The last few weeks I’ve been showing how the housing affordability and land use reform issues have become part of the broader national political frenzy. A few national media pieces the last couple of days have brought home the fact that when you start playing with the big kids, expect to get knocked around by the big kids.
To demonstrate how this issue is akin to the new kids who find themselves in the middle of a circle of the bigger kids, getting pushed around and back and forth, here’s my take on how the left and right, liberal and conservative, sides of the political spectrum are viewing it.
On the right, you would imagine that folks would be all in favor of restraining the power of government to control land use, freeing up landowners and developers to pursue favored projects that would produce lots of housing and maximize profits. What’s been happening, however, is that the conservative side has been seeing the land use reform efforts (I’ll call it pro-YIMBYism) as a move to do away with the sacred large-lot, single-family home and make everyone settle for high density housing and restrictions on auto use (particularly parking).
On the left, it would seem there would be support for enhancing housing variety and thus affordability, more compact communities and broader transportation options. But here also, the view has been skewed to see it as a way to unleash developers to build housing that doesn’t fit in existing neighborhoods, damages the environment and historical context, and lets them earn unwarranted profits.
This dichotomy is explored in several media pieces, starting with an article in The New Republic, Zoning Out: The Case Against YIMBYism by Michael Friedrich, a journalist who writes about culture and cities. He says:
Since around 2014, YIMBYs have been vigorously trying to loosen these and other development constraints through legislation and local activism. Whether their ideas emerged from the depths of right-wing think tanks or from the passions of Bay Area populists like Trauss is a point of some contention. What’s certain is that YIMBY policies satisfied elite consensus, promising workforce housing for tech-sector donors while scratching a deregulatory itch that libertarians had long been trying to reach.
This context is also explored in a piece in The Atlantic last week titled The Biggest Myth About the YIMBY Movement, by Ron Davis, a business consultant who helps products brand and get to market, as well as helping with social causes, including housing affordability. He is currently running for a seat on the Seattle City Council. Davis said:
Over the past year, the conversation about housing affordability went national. Unfortunately, it brought with it all the contentiousness of a local-zoning-board meeting. The Democratic YIMBY movement argues for reducing restrictions on building in order to increase the number of homes and lower housing prices. This has inspired a furious backlash within the liberal coalition. These critics paint the YIMBY vision as a centrist, pro-business scheme that betrays progressive values.
Adding to the confusion over where the push for housing abundance falls on the political spectrum is the fact that YIMBYs often talk about the need to cut “red tape,” such as restrictive zoning and procedural rules, to make building homes easier. This rhetoric, along with the movement’s focus on supply, can, to some ears, evoke Reagan-era trickle-down economics.
Elsewhere, in a story in Reason, Barack Obama Wants Democrats To Be the YIMBY Party. That’s Easier Said Than Done., housing and land use writer Christian Britschi notes that:
Meanwhile, in red and purple states, it’s often Democrats who are the more NIMBY party. A long history of Republican-controlled state governments preempting the liberal policies of blue cities has made Democrats partisan defenders of local control.
What to make of all this? Back to Michael Friedrich:
So the YIMBY story goes: What’s good for the industry is good for the tenant. In recent years, this viewpoint has become enormously influential. … YIMBYtown (2024 conference in Austin) featured both Julián Castro, President Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development, and Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican who appeared virtually at the conference to advocate “red-state YIMBYism.” Young, progressive-minded activists are also in on the action, and the conference held panels not just on wonky stuff like minimum lot size and parking reform but also anti-racism and ending homelessness.
The policy that unites YIMBYs—from orthodox free-marketeers to grassroots social housing boosters—is “upzoning,” in which cities reform local land-use policy to allow for more, and bigger, development.
Friedrich then spends much of the rest of his story demonstrating that zoning reform doesn’t really work.
If only it worked. A decade since the YIMBY movement launched, there’s little serious evidence that its policies are the magic supply-increasing bullet that proponents claim, nor that they meaningfully decrease rents for working families. The YIMBY agenda can’t solve the housing crisis.
The one major study of land-use reforms across the United States shows that, during the three to nine years after a city enacts upzoning and other density-increasing measures, new housing supply increases by less than 1 percent. That increase occurs primarily at the high end of the market, and there’s little evidence that new supply frees up additional low-cost units or makes them cheaper.
Friedrich, however, is not a no-hoper:
But there are solutions: ones that provide the homes we need without ceding power to the profiteers who rigged the system. … Faced with these results, Resnikoff pointed to a wish list of other needed policy changes, like permitting reforms and rule changes to cut developers’ construction costs. But needless to say, upzoning produces nowhere near the dramatic supply spike that YIMBYs promise.
In Davis’ piece, he talks about NIMBYs, who are often conservative, well-off property owners (but the same dynamic seems to apply to liberal, well-off property owners):
Sometimes working together, sometimes working separately, NIMBYs have manipulated a web of local laws and requirements—such as exclusionary zoning, minimum lot sizes, and parking minimums—to reduce production of homes. As with any production cap, the result is higher prices for new residents and higher profits for incumbents, and a transfer of wealth and power from buyers and renters to existing owners.
Because the First Amendment protects private citizens’ right to advocate for government policy, the courts can’t stop homeowners from using their power in this way. The only remedy is political pushback.
There’s so much stuff to contemplate in these three pieces, and honestly it left me rather confused. There does not appear to be any clear alignment on the political spectrum for housing and land use reforms.
I guess this is what life is like in today’s political area, where the big kids play.