Opponents of “YIMBY” (“Yes in my Backyard”) zoning reform often emphasize the need for “local autonomy” in land-use decisions. State and federal governments, they say, should not ignore local decisions on zoning policies. After all, people within a community know their needs better than far-away authorities. And different communities have different needs. This oft-heard mantra is at odds with the reality of what YIMBY-ism means. more It’s local autonomy, nothing less. It doesn’t get any more local autonomy than letting each landowner manage their own land.
The “local autonomy” argument for zoning restrictions is made by both the left and the right. Housing Emblem The conservative Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 report declares that “it is essential to ensure maximum flexibility in law for state and local governments to pursue locally formulated policies and minimize the ability of the federal government to preempt local land use and zoning decisions.” For this reason, it stresses, among other things, that “a conservative administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” Single-family zoning is, of course, the most restrictive type of exclusionary zoning that stifles new housing construction in many parts of the country.
Yes, I know that Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025. He claims he “knows nothing about it.” But the chapter on housing was written by Ben Carson, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration. Carson and Trump co-wrote a book during the 2020 election. One The Wall Street Journal Editorial It attacks efforts to curb exclusionary single-family zoning and emphasizes the need to preserve local autonomy, so it’s fair to say that Project 2025’s chapter on housing reflects popular views on the right in the Trump era, even if Trump himself doesn’t know much about them.
Left-leaning NIMBYs also often emphasize “local autonomy,” a common argument among blue-state advocates of single-family zoning and land-use restrictions in places like California. Blue-state NIMBYs may disagree with Project 2025 on many other points, but they agree on this one.
Defenders of zoning on both the left and the right overlook the reality that deregulation actually strengthens localism. Deregulation doesn’t force a single land-use code on an entire community. Rather, it allows individual landowners to decide for themselves. They can build apartment complexes on their land. But they don’t have to. They can stick to single-family homes instead, or use the land for something else. I can’t control what you do with your land, and you can’t control what you do with my land. It’s hard to get more localist than that.
YIMBY zoning reform allows land-use decisions to be more diverse and local than if they were mandated by a centralized zoning board. If you believe in leveraging local knowledge and considering the diverse needs of different neighborhoods, you are better off letting landowners decide land use for themselves. The best use for my land may be very different from the best use for the land next door or across the street, and each owner may have local knowledge that city officials don’t easily have access to.
This is especially true when we remember that most zoning rules are not simply a matter of neighbors deciding between themselves. In large cities and suburbs, local governments often impose a single zoning rule on tens or even hundreds of thousands of properties. This is not localism. This is regional economic central planning.
Even if local zoning is overridden by a higher level government, such as a state, the net result is greater local autonomy, because the final decision-making power over how to use a particular piece of land is left in the hands of landowners, rather than state agencies, who are more decentralized and loyal to local autonomy than a government zoning board.
It’s also worth noting that YIMBYism, underpinned by strong property rights, doesn’t reject all local coordination. Landowners can also voluntarily cooperate, even forming private planned communities, if they want coordination on a larger scale. I’ve previously outlined why such private efforts are different from government zoning and why they don’t share the latter’s major flaws: Voluntary private collaborations are more responsive to local needs than zoning, because landowners will only enter into such an arrangement if they believe it’s best for them and their land, and they use local knowledge in making decisions.
In short, if you truly believe that local control over land use decisions should exist, then you should oppose zoning regulations and support YIMBY-ism, which is the most localist view of all.
A better argument for zoning regulations is not regionalism but its opposite: the concern that excessive regionalism in land-use decisions can harm outsiders. If I build an apartment building on my property, it may inconvenience my neighbors, overburden the local infrastructure, or have other negative effects, but I may not take that into account precisely because my focus is too regional and I care primarily about my own interests. Even if my neighbors were to have a say in the decision, we might not consider the potential impacts of the new development on other people in the neighborhood.
Here, the zoning regulations themselves cause great harm to outsidersIt has historically been a huge problem by raising housing costs, discouraging people from “moving to opportunity” and slowing economic growth. Has been used to maintain racial and ethnic segregation.
There are non-localist and even anti-localist rationales for various zoning restrictions, but if you value “local autonomy” then you should be a YIMBY.
I have critiqued in more detail the rationale for constitutional restrictions on property rights based on regionalism and federalism. Articles from 2011 On “Federalism and Property Rights.”
