A Dad’s First Duty

How We Made the American Dream Illegal to Build

There’s a moment every dad knows.

We’ve got someone who depends on us, usually multiple someones. A wife, a kid, a family in the making. There’s a still small voice in the back of our monkey brains asking, “Can I put a roof over their heads? Can I feed them? Can I protect them?”

That’s the oldest duty. Older than any law or philosophy we’ve written down. Before savings accounts, calendars, or career ladders, before anything else, a man provides food, protection, and shelter. It’s what fathers have done since the beginning of time, in every culture that survived long enough to have a culture.

The duty to provide stable shelter feels increasingly impossible for millions of American men to fulfill.

Not because they’re lazy. Not because they’ve made bad decisions. But because somewhere between their grandfather’s generation and theirs, we made it illegal to build the American Dream.

The Fatal Conceit

If you’ve read Hayek, you understand the knowledge problem. You already know the argument, but let me just show you where it lands.

In 1924, Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department convened a panel of expert planners and handed states a model zoning law. Their theory was that trained experts, using the tools of science and rational management, could design better neighborhoods than the people who lived in them. They could decide what got built, where, how dense, how tall, the building materials, the paint color, the kind of shrubs, and how many parking spaces. Even what your screen door looked like.

They called it rational land use planning.

Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

It spread fast. Nineteen states had adopted it by 1926. By the 1930s, zoning covered 70% of the American population. LBJ’s Great Society wired it into federal policy through HUD dollars, funding any local government willing to adopt a (very communist-sounding) five-year land-use plan.

The results were predictable. Once you give a planning commission the power to approve or deny what a property owner builds, the people who already own seize power over the process. They have every incentive to use the machinery of local government to protect what they’ve got, so they make sure no duplex, no starter home, and no apartment building goes up nearby.

A classic bootlegger and baptist problem. The planners provide the moral cover, and the incumbent homeowners collect the benefits.

The intentions, at the top, are what the Progressives have always claimed: clean cities, healthy kids, and orderly “fairness.” A supposedly scientific alternative to the supposed chaos of freedom.

The results are the reality we live with today.

The Reality of the System

The dysfunction of the process is best understood from the developer’s perspective.

Say you want to build a starter home to rent or sell that’ll be affordable at the median income in your state.

First, zoning says you can’t build that type on that lot. Actually, around 75% of the lots in your city.

You find a lot that allows it. But the minimum lot size rules say the unit design is too small. It’s not single-family zoning, but other rules force you to build larger units and push your costs beyond affordability.

You find a place without minimum lot size requirements, but parking minimums require two spaces per unit, whether or not the residents own cars, and now the lot geometry doesn’t work.

You figure out a redesign that satisfies the rules, but now building code materials requirements price you out of affordability once again. They require the newest, fanciest insulation. You weren’t planning on putting in asbestos or anything, but the new stuff is three times as expensive as the old. Sure, it’s more energy efficient, but it’s also more expensive.

Each rule has a “justification.” But put together, they cut the bottom rungs of the ladder to homeownership, the one your grandfather climbed.

The system still works pretty well for the generation born into its flowering. Baby Boomers now make up 42% of all home buyers in America and more than half are paying cash. This year, we reached a depressing new milestone: the median age of homebuyers is the highest it’s ever been. Millennials, the largest generation in the country, are now entering their 40s. They dropped from 38% to 29% of all buyers in a single year. At every comparable age, they’ve owned homes at significantly lower rates than Boomers did, less than two-thirds as much, according to Federal Reserve data.

Buying a home gets most of the attention, but it isn’t any better if you stay renting. Half of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage. Among Gen Z, it’s two-thirds. Since 1960, the share of Americans spending more than 30% of their income on housing has roughly doubled.

Like all social phenomena, the housing supply crisis is worst at the bottom of the income ladder. If you’re renting on under $30,000 a year in income, after you pay rent, you have an average of $250 left for food, transportation, medicine, emergencies, and a future. Most months, it isn’t close.

