Tim Scott Highlights Zoning Law Issues While Discussing Housing Shortages In The US

11 hours ago

At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) spoke about housing affordability.

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Transcript

00:00time for us to have a nonpartisan conversation about solving needs in our

00:04country. I wish we would do this more often around every committee in the

00:07Senate, frankly, in the Congress. For those of you perhaps not aware, I spent 13

00:13years, six months, seven days, and 12 hours on local county council. And so,

00:20exactly, I was not excited to leave at all. I really enjoyed my time there, but

00:26I'll say without question that the issue of housing is very much a local

00:31issue. And frankly, while the state legislature can do some good, it's those

00:37communities who really have building caps that distorts the market in

00:43extraordinary ways. The way that they use their zoning laws and density

00:48requirements is, in fact, what has exacerbated the problem from California

00:54to New York and beyond. How does that happen? Well, your local communities

00:58decides they don't want anybody else moving in. It's like, not everyone wants

01:02a wall built, but we're building this virtual wall outside of certain

01:05communities by saying we're not gonna allow for any high-density construction

01:09in these areas. And you add that on top of the construction cost and 7% interest

01:16rates, you have destroyed the local housing market. Mayor, you've done a

01:23fabulous job in Texas from crime to improving safety to focusing on

01:30homelessness and reducing the amount of time it takes to get things done on

01:34every topic, it seems like, frankly. And I really appreciate your service to your

01:38community in many ways to Texas and beyond. Can you talk about how you

01:44would address the issue from a zoning perspective, number one? Number two,

01:49compound question here, is the housing, the homelessness crisis. It's something we

01:55should all be passionate about. An 18% increase with record number, record

02:01dollars being spent through HUD to address homelessness, and yet the problem

02:06gets worse. It's almost as if the more money we put out there, the worse the

02:09problem has gotten. I'm sure someone will rebuke me for that statement, but the

02:13truth of the matter is, we seem to be dealing with something more complicated

02:17than, here's a couple more dollars, let's solve the problem. Well, I appreciate the

02:21question, and I'll do my best to tell you, in all cases, my perspective as the

02:29the leader of a city on the policy side and the political side as opposed to the

02:34bureaucratic side. But we're talking about something that's largely a

02:38bureaucratic issue, and so there's just a lot of the issues related to

02:45specifically ask about zoning. I would also throw in with that permitting, this

02:50is process. This is about process, and this is about, in many cases, local

02:57governments not being sufficiently focused or perhaps incentivized to focus

03:02on their process and making it easier to do business with the city. Frankly, there

03:11are entities that exist in the world, in the United States in particular, that no

03:15how to build houses, know where houses need to be built, and can do so

03:19profitably, but are being hamstrung by local governments and how difficult it

03:26can be to navigate their process and how long it can take to bring a project to

03:33fruition. So we've had success, but it's not for no reason. I've had to really

03:40lean in over the past six years with the bureaucracy. Our bureaucracy is headed

03:45by a city manager in Dallas, but I've had to really impart upon them just how

03:50important it is that we prioritize getting down these permit wait times.

03:55This didn't just happen on its own. Departments had to be consolidated, staff

04:00had to be moved around, things had to be done, you had to reconfigure how

04:05we went about serving the developer community, having pre-meetings

04:11with folks about their projects. We had to be very creative about how we got

04:18projects done more quickly, and so that takes a concerted effort and that's a

04:23process thing. I'm talking to the United States Senate right now, and so the

04:28question I think I want to not address here is, what can you do to

04:33help with that? I mean, I think we need some form of change in

04:40conversation around this topic of housing, because I think we get confused,

04:46frankly, and think that housing somehow is something that we, as the local level,

04:52can just determine the price of, and that there's nothing that, you know, housing

04:58is like everything else. The supply and demand determines the price of it, but we

05:01don't act that way, and I think we could use some help with changing that

05:04narrative around that. As far as homelessness is concerned, I would say

05:07similarly, we have a narrative problem. In a lot of ways, I've had to push back

05:12on the idea that the folks that you see sleeping on our streets are there

05:15because of the high median housing price in Dallas, and it's really not about that.

05:21The unhoused that you see on our streets are there for other reasons that I

05:25outlined before, so I think in addition to thinking about carrots and sticks and

05:30the things that Congress can do financially, we could use some help with

05:34changing the narrative around these topics to understand what the real root

05:37causes are. Extending myself to 54 seconds you did not use in your opening

05:42statement. To me, the housing issue we have of

05:48affordability is, in fact, the more you suppress housing construction because of

05:54your zoning laws, the higher your prices are going to go in the communities.

05:58You're talking about a manufacturer crisis. Please continue. Well, I

06:03agree with that pretty strongly, Senator, so thank you for taking this up.

06:07I think this is exactly right. I mean, America is full of land, right? We are an

06:12abundantly rich country. This is not necessary. We did this to ourselves. We

06:17did this to ourselves by stopping the natural genius of American builders, by

06:20restraining them over and over again, by making it impossible to figure out new

06:24ways to build. Just look at what's happened to productivity in the

06:27construction industry. Every other industry, right, it soars. Construction has

06:31stagnated. It is stagnated in part because our projects are tiny, which

06:35means that our firms are tiny, and firms that have four people, six people, don't

06:39have research and development departments. There was a time when

06:42construction was just as dynamic as every other industry, but because of this

06:45web of local land-use regulations, it is no longer so. Thank you, sir. Senator Kim,

06:51next. Thank you.

Tim Scott Highlights Zoning Law Issues While Discussing Housing Shortages In The US

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