Decisions that occurred outside public view helped produce the nation’s housing crisis.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon swooped in to give Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, the perfect reason to veto a valuable bill. The proposed Arizona Starter Homes Act sought to legalize smaller dwellings to address the affordability crisis straining the fast-growing state. After the state legislature had already passed the bill, a regional Navy official wrote a letter to Hobbs opposing it. The intervention seemed bizarre, as I noted in an article at the time. But now we know what happened: The U.S. military was doing a favor for a NIMBY local government—in this case, the city of Glendale, a Phoenix suburb that is also home to Luke Air Force Base.
The episode reveals something important about how the nation’s current housing crisis came about: The shortage of homes is the result of thousands of decisions that barely anyone is paying attention to—and that in many cases happen outside public view.
After the Arizona bill’s demise, Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat who has pushed for federal action on housing-supply policies, reached out to the Pentagon for an explanation. In a response letter that Garcia shared with The Atlantic, William A. LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, revealed that Glendale had tipped the military off to the bill. Ryan Lee, the city’s intergovernmental-programs director, confirmed to me over the phone that he’d played that role but declined to answer further questions.
The bare facts here are infuriating: The democratically elected representatives of the people of Arizona were able to come together with a commonsense solution to the nation’s most pressing economic problem, and a staff member at a mid-size city was able to call in the military to provide the governor cover to veto? Without so much as a public vote?
Garcia surmised that what the Department of Defense did is part of a larger pattern. “My guess is, for far too long, large organizations like DOD have engaged in these types of efforts—sometimes public and other times maybe not,” he told me. “And folks never really find out about it.”
One prominent supporter of the starter-homes bill, State Representative Analise Ortiz, whose district includes parts of Glendale and Phoenix, told me she hadn’t been aware of Glendale’s decision to involve the military but wasn’t surprised: “Cities across the state were doing everything in their power to try to stop the Starter Homes Act.”
Ortiz was skeptical about Glendale’s motivations in enlisting the Department of Defense to gain the governor’s veto. “This is not the way we typically go about creating policy,” she said. “Typically, if a city is looking at a bill and wants to get all perspectives, they will think of that in the weeks that it takes for a bill to get through the legislature. If there was a genuine concern here, it should have been raised much earlier in the legislative process, and the fact that it was not raised until the 11th hour—it seems to me like it was solely a tactic to get the bill vetoed.”
The Biden administration has been vocal about its concern for housing affordability and has specifically praised state and local actions like those in the now-dead Arizona bill. In the weeks following Hobbs’s veto of the Arizona law, at least one senior administration official contacted the Defense Department to inquire how it got involved and why it intervened against official Biden policy. The conversation, according to a source who requested anonymity to speak freely about discussions within the administration, revealed that the Defense Department had simply not even registered that local land-use fights were important to federal officials, and ended with the mutual understanding that future similar engagements would require a discussion.
Housing politics is local is a familiar refrain, but one that national leaders have become less and less able to hide behind. After pandemic-induced inflation led to widespread dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, federal policy makers realized that rising shelter costs (rents and mortgages) needed to be addressed, lest voters take their frustration out on their elected officials. After all, if voters are going to blame you for it, there’s no point complaining that it’s actually someone else’s job.
At the least, federal officials should stop enabling NIMBYism at the state or local level. “I think it’s important for them to be put on notice,” Garcia argued. “I don’t think the DOD should be engaged in stopping housing developments across the country. This is a national priority.”