It was in the 1960s that Los Angeles started to reduce its zoned population capacity from 10 million people down to 4 million. (https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/progr

It was in the 1960s that Los Angeles started to reduce its zoned population capacity from 10 million people down to 4 million. (https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/zoning/ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/z...) When the 15th amendment was passed, Southern states didn't simply allow former slaves to vote; they passed laws that had the intent and effect of denying them the vote. You can't deny a black person the right to vote, but you can deny the vote to everyone who cannot prove that his or her grandfather was a voter, or who cannot pass ambiguous poll tests. Zoning laws were used to make a similar end-run around the Fair Housing Act. You can't make it illegal to sell a home to a black couple or explicitly exclude them from housing, but you can make it illegal to build any new homes and give the residents and city planning/zoning commissions the political power to block new development and "preserve neighborhood character." Of course this issue is far murkier nowadays, since everyone has their own reason for opposing new development. Some people erroneously believe that the government limiting the supply of housing when demand is (almost) always increasing will halt "gentrification"/displacement and stop or slow the rise in prices. Others believe their neighborhood should be encased in amber: never changing from the moment they bought in, and believe that they can make traffic better by simply blocking new development, like new residents won't live in further suburbs/exurbs and commute through their area anyway. In areas that passed pants-on-head property tax hike-cap laws (California, Texas), residents now have every incentive to have their local (and very responsive!) government ban all new development and increase their property value since they will no longer have to pay a corresponding increase in property taxes. Unfortunately, even cities where 60% of the residents are renters can't seem to out-organize or out-vote homeowners, nor does there seem to be an awareness that housing prices are a political choice rather than some immutable fact.