Preemption Is Coming to Save Us From Zoning

By Alli Quinlan
There’s a phrase we use in housing reform circles that always gets a laugh, because it’s painfully true: everything we want is illegal.
The walkable Main Street. The corner store with an apartment above it. The small beauty shop attached to a home where you can hear the baby cry and step inside to comfort her. The historic neighborhood everyone puts on a postcard. In many towns, those places are not compliant with zoning. In fact, they could not be built today.
And yet we treat zoning as if it were some carefully calibrated, locally crafted expression of community character. It isn’t.
A huge portion of modern zoning was not born from deep local wisdom. It traces back to mid-20th-century model codes, widely distributed and lightly tailored. In many places, your town has a zoning code because, sometime decades ago, funding was available and a template was adopted. We now treat those inherited systems as sacred. They are not.
They are producing outcomes no one actually wants.
There is nowhere in America I have worked where people say, “Our housing is great. It’s so affordable. Our kids can buy a house. Our grandkids live around the corner. Small businesses start easily. Home builders are thriving. Our budget is balanced and we can pay for our infrastructure.”
Zoning is not creating that anywhere.
Across the country, through our work training small-scale developers in dozens of states, we see the same pattern. Rust Belt cities with too many buildings and not enough people. Fast-growing Southern cities with too many people and not enough buildings. Very different places, same structural barriers. And zoning is the biggest one.
Modern zoning represents a radical experiment in separating and segregating uses in ways towns were never historically built. For generations, Americans lived above shops. They walked to work. Businesses and homes blended naturally. Families housed parents, children, and aging relatives in flexible ways. Those arrangements were practical, human, and economically resilient.
Zoning made them illegal.
When housing becomes too expensive because we can’t build it in practical ways, the consequences cascade. Young adults delay marriage. Families delay children. Local economies struggle to regenerate. Downtowns hollow out. Small business formation declines. Municipal budgets strain under the weight of infrastructure liabilities without sufficient tax base.
We are living inside those consequences.
So when people hear “state preemption,” they often recoil. It sounds political. It sounds like overreach. But step back for a moment.
The state already preempts local authority in countless areas. The state sets standards for education. It governs highways. It establishes building and safety frameworks. Local governments are political subdivisions of the state. Their zoning authority is derived from state law.
Preemption is not some exotic intrusion. It is a tool within our existing structure of government.
Here is the pragmatic question: Is it efficient for 15,000 municipalities to independently spend enormous time and money hiring consultants to rewrite fundamentally flawed zoning codes that share the same structural DNA? Or does it make sense for the state to remove unnecessary regulatory burdens at scale?
Requiring every small town to undo the same inherited mistakes, one by one, is wasteful. It is politically exhausting. Local officials take the heat for changes residents may not fully understand. Meanwhile, the housing shortage deepens.
State preemption, done carefully, can reduce zoning burdens in a uniform way and restore the ability to build housing and small businesses that reflect how communities actually function.
Texas offers a powerful example of what works when flexibility and local calibration are preserved. As a full home rule state, Texas allows municipalities to adopt and tailor their own building codes rather than imposing a single statewide mandate. That flexibility has enabled practical adjustments aligned with local construction markets. In some cases, cities have expanded what can be built under residential codes, making small multifamily projects more feasible and affordable.
That kind of pragmatic calibration is valuable.
But zoning is a different category. Zoning is not delivering affordability, vitality, or sustainability. The status quo is not neutral. It is actively producing harm.
The parts of town we love most — the vibrant blocks, the mixed-use corridors, the historic neighborhoods — were largely built before modern zoning or outside its strictures. They endure not because of zoning, but despite it.
If we are honest, we are starting from a flawed premise. We assume that the current system is functioning well and merely needs protection from outside interference. In reality, it is constraining opportunity and driving up costs.
Preemption is coming, whether we frame it as political or not. The real question is whether we will use it as a pragmatic tool to unfreeze a housing market that is stuck in amber.
Texas has long demonstrated that local initiative, market alignment, and practical governance can coexist. Applying that same pragmatism to zoning reform — including thoughtful state action where appropriate — is not an abandonment of local values.
It is a recognition that the system we inherited is not delivering what Americans want: affordable homes, thriving small businesses, and communities where our kids can grow up, stay, and build their own lives.
If everything we want is illegal, then it’s time to change the law.