My wife works in affordable housing. When she tells me about the families that end up moving into one of the units she develops, they usually weren't homeless before, but they often lived (and continue to live) in insufficient housing -- things like 5 person families in a one-bedroom apartment. Plus other negative factors (crime-ridden neighborhoods, lots of deferred maintenance on their units, etc. In one memorable case, no bathrooms in the unit. Safety code violations).
So there's a ladder, right? At one end, you have people who literally live on the street in cardboard boxes. One tiny step up from that, people who couch-surf or live in their cars. Another step up, people who live in extremely cramped or otherwise heavily compromised unit. Then you have people who aren't like four to a bedroom, but still live in very small units that have significant compromises. Then people who are like "well, the kids share a bedroom and the kitchen is a postage stamp." And so forth and so on, up to the level of "we have a beautiful large house with a big yard and nice views and..."
I think there's an understandable impulse to draw a line somewhere on that ladder and say, "Well, above this line, it's not really a problem and we don't care if people at that rung want to be a rung higher." And so you get lots of progressives who only want to talk about "affordable" housing to some definition of affordable, or who only want to talk about homelessness. But I think it's really important to see that crowded higher rungs put pressure on lower rungs.
My family is very fortunate when it comes to income. We have a nice house, nobody shares rooms, etc. But it's still a house that, when I was a kid, I would have associated with someone significantly lower income than we actually are -- because we live in the Bay Area and housing is ultra expensive. I'm not saying anyone should be crying about my life -- my house is nice. But because I bought this house for $1.6M, someone who has a six figure income, but not as nice a six figure income as I do is staying in a starter house, maybe a two bedroom. And you shouldn't cry for them either. But because they're in that house, someone else is staying in a condo. And there's nothing wrong with condos. But because that person is staying in a condo, someone else is in an apartment. And that means that someone else is in a smaller, dingier apartment where they're sharing rooms. And because that apartment is not available, someone else is crammed like sardines in a tiny little apartment.
Which all seems relatively obvious, but god, it doesn't seem to be very obvious to a lot of people.
I don't think any of this is wrong, but I think some left-liberals really do get turned off by this line of thinking because it "smells" to them like trickle-down economics. They see the same argument as yours in "if you lower taxes on the rich; they'll spend more at small businesses, enriching everyone." How do you respond to this sort of critique?
I mean, I'm I think way to the right of the median here, so you may not love my answer, but the basics are:
1. People lean heavily into the idea that new housing gets built that's "luxury" or "for the rich," but you have to understand that that's not really true. Developers like to build dense housing. The market we're unlocking is not "six bedroom manors with an acre of grounds around them," it's like "relatively spacious two and three bedroom apartments/condos with granite counters." It's serving a mass audience that happens to be a bit wealthier than average.
So to the extent that it does "trickle down," it doesn't have far to go. If we want to use a tax break analogy, we aren't talking about lowering taxes on the ultra wealthy 1%, we're talking about lowering taxes on the top 20% or so.
2. The more we remove barriers, the further downmarket we go. If you can only build housing for a few thousand people a year, you fight for the richest few thousand people in the city. But if you can build housing for 10,000 people or 20,000 people instead of 5,000 people, well, you're gonna have to start broadening the appeal of your new units. Right now, the restrictive policies actually *encourage* the building of only luxury housing. In the same way that when Tesla started making cars, it made $100k cars. Then when it got bigger, it started making $60k cars. Then when it got bigger yet, it started making $40k cars, and if it gets bigger yet we'll expect it to make $20k cars. There just are only so many $100k cars you can sell.
3. It's actually good that people can, in say 2030 buy housing that had all the amenities that a well-off person would expect in 2020. Housing is a durable good! The median person gets a nicer apartment if the apartment was originally built for a high-end audience.
