressive Democrat lawmakers. They’re now complaining about the influence cities are wielding in the legislature. “Cities and their lobbyists cannot continue to be the only barrier to statewide zoning reform solely to retain power and uphold policy decisions that have been historically…