Politics & Power Quote by Randy Neugebauer

“Reasonable” is doing the heavy lifting here: it sounds like common sense, but it’s also an ideological filter. Neugebauer’s line isn’t just about lowering rents; it’s about assigning blame. By tying high housing costs to “regulations,” he offers voters a clean villain - government red tape - and a clean fix - “regulatory relief” - while sidestepping messier culprits like land scarcity, investor demand, wage stagnation, or the political unpopularity of denser neighborhoods.

The phrasing is calibrated for a familiar American storyline: markets are naturally efficient, and public rules are the friction. “Reasonable” implies that existing rules are unreasonable by default, but it never specifies which ones: zoning, environmental review, labor standards, building codes, permitting timelines, fair-housing enforcement. That vagueness is strategic. It lets listeners project their own pet grievance onto the claim, while shielding the speaker from having to defend cuts to any particular safeguard.

Context matters. Neugebauer, a Republican congressman from Texas, was speaking from a pro-development, pro-deregulation tradition in a period when housing affordability was increasingly visible but politically contested. The quote reads like a legislative mission statement: frame affordability as a supply-side problem, then make deregulation the morally urgent path to “more Americans” benefiting.

The subtext: if housing is expensive, someone chose that - bureaucrats, planners, maybe even “special interests.” It’s a populist posture with a business-friendly payload, compressing a complicated crisis into a single lever voters can pull at the ballot box.