4. The actual big one: the market is much better at meeting the demand of a complex market like housing. We just don't want big centralized government bureaucracies deciding How We All Should Live and stamping out a bunch of units, when the market is perfectly capable of doing a more nuanced job here. The government should only intervene at the very low end where it actually needs to.
you are totally right but i think its point "4" that is the doozy. hard to get lefties to agree that the market is good at blablabla. i think good pro-YIMBY propaganda would maybe center on vilifying preserve the neighborhood mentality. a bunch of super rich or privileged or whatever people want west village to stay super cute and if all the workers at the boutiques and restauraunts and whatnot have to live in a different state or whatever so be it. uglier more inclusive neighborhoods with high rises, that's what we want. and yes some developers will make money but so will some super wealthy penthouse owners lose quite a lot don't worry rich-people-haters ferris bueller and whatshername from sex and the city (didn't they flip condos or something at some point) are going to lose lots of money if you YIMBY a little. in short YIMBYs need better propaganda.
you are totally right but i think its point "4" that is the doozy. hard to get lefties to agree that the market is good at blablabla. i think good pro-YIMBY propaganda would maybe center on vilifying preserve the neighborhood mentality. a bunch of super rich or privileged or whatever people want west village to stay super cute and if all the workers at the boutiques and restauraunts and whatnot have to live in a different state or whatever so be it. uglier more inclusive neighborhoods with high rises, that's what we want. and yes some developers will make money but so will some super wealthy penthouse owners lose quite a lot don't worry rich-people-haters ferris bueller and whatshername from sex and the city (didn't they flip condos or something at some point) are going to lose lots of money if you YIMBY a little. in short YIMBYs need better propaganda.
Matt Y. said the issue is that the number one thing that is hard to get approved is the number of unites you build fewer unites and only rich unites. He gave the example of quotas on cars in the 80's and that is when Toyota made Lexus brand because if we can only sell a few then we need to sell nice ones.
Excellent description of "filtering" and its absence. If more market-rate housing were available at all levels, the less desirable housing would filter down to the people now inadequately housed in crammed apartments, their cars or someone else's couch.
My apologies for bringing partisanship into one of the first comments, but I was struck by the top 5 states for homelessness: New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. All deep blue, controlled by Democratic majorities. As one of the Matt's conservative readers, I find myself questioning my own pre-existing beliefs and biases in the face of some of his compelling arguments. I've even moved left on a few issues! I wonder if this happens for left-leaners on a topic like this?
NIMBYism is inherently conservative – they are standing athwart their neighborhoods yelling "stop". Even if it is practiced by otherwise liberal people who have no problem hanging a "black lives matter" sign next to a "preserve our neighborhood" one.
Some parts YIMBYism could be called conservative or at least libertarian - reduce regulation and let the market decide what to build – but wanting cities to progress is something a lot of us consider progressive.
Some of the most racist, nastiest comments I have ever heard in public forums came from retired ex-hippies in SF and Berkeley. Those areas are not right wing, but there is certainly a subset that are. They wear the symbols of being progressive (BLM sign, etc) - because those don't make parking spaces harder to find or represent people they don't like in line at their local coffee shop.
YIMBYs, at least, are very motivated by actual fairness concerns. People assume we are developer shills because - for a lot of people, it goes beyond their mental model that you could possibly advocate for something you personally would not benefit from.
i think the way to talk about it is that you gotta serve somebody and it might be the developer or it might be the investors that own expensive units in west village but you gotta serve somebody. and you might be giving in to developer interest but the idea is that 25 million dollar penthouse needs to come down to 15 million so that older condo down the street goes from 3 mill to 1.5 mill so that the rent a few block up goes from 5000 to 3000 so that at least out in freaking bed stuy the rent gets back down to a thousand or less. don't preserve west village, de-gentrify bed-stuy. i am literally the worst propagandist in history i will see my way out.
I was thinking more along the lines of questioning things like "developers bad, market solutions don't work, raising the minimum wage to $15/hr doesn't have bad effects on extremely low-skilled worker's opportunities, eliminating enforcement of low-level drug possession, closing down psych hospitals, environmental regulations that make building hard, gentrification is bad" rather than "NIMBY's are closet conservatives".
It's not really about specific things. I came to SlowBoring because I was already questioning a lot of things that liberals conventionally believe, all the things you mention. I’m responding more to the moralistic, contemptuous, and ultimately coercive social tone on the Left, because I know from history what it leads to in terms of disastrous policy for the rest of us. What I’m seeing is a repeat of the worst excesses of the Sixties, only this time as farce.
