Bennett Wooten owns apartment communities. He’s not a Wall Street firm. He’s not a hedge fund buying up neighborhoods. He’s a builder — the kind of person who looks at a piece of land and sees homes for families who need them.
He found a 13.55-acre parcel at 699 Newnan Crossing Bypass in Newnan, Georgia. The land was already zoned General Commercial. He didn’t need a handout. He didn’t ask for a subsidy. He saw workers near jobs and retail with nowhere affordable to live, and he proposed a solution: 272 apartments, 12 townhomes, and 7,500 square feet of new commercial space.
The Planning Commission voted unanimously to deny it. The City Council followed through on February 26, 2026.
The lot is still empty. The workers are still driving.
Think about what just happened. A private citizen, risking his own money, on land he controls, responding to real market demand, was told no. Not because the land was unsafe. Not because the infrastructure would collapse. Because the old rules say commercial zones stay commercial. Because a board of planners decided they knew better than the man writing the checks.
This is not bad luck. This is the rule in most American cities.
The People Paying the Price
Every day that housing isn’t built near jobs, real people bear the cost. Workers lose hours in traffic that never should have existed. Families miss dinners. Kids miss bedtime stories. Paychecks that should be building savings disappear into gas tanks instead.
That’s a conservative argument. Strong families, time at home, money that stays in your pocket instead of your fuel tank — that’s what’s at stake when builders are blocked from putting housing near jobs. This isn’t about forced density, fifteen-minute cities, or whatever urban planners are selling this year. The left will take this same problem and use it to justify telling you where to live, making driving expensive, and designing cities around their preferences instead of yours. That is tyranny dressed up as environmentalism.
The conservative answer is simpler. Let builders build where the market tells them to. When housing prices rise along commercial corridors near job centers, some people choose to live there. Others won’t. Nobody gets forced. But the option exists — and right now it doesn’t, because the zoning rules say no before the builder can even ask the question. Nobody is saying you have to live near work. Some people like the space. Some people like the drive. That’s fine. But right now, in most American cities, you don’t get to choose — because the housing near the jobs was never built. The choice was made for you, by a planning board, before you ever showed up.
What happened in Newnan is that shortage made concrete and personal. The homes were practically ready. The demand was real. Someone was willing to build them. A government board said no, and nobody driving two hours to work got a vote.
A Rule Twisted Beyond Recognition
For most of American history, mixed use wasn’t a policy debate — it was just how towns worked. Shops on the ground floor, families living above them. That’s how Main Street was built. Single-use zoning came along and flipped it, and it was built on a real insight: you probably shouldn’t put apartments above a fat rendering plant or next to heavy industry.
But somewhere along the way the rule stopped distinguishing between a steel mill and a coffee shop.
A commercial zone is a commercial zone. No housing. Doesn’t matter what’s there. That is the logic that left 13 acres of commercially zoned land sitting empty next to jobs and retail in Newnan, Georgia — because a rule written for one problem got applied to everything, forever.
Who Decides
What makes Newnan particularly revealing is this: the owner already had General Commercial zoning. He still had to file a rezoning request just to unlock the right to add residential units on his own property. The board denied him on the grounds that “reasonable economic use” was still possible under the old rules. In other words, you can still use your land for something — just not what you want to use it for.
In Newnan, the median household earns $82,292 a year. Average rent for a one- or two-bedroom apartment ranges from $1,600 to $1,700 a month. A local developer looked at that commercially zoned lot next to jobs and retail and concluded it would pencil out — 272 apartments, 12 townhomes. Maybe he knew the workers personally. Maybe he ran the numbers cold. It doesn’t matter. He was the one who would go bankrupt if he was wrong.
Yet one councilman, Jim Thomasson, responded: “I don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves and have too much supply.”
The councilman believes he knows better than the builder what the market will bear. He doesn’t. The builder knows his market — who’s renting, what they’ll pay, and whether the units will fill. He’s not working from theory. He’d better be right, or he goes broke. If the councilman is wrong, nothing happens to him. We’re letting the wrong person decide — and getting the inevitable consequence: high prices and an empty lot.
