Stasis Undermines Equality: Or, What's Wrong With Urban Growth Controls?

ABSTRACT

Egalitarian critics of gentrification argue that urban growth controls protect the worst off from market‐driven change in cities. A growing body of empirical literature shows that growth controls cause the problems these critics want them to solve: they raise housing costs and exclude the poor from cities. But these egalitarian critics also face deeper philosophical problems. First, they assume (but do not argue) that neighborhoods are the sites of communal goods that are undermined by new entrants. This conflicts with the feature of cities that generates economic mobility: allowing cooperation with culturally dissimilar newcomers. Second, the democratic land‐use governance these theorists call for already exists, and it enforces stasis precisely by distributing participation costs so as to exclude the poor. Egalitarian arguments for stasis are self‐undermining.