Back on May 26, and then again in June 7, the blog posts were about a story written by Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic.  One of the main conclusions of the piece and interview with Demsas was that with the way our local government are frequently a number of small jurisdictions scattered around a metropolitan area, each with its own land use authority.  Thus each jurisdiction has a say over what happens within their boundaries, but not really over what happens elsewhere in the region.  To quote Demsas again,

When you restrict a development discussion to a very hyperlocal level, then you can’t have necessary conversations to balance the wants of various interest groups. If you’re dealing with a very rich, white area whose residents are wedded to their exclusionary zoning, they’re always going to resist giving up their space for, for example, homeless housing. And even if these people want homeless housing to exist in general, they have no power to make that occur somewhere else. The only power they have is to exclude it from happening in their own place.

A couple of interesting studies have come out recently which appear to support this contention, likely for a very basic reason:  income and ability to pay for necessary public services in the home town.

The first is a piece on the website The Conversation, which is a website supported by a number of universities around the country and provides a forum for researchers to write about their work.  The piece I’m on, is titled How small wealthy suburbs contribute to regional housing problems, based on research done by Paul G. Lewis at Arizona State and Nicholas J. Marantz at UC Irvine.  Their premise is,

locating new apartments and townhomes near jobs can be difficult. It means building them in existing communities, where small local governments often constrain housing development.

To test their hypothesis, Lewis and Marantz looked a census information from 2008 to 2018, first in California and then nationwide, to see how many new multifamily units were built in jurisdictions with populations over 100,000, and then in those with populations of less that 30,000.  Their conclusions are not really surprising:

Over that span, according to our statistical estimates, a typical neighborhood-size census tract located within a city of 100,000 residents saw the development of 46 more new multifamily units than an otherwise very similar census tract located within a smaller city of 30,000 residents. In other words, smaller cities, which typically are suburban in nature, added far fewer multifamily units.

An extra 46 new apartments might sound like a small number, but it can make a real difference at the neighborhood level. Nearly half the census tracts in our sample – each with around 1,200 to 8,000 residents – gained five or fewer multifamily units.

This is significant, according to the authors, because,

In many of these communities, residents actively participate in local politics to fight increases in density and multifamily housing. As proposals for new housing are deflected away from these small communities, housing either doesn’t get built, thus raising rents by limiting residential supply, or it gets pushed to far-flung exurbs that are distant from most jobs.

Why does this happen?

Why does a municipality’s size matter so much for how many apartments and condos get built? In a word, politics.

Homeowners tend to be the dominant political interest in small suburbs. They may worry that larger or denser residential buildings will decrease their property values, increase traffic or strain local infrastructure. Fears about even minor projects – like the proposal for 16 townhomes near Curry’s estate in Atherton – can get magnified.

To be sure, many homeowners in big cities have similar worries. But in a large, diverse city, anti-growth voices often are counterbalanced by pro-housing interests active in city politics, such as large employers, developers, construction unions or affordable-housing nonprofits.

So are these citizens in smaller communities more prejudiced against “those kinds of people” moving into multifamily housing?  Well, it’s apparently a mixed bag.  It seems to have more to do with class and income distinctions than on racial grounds.

Another writer at The Atlantic, Reihan Salam, writes about this in a story in last week’s issue.  Titled Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires, it’s subtitle says ”Treating suburbanites as hateful snobs will not make them more welcoming of newcomers.” The basic conclusion is this:

the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of the leading philanthropic champions of YIMBYism, commissioned a series of focus groups and surveys, culminating in a report published last year. According to the authors, “Most renters and owners we heard from expressed that they are wary of affordable housing solutions in their neighborhood, citing worries that it will result in crime, noise, litter, illegal dumping, and a general lack of property upkeep.” Moreover, although a large majority of respondents “broadly embraced diversity as a current or aspirational feature of their neighborhood,” they expressed deep discomfort with the idea of having neighbors significantly poorer than them.

Salam says this about the YIMBYs approach:

Convinced of their righteousness, some of the most ardent YIMBYs have adopted a moralistic posture, denouncing recalcitrant homeowners as snobs or bigots, and calling for sweeping legislative measures that would strip local governments of their land-use authority and further circumscribe the ability of landlords to choose their tenants.

While this line of argument is sure to resonate with some number of social-justice progressives, it is unlikely to persuade anxious homeowners and renters who dread the prospect of neighborhood change. Chris Elmendorf, a professor of land-use law at UC Davis, has warned that framing zoning reform as a matter of economic justice is likely to backfire. Today’s affluent suburbanites might resent the suggestion that they’re guilty of racial animus, but they’re entirely comfortable with being accused of colorblind class prejudice.

So what is then driving the suburban communities’ opposition to more affordable housing, even when these same people say it’s a problem and more affordable housing is needed?

Opponents of new housing in their backyard might not be especially enlightened, but they aren’t delusional either. Exclusionary zoning is, as the name suggests, a strategy for improving the local tax base by deploying local land-use regulation to attract rich residents and deter poor ones. Local public services in the U.S. are largely financed by local property taxes and other municipal revenues, such as sales taxes and parking and sewerage fees. One needn’t be a hateful snob to recognize that while some newcomers will generate more in local revenues than they receive in services, others will not.  Indeed, these local fiscal pressures are arguably the central force shaping America’s fragmented metropolitan geography.

This argument echoes that of William Fischel, professor of economics at Dartmouth University (who we had here at our ULUI land use conference a few years ago), and is the author of the book Zoning Rules: The Economics of Land Use Regulation, in which he makes the very argument that much of the suburban opposition to new housing, particularly higher density housing, is based in economic rationale.

Some are proposing making significant changes to how local services are funded, to reduce opposition to moderate income housing.

YIMBYs should work to soften the local fiscal incentives that drive exclusionary zoning in the first place. Zachary Liscow of Yale Law School found that when states take on a larger share of school funding, rich people become more willing to move into poorer jurisdictions, likely because doing so would no longer saddle them with the special burden of supporting services for large numbers of neighbors who pay little in taxes. Consistent with this pattern, he found that centralized school funding led to lower taxes in lower-income municipalities.

Going back to the piece in the Conversation, the authors also recommend possible fiscal incentives, and a more regional approach to addressing housing.

States could also create incentives for local governments to approve more housing. Certain types of state-collected revenues, such as sales taxes or gasoline taxes, could be distributed to local communities based on each community’s count of bedrooms, with additional credit given for affordable units. This type of incentive might lead local officials to view new apartments as improving their community’s bottom line.

Another approach is for state governments to create metro-level mechanisms designed to represent the needs of housing consumers throughout the region.

This is what Jerusalem Demsas noted in her story and interview back in May.  There is a lot to think about in these pieces I’ve referenced.  To see the veracity of what’s being discussed here, just think back onto some of your recent proposals in your community for more affordable, higher density, multifamily housing.  Right?