You may know that city leaders are in the throes of deciding what to do about the lack of affordable housing. The option being debated is "inclusionary zoning," a practice in which developers would have to make a portion of their units affordable.

Anyone who drives around North Raleigh and sees the new developments with homes starting "in the 330s" understands the need for this law. Who can afford those prices? Certainly not the waiters who serve you, the postal worker who brings you mail and a whole lot of other folks whose services you really, really want.

City fathers ought to schedule their next junket (oops, "fact-finding trip") to New Jersey.

The Garden State since 1975 has mandated that each municipality allow for affordable housing. While many credit this law as having done much for those of moderate means, even supporters concede the law has not worked as well as intended.

Reams of copy have been written about the law's "unintended consequences," as a 2001 story in the New York Times put it.

The history is too tangled to recount here, but one fact is, I think, instructive: The Mount Laurel doctrine began and has been shaped by lawsuits.

When the government doesn't solve problems and the courts step in after citizens groups, businesses and others sue, things rarely turn out as well as they would have if the government had acted on its own.