Red States Are Easing Housing Constraints

In 2023, Montana legalized duplexes and tiny homes and streamlined subdivision development. Earlier this year, Texas reduced minimum lot sizes and allowed apartments in commercial areas. And a recent survey found that roughly two-thirds of states where the GOP holds the governorship and both legislative chambers have passed at least some pro-housing legislation this year.

Policies like these should make sense for Republican states that want to lower housing costs. “But conservative governance principles sometimes clash with conservative lifestyle preferences,” M. Nolan Gray writes. “In recent years, President Donald Trump has promised to defend the ‘suburban lifestyle dream’ against alleged threats—namely, apartments.”

Indeed, some red states, like South Carolina and South Dakota, continue to resist pro-growth reform. But Montana and Texas have threaded that needle effectively, “with pro-growth business groups and housing reformers standing together with rural interests and environmentalists eager to spare natural and working lands from sprawl,” Gray observes.

Read more about the growth of red state YIMBYs.

Earlier this month, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker signed a bill that includes pension “sweeteners” for Chicago police and fire employees who were hired after 2011. The arrangement will create $11 billion in new liabilities, according to some estimates. The city already carries more pension debt than 43 other U.S. states.

“The new pension sweeteners will more than likely contribute to another credit downgrade for Chicago,” Austin Berg writes, “dropping the city into junk status and imperiling its ability to invest in schools, safety, and infrastructure.”

Read more about how the legislation could push Chicago into fiscal collapse, and why American taxpayers could be footing the bill.

In a recent survey of nearly 2,500 adults, Scott Mourtgos found that when respondents read protest-and-reform or race-themed headlines about police use of force, they were about 7 percentage points less likely than those in the control group to approve of legally reasonable force.

“What happens on the street matters but so does how these events are portrayed,” Mourtgos writes. “Over time, the media may reduce public support for legal uses of force—to the detriment of police officers and the communities they are sworn to protect.”

For decades, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon attracted people from across the country, turning cities there into urban hubs. But today, the states are experiencing sluggish housing construction and job growth, and a deteriorating business climate as residents continue to leave.

What happened?

The states “began adopting the very policies—above all on energy, housing, and regulation—that many newcomers had fled from in California,” Joel Kotkin writes. To turn things around, these states will have “to realize that following the California model is a prescription for decline.”

Read more about the progressive policies that have contributed to their demise.

Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Judge Glock, and Renu Mukherjee discuss President Trump’s threat to send National Guard troops to Chicago, Baltimore, and New York; the government’s stake in Intel; and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s attempt to bench press 135 pounds.

“Veselka was my wife’s and my first date; we return on our anniversary and tip the number of years we have accrued to date. No late-night vampire hours guts the culture.”

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