Political lessons from ten nations about building affordable, low-carbon neighborhoods.

“If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.”

This oft-repeated maxim was probably not expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, despite Internet claims to the contrary. (Experts at the Eisenhower Presidential Library have never found evidence he said it.)

Still, it’s wise counsel: expanding the scope of a problem can make new solutions possible. Confronting French beaches so fortified with German armaments that they seemed impregnable, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower launched a D-Day invasion that attacked five beaches at once—an operation the scale of which dwarfed all previous military landings. Attacking one beach was too hard, but when the problem was redefined as landing simultaneously on five, military planners began imagining the scale of engineering and force concentrations that would be needed.

Later, as president, confronted with a balkanized and piecemeal US highway system and a reluctant Congress, Eisenhower didn’t whittle down his proposal: he enlarged it. He proposed an interstate highway system so vast that it would not only speed travel but serve national defense needs, including evacuating cities in an age of nuclear weapons. If the problem was just transportation, it was politically unsolvable. If it was both transportation and military preparedness, the stakes were high enough to mobilize a commensurate response.

Just so, enlarging the problem of residential lockdown from a local housing issue to a state or national issue—elevating it to higher levels of government—is the cutting edge of pro-housing political strategy in recent years in North America. It’s an Eisenhower-like strategy. Starting in California and then in Oregon and a string of other states, advocates of abundant housing have elevated their case for upzoning and other pro-housing reforms from city halls to state capitols. Sightline has been prominent among them. Some advocates, including Sightline again, have escalated further, to the national level.

The political theory behind this strategy is that by taking the campaign to a larger arena, advocates can draw in a vast and rarely assembled coalition: displaced and would-be urban residents, affordable housing providers, major employers and unions, chambers of commerce and economic development agencies, and advocates for everything from racial and social justice to economic opportunity to climate sense to private property rights to transit improvement to children’s health to homelessness services.

These interests have a lot to gain from abundant housing, but they lack enough incentive to expend political effort in thousands of jurisdictions in countless local land-use planning processes. Only the obstructionists are widely distributed enough to engage in that conventional process. By enlarging the fight, pro-housing forces can dilute the excess influence that these housing-shortage deniers and home-building obstructionists hold in city politics.

TWO LESSONS

This political theory is, in fact, one of the central tenets of American political scholarship from the Eisenhower era: that solutions to hard political problems—solutions that advance the broad public interest—are more likely to emerge from larger arenas, from higher levels of government, where the power of narrow, private interests is watered down by the profusion of other such interests. Cascadian political scientist Grant McConnell wrote perhaps the classic articulation of this mid-twentieth century view that national government is more likely to solve hard problems well than are state or local governments. Small might be beautiful, went the reasoning, but it could also be parochial, backwards, and oligarchic.

This logic fits the problem of housing well: putting much more at stake, all at once, in one giant fight, rather than piece by piece in hundreds of separate local ones, might interrupt the trench warfare that has made abundant housing an unattainab...