Ep. 120: How Exclusionary Zoning Hurts Poor Neighborhoods with Matthew Mleczko

When cities adopt exclusionary zoning, their housing stock becomes scarcer and less affordable over time. Matt Mleczko shares research suggesting that the impacts extend beyond exclusionary jurisdictions’ borders, hurting poor communities that have no say over their neighbors’ land use policies.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

Follow our Substack at uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Email Shane at at shanephillips@ucla.edu and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• Mleczko, M. (2026). The Cumulative Exposure to Exclusionary Zoning in Impoverished Neighborhoods. Demography, 63(1), 213-239.
• The National Zoning and Land Use Database.
• Jones, P. (2010). The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee. Harvard University Press.
• Wikipedia page on ‘Sewer Socialism,’ a movement that started in Milwaukee.
• Perry, E. M. (2017). Live and Let Live: Diversity, Conflict, and Community in an Integrated Neighborhood. University of North Carolina Press.
• Fischel, W. A. (2015). Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
• Goetz, E. G., Damiano, A., & Williams, R. A. (2019). Racially concentrated areas of affluence. Cityscape, 21(1), 99-124.
• Taylor, K. (2019). Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. University of North Carolina Press.
• Connolly, B., & Kazis, N. (2026). Rezoning the Rust Belt [working paper]. SSRN.

Transcript

Shane Phillips 00:00:06
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. 

This week we're talking to Matt Mleczko about how residents of poor neighborhoods can be harmed by their proximity to cities with exclusionary zoning, even when those poor neighborhoods don't have exclusionary land use policies themselves. Matt's research both narrows and expands on how we typically evaluate the impacts of exclusionary zoning. It's narrowed by focusing on impoverished neighborhoods rather than whole cities or metro areas, and it's expanded by looking at zoning practices outside the borders of the places whose outcomes we're measuring. 

Early in the conversation he makes a point that's going to stick with me. If exclusionary zoning in one city increases rents and rent burden and home prices in a poorer city nearby, as his research suggests it can, then that's not just a matter for local control for that wealthier city. If anything, that might be a fair housing violation. That demands remediation either by the city, if it's willing, or by the state or federal government, if it's not. 

Something related that we talked about is how more exclusionary and affluent places also tend to be the places where building new housing is most financially feasible without subsidies, whereas that's much less likely to be the case in less affluent places. What we didn't really get into is how that relates to the earlier point, how, if the richer, exclusionary city chooses not to allow housing, it won't necessarily just be made up for by its less restrictive neighbors, because those neighbors might not have markets where rents and home prices are high enough to cover the cost of construction. Because of that, when middle and upper income neighborhoods and cities say no to housing that may be functionally the same as the entire metro area saying no to housing. That's bad for most people in that metro area but, as Matt's research shows, it's particularly bad for people in poor neighborhoods who already have the fewest choices and the most trouble affording housing. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt and Tiffany Lieu. You can reach me by email at shanephillips@ucla.edu and our Substack is at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. We just published our first newsletter last week, which we're hoping to publish every few weeks on an offset schedule from the podcast, and that's going to feature reading reports, research, blogs that we've been reading that may not find their way onto the podcast but we think is worth your attention. So we hope you find that useful and, if you do, please do subscribe at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. 

With that, let's get to our conversation with Matt Mleczko. 

Matt Mleczko is an assistant professor in the Marquette University Department of Political Science and he is with us today to talk about his research on how exclusionary zoning in more affluent communities negatively impacts impoverished neighborhoods located in the same city or metro area. Matt, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Matt Mleczko 00:03:35
Hi Shane, thank you so much for hosting me. I'm a regular Housing Voice podcast listener, so I'm honored and grateful to be joining you. Looking forward to the conversation.

Shane Phillips 00:03:43
Love to hear it. And my co-host today is Mike Lens once more, but this is his first time back since taking over as the Lewis Center's director from our longtime much beloved former director Evie Blumenberg. Welcome back, boss.

Mike Lens 00:03:58
Wow, that's a big title. You are still the boss of the podcast, Shane.

Shane Phillips 00:04:03
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Matt Mleczko 00:04:06
Hey, Mike, congrats.

Mike Lens 00:04:07
Thank you, Matt.

Shane Phillips 00:04:08
Well, Matt, we always start off with our guest giving us a tour of some place they want to share with our audience. So where are we headed?

Matt Mleczko 00:04:15
I'm going to take you and Mike and our listeners on a tour of my home city of Milwaukee. I grew up about 40 minutes south of Milwaukee, in Kenosha, so I spent a lot of my upbringing here. And I fell in love with this city, and I think you and all our listeners would find a lot to love here as well. So we'll start at Pilgrim Coffee in the Halyard Park neighborhood. One, because this is going to be a packed tour and you're going to need the caffeine, but also because coffee is something that Milwaukee really excels at. We've got a lot of great coffee shops here, including an active Yemeni coffee scene, which is one of several interesting things that I think a lot of people don't know about Milwaukee. From there we'll head just a few steps east to the Historic King Drive. This is the section of MLK Drive that joins the Brewers Hill, Halyard Park and Harambee neighborhoods of Milwaukee. So this street features a statue of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, which is my favorite landmark in the city. And the historic King Drive area is also a point of interest because it represents a pretty promising story of neighborhood revitalization in Milwaukee. Decades after the construction of I-43 that goes right through the city helped decimate much of the historically black Bronzeville neighborhood that used to occupy this area. So from there we'll head south through the west part of downtown to Marquette University, where I work, and we'll tour the St Joan of Arc Chapel. This chapel dates back to 15 th century France and it contains a few relics, including a stone of St Joan of Arc that Joan reportedly prayed near before battle. So it's Milwaukee's oldest building and we're really fortunate to have it right in the heart of campus. And I just think it's a really beautiful, peaceful space for anyone, religious or otherwise. From there we'll walk a few steps west and south to the 16 th Street Viaduct. And this bridge is now named the Father Grappa Unity Bridge, and it became the main site of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches. So, as detailed in Patrick Jones's The Selma of the North and some other accounts, these marches were led by the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council in partnership with Father James Grappi, and this was in support of a open housing ordinance that was introduced by then-Council Member Val Phillips in the 1960 s. And these civil rights leaders marched for 200 consecutive days, including down this 16 th Street Viaduct, to protest segregation and racial housing discrimination. And this eventually made Milwaukee sort of an international and international site of the civil rights struggle. And it became. It was credited with building the political will necessary to pass that open housing ordinance that actually went even farther than the Federal Fair Housing Act. So from there we'll continue south toward Lincoln Village, which is a traditionally Polish neighborhood but now it's a largely Hispanic and Latino neighborhood. And Lincoln Village is a really vibrant neighborhood, has a number of really cool cool landmarks, including St Joseph at Basilica, which is one of my favorite churches and happens to be where my parents were married. And it also has Kazi Park, Kozichko Park, which is one of our many amazing city and county parks. From there we'll head just a little east or, excuse me, we'll head a little south to Leon's for some frozen custard. That's a must do in Milwaukee.

