Housing Policy

Europe, A.C., and the Housing Exception to America's Economic Success Story

Plus: L.A. criminally charges contractors offering to build an ADU in the Palisades, South Carolina streamlines squatter removal, and a Florida city uses eminent domain to thwart state housing law.

Christian Britschgi | 7.7.2026 11:50 AM

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(Midjourney)

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. 

This week's newsletter includes stories on: 

But, first, since the U.S. just celebrated the 250th anniversary of our independence, I wanted to start this newsletter by making a quick point about housing as the exception to the economic success story that is America in the 21st century. 

The High Cost of a Little Less Housing 

If you were on social media during the lead-up to the Fourth of July holiday this year, you almost certainly witnessed the wave of Americans dunking on Europeans for their lack of air conditioning. 

While us Yanks take climate control for granted, central air remains a luxury in the Old World, reserved only for the highest floors of the E.U. bureaucracy. 

Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.

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This is a common point of national pride here at Reason. The air conditioning discourse featured heavily in Sam Bowman's 2025 cover story on America's relative wealth and opulence when compared with our counterparts across the pond. 

Bowman's top-line thesis for why Americans are richer is a pretty simple one: The American economy grows just a little bit faster than Europe's every year. 

An extra annual percentage point of GDP growth has added up to the point where your typical American could stop working in October and still make more money than the average Frenchman working until the end of the year. 

Bowman's cover story came to mind when I was reading a recent essay by housing writer Kevin Erdmann about how even low-cost, slow-growth cities need zoning reform to overcome their housing shortage. 

As Erdmann says, almost everyone agrees that New York City has a housing shortage. Prices are high because regulation prevents many feasible housing projects from ever being built. 

There's less of a consensus that a place like Buffalo, New York, has a housing shortage. Prices are a lot lower, and even under the most permissive zoning regime, there are plenty of neighborhoods where nothing would get built. 

If housing-starved New York upzoned broad swaths of the city tomorrow, argues Erdmann, it would build a lot more housing, even though only a small minority of properties would actually be redeveloped in any given year. 

"In New York City, there are many locations where upzoning would not lead to adequate construction. If you made sure to avoid the locations best suited to more infill growth, you could upzone 90% of New York City to minimal effect. And, yet, broad upzoning would easily lead to construction activity multiples of New York's current rate of building," he wrote.  

None of that is particularly controversial. Erdmann's perceptive point is that it's essentially the same story in Buffalo, which allegedly does not have a housing crisis.   

"There are places in Buffalo where nothing would be built under any zoning regime. But broad upzoning, or lending reform, or construction capacity, or expanded rental market options, that applied to all of Buffalo, would increase construction and lower rents," he continued.

In other words, restrictive zoning regimes are costing every city in the country some amount of new housing construction. What's true for the superstar cities is true for much of the rustbelt as well. 

Whether one looks at Buffalo or New York City, land use regulations are resulting in a marginal reduction in annual production. That has compounded over time to give us a nationwide housing crisis. 

The crisis is most evident in places like New York City. Liberalizing land use regulations would have the biggest benefits there. But deregulation would benefit everywhere on the margins. 

All patriotic Americans can understand this logic........

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