"Ronald Utt meets a waiter in a Slidell, Louisiana, Applebee's who moved there from California because it's cheaper. To him, it's another sign that California is going to hell in a handbasket, with median houses selling for $750,000 in some parts, unaffordable to 95 percent of the population and a working class moving out to be replaced by immigrants. Utt then implies that Northern Virginia is going to hell too, and maybe Charlottesville will go along for the ride. But the media is underreporting that median home prices are under $200,000 in markets like Houston, Atlanta, Raleigh and Indianapolis—places where local government isn't tyrannically regulating land use. He also argues that NoVA regulation is driving D.C. employees to live in West Virginia, leading to traffic gridlock as well.

So went a talk Utt gave to the Free Enterprise Forum on December 4, addressing Virginia's housing and transportation policies to an audience of bankers and businessmen, builders and developers. Utt is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who, in the 1980s, helped lead Ronald Reagan's privatization efforts, so it's not surprising that much of the tone was "regulate less and everybody prospers." But that doesn't mean that all of what he said contradicted the policies in place here in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Central Virginia.

Utt: "[Counties are saying] what we welcome are houses on three acres or more that have certain amenities that will in turn attract a certain economic level and others need not apply."

The local application: It can be argued that Albemarle and Charlottesville are in fact doing this with increased proffer expectations and demands for amenities like sidewalks and trails, but they certainly aren't trying to. Both localities push for higher-density development and don't like three-acre lots. Mixed-income is all the rage, and to get that, both localities are tweaking their ordinances to increase affordable housing. The county is trying to forcibly mix this up by demanding affordable housing within projects—and not just cash given in lieu. Still, 15 out of 100 houses hardly a mixed neighborhood makes.

"Housing doesn't cause people, people cause housing. So none of these growth [regulations] have anything to do with changes in the population, changes in the birth rate, so all they do is push the problem somewhere else."

Inarguably, the rising housing costs in Charlottesville and Albemarle have affected the surrounding counties. Growth has gone up significantly this decade in Fluvanna, Orange and Louisa, though that's not as much the case in Buckingham and Nelson counties.

"Everybody rues 'I can't afford to live here, my children can't live here,' when in fact they would not be willing to give up the $200,000 in equity they have accumulated in their house largely as a consequence of artificial limits on building and development."

He's probably dead right about this one." (Will Goldsmith, C-Ville Weekly, December 11, 2007)