Here I have found a place that has a more thoughtful tone, where questions that I already had can be explored and deepened in a civilized fashion. I’ve thought more and have been more open-minded about policing, about market housing policy, about immigration, and about electoral politics since I came here, and can think with more integrity about all these things thanks to exposure to conservative ideas in a non-partisan way. It hasn’t turned me into a conservative but makes it easier for me to engage with conservative ways of thinking. And I think that’s essential because our country is in a mess and enough people need to be pulling together to get us out of it. We need to understand each other.
Yeah I'd say my beliefs are pretty uniformly progressive but not left-wing, depending on what you consider that to mean. As some others say, I am of the belief that YIMBY really should be considered progressive, but I guess it's not leftist. My questioning of the left is really centered on settling on single ideas, and then assuming no other system is acceptable. Many left-leaning people scoff at the idea of some sort of highly regulated private healthcare like many European systems rather than M4A. Getting to zero ghg emissions through private contracts rather than huge public employment is not okay. Basically, I agree with the good leftie ideas, and disagree with the bad ones like any true Slow Boring subscriber with all the objectively best beliefs.
I personally think the causality runs the other way. It’s not that democratic constituencies create urbanization-related social problems- it’s that urbanization creates social problems that conservatives doesn’t have a lot of answers for, and that drives urbanized populations towards liberalism.
As mentioned, the whole concept of NIMBYism is deeply conservative, and it seems clear that it drives a whole bunch of problems in cities! The fact that people who believe in it can also have BLM signs in their yard is a little annoying, but hey, people are inconsistent sometimes.
I suspect a lot of Yglesias readers are left-wing but willing to question bits and pieces of what's currently in vogue. That attitude is going to be more naturally open to YIMBYism.
I think coding NIMBYism as conservative is important precisely because this site's audience is niche and the average liberal doesn't want to stray far from the current consensus. Until it's widely accepted as 'the side Donald Trump is on' it's not seen as embarrassing for good normie liberals to fight housing development. You can see hints of this happening in the Bay Area - cities quickly shifting views on the issue as soon as the narrative became 'single family housing zoning is racist'.
I don't know that it's exactly conservative - I think there is a real desire to see progress and social change, just at someone *else's* expense. Tax someone richer than you to help the poor, build affordable housing but put it somewhere else, etc. From an individual family's perspective this would be a great deal - help others without it costing you anything! It's more of a "stingy liberalism" than actual conservatism, because it's not a desire to keep things the way they are so much as offload the cost of change onto someone else.
I'll give you an example. A new building was going up in my neighborhood and my very liberal environmentalist friend said, "Ugh, why are they building that." With an air of disgust." And I said, "Well, in order to reduce our carbon footprint they want to people to be able to live closer to work." "Oh." she said reluctantly.
I don't really understand the core of it. On an intellectual level they understand the need. But somehow to them "environmentalism" is some kind of utopia without any tradeoffs... or something. As I said I don't really get it.
Reading Matt's takes on housing has definitely helped me appreciate free-market economics more. NIMBYism, some aspects of wokeism, and some reactions to One Billion Americans have made me more sceptical of some left-wing views.
The not-totally-fair pro-progressive take on this is that the coastal places have all the right jobs policies, and so the problems are showing up in the housing. The fact that some places like Texas are able to do decently on the jobs front while not having the same housing problem is a natural rejoinder to this, though I think there is still some discussion to be had about whether Texas is actually starting to get the housing problem in its cities (it certainly has it in Austin, though I would argue that the issue in Austin is that it's bad old urban planning means the cul-de-sacs start a mile from downtown, while Houston and Dallas still have miles of parking craters that are being filled in).
i think it is really hard to get people to believe that "developers are bad" is a bad take, and that public housing is a bad idea, and that some combination of public housing and increasing people's welfare aren't the right take on this issue. my just-build-some-public-housing-and-increase-welfare friends and family are very far from accepting or would never accept letting a real estate developer (aka trump) make millions building a skyscraper in a beautiful, trendy, "weird" neighborhood and ruin it. it hurts their hearts and they think about politics and economics with their hearts not their heads and there is plenty of propaganda geared to them for that.