Shane Phillips 00:07:23
Nice.

Matt Mleczko 00:07:23
From there we'll go east down Oklahoma Avenue, which will take us to Humboldt Park in the Bayview neighborhood, where we'll enjoy one of Milwaukee's many free summer music festivals- Chill on the Hill. We'll go north over the Hone Bridge, which is named after one of three socialist mayors in Milwaukee's history in the 20 th century, Daniel Hone.

Shane Phillips 00:07:44
Was this where the sewer socialists were based?

Mike Lens 00:07:48
Wow, that's right.

Matt Mleczko 00:07:50
Yes, Daniel Hone is one of them. We were doing it before. It was cool in New York. But yeah, we'll go on Lincoln Memorial Drive. On this stretch you'll see the Summerfest Grounds, which it's home to the largest music fest in the world.

Mike Lens 00:08:04
So that's where my brain has been this whole time is my memories of Summerfest. So I assume we are going to get there. Good to hear it's still alive and kicking.

Matt Mleczko 00:08:15
Yes, definitely Just wrapped up. And this drive will also take you past our art museum, which is pretty famous, designed by Santiago Calatrava, Spanish architect. This will take us downtown, where we can go along the Riverwalk towards Lakefront Brewery, where we can sample some award-winning beer and cheese curds. And finally—

Mike Lens 00:08:34
Mmm. Cheese curds.

Matt Mleczko 00:08:34
If you're still with me. After all that, we'll head to Riverwest for some live music in one of Milwaukee's most integrated and honestly interesting neighborhoods. It's featured in Evelyn Perry's Live and Let Live. It's also home to a 24-hour bike race slash neighborhood block party known as the River West 24, or, to many others, the People's Holiday, and that's coming up in a few weekends. So a whole lot more to see and do, but I'll just call it there and Shane Mike. Anyone listening to this consider this an open invitation to come discover Milwaukee.

Mike Lens 00:09:06
This is so cool. And I have to note, Matt, I was not aware that you are like Tyler Herro, but really Tyler Herro is like you. Where you know he's coming home to Milwaukee. I did not realize you were coming home to Milwaukee when you joined the faculty at Marquette.

Matt Mleczko 00:09:25
That's a good analogy and I have mixed feelings. Great to welcome Tyler to the team. Very sad to be missing Giannis, but Giannis will always be a hero to us here.

Shane Phillips 00:09:38
I got to say you have much more awareness of the history and geography there, Mike, because I only realized at the beginning of Matt's tour that Marquette University is in Milwaukee. I don't know where I thought it was, but I think I thought it was somewhere like East Coast-ish, maybe like Virginia or South—

Mike Lens 00:10:04
It does sound like a fancy, you know, coastal, yeah.

Shane Phillips 00:10:06
Where is Purdue?

Matt Mleczko 00:10:12
It's Northwest Indiana.

Shane Phillips 00:10:13
Maybe I was thinking somewhere in that vicinity. But I've already learned something really important here today, and just we're getting started.

Matt Mleczko 00:10:22
Well, we're on the map now.

Mike Lens 00:10:24
Big time, big time.

Shane Phillips 00:10:24
Okay. So today's research article was published earlier this year in the journal Demography, and it's titled "The Cumulative Exposure to Exclusionary Zoning in Impoverished Neighborhoods." And, extremely wonky, unnecessary side note, but I did really appreciate Demography's layout of their website, how the actual text is on one side and you can scroll the figures separately on the right. I don't know, it was just nice. Anyway, Matt is the sole goal author on this one and there are a few things to point out here at the top. First is what we mean by exclusionary zoning, which we'll probably define a bit more later, but broadly speaking, just means land use rules that tend to prevent lower cost, more affordable housing types like plexes, apartment buildings, townhouses etc. The lower the allowable density and height and floor area and so forth, and the larger the lots, the more exclusionary, particularly when those restrictions are present in places with a lot of demand and access to things like jobs and good schools and clean air. Second is that when we talk about exposure to exclusionary zoning for impoverished neighborhoods, we also mean exclusionary zoning in neighborhoods or jurisdictions that are near those poor neighborhoods, not just the zoning rules inside of their own borders. And the cumulative part of cumulative exposure is also important, but we are going to get to that in a bit. To summarize the results very briefly, exclusionary zoning is associated with higher rents, higher shares of rent-burdened households and higher property values, even in poorer neighborhoods that might not be zoned restrictively themselves. It is also associated with a lower supply of low-cost rental units at the metro level. And I think one of the real contributions of this paper is that it looks at these impacts through a different lens than most prior research on the topic. Most research on exclusionary zoning focuses on how it segregates people by race and class, or on the corollary of how it prevents people from moving to places that offer them better opportunities and upward mobility, or on how it aggregates into an overall condition of housing scarcity that makes housing less affordable to everyone. Matt's research investigates how exclusionary zoning affects poor communities in particular, which is a topic that definitely deserves more attention, and so we're excited to talk about it. So, Matt, I gave a really quick overview of some of your main findings and what sets this study apart from earlier research, but let me give you the chance to fill in anything I missed. What else should we know about? What motivated you to work on this topic and the research gaps as you see them.

