Yes, you read that correctly. From a staff editorial in Monday's New York Times embracing a supply-side approach to housing affordability:
More market-rate development is a worthy goal in its own right, because middle-income households increasingly are unable to afford housing in the metropolitan areas where economic opportunity is concentrated. Expanding the supply of housing also helps low-income families who might otherwise find themselves priced out of their apartments.
This embrace of deregulation merits particular praise because the states most resistant to allowing housing construction are the strongholds of the Democratic Party, in the Northeast and along the Pacific Coast, and the most resistant voters are the wealthy residents of those states who provide so much of the funding for Democratic presidential campaigns.
The Times is waddling in behind the Wall Street Journal, which, as I noted here on June 20, editorialized that President Trump "could put Democrats on the spot for high housing prices and homelessness by talking about restrictive zoning for elites and high property taxes."
The Times editorial reports that on June 25, President Trump issued an executive order "establishing a White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing."
This, like airline deregulation, has the potential to be such a good idea that it transcends the usual partisan political boundaries, which is part of the reason it has been a long-running theme around here.