Pick any city in the United States, and it is likely to have renters and potential homeowners who are concerned about rising home prices. Over the past decade, housing costs have risen much faster than inflation, making it challenging for many people to afford homes that both meet their needs and are located where they have access to jobs and essential services. In an effort to stem rising housing costs, state legislators across the country are increasingly proposing bills to spur housing construction by changing land-use regulations and altering other local policies.

Why This Matters

As of 2023, 144 state-level bills had passed that aim to alter land-use regulations. And more than 400 such bills were introduced in the first half of 2025 alone. Even so, many proposed land-use bills fail, in part due to inadequate preparation.

Legislators seeking to encourage housing production thus can benefit from understanding which conditions—such as local demographic and economic trends—are most appropriate for states to intervene in and which successful practices other legislators have used to design and ultimately pass pro-housing bills.

What We Found

In this report, we document the results of a process study and quantitative analysis of state housing and land-use preemption legislation nationwide.

We begin by examining economic theory on when state intervention in policy areas historically subject to local control—such as housing and land use—may be warranted to resolve market failures. We show how local power over zoning, for example, sometimes creates housing monopolies, free-riding, and over-consumption of shared public goods.

Next, we explore the characteristics of several dozen recently proposed bills in states nationwide, leveraging data about bill sponsorship and success rates, and interviewing legislators involved in the bill-promotion process. We found the following:

• Pro-housing and land-use preemption bills are proposed in states with both Democratic and Republican legislative majorities, but recent bills were more frequently sponsored by Democrats.
• Although most bills were disproportionately sponsored by members of just one political party, the partisan nature of these bills was usually not due to housing or land use being single-party issues; rather, it was often the result of in-group and out-group dynamics that factor heavily in today’s polarized political environment. However, respondents overwhelmingly emphasized the value of bipartisan support for their bills.
• States’ leagues of cities or counties hold significant influence over the fate of pro-housing or land-use preemption bills. These organizations’ input can greatly improve the quality of legislation proposed and their opposition can undermine bill success.

Housing bills are subject to the same rules and processes as other types of legislation; lawmakers we interviewed emphasized paying attention to standard bill-passage strategies, including socializing bills early, building strong cross-sector coalitions, avoiding omnibuses unless the reform has strong party support, setting scopes that can be used to bargain away elements in negotiations, and strategically orchestrating committee dynamics. However, we found that pro-housing bills and those that preempted local land-use controls were unique in a few key areas:

• The fault lines dividing pro-housing supporters from opponents do not typically run along party lines. Successful bill-promoting legislators instead said they needed to attend more to representatives’ rural/urban or wealthy/poor constituent bases when assessing who would or would not support (or cosponsor) a bill.
• During bill design and passage, bill sponsors need to strategically negotiate and partner with the leagues of cities among other relevant stakeholders—including constituents, local governments, gubernatorial administrations, environmental organizations, housing advocacy groups, partisan think tanks, industry lobbying groups, interest groups, developers, researchers, homeowners’ associations, and labor unions.
• Sponsors can integrate strategic elements into pro-housing legislation to ease passage, such as by including a pilot program; funding infrastructure or local staff time to support the reform implementation; offering a menu of options for cities to opt into; restricting the bill’s applicability to certain cities or geographies; adding numerical outcome targets or caps; including carrots such as implementation delays or sticks like builders’ remedies; attending to vulnerable populations’ exposure; and pairing housing-production bills with other bills focused on anti-displacement and housing financing.

Even with these helpful strategies, interviewees overwhelmingly argued that housing legislation is very context and content dependent. There is no silver bullet or set of conditions that can guarantee such reforms will pass. Instead, legislators must employ skillful strategies to design, build support for, and pass bills that improve housing production and availability.

How We Did It

We collected a sample of legislation by reviewing 48 recently passed and unpassed state bills from the 2023–24 legislative session that were designed to influence or mandate changes to local land-use policies and regulations to encourage additional housing supply. Through a series of semistructured interviews with 31 legislators and others involved with the legislative process, we explored why bills were proposed, what obstacles they faced, and which characteristics led to their success or failure in the legislature.