Can we NIMBY cars instead of houses?

An idea that might be dumb but could be great

I have an idea that I think is probably good but might be terrible. Expressing uncertainty is generally considered bad column-writing, but something I really liked about old-school blogging was the ability to think out loud at greater length than a tweet, so I’m gonna do it.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that regulatory barriers to housing supply are the key problem of housing affordability, some people on the internet continue to dispute this in terms that I find increasingly abstruse and incomprehensible. And when I look at something like Maryland Governor Wesley Moore’s great housing rhetoric paired with just-okay housing policy (here’s some excellent thoughts on how to improve it), I worry that policymakers are starting to take these weird theoretical objections too seriously. I really think people considering the promise and peril of housing reform would do well to log off, ignore the Marxist geographers, and talk to a normal person who doesn’t like development — because that person is going to tell you that he is worried about traffic.

I’m of two minds about this objection.

On the one hand, it’s absurd for a great nation to be kneecapping its ability to enjoy rapid economic growth and rising living standards out of fear of traffic jams. It’s doubly absurd because there is actually a well-known solution to traffic jams — congestion pricing, with the revenue used to offset other taxes that governments are collecting anyway.

On the other hand, the nice thing about the traffic jams objection to more housing is that it’s not grounded in some loopy theoretical account of how the world works. It is, in fact, true that if more homes get built in your town, the traffic will get worse. Even if your town has a really great transit system and all the new housing is built next to train stations, that new housing will generate more than zero additional car trips. That is just a true fact about the world.

So here’s my (probably great, maybe terrible) idea: Why can’t we address the problem straightforwardly? Instead of making it unreasonably expensive and inconvenient to add new housing to in-demand areas, couldn’t we make it expensive and inconvenient to add new cars? Unlike my “congestion pricing everywhere” plan, this is not optimal technocratic policy, but it could be a lot more politically tractable. And if it were widely adopted, I think it could end up leading people to the enlightened conclusion that if drastic deregulation of housing supply were done broadly, it actually wouldn’t generate dramatic amounts of new traffic.

One part of this I feel very confident about, but another I’m more uncertain on.

Cities should manage parking more cynically

Here’s where I have a greater degree of certainty.