The Politics of the Unrepresented Future

The Twenty-First Century Road to Housing Act became law in July. There was no celebration of its enactment since it became law without President Trump’s signature. He simply allowed the 10-day waiting period to pass until it happened by default.  

One of the more persistent challenges in public policy is that the people affected by a decision are not always the people represented when that decision is made. Housing may be one of the clearest examples. 

Across the country, communities are wrestling with affordability, housing supply, zoning, permitting and the pace of development. The discussion often becomes ideological very quickly, but there is a more basic question underneath it: how do we make decisions today that fairly account for the people who will need homes tomorrow? 

That is harder than it sounds. 

Decision making 

The people who live in a community today have an understandable interest in how that community grows. They care about schools, roads, infrastructure, traffic, taxes, safety and the character of the place they call home. Those are legitimate concerns, and local governments have an important responsibility to consider them. 

But the people who may want to live there five or 10 years from now do not have the same voice. The young family looking for its first home is not at the zoning hearing. The worker who cannot afford to live near his or her employer is not necessarily represented when a project is delayed. The future homeowner who would have purchased a house that is never built does not appear on anyone's list of stakeholders. 

Yet those individuals ultimately experience the consequences. That imbalance is worth thinking about, particularly for our industry. 

Windows and doors sit near the end of a long chain of decisions that determine whether housing gets built at all. Long before a manufacturer receives an order, land must be available, zoning must permit the project, infrastructure must support it, approvals must be secured, financing must work and the economics of construction must make sense. 

When any part of that process becomes unnecessarily uncertain, expensive or prolonged, the effect eventually reaches manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, builders and consumers. 

No single zoning requirement or permitting decision creates a national housing shortage. In many cases, each individual requirement may have a reasonable purpose. 

The difficulty comes from accumulation. 

One additional review does not seem consequential. Neither does one more design requirement, another hearing, a longer approval period or an added condition of development. But when those requirements multiply across thousands of communities and thousands of projects, their collective impact becomes significant. 

Housing becomes more expensive to produce. Some projects become smaller. Others are delayed. Some are never built. 

That should lead us toward a more practical conversation about regulation. 

The issue is not whether communities should have rules. Of course they should. Building safety matters. Fire protection matters. Energy performance matters. Infrastructure matters. Environmental conditions matter. Thoughtful planning matters. 

The question is whether our rules are clear, predictable and proportionate to the risks they are intended to address. That is an important distinction for the window and door industry as well. 

Certainty and consistency 

WDMA members operate in an environment shaped by building codes, energy codes, product standards, zoning decisions and increasingly complex state and local requirements. We understand the value of regulation when it is tied to measurable performance and a legitimate public objective. 

We also understand what happens when requirements become fragmented, duplicative or disconnected from demonstrated outcomes. 

Housing policy may benefit from the same principle we frequently advocate elsewhere: focus on performance rather than prescription. 

Communities should be able to establish reasonable expectations for safety, infrastructure and development. But once those expectations are clearly defined and satisfied, there should also be a reasonable path toward approval. 

Certainty has value. So does consistency. 

And so does recognizing that the cumulative cost of regulation eventually shows up somewhere—often in the price paid by the person trying to buy or rent a home. 

Policy’s considerations 

There is another dimension to this conversation that deserves attention. Housing policy naturally gives considerable weight to people who already live in a community. Perhaps the next generation of policy should also give greater consideration to those who are trying to enter it. That does not require choosing between existing residents and future residents. It requires recognizing both. 

We will not solve the nation's housing affordability challenge through any single policy change, and certainly not through zoning reform alone. Land costs, labor availability, financing, material costs and broader economic conditions all matter. But our decision-making systems matter too. 

The question worth asking is whether they are designed only around the interests and concerns we can see today, or whether they also leave room for the people and communities we are trying to build for tomorrow. 

For an industry whose products literally frame the places where people live, that seems like a conversation worth having.