Matt Mleczko 00:13:08
Thanks for that summary, Shane. That was pretty comprehensive. So yeah, I'll focus on a bit more of the motivation of what led to this study. I mentioned that I grew up in Milwaukee- in the Milwaukee area, I should say- and spent a lot of time in Milwaukee. And I wasn't a social scientist back then. But I couldn't help but notice and honestly be disturbed by the amount of segregation and inequality that I witnessed throughout the area. I just remember thinking that there was no way that what I was witnessing was random or natural. And relatedly, I couldn't think about poor, segregated, largely black neighborhoods in Milwaukee without thinking about the affluent, segregated, largely white neighborhoods in the metro area. So, that's to say, I sort of picked up on this idea that concentrated poverty likely doesn't exist without concentrated affluence, especially when you're thinking about the historical context of redlining housing, discrimination, residential flight, suburbanization, exclusionary zoning, deindustrialization, et cetera, et cetera. So from a young age I was attuned to this idea that neighborhoods of a metro area are inextricably linked, whether we care to recognize that or not. But the mechanisms behind why that was the case, especially the ongoing ones, were still a little bit unclear to me. So fast forward a few years to the point in my life where I'm living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is a largely affluent college town. There's a lot of things that are great about Ann Arbor, which makes it a really expensive place to live. And I would regularly hear about people who, some of which were my own friends, were getting priced out of Ann Arbor and relocating to less affluent neighboring municipalities like Ypsilanti any. So I figured that Ann Arbor, a place that prides itself on progressive values, must be doing everything it can to be building affordable housing and generally promoting housing affordability. But plot twist, in actuality, at the time the city, via a ballot initiative, reneged on a large scale market rate development in the heart of downtown in what was, and to this day remains, a parking lot. And this is a deal that would have granted the city millions of dollars in a development agreement to build affordable housing and provide other community amenities. So this was sort of a light bulb moment for me in terms of figuring out one of these contemporary, ongoing mechanisms that entrench place-based inequalities and segregation. Before then, zoning and land use and development procedures were pretty opaque to me, but this was an example of exclusionary land use practices that started to connect the dots for me. Before this, it didn't occur to me that affluent municipalities like Ann Arbor have enormous, essentially monopolistic control over development procedures. And this insight clarified to me how affluent places consequently have a lot of power to exclude, and often do regardless of the intentions. And I remember around that time that a roommate of mine who was studying at Michigan lent me their copy of Bill Fishel's "Zoning Rules!" And so there was really no going back after that. And so I entered my PhD program with a pretty clear understanding of how exclusionary zoning maintains segregation by locking in opportunity hoarding. But I was curious to what extent Ann Arbor's exclusion explained some of the challenges facing places like Ypsilanti. Or say how Brookfield, Wisconsin, which is a western suburb of Milwaukee, how exclusionary land use decisions perhaps explain some of the challenges facing Milwaukee's north side and so on. That is, I thought about the people being priced out of Ann Arbor who then moved to places like Ypsilanti, which likely puts pressure on Ypsilanti's probably relatively fixed housing stock, which conceivably puts more strain on those least likely to be able to weather those increased housing costs. So in other words, I thought about the spillovers of exclusionary land use decisions in the places, not necessarily making those decisions decisions. So this study was an attempt to see if we've been systematically understating the consequences of exclusionary zoning. You know it's one thing if the Ann Arbor's of the country prevent multifamily housing and walkable neighborhoods and so on and so forth through their zoning codes, many might not like it but given local control, that might be their prerogative. But if we have good evidence that the zoning decisions of municipality A are having negative consequences on municipality B and municipality B is poorer and more disadvantaged, then that seems to me like it's bordering on a fair housing violation and not simply just a matter of local control anymore. And then I'll mention one other thing, which is that along this process it really puzzled me that I would regularly encounter a lot of ambivalence toward exclusionary zoning among a lot of housing advocates. And at first I thought you know this might be unfamiliarity with the issue. But then I eventually came to understand that a large segment of the public and I would say housing advocates are pretty skeptical that addressing exclusionary zoning will do any good in advancing housing justice. I think Vicki Bean and Ingrid Ellen and colleagues have done a really good job of detailing this supply side skepticism. So this project was also an attempt to see if we can reframe the issue of exclusionary zoning as a problem on the margins. If you care about poverty or housing inequality but you might be skeptical about developers or skeptical with the notion of moving to higher opportunity neighborhoods or what have you. If we have good evidence that exclusionary zoning exacerbates poverty and material hardship, then that implies that we should be confronting exclusionary zoning period. And of course that's not to say that exclusionary zoning is the primary issue facing poor neighborhoods- It's not. But what this research shows is it's part of the problem. So to put a bow on this, the study suggests that we should resist the notion that rich or poor neighborhoods exist separately from one another, especially from a housing perspective. And then, if we care about reducing poverty and spatial inequalities, then we should also care about exclusionary zoning.

Shane Phillips 00:19:03
Well said. And I think it's important context for folks who are not aware... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Milwaukee is the most racially segregated metro area or city in the country.

Mike Lens 00:19:14
By most measures.

Matt Mleczko 00:19:16
We're regularly in the top five, yeah. And it's been that way for a while.

Shane Phillips 00:19:20
So I think that that personal experience, like your intuition, was correct.

Matt Mleczko 00:19:26
And you know I should say, as a former resident I feel I have a little bit of leeway to dunk on Ann Arbor a little bit, but I really liked my time in Ann Arbor and I should say, in the last since I moved away. They're actually a place that's done a lot of good work moving towards, you know, more, more equitable housing policies. And so there's a good arc to that story. But you know the context of me discovering the issue was, you know, played an important role in my development on this topic.

Shane Phillips 00:19:56
As it did for many of us. So at the heart of this analysis that you did is a database that you created with Matthew Desmond called the National Zoning and Land Use Database. I'd like to have you tell us about that a bit and what it's bringing to the table, and give us some of the highlights on how you use that and a few other data sources to actually do this analysis. And a follow up question: can we use this database?

Matt Mleczko 00:20:26
So, well, the quick answer to your second question is yes, but I'll talk about that a little bit more. Yeah. So in order to do the study that I had in my mind, I needed access to zoning data. And I quickly realized that these data were practically non-existent for the present time period, which, back then, was 2018. At that time, the only zoning data that really existed were a few survey-based measures from the early two thousands. These were the results of really impressive undertakings by teams of researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Urban Institute. And they were, no doubt, really, really instrumental in expanding our understanding of exclusionary zoning, but they weren't going to do much good for me as someone who wanted to study exclusionary zoning in the present time period. I knew, though, that zoning and land use regulations were largely available online for free in text format. So just the regulations are. Most municipalities make them publicly available online.

Shane Phillips 00:21:26
Just right in the municipal code, you mean.

Matt Mleczko 00:21:28
That's right. Yep. And so at that time in graduate school I was beginning to learn about methods of turning text into data. So, in partnership with my PhD advisor, Matthew Desmond, I decided to see if it would be possible to turn the text of those zoning and land use regulations into usable data. So our approach was to use some pretty basic natural language processing techniques to essentially capture keywords found in nearly any set of zoning and land use regulations. So we would capture the surrounding context around one of those keywords and then search for additional keywords that were assigned weights that would signal the presence of some given regulation, like minimum lot sizes. So in the surrounding context, if enough keywords were captured and the weights passed some requisite threshold, that signaled the presence of a particular regulation. But we also built the code to capture dimensional information, information about certain regulations, not just their presence. So not just does a minimum lot size exist, but what are those minimum lot sizes across districts? So this code was built to search.

Shane Phillips 00:22:32
Because most places have minimum lot size regulations, but whether it's 5,000 square feet or an acre makes a really big difference.

Matt Mleczko 00:22:42
Exactly. Yeah. So this code is built to search the text but also dimensional tables to find all of that relevant information. And not just that, things like how many local governing bodies need to sign off on developments with or without rezoning. So it's procedural stuff. And I should say most of these measures were based on the same measures that existed in those prior zoning survey, the survey-based zoning data of the early 2000 s. So, similar to the team of Wharton researchers who built the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index, we combined the same zoning measures in addition to a measure of maximum permitted density. So that measure came from the similar National Longitudinal Land Use Database from Urban Institute. We combined all these measures into an index that we call the Zoning Restrictiveness Index, or ZRI for short. This index is slightly different in that the underlying data construction is different, obviously, and it contains more underlying measures. But otherwise they're pretty much the same measures and they're positively correlated with the Wharton measure. So the ZRI gives us a summary measure of exclusionary zoning at the municipal level, in which higher levels onto that index indicate higher levels of exclusionary zoning. And then we scaled this up to the metro area a few different ways. One was a simple median of ZRI scores across a metro area. So just average restrictiveness. The other, slightly more complicated way was to take the median ZRI score plus the difference in ZRI scores between a metro area's central city and its most restrictive suburban municipality. So these measures are combined into one index and then standardize. And what it gives us, beyond just overall restrictiveness, is also the extent to which there are gaps in restrictiveness across space in a metro area. So it's picking up on those pockets of exclusion in the suburbs. And this would be a measure that would be more likely to pick up on those dynamics that are, you know, upholding modern day segregation.

