For Kotkin, excessive top-down planning isn’t just an academic concern—it’s a scourge on the American ideal of community-based self-reliance. In “Restoring Localism,” a sprawling new report from the COU, Kotkin and co-author Wendell Cox identify with grave concern a national trend towards “hyper-centralization,” especially in federal and state policies on poverty, education, and climate change. This is happening in spite what Kotkin views as a popular preference for community-based solutions, an increasingly diverse set of urban and suburban populations, and the public’s documented decline in confidence in government.

“‘[H]yper-centralization’ assumes the superior expertise and wisdom of bureaucracies with the power to regulate,” he writes. “It is tied to the nationalization of politics, an approach that ignores local conditions and rationalizes single solutions for a highly diverse country.” Kotkin wants the country needs to “return” to what he terms “localism,” a governance structure that’s rooted in cohesive groups of people, as opposed to a centralized city, state, and (especially) federal government.

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We spoke with Kotkin about local control, the value of homeownership, and what’s wrong with California.

You write in the report that “the New Urbanism movement is founded on the sound principle of small districts built around ‘the concept of community.’ But its founding principles favor solutions that would require centralized planning around a fixed set of preferred, even mandated, options.” Why does “centralized” planning, when it’s coming at the city level, necessarily contradict your theory of localism?

I’m perfectly OK if the city of Portland decides to ban cars in the middle of the city. A city deciding as a democratic entity on issues like minimum wage, environmental laws, density requirements—whatever those people want—I have no problem with an area deciding to do that. But what I don’t want is some big Washington, D.C. government or regional bureaucracy saying that you have to be a certain way. That’s not in the spirit of self-governance. It’s less about the result of the decisions as about who gets to decide. I think that’s the real issue, and that’s why we get these crazy politics: People feel powerless, they feel like someone is telling them what to do. And that’s not useful.

You do seem to identify a corollary problem at the city level.

Yes. For instance, the city of L.A. is moving in a direction of higher density, which I think is not helpful for most people in L.A. But that’s what the political consensus is. There I think the one big problem is size: When you’re a city like L.A., council districts are like congressional districts, and you need lots of money and support to get elected, and you can’t have grassroots democracy in that kind of system. You just can’t run for city council because your neighbors think you’d be good. It becomes something where only certain players with certain backers can get anywhere.

Are there cities you’d hold up as exemplary models of localism

What I like about Houston is that there’s a clarity of choices for residents. If I go into neighborhood A, there is this specific housing covenant. But if I move to neighborhood B, there is a protection for higher density development. That’s why there are so many planned communities outside of Houston, these gigantic things like the Woodlands and Cinco Ranch, where people say, ‘I want something that is predictable.’ I also like Houston because of the cost. You can be a young person, live inside the 610, go to bars and stay out late, and when you grow up and want a family and establish yourself, you can go to the suburbs and they’re affordable. The Bay Area is a problem, because you can’t buy a house anywhere within 40 miles of San Francisco, unless you have rich parents and you rob the bank. In Houston, there are a lot of choices—different towns with different approaches, many of which aren’t necessarily tied to any sort of city government. You know, I follow opportunities for minorities to buy houses, and it’s clearly better for minorities to buy houses in Texas than a place like New York City or Boston.

You said that California is where you see the most dramatic trend away from this vision of dispersed homeownership. What’s the matter there?

It’s increasingly centralized. It’s increasingly state mandates that dominate what cities can and cannot do. [Governor Jerry] Brown is basically saying no more greenfield development. But if you talk to developers, they say they want to build 20 units to an acre in Rancho Cucamonga but the state says it needs to be 50 to an acre. Otherwise the projects won’t get approvals, you’ll get sued by the state, you might not get transportation funding. Well, the developers can’t sell that! No one is going to move out to the Inland Empire and spend $400-to-$500,000 for a box.

Growth of state control has become pretty extreme in California, and I think we’re going to see more of that in the country in general, where you have housing decisions that should be made at local level being made by the state and the federal level too. You have general erosion of local control.