Rent Free Q&A: Bryan Caplan on Build, Baby, Build
People write and write and write about the need to deregulate housing construction, and yet some days it seems like minimal progress is being made. Perhaps Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) reformers would be better off drawing the argument against zoning instead.
That’s certainly the view of George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan. His new comic book Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation makes the illustrated case for eliminating basically all restrictions on building new homes.
This is Caplan’s second comic book. His first, 2019’s Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, made the radical libertarian case for eliminating all restrictions on immigration. Now Caplan and illustrator Ady Branzei do the same thing for housing.
In Build, Baby, Build, Caplan explains to readers why regulation makes housing so expensive, how building more of it would lower prices, and the tremendous knock-on benefits that would flow from more affordable shelter.
The book is a surprisingly thorough treatise on how America, with some serious deregulation, could build its way out of its seemingly most intractable problems. The occasional appearance of a city-wreaking Not In My Backyard (NIMBU) Uncle Sam and a deregulation-loving Dracula makes it a breezy and entertaining read for people who otherwise don’t care much about debates over minimum lot sizes.
For this week’s edition of Rent Free, I talked to Caplan about why he decided to make the YIMBY case in comic form, why abolishing zoning really is a panacea, and why even selfish NIMBYs should love more home construction.
Q: Why make the case for more housing in a graphic novel form? What do you think that adds to the argument?
A: There is so much high-quality research out there on the topic and yet, almost no one would ever read it because most of it is really boring. Which means that I look at this bounty of knowledge that we’ve got and I’m just sitting there saying, “How could I communicate this to anyone else in the world?” Honestly, I’m just looking for some way of getting other people interested. The main pitch that I’ve been giving for this book when someone just gives me 20 seconds is, “I’ve written the most fascinating book that has ever been written on housing regulation.”
Q: You make the strong case that ending zoning and most building regulations is a panacea that will solve so many of our problems. Why that is?
A: I am careful to not say “solve” because solve sounds like 100 percent. What I will say is it’s like a panacea because it makes a big dent in a bunch of problems that often we think of as just individually unsolvable. The idea that there’s one policy that can go and work some magic on all of them simultaneously is hard to believe. But that is my story.
You’ve just got to go through issue by issue. I start off with the basics. Housing regulation has greatly inflated the price of housing and deregulation would get the price of housing back down. This is such a large part of the typical person’s budget. Getting the price of housing down by 50 percent is not like getting the price of chewing gum down by 50 percent. It is making a big difference in the overall standard of living.
Once you realize that, then it’s like, “Well, but it’s not going to have equal effects on everybody, right?”
For people who are poor, they right now spend a larger share of their income on housing, so it’s going to give them extra help. That’s going to reduce inequality, which is another thing people talk about.
There would be a lot of additional employment for people in the construction industry, which is a demographic that has done really badly in the past few decades; non-college-educated males. Well, that’s basically the main kind of people that work in the construction industry.
If you’re really worried about non-college males and how they’re faring and how they haven’t really adapted well to a service sector economy or office jobs, here we’ve got a way to go and create a lot of additional traditional masculine, non-college jobs. And once again, because it is still a very large industry, this isn’t just like doubling employment in chewing gum.
Do you want me to keep going on the list of problems or is that enough?
Q: Yeah, give me one more if you’ve got another one.
A: There’s a traditional path of upward mobility that Americans used to have, which is just to move to the highest-wage parts of the country. This is pretty much foolproof.
You just say, “I’m going to leave the South and go to California,” or “I’m going to leave the Midwest and go to New York City.”
This doesn’t work anymore because housing prices have gotten so high in what we call our gold rush areas of the country that they eat up more than 100 percent of the wage gains you get.
Right now, we have this weird, historically unprecedented situation where people are leaving high-wage areas to go to low-wage areas to get a worse job because the housing cost savings are so large, that they’ll actually have a higher standard of living.
You can enhance not just equality, but social mobility by deregulating housing so that housing prices will be lower in the boom areas.
Q: Your last comic book was making the case for open borders. How much of a connection do you see between immigration and housing and the radical libertarian position on those issues?
A: The big connection is just this: If you measure how distorted the market is, the most distorted market is the international labor market. If you understand your basic economics, the more distorted the market is, the greater the gains are from deregulation. Housing is not as bad as the international labor market, but it’s really bad.
We take a product that’s a large share of people’s income and we strangle it so that it’s just really hard to lawfully do the things that are physically doable. That is just a big part of it.
These are policies that are so taken for granted that people don’t even think of them as policy. People don’t usually think about immigration restrictions. It’s not really a policy, it’s just a fact of life.
The same thing goes for housing regulation. You just walk around Central Park and look and you say, “Huh, there are a couple of skyscrapers here. Otherwise, the park is ringed by a bunch of buildings that are maybe six stories tall.” Given the profitability of building skyscrapers here in a free market, they would just be demolishing hundreds of buildings and replacing them with skyscrapers.
Q: Your book presents big cities as bright, fun, futuristic places. How much of the case for cities rests on the aesthetic case and the economic arguments are secondary?
A: For me the economics is definitely primary. This is why I wanted to do this issue. But I was very mindful of the fact that for a lot of people, it’s just the aesthetics that are bothering them.
I think most people can get used to a lot of different aesthetics, but the status quo bias is so strong that if you’re used to things looking a certain way, not having skyscrapers around Central Park,
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