Shane Phillips 00:24:53
And this kind of calls back to what you were talking about earlier, how you sort of almost need these concentrated areas of affluence to create these concentrated areas of poverty. And as I was reading this, it was making me think a lot of Ed Goetz's work with Anthony Damiano and Rashad Williams in their 2019 paper "Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence." So just want to flag that, I guess, and we'll put that article, which is really good, in the show notes as well.

Mike Lens 00:25:21
And I mean building on that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's book "Race for Profit," that goes into a lot of depth, I think, both theoretically and a little bit empirically about, and certainly historically about, how these relative valuations really matter. You know, and then you can go even further into this- is a lot of people would say this is like the crux of racial capitalism, right. Where, like you, devalue one area or good or product that has a racial connotation to it in the service of increasing the value of one that has a different racial connotation right.

Matt Mleczko 00:26:01
I think all the work you're pointing to definitely is related and certainly motivated the way we approached- and I approached- measuring this stuff. And, if I can, I'll just say a little bit more about the data more broadly... What I figured would be a summer of work blossomed into years of painstaking data creation, but it ultimately led—

Shane Phillips 00:26:23
Somehow that sounds so familiar! (Laughs)

Matt Mleczko 00:26:23
Yeah. Yeah. It was worth the effort and it ultimately led to what Matt and I and our team at the Eviction Lab called the National Zoning and Land Use Database, which is a totally open source version of zoning and land use that lives on GitHub for anyone to use or modify or scale. These data contain zoning and land use measures over the years 2019 to 2022, because that's how long it took to collect the underlying data- And this is for the same roughly 2,600 or so municipalities that existed in the previous existing survey-based zoning data from the Wharton team. What's great about the National Zoning and Land Use Database is that it provides usable data at the municipal and metro level, but it also provides the underlying text data and the code that was used to create the measures, which means that anyone can replicate this, expand upon it or improve upon it. And throughout the process of creating these data, the Wharton team published and updated data set for an overlapping time period with about 800 or so of the same municipalities. So we were able to benchmark our results to the same measures in the Wharton data and found that our results were pretty accurate, which was reassuring to us. But to demonstrate how this tool can be scaled. We went beyond those measures captured in the Wharton data to create measures like: does a municipality permit an accessory dwelling unit Or what are the minimum parking requirements. So we're hopeful that with this NZLUD it can be a useful tool for others interested in studying zoning and land use, especially exclusionary zoning. And I would say the impacts of emerging zoning reform efforts both in the country. And it's an active area of research for me to expand the NZLUD to other municipalities to include additional zoning and land use regulations and to publish- hopefully district level rather than aggregate get municipal level- zoning information. So definitely more to come and I welcome anyone who's interested in collaborating on that to reach out.

Shane Phillips 00:28:27
That sounds. It sounds like a great resource. And it's honestly, it's just hard to keep up with all of them. And so part of what's great about doing this show is just being exposed to some of this stuff that I might not come across otherwise. And actually, speaking of exposure, I did want to clarify. You talk about cumulative exposure in this article and we'll get into more of that later on. But I just want to clarify what you mean when you say exposure to exclusionary zoning and particularly cumulative exposure. Are you just talking about essentially being around or near or within a metro area that has this exclusionary zoning at either period? So this earlier period with the Wharton measure and then also your own measure for the 2019 to 2022 period? And so if you were in a place that had above average exclusionary zoning in both periods, that would be two exposures to this exclusionary zoning, versus if maybe it was below average exclusionary in the earlier period but above average in the later period. That would just be one period of exposure. Is that correct?

Matt Mleczko 00:29:36
You're thinking about that right. By exposure, I'm just referring to what residents of a neighborhood, of a municipality or metro area are subject to in terms of zoning and land use restrictiveness around them. So, yeah, if a metropolitan area has above average levels of zoning and land use restrictiveness- and we'll get into a little bit later why above average is the measure- but if they have above average levels of zoning and land use restrictiveness, they're considered exposed to exclusionary zoning. And the same is true for a municipality, though to try to capture the spatial dynamics in the housing market, it's not just the municipality itself, but municipalities within a 10-mile radius of that focal municipality. And this matters in the case of a central city like Trenton, New Jersey. So Trenton, according to the NZLUD, is a relatively permissively zoned central city, but it's surrounded by a lot of really restrictively zoned municipalities, like Princeton, where I was studying for graduate school. So if you were just considering Trenton's zoning and land use regulations, you would conclude that residents in Trenton aren't really exposed to exclusionary zoning. But I don't think that's right. Renters in Trenton face far fewer outside options because they have virtually no options available to them in municipalities like Princeton or West Windsor and what have you? Because those, those housing options are artificially limited. But ignoring the land use regulations of neighboring municipalities where people would conceivably look for housing would understate the level of exclusionary zoning that residents are subject to. So that's to try to motivate why I use that 10-mile radius when looking at municipalities. And really quickly. Just the cumulative part is really referring to the overtime component. So there's two time periods in the study. And so every municipality or metro area in the study is going to have two time periods and two measures of. Were they above or below average restrictive in the time periods? And so yeah, if it's both decades, like a metro area like New York City is considered restrictive for both time periods.

Shane Phillips 00:31:45
Mm-hmm. Surprise.

Matt Mleczko 00:31:46
That's two, basically two periods of exposure to exclusionary zoning, whereas others might just have one or zero.

Shane Phillips 00:31:54
So jumping ahead to results, you looked at the relationship between, on one side, being in a metro or municipality with above average restrictiveness and, on the other, the monthly median gross rent in your census tract. And you're looking at three kinds of tracts. First is just those with above average poverty rates. So that means above a 13%, I think this is the national average. Second is tracts with high poverty rates, which you define as 40% or more households in poverty. And third is high poverty tracts that are just within the central city of a metro area. So that'd be Los Angeles in the LA, Long Beach, Anaheim MSA, Dallas in the Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, MSA, etc. You have four different models for evaluating this relationship, but for now let's just focus on the results of your preferred model, which is the marginal structural model, and we can talk about why it's preferred in a minute maybe. You mostly only observed statistically significant results in the census tracts with above average poverty, so that 13 poverty rate threshold. By comparison, the results in the high poverty tracts, 40 and above, suggest higher rents and higher rent burden, but the results were not statistically significant. So elaborate on those findings for us a bit. How big are these effects and how should we actually interpret them in light of this concept of cumulative exposure?