Buying is out of reach. Renting is crushing the family budget. Pick your poison.

Planning Has Consequences

The economic figures are damning, but housing unaffordability reaches deep into social outcomes as well.

Financial distress is consistently one of the strongest predictors of divorce. A meta-analysis of 48 separate research papers found that children from divorced homes are roughly twice as likely to end up involved in crime, one of the most consistent findings in the social sciences.

Even if the economic devastation weren’t bad enough, housing costs push marriage further out of reach and delay the choice to have children. Couples calculate the expense of raising a kid and say, “Not yet.” They keep saying it until female biology makes the final decision. I suspect it’s one of the drivers behind the now shockingly low birthrate of 1.6 per woman in the United States. We need 2.1 to replace ourselves. We are a civilization slowly deciding not to exist.

Of course, housing isn’t the only factor. Individual choices matter too. These things are never mono-causal. But we must also consider the systems at play here, especially when those systems have been imposed on us by governments.

To put a point on it: how many men in their late 20s and 30s are delaying becoming fathers because housing is so far out of reach? There are fewer dads, and in the not-so-distant future, there will be no America to save.

We Don’t Need a Miracle

When you repeal the progressive planning regime, you don’t get anarchy. You enable property rights.

Property rights aren’t a policy preference. They’re a universal human constant, and their strong protection is one of the most distinctive features of the Western tradition. The premise of the American founding, an idea we take further than any other society, is that the individual has rights which precede the government.

Not granted by it. Not revocable by a planning commission. Natural laws and natural rights. The right to your labor, your land, and what you build from both.

The progressive planning ideology that built the zoning system starts from the opposite premise: that your land, in some meaningful sense, belongs to the collective. That the community has a legitimate authority to override your choices about your own property, for the good of the neighborhood, the plan, the approved vision of what cities should be, even if there are no foreseeable third-party effects.

That is the fatal conceit Hayek diagnosed. And in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs showed us the layered, unpredictable, gloriously unplanned street life that it destroys. The corner store. The mixed block. The neighborhood that grew into itself over decades because people were free to build what they needed.

With one zoning code at a time, over a hundred years, we planned it all out of existence. We can’t look at the father struggling to keep a roof over his family’s head as a failure any more than we would look at the famine under Mao’s Great Leap Forward and blame the farmers.

Tokyo is the largest city on earth and one of the most affordable in the developed world. Japan has national zoning standards that make it relatively easy to build almost anywhere. Supply responds to demand. Prices stay reasonable. It’s also famously clean, dense, and orderly, not the hellscape the planning class insists a low-barrier-to-entry system produces.

Houston never had zoning in the way the rest of America does. When prices rose, property owners responded by building. No two-year permitting process. No planning commission. Houston’s metro area absorbed nearly 200,000 new residents in 2024 and remains the most affordable major metro in America.

In my home state of Montana, we proved reform can be done in a red state. In 2023 and 2025, we removed the most restrictive zoning barriers in the state and restored property owners’ right to build on their own land. We’re building like crazy. Nothing collapsed. The media was so startled that they called it the “Montana Miracle.” All we did was get out of the way.

That looks like a miracle after fifty years of central planning.

Build the Dream

Every week, my new publication Build The Dream traces what a century of scientific progressivism has cost us in housing, family formation, and communities worth passing down. The history of how the permission system was built. The policy changes that can tear it down. The politicians blocking the way—named, on the record, accountable.

The housing crisis is a philosophical failure before it’s a policy failure. The idea that experts should decide what gets built is the idea that broke the system. The restoration is just as philosophical: property rights applied honestly to the most basic human need.

A man should be able to build a home for his family. He should be able to afford rent and medicine for his kids. That shouldn’t require a permit, a hearing, a planning commission, and a neighbor’s approval.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

Let’s build it.