Soon after publicly endorsing private property rights, Republican State Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer voted against House Bill 1169, which intends to make it legally easier especially for churches to build housing on their land. The bill passed through committee anyway.

Westminster Councilor Kristine Ireland went on an angry rant about shoddy Lenin-era Soviet apartments, and she warned of problems “when the government controls your life.” She gave this speech in defense of the city’s “right” to bureaucratically plan the housing market and dictate to people how they may and may not develop their private property. I guess Comrade Ireland failed to see the irony.

These events illustrate the topsy-turvy nature of housing policy in Colorado, where many Republicans claim to support property rights even as they promote political economic planning and land-use socialism, and where many tax-and-regulate progressive Democrats nevertheless embrace “Yes In My Back Yard” land-use reforms to expand housing options.

The limits of local control

It’s easier to explain why Democrats are willing to step out from their usual regulate-more mentality and demonization of developers to partly free up the housing market. For most households, housing is a huge expense. For many families, the high cost of housing crushes their budget and makes them effectively poor. For some families, the artificial shortage of housing caused by government pushes them onto the streets. So pro-housing YIMBY reforms can be described in terms of “social justice” and equity.

But why do so many Republicans endorse land-use socialism? Usually the reason boils down to “local control.” Republicans, relegated to the margins of Colorado politics due largely to the party’s self-inflicted wounds, hate that the Capitol is dominated by Democrats. Republicans are relatively more powerful in many cities, so they tend to promote local control and push back against any state interference.

In many contexts local control makes sense. The idea is that local government is more likely to be responsive to local needs, and local politicians and bureaucrats are more likely to care about people near them.

Local control also is an essential part of the distribution of government power, a key check to tyranny. We separate powers not only by branches of government but by regional levels. Most of us live under four main levels of government: federal, state, county, and city. We call our country the United States because (some of) the states preceded the federal government and granted its authority.

But local control has its limits. Practically speaking, it makes little difference to me as a private individual whether a federal agent or a local police officer locks me in a cage for no good reason. Nor does it make much difference to me as a property holder if a bureaucrat in Washington D.C. or a city planner restricts how I may develop my own property. Indeed, in many contexts, the local bureaucrats, just by virtue of proximity, tend to be far more meddlesome.

In some contexts, the federal government is justified in usurping state control. The Civil War essentially was about Southern states claiming the right to locally sanction the evil institution of slavery. In the face of bigotries epitomized by George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” the federal government had to send in troops to enforce desegregation of public schools. Under the Bill of Rights as expanded by the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal courts often throw out rights-violating state and local laws.

Similarly, in many contexts, state government rightly preempts local control. Republicans have no problem recognizing this when it comes to issues of wage controls and gun restrictions, where the state properly limits (but unfortunately now sanctions) the impositions that local governments may impose on citizens.

The fundamental purpose of government is to protect people’s rights. When “local control” becomes a pretext for local politicians and bureaucrats to run roughshod over people’s rights, the state rightly intervenes.

In the context of land-use regulations, we should be suspicious of local control because it is subject to systemic biases. Generally, the people who show up to complain about new developments are people who already live there, not the people who are locked out of the community because local government artificially restricts the supply of housing.

Moreover, anti-development complainers often tend to be busy-bodies with nothing better to do with their time. The people who are pro-development, but who have no direct financial stake in a given development, tend to be too busy to follow the machinations of the Byzantine bureaucratic planning boards.

Generally, then, local governments tend to violate rather than protect the rights of property owners to develop and use their own property as they see fit. Therefore, the state rightly steps in to ease those local restrictions. In this case, individual rights should trump local control.

Yes in God’s back yard

I testified in favor of HB-1169, the “Yes In God’s Back Yard” bill, on March 27. However, I said, the bill needs to be amended to extend not only to “faith-based organizations” but to other nonprofits that aren’t religious. Otherwise, the bill improperly “establishes” religion by giving special legal privileges specifically to religious people, and it denies equal protection of the laws to atheists and to religious people who run nonreligious nonprofits. Nevertheless, I love the idea of making it easier for churches and other nonprofits to build housing on their property.