I don't want to go too far into saying that all things partisan are to blame, since there are a lot of non-partisan, practical realities that create both homelessness and expensive barriers to solving it. But I will note that there is a 'bipartisan' consensus, or so to speak, that people should be able to live in single family homes and work close enough to them to make them practical.
This is speculative, but I have to imagine that the desire not to see the neighborhood you grew up in turn into a bunch of high-rise apartment buildings crosses party lines. Even so, the forces against that sort of development are ultimately contributing to housing shortages.
Having now lived in Los Angeles for 17 years, you start to notice a huge undercurrent of conservatism underneath the Blue State facade. Remember, this is the state of the Third Rail of Prop 13. The notion of "you can't change anything" is very strong here.
California is no different from any Red State, in that it built a sprawling, car-centric infrastructure - it just grew fast enough to run out of space sooner. Unfortunately, that undercurrent prevents real solutions to the problem, because no one is willing to change anything.
It doesn't help that many environmental laws (like CEQA) have been weaponized in the service of the NIMBY cause. Ironically, those protections prevent good building instead of enabling them.
Ultimately, I don't think it's a problem with left-wing ideology, so much as a desire to throw tax money at problems and simultaneously prevent meaningful, local change. That's a conservative sentiment, not a progressive one.
just wanting to take poor or homeless people and give them a home is such a powerful sentiment i think it is so hard to counteract even in people who are well-meaning, but then like you say people who own property do not want to see their capital decline and that is conservative whether the rest of your politics is left or right. so you can't say that you have to shroud it in anti-developer propaganda and preserve the character of the neighborhood propaganda and deregulation is yucky propaganda. and the problem is, which is frustrating for YIMBYs, this propaganda is effective and appealing and people battle this with focusing on the numbers but i don't think there is good pro-YIMBY propaganda that i've seen just rational arguments.
I was a bit NIMBY by default, but Matt has definitely made me reevaluate my priors. For example, my assumption that building slightly higher density housing a mile down the road would lower the value of my house.
As a Progressive person politically that's become a bit obsessed with housing and zoning, it becomes clear how easily some ideas for housing reform (ie. "make it legal to build apartments" = "DEREGULATION!", or "we should eliminated redundant construction expenses to make housing / transportation cheaper" = "UNIONS ARE BAD AND MAKING CONSTRUCTION COST PROHIBATIVE!") could *easily* be twisted by those further to the Left of you into basically being "Republican talking points!!!"... So, yeah, sorta
dude i agree how can you convince a new yorker that between trump trying to build a new tower and the folks that live in the neighborhood and hate high rises, that trump is in the right and the neighborhood normies are the bad guy? the arguments matt makes are great but the picture in people's heads are just hard to overcome.
I think at least part of what's going on there is that homelessness has an unfortunate property where you get punished for doing a good job at it.
If a place provides services for homeless people, those services could well be legitimately rehabilitative - i.e. they could be helping individual people they affect get back on their feet and reducing the national stock of destitute people. However, since those programs kind of by definition make it easier to be homeless in that city, homeless people as rational agents are going to try to go there. Thus, even if [insert blue city here] is improving homelessness overall, the actual number of homeless people *in that city* will paradoxically increase.
As an extreme alternate example, if you scrapped all homeless programs and encouraged your police force to torture and harass them, it's likely your homeless problem would get "better" as people fled to adjacent cities. But it's a zero sum game. You've just dumped part of the problem on someone else.
The game theory here just sucks for state and city level solutions.
I suspect whether panhandling works well is much more important to where the homeless decide to live and I’d wager the overwhelming factor is where they lived when they became homeless.
I think that explains a lot of the gap between cities and rural or suburban areas (density of people is probably a big factor in panhandling success) but explains less of the gap between blue and red cities.
It's not just that homeowners don't want new housing built, though, it's that they explicitly don't want housing prices to fall. And they tend to be more engaged in local politics than renters, so politicians are incentivized to listen to them and support pseudo-econ tall tales about how Nimbyism is really just fighting gentrification/racism/Manhattanization/etc.
How do you cut through that and get the politically engaged to want to build when if it has its intended effect it really will cut into their net worth?
