A few weeks ago the Cato Institute had an event where William Fischel, an economics professor at Dartmouth; Matt Yglesias of Vox Media and Robert Deitz of the National Association of Home Builders, gathered to discus Fischel’s new book, Zoning Rules, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
I couldn’t attend in person, but I was able to take in the livestream and did some live Tweeting.
While Fischel had a very pointed critique of land-use regulation, he was surprisingly in favor of comprehensive zoning. He attributed it to the automobile, said they threw out thousands of years of property law and said it became much more restrictive in the 1970s. In that decade, high inflation collided with nascent environmentalism to make land use much more restrictive.
According to Fischel, that’s when the idea of the house as an investment started to take off. It was like a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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