The reactionary headline is one that can be easily defended.

The text within the article doesn't do a great job of it.

It's apparently a meme this week to blame "zoning" on prejudice-via-legislation. There was plenty of prejudicial, predatory action against minorities and the poor through redlining, HOAs and other land-based legislation but "zoning" has been about taxation and purpose for the past 50 years or so. Generally if you wanna keep the darkies and the poor out there are easier, cleaner, less actionable ways than putting it in the municipal code.

Most of the issues everyone's upset about right now - a lack of affordable housing - are directly related to:

1) low property taxes, which reinforce holding property

2) low interest rates, which inflate mortgage prices

3) low taxation, which increases the amount of house available to the wealthy and pulls it out of the reach of lower-income buyers

4) high burden for young buyers (principally student loans), which decreases the availability of down payments

5) wealth transfer between generations, which means kids who can get a phat endowment from their parents are more likely to get a house

6) foreign investment, which means a young family of 30-year-olds with 2 kids have to compete against a cash offer from a Chinese REIT.

An increase in legislation? That's related to the legislative process; repealing ordinances is every bit as much work as writing new ones. So old ones stay on the books. An increase in licensure? Standard population pressure stuff. The halcyon era of 1945 had 140 million Americans. We're at 330 million now. Yeah - the 'boomers went to college for the first time. Their parents went to high school for the first time. And their kids - no surprises here - are going to grad school for the first time.

This is archetypal Mandarin shit - the more people in the fight, the greater the arms race.

As to the increase in incarceration, that's that whole "war on drugs" thing which was and is about racism. Look at it this way - LBJ democrats passed civil rights legislation and lost the South as a consequence. In order to maintain hegemony over minorities, privileged white people threw blacks and hispanics in prison. You can try to pin that on the 'boomers, but the Reagans were a couple generations older than that, and so were all their cronies.

The article is just kinda wrong in places, too - weird how they blame incarceration on the "crime wave of the '60s and '70s" when the boost in incarceration happened in the '80s. And stuff like this:

Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence.

It's not a great article. Fundamentally, the 'boomers came of age in an era of nearly unlimited resources and now that the era is over, we're all paying the price.