Matt Mleczko 00:33:26
So, Shane, I'm going to give a little bit of context behind some of these like modeling decisions. But if any of this is not needed, I guess we can just cut it out. But I figured it might be useful to explain, like, why I'm the marginal structural model stuff.

Shane Phillips 00:33:41
I mean I think the modeling—it's easy to get too far in the weeds, but I could definitely see the value in sharing essentially why a couple of the models are likely to understate the results and another one of the models is likely to overstate. I think that actually could inform a little bit about, like you know, it doesn't just tell us something about the methodology, but actually about cities and affordability and housing markets and so forth.

Matt Mleczko 00:34:08
So a couple of things. First of all, I wanted to use data over time for this study to answer the question of whether exclusionary zoning aggravates material hardship over time. That's something that's generally not done, because zoning data for any time period are really difficult to come by, let alone over time. And now you might be thinking that I only have the national zoning and land use data for one time period, and that's right. But because those those measures were constructed to be identical to the previous Wharton measures, that also allows me to combine both of these data sources into a panel database. So that grants me data over time that essentially spans two decades. So from around 2004 to about 2022. But studying zoning and land use policies over time introduces a potential problem in that zoning and land use policies of yesterday can impact tomorrow's socio-demographic conditions in ways that can also impact tomorrow's housing market outcomes. So in other words, if you're trying to hold fixed, different characteristics about places to make apples-to-apples comparisons, one might complicate the causal connection between exclusionary zoning and the outcomes of interest, something that's referred to as post-treatment bias. But not controlling for those factors could also lead to biased or oversimplistic comparisons comparisons. So to get around this conundrum, I used what are called marginal structural models to first estimate the probability of being an above average restrictive metro area or municipality in each of my two time periods. So that's where that cutoff comes from and why, why I use that construction. I then create weights based off of those probabilities and then I use them to reweight the whole data, to balance the sample on a range of those socio-demographic factors over time. So in other words, this reweighting procedure balances the sample on everything I observe in this study and every feature of interest except zoning and land use restrictiveness. So it makes places with different levels of exclusionary zoning essentially more comparable. So it helps to isolate the treatment of interest without having to avoid controlling for important background characteristics or controlling away the effect of interest. The other thing to note is that I'm measuring three outcomes. So median gross rents, the share of the neighborhood experiencing rent burden and median property values at the census tract level only in neighborhoods above a certain poverty threshold. And then I aggregate those neighborhoods into one unit for either the municipality or the metro area. So the idea here is to determine the impact of exclusionary zoning on impoverished places that are largely not practicing exclusionary zoning. And this allows me to compare whether measures of material hardship are systematically higher in impoverished neighborhoods of exclusionary areas compared to similarly impoverished neighborhoods of less exclusionary areas. So, in other words, if you are a renter living in a poor neighborhood, is it worse to be in a poor neighborhood of an exclusionary metro area? That's ultimately what the question comes down to.

Shane Phillips 00:37:08
And a little context here, because this has been something I was just looking into, a totally unrelated project recently. But it is not uncommon for poor neighborhoods to have exclusionary zoning. I think what is important there is that in poor neighborhoods exclusionary zoning is often not binding. It's not really preventing development from happening because, regardless of what the zoning zoning allowed, oftentimes housing is just not feasible, financially feasible to build there in any case. And so I think maybe that distinction is a little bit important, because I think it is maybe natural, especially for more kind of pro housing, you can be type folks- And I think I have this intuition as well- to think of poor neighborhoods as sort of mutually exclusive from exclusionary zoning. And that's just not the case. It's just not necessarily binding in those poor neighborhoods.

Mike Lens 00:38:06
There are poor single-family neighborhoods, but developers are less likely to develop there.

Shane Phillips 00:38:12
Even if you upzoned them. Yeah.

Mike Lens 00:38:13
And I mean that's—even if you upzone them, which you know, I think there's a lot of listeners and certainly a lot of people who think we're probably too YIMBY-ish to listen to in the first place. Who would disagree with that right? Like you know, people are really, really worried about upzoning South L.A and East L.A and places like that. Right now. You know, I do think that's – Los Angeles is a particular case. So if you go to places that have lower demand at the metro level, at the city level, et cetera, I think what you're saying very much holds.

Shane Phillips 00:38:44
And there are poor neighborhoods that are, you know, right next to wealthier neighborhoods or in a downtown, in places that might have higher demand despite their current conditions or current demographics or whatever. So this is very much an on average kind of effect, as we often talk about here, like we can't really say anything about any particular neighborhood. But overall, I think there's no question that what we're saying is true.

Matt Mleczko 00:39:11
I think those are all really important points in good context. One more quick methodological point before getting to the results. The fourth outcome that I analyze is the share of housing units affordable to households earning below median incomes. And that's at the metro level, just to reflect the fact that housing markets are metro-wide in nature. So to review the results, I find that rents are systematically higher by about $24 to $27 in above-average poverty neighborhoods.

Shane Phillips 00:39:42
And that's monthly rent.

Matt Mleczko 00:39:44
That's monthly rent. Yes. And that's in each period of exposure to exclusionary zoning. So for municipalities or metro areas that have had above average levels of exclusionary zoning over the past two decades, that's about $50 more in above average poverty neighborhoods on average. So about $600 more per year in rent just due to exclusionary zoning. And in above average poverty neighborhoods of municipalities, I find that each period of exposure to exclusionary zoning is associated with a one percentage point increase in the share of rent burdened households.

Shane Phillips 00:40:19
This is households that are paying more than 30% of their income on rent.

Matt Mleczko 00:40:23
That's right. And these may seem like small increases, but it's worth keeping in mind a few things. For one, these results are averages. So of course, in some areas the impact of exclusionary zoning will be higher and some it will be lower. But beyond that, there are many households living in poor neighborhoods who would likely struggle to find the extra $600 per year to pay rent. That results largely from artificial scarcity, not higher quality housing or more local amenities or anything like that. And it's actually somewhat surprising that exclusionary zoning is associated with more rent burden, or at least a higher share of renters experiencing rent burden in poor neighborhoods, because I'm comparing similarly poor neighborhoods across municipalities or metro areas with similar rates of poverty along with other socio-demographic characteristics. So, in other words, you might think that there's not much role for exclusionary zoning to matter much within those comparisons, but these results suggest that it that it does matter on the margins still.

