To Help Parents, Let's Cut Red Tape and Build More Homes

The Trump-Vance administration has largely delivered on its campaign promises, some for better, some for worse. And where the next three years and 10 months will go is anyone’s guess. But some of its opening moves show the potential and tensions in operationalizing a pro-family approach to politics. When it comes to some of the biggest costs facing families, such as housing and child care, the White House could bring some much-needed energy to reorient policy in a pro-parent direction—if it can avoid the tendency from some friends to ignore basic economic principles. 

For example, I join former Cato scholar Randal O’Toole and IFS Senior Fellow Brad Wilcox in celebrating the impulse behind the recent memo from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Done right, inculcating an attention to marriage and fertility rates in public policy could orient our infrastructure spending to areas of the country most likely to need it. And, if implemented correctly, it could go a long way towards putting into practice the insight that government need not be neutral when it comes to recognizing the unique needs of families with children over households without when designing our infrastructure and built environment. 

Thinking through how to properly apply this framework will be crucial. While celebrating families, the feds should seek to make communities family-friendly, rather than presume to know what type of community most families would choose. Areas with more babies are likely to need more infrastructure down the road, yet that won’t necessarily mean we should start building multi-lane highways in rural counties in New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota or Nevada, which record some of the highest fertility rates in the country.

Indeed, certain federal grants for mass transit are properly thought of as pro-family: the All Stations Accessibility Program, for example, helps retrofit older train and subway stations to account for wheelchairs and strollers to help parents with small children get around town. The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2022 allocated $5 billion for the Safe Streets and Roads for All initiative, which will help make roads safer and aim to reduce pedestrian fatalities, a key part of building urban and suburban communities where parents can feel more comfortable letting their children walk to school or ride their bike to a friend’s house. That kind of effort should be, almost by definition, part of a pro-family agenda.

Focusing on making life better for families will be a better use of time than trying to prescribe how they should live their lives, or what kind of house or commute they have to choose from. For example, Jonathan and Paige Bronitsky, writing for The Federalist, would give policymakers the tools to rule certain types of housing out-of-bounds. Want to build a mixed-use development, or a triplex? Tough luck. This commission or that zoning board says only houses that meet our aesthetic preferences or ideas of what a house needs to have will be permitted. In his IFS post, O’Toole characterizes this as “letting Americans live the way they want to live.” The opposite is true. 

O'Toole is a fan of using state power to force developers to build according to his read of families' preferences—single-family homes with a yard. “So long as room is available to build more homes,” he writes, “single-family zoning has almost no effect on housing prices.” Talk about assuming away the major objection! Major cities, from San Diego to Seattle to Salt Lake City, are hemmed in by history and geography—as Mark Twain is said to have penned, “Buy land, they ain’t making any more of it.”

While celebrating families, the feds should seek to make communities family-friendly, rather than presume to know what type of community most families would choose.

If those areas are to grow and thrive, they will have to adopt a diversity of housing styles, including family-friendly apartments, studios, duplexes, and triplexes. Restrictions that stipulate only homes of a certain style and yard size can be constructed are essentially hanging a “No Vacancy” sign outside most of our urban centers. 

Contrary to O’Toole’s assertions, it is not his bête noire, urban growth boundaries, that are driving the cost-of-living crisis in too many American homes—rather, it is predominately our zoning and land-use regime. As I recap in a new EPPC report, the accumulated result of decades of policies that were apathetic or opposed to growing the housing stock have pushed prices upwards. Environmental laws, developer fees, minimum lot size requirements, bans on duplexes and accessory dwelling units, and, most recently, tariffs on imported lumber all make housing less affordable, and make developers less likely to build the kind of starter homes that can help young couples just starting out. By contrast, urban growth boundaries are predominantly a West Coast phenomenon, and can't explain why housing prices have risen so quickly in Atlanta, Nashville, northern Virginia, or other places where supply has not grown to meet rising demand.

In my report, I suggest some options for ensuring new housing stock is oriented towards families’ needs. Of particular interest to large urban cities with existing zoning requirements would be to nudge them towards more family-friendly styles of development. Broad-based zoning reform would be ideal, but in the interim, city and county policymakers could nudge the needle in the right direction. Giving developers fast-pass permitting or density bonuses—building more units than would otherwise be permissible on a given plot of land—in exchange for amenities aimed at making urban and suburban life easier for parents is a trade well worth making. 

These could include features such as shared bathrooms in-unit to maximize space (rather than en-suite bathrooms, which are better suited for multiple unrelated individuals), dedicated car-seat storage for families that rely on transit or ride-sharing, ground-floor retail space for child care (with residents given priority on wait lists), shared indoor or outdoor children’s play areas, or other parent-friendly amenities.

But it’s important that these steps be taken as part of an all-of-the-above approach to housing, not as a replacement for it. Indeed, it will be easier to have more apartments and houses that are congenial to family life if they are part of an attitude that embraces more housing of all kinds, rather than picking and choosing specific styles and approaches and deeming them the only kind appropriate for all families. 

America is a nation that prizes individuality and choice. In our efforts to buttress family life, it’s important to identify the essentials—giving priority to policy choices that help more couples get married and more would-be parents have children—and allow for our nation’s rich diversity to put that into practice in more ways than central planners could ever imagine. 

Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he writes the weekly “Family Matters” newsletter.