A recent story in The Kansas City Star on an effort at housing reform in Lee’s Summit makes an important and necessary admission: the problem is government regulation.
The city is growing in population. That is good. But the supply of housing is not keeping up with that growth. That is bad. As a result, housing prices are rising and pricing out long-time residents. That is also bad.
The good news is that city staff issued a report with some recommendations, including relaxing the city’s restrictive zoning codes. Tracy Albers, the city’s development services director, offers a remarkably free-market reform proposal. According to the Star:
[Albers] said that the city’s influence on which new housing types are built in Lee’s Summit is “limited”. City staff can’t control interest rates or construction costs, she said, but they can woo developers, invest in other projects that make people want to live in Lee’s Summit, create more permissive zoning policies and “make the development process as predictable as possible.”
Unfortunately, despite the proposal having many free-market ideas, there are some red flags. Wooing developers and investing in projects feel like euphemisms for taxpayer subsidies. But those don’t appear to address the problem Lee’s Summit is having. They have plenty of people, and the city is growing. The problem is that the city’s rules and regulations are getting in the way of the market’s ability to accommodate that growth. Remove those barriers, and let’s see what happens.