Shane Phillips 00:41:24
So you talked about the median monthly rent and the share of rent burdened households. You see a similar effect on home prices, with prices about $20,000 higher per period in above average poverty tracts in places with above average zoning restrictiveness. I just want to note that, because I don't think we're going to spend any time on that finding. And instead we're just going to jump ahead to your results on the supply of low cost rental housing. Here you observe about a one percentage point decline per exposure period in the proportion of homes that are affordable to households earning 50 of their areas median income or below- that's very low income households- and about a two percentage point decline for households earning 80 or below, which is the definition for low income households. So if you're in a place with restrictive zoning during both periods you would double those numbers to two percentage points and four percentage points respectively. And just want to note here that this is percentage point declines. And so you know, if 50% of the housing supply was affordable to households earning 80% of area median income or below, a one percentage point decline would be from 50 to 49%. But if only 5% of homes were affordable to people at that income level, a one percentage point decline. Decline would take you from five percent to four percent, and so the baseline matters. I don't think we have the baseline on hand here really quick, maybe I can get that from you after the fact, Matt and, and insert that here, but I just want to flag that this distinction between percentage point and percentage or percent decline is important. Chiming in here really quickly: I got these numbers from Matt shortly after our talk. I'm just going to stick with low income households, which again is those earning up to 80% of their area's median income. His numbers show that, on average, about 88% of rental units were affordable to low-income renters in 2000, 80% in 2009, and 64% in 2022. So that's the overall average, and his results mean that exclusionary metros saw the number of affordable units decline slightly more than that and that less exclusionary metros saw the number decline slightly less on average. I may get in trouble for being this precise and specific with my example, but here we go. If 88% of units were affordable to low-income renters on average in 2000, then by 2022, this would have declined to around 66% for less exclusionary places and 62% for more exclusionary places. That may not sound like much, but in a country with over 40 million rental units. A four percentage point gap is nearly 2 million homes. So not exactly a small deal. All right, let's get back to the conversation with that. Anyway, what I found really interesting about those results is that you didn't observe a drop in the supply of extremely low income housing, which are units affordable to households earning 30% of median income or below. So I'm curious what you made of that finding. I was. I was thinking that one conclusion might be that once you're getting down to those really, really extremely low income households, the market just is not able to serve them very effectively or in very large numbers, regardless of how permissive your zoning is. Maybe to put that another way, if you can only afford $500 a month for rent, it doesn't matter all that much to you whether the median rent in your community is $1,200 or $2,500. Either way, the vast majority of housing is going to be pretty far out of your reach or a real burden. I was thinking at those income levels. A lot of people are probably either having their housing costs subsidized in some way or their homeowners living on a fixed income but who maybe have their mortgage paid off. As I thought about this more. I realized you would also need to include people who can't technically afford the housing that they're in by this technical standard of spending 30% of income or less. But they just end up spending more of their income, as many very low and extremely low income people do. And so for those people the $1,200 rent is still a lot better than $2,500. And that probably explains a lot of why homelessness rates are lower in more affordable cities, for example. So I bring this up just because I do not want to give the impression that zoning restrictiveness doesn't still impact people in deep poverty. Anyway, I'm curious to hear what you thought of these results and the gap that you saw between the effect on the supply of extremely low-income housing compared to actual declines in the supply of very low and then low-income housing, sorry, the supply of housing affordable to people at those income levels.

Matt Mleczko 00:46:11
I think you're thinking about it in the way I am as well. I think that this reflects the fact that extremely low-income households- so those earning 30% or less of the area median income- face so many barriers and disadvantages that marginally more expensive housing doesn't matter much, because households at this low level of income struggle to afford any housing everywhere. So we don't see much of a difference when comparing across metros that vary in their levels of exclusionary zoning here here. And this is perhaps a subtle but important takeaway of the article, in that these results demonstrate why I don't think it's correct to think of zoning reform as the silver bullet for the housing market and certainly not the most effective anti-poverty strategy we have at our disposal. I think one major problem with understanding the impact of zoning reform is that places are only generally able to pass the most politically palatable zoning reforms, which which are not necessarily those that will have the most impact. But even if you took the most ambitious and comprehensive zoning reforms, those are probably not likely to deliver housing that's affordable to someone making $ 7.25 an hour, which is still our national minimum wage. That was a minimum wage when I was working in high school. And so this brings up a point of like. This involves a lot of things: the labor market conditions and whether we think that's a reasonable minimum wage, and many other things. The point is it's just very difficult to imagine zoning reform driving housing costs down that much, especially given all the very real costs of development that I think are really not widely understood, not to mention how any developer would make enough profit to make it worth their effort. However, and this is really the main point, exclusionary zoning still clearly makes matters worse for low-income households. It's associated with a 1 to 2 percentage point decline on average in the stock of low-cost housing across an entire metro area. So think all affordable housing, subsidized or not- And again that might sound pretty small, but consider that in a metro area like New York City that again has been highly restrictive over the past two decades. This translates to roughly 140,000 fewer low-cost apartments just because of exclusionary zoning. So this brings me back to my point about ambivalence about exclusionary zoning. If we know of something that is making it more difficult for households living in poor neighborhoods to afford housing, we should probably address it, especially if it entails largely arbitrary rules that can be addressed without any additional funding.

Shane Phillips 00:48:44
And this question might be too simple at some level, but what do you think is actually driving these results? What is the mechanism or mechanisms by which exclusionary zoning in one place leads to higher rents and rent burden and home prices and reduced supply of more affordable or lower cost housing in other places that have above average poverty rates? I sort of hesitate to ask because it seems obvious, but I also. There's a lot going on in this study and I want to make sure that the pathway from A to B or A to B to C to D is clear to our listeners here.

Matt Mleczko 00:49:22
I think this really brings us to the crux of the matter and one of the main reasons why we should care about exclusionary zoning, and that's the importance of housing supply and the issues of scarcity. So to me, the most likely mechanism to be operating here is scarcity. In general, when the supply of a commodity decreases and demand for that commodity stays the same or increases, the price of that commodity is going to increase. And by and large, we treat housing as a commodity in our society. Whether or not we should do that is a separate and really important, important question. But because we do, when the supply is constrained and demand stays the same or increases, the price property owners can get for that housing, either by selling or renting, is generally going to increase. So think of this in the context of landlords in poor neighborhoods. In many cases they are renting to low-income households who we know have very little choice in the housing market for a variety of reasons. So as the housing options available to these household starts to dry up because other nearby communities are artificially restricting housing choices through their zoning and land use codes, landlords who do provide the increasingly few options for these households probably have more leverage to raise rents. And this is likely especially true when thinking about people being priced out of exclusionary jurisdictions and moving towards more affordable, less affluent ones, kicking off a sort of domino effect. Fact, this is a process that many might label gentrification, but not necessarily associated with exclusionary zoning. And I think that's largely because they're witnessing the end stage of that process, not the more upstream stage, that plays out on a Thursday night planning board meeting where residents are protesting a garden style apartment in their municipality. Relatedly, these results show that exclusionary zoning enables property owners in these same neighborhoods to sell their properties for more. And some might think that's a good thing for property owners in poor neighborhoods, but it's definitely bad for aspiring homeowners and renters. And it's worth considering, too, that a property owner in this context may be a non-resident. They may be facing higher property taxes. And even in the case of a long-term resident who earns some property appreciation due to exclusionary zoning, we should really ask ourselves if that's really the best way to compensate some homeowners in impoverished communities, given all the associated costs as well.