I think the net worth argument is a distraction. The real issue is quality of life and the desire not to be displaced from their home places. People will get crazy about that. They don’t respond to the financial issue because that’s not the important issue.
YIMBY development will change the quality of life in low-density areas, and the key thing is that there is no trust that this will be for the better. Even careful, localized densification around the train station, or missing-middle development in a walkable urban neighborhood, brings up the whole question of losing control of the situation. “If there, why not on my block?” People don’t want to let the camel’s nose under the tent. They will fight like hell against that. This is a mathematical certainty. How do you start to build trust, when the approach is one of moralism and condemnation of normal human instincts?
I live in a liberal City neighborhood. I am a liberal and an urban planner and knowledgeable and believe in more housing abundance. Nevertheless I will likely show up at meetings and write my representatives to resist the upzoning and low-income housing being proposed for my neighborhood. My neighborhood is already as dense as any outside of Manhattan, it works for me, it’s fine the way it is (except around the edges). Why should I suffer when there are vast redevelopable areas in the City built up at low density near transit lines, within a mile or two of my house? But of course those areas are also filled with people for whom their neighborhood also works. This kind of development pits people against each other in the most direct way. It’s inevitable, and very difficult to manage.
The whole message from the City and the mayoral candidates is “privileged people are immoral and have had it too good and now need to take their medicine.” Given the state of the city at this moment, there is a clearly perceptible racial edge to this which makes this proposition even more distasteful. Before the planners even get here to make their case, it is probably *already* too late for persuasion. This is how the left ruins the possibility for good.
Too much local control does not always produce the best overall results, especially on issues like land use. Most changes, even those for the greater good, will gore somebody's ox, and the only way to prevent those people from stopping everything is for decisions to be made with a little more distance and broader perspective.
I think the federal government is too far away for most of this, but there is a real need for rejuvenation of State-level governance.
Local control at the neighborhood level is the ultimate place where tyranny of the local majority can occur. At some level, it is somewhat fascinating, as it is the level of government where a mediocre and deeply corruptible politician can ply their craft (think condo board head who steers maintenance contracts to their friends, corrupt HOAs, etc).
At least at higher levels of govt (county, state) there are more checks and balances against a lot of the worst abuses.
It surprises me that people haven't figured the connection between hyper-local control and corruption.
You’ve got a good point. My dad was head of his HOA. He always made sure that my kids and their friends could have (pretty expensive) summer pool passes, all for free!
Yup - it's not usually corruption at the level that will even make the local news. Just small things like what you describe. Here in SF, it is often incumbent business owners doing micro-astroturf campaigns to stop competitors from moving in, but same dynamic applies.
When I lived in Chicago, I had a friend who ran a small theatre. In order to get anything done on his property, he noted it was local custom just to call the local Alderman and get the approved vendor who would make sure the appropriate people got paid off. It was barely hidden - even in the 2000s.
It's called "counselmanic prerogative" in Philadelphia, which is trending in the direction of having as many zoning codes as council districts. And it has been a corruption problem.
In some ways the scale of potential corruption goes up the further up the chain of government you go. Look at the complexity of the federal tax code vs your local sales tax. There's just so much more room for special interest carve outs.
I would agree that, from a scale standpoint, it certainly does. Local corruption is small scale and almost trivially easy to get away with. Corruption at higher levels has stronger controls / more governance - but also a much higher "blast radius" when it does happen.
That said, I suppose it depends on how you define corruption. There may be special interest carve outs. But those are a consequence of legal but ethically questionable processes. If you make lobbying for a carve out and receiving the benefit in your formal definition of corruption, I would agree. My POV is both are bad, but the local stuff you could argue has far more impact on day to day life for many ppl.
I can see where you are coming from. This is the argument of the Neighbourhood Defenders literature - we know that house prices are not what drives Nimby opposition to development. Rather, it's a desire to monopolise local amenities. And the way urban planning works at the moment (concentrating pockets of high density redevelopment instead of more gentle redevelopment across the entire urban area https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/pockets-of-dense-construction-in-a-dormant-suburban-interior), vindicates the Nimbys for the reason you've set out.
