Affordable Housing

Housing became unaffordable across the English-speaking world between roughly 1995 and 2025, and conservatives locate the cause on the supply side: zoning rules, minimum lot sizes, height limits, environmental review, development charges, and heritage designations that make new dwellings slow, expensive, or illegal to build. On this account the shortage is not a market failure. It is a regulatory outcome, produced by governments and defended by existing owners.

The conservative prescription follows from the diagnosis. Remove the restrictions that block construction, let builders respond to prices, and let property owners use their land. Programmes that subsidise demand — grants to buyers, tax credits, low-deposit mortgages — raise prices when supply is fixed, and transfer money to sellers rather than to the people the programmes name.

Key Takeaways

• Conservatives treat housing scarcity as a supply problem caused by land-use regulation, not by builder greed or foreign capital alone.
• Restricting supply concentrates gains on existing owners and imposes the cost on renters, the young, and newcomers.
• Demand-side subsidies without supply reform capitalise into higher prices.
• Property rights arguments and abundance arguments converge here: the owner who wants to build a second unit is blocked by the same rule that keeps the city expensive.
• Conservatives split internally between free-market liberalisers and those who defend local control, neighbourhood character, and the settled expectations of homeowners.

History And Context

Zoning as a comprehensive control on private land arrived in the United States with New York City’s 1916 ordinance and spread after the Supreme Court upheld it in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926. Britain took a more centralised route with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which nationalised development rights: land could be owned privately, but permission to build on it became a public grant. Canadian provinces adopted similar planning acts through the postwar decades.

For thirty years the effect was muted because population growth was matched by suburban expansion. The constraint bound later. From the 1970s, growth boundaries, environmental review statutes, and heritage rules layered onto existing zoning. California’s Environmental Quality Act, signed in 1970, became a routine instrument for delaying or defeating housing projects. Greenbelt designations around London, Toronto, and Vancouver capped outward growth while height and density limits capped upward growth.

Jane Jacobs had attacked postwar planning from a different angle in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, arguing that planners destroyed functioning neighbourhoods through slum clearance and rigid separation of uses.¹ Her critique of expert control over urban form is now cited by both the deregulation camp and the neighbourhood-preservation camp, which is a fair measure of how the argument has split.

The economic literature caught up in the 2000s. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko documented a widening gap between house prices and construction costs in America’s most regulated metropolitan areas, attributing the difference to the price of permission rather than the price of building.² By the 2010s the finding was mainstream, and by the 2020s governments in New Zealand, California, and Ontario had begun overriding local zoning by statute.

The Conservative Position

The conservative case starts with property. A person who owns land holds a presumptive right to build on it, subject to genuine harms to neighbours — noise, fire risk, blocked light — rather than to aesthetic preference or the market value of adjacent homes. Modern zoning inverts this. It presumes prohibition and requires the owner to petition for permission, which converts a right into a favour dispensed by a municipal council.

The second argument is about who pays. Restrictive planning is a transfer. It raises the value of existing homes and charges the difference to renters, first-time buyers, and immigrants, none of whom vote in the council meetings where the rules are set. Thomas Sowell made this argument directly about coastal California, tracing the run-up in prices to land-use restrictions adopted in the 1970s and noting that the effect fell hardest on the people the restrictions’ supporters claimed to protect.³

The third argument concerns the family. Conservatives care about household formation — marriage, children, staying near parents — and the price of housing is now among the main obstacles to all three. A young couple that cannot afford a three-bedroom home within reach of work postpones children. Treating this as a distributional footnote misses what conservatives take to be the point of an economy.

Practical conservative reform is unglamorous: legalise duplexes and small apartment buildings by right, abolish minimum parking requirements, shorten approval timelines, cap development charges, and remove the ability of a single objector to stall a project for years. Conservatives also resist rent control, on the standard finding that price ceilings reduce the supply and quality of rental housing over time.⁴

Differing Positions

The main progressive objection is that markets will not build for the poor at any price. Construction costs, land values, and financing set a floor below which private developers cannot profitably build, so filtering — new units for the affluent freeing older units for everyone else — works too slowly for households in crisis. On this view direct public construction, non-market housing, and rent regulation are required alongside supply reform, and Vienna’s municipal housing stock is offered as proof that a large public sector can hold rents down for decades.

A second objection comes from within conservatism. Traditional conservatives argue that liberalisation treats a settlement as a commodity and a neighbourhood as a collection of parcels. Roger Scruton pressed this line in Green Philosophy, defending settled aesthetic and communal claims against the developer’s balance sheet and arguing that the beauty and continuity of a place are goods a market does not price.⁵ That position is in real tension with the deregulation case, and the tension is unresolved on the right.

Supply-side conservatives answer that the choice is not between beauty and abundance. Britain and continental Europe built dense, handsome terraces and mid-rise blocks under simple rules for centuries. What produces both ugliness and scarcity is a permission system that makes every building an individual political negotiation.

References

1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961).
2. Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “The Impact of Building Restrictions on Housing Affordability”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, June 2003.
3. Thomas Sowell, The Housing Boom and Bust (Basic Books, 2009).
4. Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian, “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco”, American Economic Review, Vol. 109, No. 9, September 2019.
5. Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet (Atlantic Books, 2012).