Every city with expensive housing has a set of rules explaining why more of it cannot be built.
The rules are individually reasonable and collectively decisive, which is the characteristic form of the problem.
A height limit protects a , a minimum size protects a street's character, a parking requirement protects a road.
Each was adopted in response to a real complaint and none was adopted as housing policy.
Their combined effect is nevertheless a housing policy, and a strict one.
Nobody voted for it, which makes it unusually difficult to argue against.
An argument against a policy can be addressed to whoever adopted it, and there is no such person here.
The consequence is straightforward and is rarely stated in those terms.
supply raises the value of existing homes, which wealth from those without one to those with one.
Those with one vote in local elections at roughly three times the rate of those without.
A local decision-making process therefore produces the outcome one would predict from who turns up.
This does not make the objections , and treating them as has been the main strategic error of reformers.
A resident objecting to a development is usually describing something she will genuinely experience.
The person who will benefit is not yet in the and cannot attend the meeting.
Reforms that have worked moved the decision to a level at which that absent person is represented.
They did not persuade anybody; they changed who was in the room.
That is a less satisfying account than one in which good arguments .
It is also the only account consistent with the evidence from cities that have actually built anything.