This to me says that the argument needs to be about changing the rules overall, so that every part of an urban area can make a small contribution to new housing which when added up is quite large. This requires the state government to be a tough referee which writes the zoning code to be flexible and have lots of by-right provisions and takes local governments to task to make sure it is done properly. We can't get systemic change without systemic reform, and trying to tell voters one-by-one that "this one big development right next door to you will make the housing crisis better" is unconvincing even if econometrically true.
“Monopolize urban amenities” is a pretty harsh and judgmental way to put it. I would certainly resist with all my powers someone who came to me describing the proposition like that. If development is allowed to run rampant, those urban amenities will disappear. New buildings displace neighborhood businesses and have new storefronts at high rents, that get filled with banks and drugstores. Parks get shadows. Parking disappears. So arguing that we should “share” amenities doesn’t work. They won’t be there.
I agree that by-right private-sector development is the key and that the right thing to do is to apply the principles across the board, so neighborhoods are not singled out. This is comprehensive planning, which is theoretically the legal basis of zoning. I would much rather be told “everybody gets so many units based on x criteria, and that means you take x units and here’s some options on how we can do that.” That’s much better than “you are rich and white and you’re bad if you don’t let me do what I want.”
I’m in favor of some targeted statewide preemption policies - for example, elimination of single-family zoning in all areas that fit certain rational planning criteria. But you just multiply enemies if you try to do this coercively. It still requires persuasion of voters, one-by-one, which starts with respect.
Affordable housing policy desperately needs to be reformed. It will never, ever build enough units to meet even a fraction of the need. The Section 8 program could do a lot to integrate a range of incomes into neighborhoods, if it weren’t so anti-landlord and if it didn’t force the unit into the affordable housing pool permanently. Let it just be a simple cash aid program with some anti-discrimination rules. Build a track record of solid working-class tenants who don’t trash the place or ruin the neighborhood, and tolerance for more of this will increase.
We will have to give up the idea that the most desperate, disordered families should be prioritized for state-supported housing. We need to go back to what the housing projects used to be, which were heavily-screened working-class communities that people felt lucky to live in.
Oregon has done stuff around this - North Carolina is doing so as we speak. England is currently embarked on major land-use planning reforms too.
I think there's a common misreading where people look at the fact zoning/planing policy hasn't changed in fifty years and conclude that it's because it's too politicially difficult to change, when it's probably more the case that town planning is just really boring to everyone except town planners and no politicians cared about the issue until recently. Now that policymakers have started to care and wonks have started to propose solutions, we are seeing reforms because these existing zoning frameworks exist mainly because of institutional inertia rather than because they are genuinely popular.
Oregon is a special case because urban development competes with high-value agricultural development that is very important to the State's economy and that has a strong political power behind its defense. It's very interesting. I haven't kept up with it lately, I don't know how the interesting cooperative process they set up is working.
Personally, I have literally never met a homeowner (and I know a lot of them) who has expressed anything approaching the sentiment that they don't want more development because of its impact on housing. Maybe it's there, but it feels like a shorthand that everyone just keeps assuming.
I have personally met a *ton* of people who express dismay at the idea of congestion, traffic and greed developers. It's like an irrefutable point to these people. That generic notion plus the activation that occurs around the downsides (but not upsides) to any given project explain (to me) almost everything about our inability to approve new construction.
> I have literally never met a homeowner (and I know a lot of them) who has expressed anything approaching the sentiment that they don't want more development because of its impact on housing prices.
I am one. I had incorrectly assumed lower-priced housing in my area would pull down values and higher-priced housing would push up values. This was one reason I wasn't enthusiastic about a proposed development nearby (only in my head, I didn't actually do or say anything), combined with the potential traffic concerns.
>> personally met a *ton* of people who express dismay at the idea of congestion, traffic and greed developers.<<
Me too.
Over and over I hear homeowners complaining about the latest development — particularly mid and high development—and all the ills of congestion etc they think they’ll bring.
Then with almost the next breath the same person will bemoan the lack of lower priced and affordable housing.
It seems in some respects contradictory. The more housing is built the lower prices should be. (Of course true affordable housing is a different issue altogether.)
