Housing costs today come down to too few homes and too much faith in government control instead of trusting markets and people to respond to demand.
Americans are searching for someone to blame for rising home prices, and there are plenty of easy targets. Conservatives often point to supply shortages, heavy regulation, restrictive zoning, and government interventions that distort the housing market. Underneath those surface causes is a deeper pattern: a preference for control over letting people and businesses adapt.
The story goes beyond a few bad actors or fickle markets; it’s about choices made at the community and government level that limit building. Fear of growth and an urge to protect existing neighborhoods pushed rules that made new housing prohibitively expensive to build. The predictable result: fewer houses, higher prices, and wages that can’t keep up with housing costs.
“As urbanist expert Addison Del Mastro argues in The Freeman, a tangle of building restrictions grew partly out of the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and 70s,” a video released by the Foundation for Economic Education said. “The neo-Malthusian fear, popularised by Paul Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb,’ that there were simply too many people.”
“In Boulder, Colorado, for example, a local zero-population growth chapter helped pass a 1976 plan that capped building permits to hold the town’s growth to about 1.5 percent a year. To neo-Malthusians, fewer homes meant fewer people,” the video continued.
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“Absent those restrictions, a free market would have told a different story. A spike in demand raises prices in the short run, but high prices are an invitation. They signal to builders there’s money to be made. Capital flows in, new housing gets built, prices come back down.”
This is an argument any Reagan-era conservative would recognize: government controls often create the very shortages they claim to solve. Yet the impulse to regulate remains broad and bipartisan, with people reaching for rules when they feel anxious about scarcity. Instead of removing barriers, too many officials reflexively add layers of permission and delay.
It’s tempting to blame corporate buyers, short-term rentals, immigration, or other convenient villains, then call for yet more government action as the cure. That path doubles down on the mistake: if restrictive policy produced scarcity, adding more policy usually makes the problem worse. Real relief comes from loosening zoning, cutting needless regulation, and letting builders and innovators respond to market signals.
The political frame matters. Socialism keeps gaining traction because it offers a simple prescription—more government—to people frustrated by rising costs. Conservatives should reject that temptation and return to the economic freedom that powered growth in the past. Ronald Reagan’s instincts—lower taxes, fewer restrictions, and trust in American initiative—are less nostalgic slogans and more practical guidance.
Defending those principles means fighting the regulatory reflex whenever it appears, and arguing for policies that expand housing supply rather than limit it. It also means pushing back against the idea that any shortage must lead to a bigger administrative response instead of new construction and private investment. If conservatives stand firm on economic freedom, they give people the tools to meet demand instead of locking in scarcity.