Shane Phillips 00:51:43
And not to mention, what do you do with that equity, with that appreciation? Really, the homes all around you have also gotten more expensive, so you can't take that money to buy a nicer home somewhere else. You mostly can't withdraw that money to just spend it and live a more lavish lifestyle. It's just kind of locked up there. I guess it's something you can pass on to your children, but on the other hand they can't afford to buy a home themselves as easily in that community. And so wouldn't it actually just be nicer if they could afford to live there before you die?

Matt Mleczko 00:52:17
Yeah, good point.

Shane Phillips 00:52:19
I did want to bring up one other thing. So you had a point about new housing supply and not being able to necessarily lower rents all that much, particularly at levels that would be meaningful to someone who's earning $25,000 or $30,000 a year. And I agree with that. And I think it just makes an interesting or an important point, which is it relates to the cumulative exposure idea in this analysis. And that's just that I don't think the goal of liberalizing these restrictions on land use and density and so forth is really to suddenly have this flood of new housing that lowers prices or rents by 30%. It's a much longer term effort and goal where you're trying to better match supply with demand so that rents and prices do not increase as quickly over years and decades. So that in 10 years, in 20 years, by the time you get to that second period, rents have not increased as much and you have not lost as much of that lower cost housing or hasn't moved as far out of reach to as many people. Does that ring true to you? I feel like the cumulative exposure part of this really underscores that reality for me.

Matt Mleczko 00:53:33
I think that's a great point. And it gets to part of why the politics around zoning and land use and exclusionary zoning and housing supply are so thorny, because, unfortunately, we've been doing things wrong for a really long time, which means we have a pretty big hole to dig ourselves out of. And so when land values have appreciated so much and housing costs are going up, it costs a lot to build. You know, you guys know that in California, and that can make the optics of building market rate housing to be a part of the solution- not the only solution- really difficult to sell politically sometimes, right, and so I think about that element, about it too. That comes up in a lot of conversations I have when it comes to development in the places I've lived. But no, I think you're exactly right that this is all very, very long term. And it's important to keep that context in mind. But the trick is, things are really bad right now. And we need to have a sense of urgency about correcting course.

Shane Phillips 00:54:35
This is the "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now" kind of idea. Right.

Mike Lens 00:54:40
So, Matt, it's definitely clear that in the paper, you're very careful to speak in terms of associations between variables and try to limit causal language. We've gotten a little looser with that language in this discussion because I think, Shane and I believe your findings to be very important. What are some of the limitations that lead you to be hesitant to talk about this in terms of the causality of, you know, one municipality's restrictiveness on the costs incurred in other municipalities and things like that? Like, what are some of the things that give you pause or that you highlight as limitations to the study?

Matt Mleczko 00:55:25
Thanks, Mike. The caution comes from some real limitations that exist in this study, like most. First and foremost, these underlying zoning data, as much as all the work that went into it, they're imperfect. So given the work we did to create these data, we know they compare reasonably well against other survey-based measures. Zoning and land use regulations. The most restrictive metro areas and municipalities in this sample generally align with rankings from other measures, and other researchers have used these data to corroborate their findings. So, in other words, these data paths face validity. But it's definitely true that getting an accurate measure of exclusionary zoning is tricky for a variety of reasons. One issue is just the access to the data itself. The NZLUD covers about 2,600 municipalities, which is a meaningful start, but that also misses tens of thousands of other municipalities across the country with zoning and land use authority. So that's one limitation. Another issue is the underlying regulations to consider. So it's difficult to know which regulations matter for exclusionary zoning, especially given the many elements of zoning and land use policy at play. A related issue is the limitations with the measures used in the study. One thing we didn't explicitly cover is how I was limited to the same measures in the previous Wharton data and Urban Institute data. In order to be able to use data over time, right, these measures need to be comparable, but some of the underlying measures like, say, the maximum minimum lot size of a jurisdiction certainly tells you something about a municipality's zoning and land use policies, but perhaps not as much as, say, the average minimum lot size or something similar like that. These are measures that make more sense to ask in a survey-based format. But, given the methods that built these data, it's a limitation of this study. But, moving forward, this is a method built to be able to extract different kinds of zoning measures. And probably obvious that getting an accurate measure from the text extraction process is also really difficult. So these ordinances with zoning and land use information are enormously complicated texts with virtually no standardization, which makes extracting useful and accurate information especially challenging. We built a lot of checks in the process of building this data, but there's almost certainly measurement error based in the data building process. One thing to note is that this was another reason behind using a marginal structural model, since accurately estimating whether a or a metro area is above or below average- So essentially a binary classification- is a bit easier than estimating a continuous measure of exclusion right. And you know- again, I'm optimistic- that refinements and improvements to the code can produce, you know, even more accurate data in the future. It's an active area of research. One other thing that we didn't talk about is because the NZLUD replicates the same survey sample as the Wharton data. There will municipalities with missing data throughout a metro area. So in some cases there are many municipalities that don't have any zoning data for a particular metro area. So I implemented some coverage thresholds in order for a metro area to be included. And additionally, previous work demonstrated how accurate data can be generated from a metro area with many missing municipalities, because we were able to replicate the data for two metro areas, Houston and San San Francisco, with full coverage. And the measures were generally the same comparing to when we had just a few municipalities. I suspect that's because a lot of municipalities copy each other's zoning and land use codes. But still there's limited municipal coverage in the metro area analyses which prompted the municipal level analysis. And reassuringly, those results are all highly consistent. So that reassures me a bit. Finally, there's just a lot of missing information in the first time period of the panel data. That's because the Wharton and Urban Institute data have some missing data, but also combining. There are two different samples of different cities throughout the country and different municipalities. So when you combine them that's also going to create missingness. And that's just an unavoidable issue when using the data. So, you know, all of these limitations I've listed give me, you know, give me an abundance of caution at not claiming causality, but the diagnostic checks of the marginal structural models indicate pretty good balance, so that I know that these are apples to apples comparisons generally being made in this study. And then, of course, there's just always- you know I've controlled for about as much as I can think of that's worth controlling for, but it's not everything. And so you know, there's always perhaps some lurking background characteristic that matters that's not being captured here. And so abundance of caution, I guess, is the policy. But I do still think that the methods in the study get us really, really close and some really good evidence about what exclusionary zoning is doing in high poverty neighborhoods and what the consequences are.

Shane Phillips 01:00:37
I had a follow up sort of to that and it actually comes from a little bit earlier. But on these measures that you've drawn, it was making me think about, you know, right now you're just, as you said, looking at above average or below average exclusionary zoning. Is it possible now, or do you think it will be possible in the future, to have something more like a continuous measure where you can say you have a place that is above average slightly versus a place that is, you know, super exclusionary and able to see if, as one might expect, the effects on the supply of affordable homes and the monthly median rent is larger for the places that have more strongly exclusionary zoning versus the ones that are more moderately exclusionary? I know that's not the focus of this analysis, but do you think that's something that will be possible from this data in later periods maybe?