This only for the specific case, but research shows that building new appt buildings and affordable housing units in heavily suburban areas, does not actually decrease home values. In this case, it's just good because in certain areas the only housing available are massive single family homes, but the apartments just provide smaller units, thus cheaper units, without affecting the home values. In some cases, this added density can increase the value of their homes, as the increased density attracts more commercial businesses.
I know we're talking mostly about urban environments here, but I think NIMBY sentiments in suburbs are stronger but go a little unnoticed in this conversation. Urban centers of course need to better, but suburban areas doing some extremely modest rezoning that doesn't hurt their existing residents home prices at all could help the affordability problem. Especially if suburbia has some limited space for appt. renters and cities need to compete with the pricing.
yeah, I agree. it's just that the "homeowners oppose development because of it lowers prices" is *such* a common talking point, it seems so odd to me that I've never heard that concerns expressed.
To me, there's such a profound status quo bias. Everyone loves visiting charming, dense cities and then turns around and opposes anything resembling that in their own area.
A little bit, but not much. Very naturally, people who just moved into a neighborhood tend to wait several months, or a year or two, before thinking themselves knowledgeable enough to directly engage. Just based on the economics of the situation, renters tend to move more often than homeowners. As a result, at any given moment, a significant fraction of renters in a neighborhood are in the less-engaged phase of their time, while a lower fraction of homeowners are in that phase.
At the extreme, some renters treat the local government the way they treat the washer/dryer or fridge that came with the unit, and very reasonably so.
What most renters care about is that their rents stay constant, so they tend to vote for rent control, even though it reduces development. And renters aren't immune to the arguments about traffic congestion, etc....
Hot take: Matt needs to extends his advocation for denser housing past zoning reform to housing regulations such as legal requirements about the amount of space per person in an apartment. We need to bring back flophouses and rooming houses as those would actually provide affordable housing. It's better for a someone to live in a flophouse than on the streets. Considering the high cost of construction, even with much looser zoning rules, we still wouldn't be able to build cheap enough housing that the homeless could afford them. We need true naturally affordable housing and with such more regulations on what makes housing legal to rent, there's little way for that to occur.
The problem here is that for an enormous population that cuts across traditional political lines, _moving_ is an act that ranges from intrinsically suspicious to explicitly hostile and damaging, so any set of market and policy conditions that enables it is to be opposed at all costs. The unifying goal of both suburban reactionaries and urban “neighborhood defenders” is that _you_ should stay the hell away and neither actively nor passively create even a tiny bit of visual change in their precious built environments.
I’m not sure that talking about the desirability of functional housing markets really is likely to change any of their minds.
We absolutely need more affordable housing but the homeless problem is much more complicated than that. When we are talking about homelessness, I wish people would specify which classes of the homeless they are talking about. In the Bay Area, it's clear to me that when people complain about homelessness , they are complaining about people with mental health or drug abuse problems who spend their days in the streets (some of who aren't actually unhoused). They aren't so much worrying about homeless people living out of their cars b/c their jobs don't pay them enough to afford housing. This population needs far more than just housing to be properly treated.
The vast majority of this population is peaceful but there's many several recent high profile incidences where members of this population have randomly assaulted people. In a Seattle , a social worker in a housing first project, was stabbed to death by one of her clients.
In the Bay Area, cities have tried to implement Housing First problems but they have seemed to do little to stem the problem. For example, in SF, many homeless have rejected placements in SF's permanent supportive housing units. There's a sense of frustration among people that they have repeatedly approved ballot measures to fund homelessness programs but the problem has continued to worsen instead of improving.
This was also my experience volunteering in a homeless shelter in New Hampshire. I'd guess about 80-90% of the residents either had substance abuse or appeared to have mental health issues. After that, the next most common residents were young adults that got kicked out of their parents' house or just left and ran out of couches to surf on. Next, and few and far between, were single parents or families with kids.
One thing I could never get my head around was that many occasional residents of the shelter preferred to be on the street over staying at the shelter. They'd "check in" for a while when it got really cold, but as soon as it became tolerable outside, they left. One guy told me once that he didn't like having to live by anyone else's rules and that he felt much freer living on the street. He said he liked that life better than dealing with the responsibilities that came with any other way.