That is central planning in a sentence. A board of people who own none of the land, risked none of the capital, and will bear none of the consequences — substituting their judgment for the builder’s. The Progressive Era didn’t die. It just moved to the Planning Commission.
“So if we wait for these guys (government) to decide when they’re (builders) going to build, we’re going to be waiting a long time before we do anything.”
– Councilman Guillaume, the sole city councilman who voted for the project
A Ladder to Climb
There was another argument against the project. More insidious than the first.
The developer, they said, was planning to charge too much in rent. It sounds compassionate. It isn’t. Believe it or not, building more housing — including at the top of the market — lowers the cost of housing for everyone.
Picture a ladder. At the top are the newest, nicest units — brand new construction, fresh paint, the highest rents in town. At the bottom are the oldest, more worn-down units — the ones a young couple or a working family can actually afford. In between is everything else.
When you add a rung at the top, people move up. The family in the mid-range unit moves into the nicer one. Their old place opens up for the family one rung below. That family’s place opens up for someone else. All the way down. Every new unit at the top pulls the whole ladder forward.
Economists have a name for this. They call it filtering. It’s not a theory somebody dreamed up last week. It’s been documented in the housing literature for seventy-five years.
“It is a well-recognized phenomenon that housing tends to move downward in the quality and value scales as it ages. Thus housing that is introduced at or near the top descends gradually through successively lower value strata… Thus, used homes would be released to be passed down to successively lower levels until the effect reached the bottom of the market. This process is popularly referred to as filtering down.”
— Richard Ratcliff, Urban Land Economics (1949)
Now flip it. When you block a rung at the top — when you tell a builder his rents are too high and send him home — the family that would have moved up stays put. The unit below them never opens. The family below that stays put, too. The whole ladder freezes. Nobody moves. Nobody upgrades. Nobody climbs. So the inflationary pressures can’t be fought by increased supply and filtering.
And the family at the bottom of the ladder — the one the council claims to be protecting — gets nothing. No new unit opens for them. No downward pressure on the price they’re paying. They just stay where they are, paying what they’re paying, for a unit that keeps getting older while rents keep going up.
The councilman who voted no thought he was protecting working people from housing they couldn’t afford. What he actually did was make sure the housing they can afford never opened up.
Other States Figured This Out
Florida passed the Live Local Act in 2023 and has strengthened it every year since. The law lets developers bypass zoning restrictions on properties zoned commercial or industrial — no rezoning required, no public hearing, no planning board vote. The state decided that commercial land near jobs is exactly where housing should go, and that local boards had proven they couldn’t be trusted to say yes. The latest update passed the Florida legislature in March 2026.
Florida’s bill isn’t perfect. It requires 40% of units to be priced below market for thirty years — which jams the ladder I just described. Some builders will just walk away when the math doesn’t work and we’ll get less housing then we otherwise might.
I’d rather it didn’t have that provision. But compared to where Florida was before — where commercial land stayed commercial, period — this is a good step toward property rights. A partial win that unlocks thousands of homes beats a pure principle that unlocks none.
Montana passed reforms allowing more housing types by right on commercially zoned land — without requiring owners to beg a board for permission. And here’s what that means in a place like Bozeman or Missoula: every apartment that goes up on a commercial corridor is a house that doesn’t go up on a mountainside. Density in town means open land stays open. The elk stay where the elk belong. The ecosystems that make Montana special don’t get carved into cul-de-sacs.
This is a conservation point, not an environmental one. If you actually care about the land — not just as a talking point, but as a place you hunt and fish and raise your kids near — then housing on commercial corridors isn’t a threat to Montana. It’s how Montana stays Montana.
The pattern is the same everywhere it works: get out of the way, and builders build. Keep the permission system in place, and you get empty lots next to full job centers, workers driving two hours, and families eating dinner at 9pm.
The Bottom Line
Bennett Wooten had the land. He had the plan. He had the market demand. He had the capital. And a government board — people who own nothing, risk nothing, and will answer for nothing — told him no.
The lot sits empty. The workers keep driving. And somewhere in Newnan, a family is eating dinner at 9pm because that’s when dad finally got home.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s blocked.
These rules were written by people. They can be rewritten by people. Other states have done it. The only question is whether we have the will to demand it.
I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream.
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