Matt Mleczko 01:01:30
Yes, definitely. It's actually possible right now. If you go to the GitHub repository that hosts the data, you can download it and see the ZRI score for every municipality and metro area. So that's a continuous measure. And that's definitely another limitation, right, is collapsing all of that information into a binary. It's definitely a trade-off. It's part of the overall approach with the marginal structural models. But, yeah, it is a trade-off. And in some cases, it's preferable to use the continuous measure and that currently exists in the data and how it's built. So what you're asking about is already possible and I encourage people to use that data.

Shane Phillips 01:02:09
Awesome. Well, I have one more question before we let you go. You have this line. I'm just going to read it here: "These results also demonstrate the importance of focusing reform efforts in all exclusionary areas, not just those facing the highest housing demand and housing costs, because exclusionary zoning is practiced nationwide, not just in the most expensive housing markets." That is a sentiment that I certainly agree with. And this comes from the discussion at the end of the study, but I'll say I didn't fully understand where that conclusion comes from with respect to the research. So I thought that might be a good place to end here just to explain what you mean by that, what this says about the need to reform exclusionary zoning nationwide and not just in the places where it bites the strongest, in places like Los Angeles and New York, for example.

Matt Mleczko 01:03:01
My aim here was to push back against the narrative that exclusionary zoning is really only a problem in high cost metro areas or the coastal metros, because it's a perspective that I came across regularly when I was studying and learning about zoning and land use policy in graduate school. And it always struck me as not strictly true. I get it. Not all, and we were talking about this earlier. Zoning reform can't solve all housing affordability problems. And many people are going to require subsidy to be able to afford any home of some minimum quality standards. But to argue that some instances of housing affordability are simply a matter of poverty and not housing policy to me starts to veer into the same sort of thinking that assigns a sharp distinction between homelessness and housing policy. And I think Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern's work has done a really nice job of pushing back on that idea. So this was sort of my way of emphasizing how exclusionary zoning is a problem in more places than I think a lot of us realize. One of the main findings from just building the NZLUD is that Rust Belt metros like Detroit and Milwaukee register really high levels of exclusionary zoning, which is one of the main distinctions between these data and previous data, like those with Wharton. And this should make sense, because it's absolutely the case that affluent suburban municipalities in the Milwaukee or Detroit metro areas undermine or forbid multifamily housing in their zoning and land use practices. So that obviously limits overall supply of housing in the region, which inherently limits the housing choices that renters in impoverished neighborhoods have access to, which, as this research shows, generally translates into more material hardship in the form of higher housing costs for renters in those neighborhoods. So yeah, housing policy matters for poor neighborhoods, even in poorer metro areas of the country. And I should add that I'm not the only one making this point. So Brian Connolly and Noah Kazis have a great working paper out titled Rezoning, the Rust Belt, in which they make the case that restrictive zoning regulations undermine necessary redevelopment and revitalization in places like Detroit and Milwaukee. So different angle, but yet another reason why we should all be very concerned with the practice of exclusionary zoning where it occurs.

Mike Lens 01:05:25
The redevelopment angle is an important one that I don't think I've learned enough about and I think is definitely undersold in the literature. But also I think a lot of people have a basic idea that there are enough housing units in places that have had slow or negative population growth over the last few decades. And therefore there's no reason to worry about housing supply issues. But every metropolitan area and a lot of cities within metropolitan areas that have slow or low aggregate population demand still have places that are very desirable to live in. And so those places are again also tend to be the ones that have the most restrictions, restrictions around them and kind of price people out and exclude people and et cetera. So, Matt, you made that point, but you know, I just kind of wanted to emphasize that for those you know who still tend to look at these aggregate numbers and think that Kansas doesn't have a supply problem and it's only applicable to California and it's similar places.

Matt Mleczko 01:06:34
I think that's a great point. And if you talk to people here in the city of Milwaukee, I mean they'll, they'll make the point that Milwaukee, like many other Rust Belt cities, used to be a lot bigger. And so, yeah, there's some to some degree. There's still available housing units, but the demography of households has changed quite a bit and household size is shrinking a lot. And that has changed the equation in many ways. That make that argument that you know the Milwaukees of the world have plenty of housing stock not exactly true anymore. And so that's just another wrinkle to this too.

Shane Phillips 01:07:05
And a lot of that housing stock might not be livable or usable anymore and might have, you know, ultimately have to be torn down or enough money spent on it that you might as well be building a new home anyway. A few more points before we close out here. I just wanted to sort of underline some things you said. One is about this not just being a rich area or an expensive coastal area problem. The way I've been putting this is, you know, Los Angeles, California, Seattle, New York, New York, Boston, these places, if you look at their zoning codes and you compare it to more affordable parts of the country, they're not that different. And I think that's kind of a point that you made, Matt. What is really different is just the demand for housing, the job markets, the labor markets. You know they changed here and got hotter faster earlier in these more expensive places. And so we really started to feel the constraint of those restrictive policies in a way that they have not really hit these slower growing places as much, but in many ways they are catching up. And so I think that point is really well taken. And just something to kind of think about now. You mentioned kind of in passing that in the Wharton Index of regulation that places like Detroit were reported as less exclusionary in their zoning practices. And that's just making, because that was a survey and not like a measurement of those places. If a place like Detroit- because the people running the city know what the demand looks like and they know their population growth history and where the job market is at it- just makes me wonder whether they are sort of reporting their vibes of the of the restrictiveness of their zoning rather than the actual policy that's underlying it. Again, because they don't really feel the bite of it, because it's not a binding constraint at the moment. But that's different than saying we don't have exclusionary zoning.

Matt Mleczko 01:09:06
That's a really interesting thought. I know people have called into question the accuracy of survey-based zoning data. And that's sort of a small but mighty debate in the field. And I think there are definitely. It's not perfect, but I do think we can buy a lot of the data that we've gotten from these surveys. But I never really thought about it from that angle and how those perceptions may sort of inform the answers to those surveys. So that's an interesting thing to think about and ponder.

Shane Phillips 01:09:36
Just occurred to me when you were mentioning that.

Matt Mleczko 01:09:39
But I do appreciate that you pointed out that you know there's certainly variants in zoning across the country but in many ways it's similar in many places. And because I sometimes get the question of well, which places are doing zoning really great. And I struggle to answer that a lot of times because just because places are less exclusionary doesn't mean that they are vanguards of housing abundance and affordability and equity. So you know, I think that's a good, good thing to bring up too and to be cautious about. These are all relative measures, right Like there's hardly any vanguards of what this should look like, but I think we're increasingly getting there in many places.

Shane Phillips 01:10:19
All right, Matt Mleczko, thank you so much for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast. Really appreciate it.

Matt Mleczko 01:10:26
Thanks so much for the conversation, guys. Really appreciate it as well.

Shane Phillips 01:10:34
You can find our show notes and a transcript of the episode on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Talk with us and other listeners at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on Bluesky and LinkedIn at @shanedphillips and Mike is on Bluesky at @mc-lens. Thanks for listening.