Aside: A lesson I learned is to not bring your nine-year-old to a committee hearing. If you do, bring an electronic device or book for the kid. As it happened, my child played video games on my phone for three hours while I waited for my opportunity to speak for a couple minutes.

That afternoon the Senate Local Government and Housing Committee heard two bills. The juxtaposition was interesting. The first bill, HB 1060, would make it easier for companies to cut through local bureaucracies to put up security fences that deliver an electric shock.

When it came to the fencing bill, Republican Barb Kirkmeyer, along with Democrat Kyle Mullica were perfectly happy to limit local control in the name of protecting personal property rights. And the two other Republicans on the committee, Larry Liston and Janice Rich, happily joined Kirkmeyer in supporting the legislation (Mullica helped present the bill but is not on the committee). The bill passed through the committee only when a single Democrat, the newbie Katie Wallace, surprisingly voted yes despite her stinging criticisms of the bill.

But then on the housing bill, which also limits local control and protects property rights, all three Republicans voted no, and the bill passed on a party-line vote.

So I guess the Republican position is yes to property rights so long as you can administer an electric shock to trespassers, and no to property rights if a church wants to house the poor. Like I said, the politics of housing and land use is crazy.

Zoning around transit centers

As Nathaniel Minor summarizes for Colorado Public Radio, last year legislators passed “a suite of bills aimed at increasing the state’s housing supply and boosting transit use by requiring some cities to allow more accessory dwelling units, apartments, townhomes, duplexes, and other multi-family dwellings, and less parking in certain areas.”

But, Minor writes, “Officials in Westminster, Arvada, Colorado Springs, and Northglenn have at least suggested, and in some cases explicitly said, that they won’t follow some of the laws.” Westminster Mayor Nancy McNally called the state’s preemption “insanity,” Minor notes.

But Tim Pegg, an alternate member of the Westminster planning commission and the head of the newly formed YIMBY North Metro (part of the broader YIMBY Action movement), tells me that part of the problem is that city officials mischaracterize the text of one of the bills in question.

Regarding House Bill 24-1313, Westminster officials complained that the bill did not adequately account for the potential of an insufficient water supply. But, as Pegg points out, the bill specifically allows cities to submit a notice, every three years without limit, “that the supply of water from all water supply entities . . . that serve the transit-oriented community is insufficient.”

I have been concerned that, rather than simply better-recognize people’s property rights, HB 1313 instead only shifts the mandates from low-density to high-density housing. Pegg assures me that is not the case. Rather, as the summary of the bill points out, the bill pertains to “zoning capacity.” So increasing the capacity at which a land owner may develop does not force the owner to build to the maximum capacity allowed by zoning.

Ideally, the law should not recognize any difference between transit areas and other areas. Rather, the law simply should recognize and protect people’s rights to develop their own property as they see fit. Some areas naturally would grow in more house-dense ways. Yes, local governments and the courts properly put up some guardrails to limit obviously incompatible uses, but on the whole government should defer to property owners. Still, overall, HB 1313 moves the legal structure more in the direction of free markets and property rights.

As for water, local government, so long as it is in the business of providing water and other infrastructure needs, should seek to provide the capacity needed by residents. It shouldn’t default on its responsibility to provide water as an excuse to block development. And cities can prevent water shortages simply by pricing water to more align with markets. When cities make it cheap to dump drinking water on thirsty non-native turf, unsurprisingly, people do a lot of that.

A final note on the terminology: “Denser” housing refers only to the number of units built on a given acre. Denser housing is not necessarily smaller housing. For example, my family’s single-family home in Westminster is under 1400 square feet, relatively small but suitable for our three-person family. Some apartments and condos offer a lot more indoor living space. And denser housing potentially allows for more walkable open space where residents can enjoy a more-natural environment. By contrast, a lot of single-family homes have small yards and poor access to walking trails.

Ireland’s hyperventilating notwithstanding, better-protecting the property rights of developers is not about Soviet-era housing policy; quite the opposite. It’s about respecting the choices of property owners and consumers to build and buy the housing they want in the context of their needs and resources.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.