For one thing, if you've lived outside for a while, you've got belongings. To move into a shelter, you have to abandon your belongings. You might have a dog or cat, and you'd have to abandon them. You'd be separated from your friends. Often you'd be stuck in a room with other people. If I were homeless, I wouldn't accept that.
"he didn't like having to live by anyone else's rules"
Is that a form of personality disorder? Like if your oppositional defiant disorder is so out of control that you're living on the street in New Hampshire! Doesn't that imply that you're too mentally ill to make choices for yourself?
It's way above my pay grade to answer either of your questions. That said, from my admittedly limited experience this person's view on this is not atypical.
The shelter I was at ran a sort of "overflow" wing in the winter that was just two large sex-segregated rooms with cots. For these beds, we would basically accept any adult for the night with almost no questions asked and minimal other requirements (eg no social worker consults, no household responsibilities, etc). My experience is of course anecdotal, but I'd guess most of this population had similar views about hating all rules and preferring to live on the street versus in a shelter unless it's so cold staying outside would be deadly.
As a corollary to this, the homeless people living out of their cars b/c their jobs don't pay them enough to afford housing, by definition, have jobs and need to live near those jobs. So giving them vacation houses at the beach won't help them either.
Abundant housing doesn't solve the problem of large encampments and agitated individuals on the street entirely on its own, but anecdotally the West Coast cities with significant housing shortages have the biggest rough sleeping encampments. Whereas Dallas/Midwestern/southern cities don't have these as much despite being poorer and having worse social programs.
New York has managed the problem in the opposite direction by putting like 65,000 people without permanent housing in hotels. This is a bad solution for a lot of reasons but does succeed in keeping people off the streets at the rate you see in SF/LA/Seattle.
"Housing First" strikes me as a decentralized form of what use to be institutionalizing the severely dysfunctional. It's ok if it helps people get back on their feet or creates a tolerable situation for those too impaired to fully regain autonomy. It also points to people who may need to be involuntarily committed.
For those that are curious for some discussion from some of the folks directly involved, I've found the Dwellings podcast produced by the San Jose Housing Department to be remarkably good.
This is a well-argued rebuttal of left-NIMBYism that gives a good overview of the YIMBY/left-NIMBY debate for people who aren't already super into the housing issue. However, from observing how YIMBY Twitter characterizes the left-NIMBY position and the vacancy issue in particular, I think the gap between those two camps is larger than most YIMBYs realize.
The left-NIMBYs fundamentally refuse to recognize the fact that the housing market operates according to supply and demand. They take the high prices in large metro areas as an unchangeable fact of life. They espouse a theory of gentrification where building more housing raises rather than lowers rents.
A large part of this seems to me to stem from the idea that housing *shouldn't* be subject to supply and demand; that we should "decommodify" housing by I guess having the state own all of it.
I don't think YIMBYs quite realize this. For example, I've seen knowledgeable YIMBY Twitter folks question why left-NIMBYs want homelessness to be higher than vacancy. They'll say, given that some amount vacancy is natural, isn't it better that there be fewer homeless rather than more?
But that misses the real homeless/vacancy point, which is, given that building more won't lower rents, the fact that the are numerically enough vacant units to match each homeless person means we should not build more. They think not having sufficient housing is not the problem.
YIMBYs, because they believe in supply-and-demand, seemingly can't even comprehend this line of reasoning. Obviously rents are high because there is demand to move to the area and if you gave all the vacant units to the homeless that would solve the homeless issue but exacerbate the housing cost issue.
Left-NIMBYs use the same vacancy to counter calls to upzone as well. There's enough housing for everyone, so why upzone? Of course it doesn't make sense to say, there's enough housing as is, so it's fine to build single-family homes but not apartments. It's just a leverage point that's "free" for them to use because they don't believe more supply will alleviate housing costs (it'll all become vacant luxury investments or something). According to their thinking, any benefit only accrues to developers.
A lot of this stuff makes more sense when you fully grasp the consequences of left-NIMBYs really, truly not believing in supply and demand.
They seriously don't. There's a proposed law in California that would allow a homeowner to split a lot in a single family area into two lots. (Once only.) And left NIMBYs say, each of the two new houses you could build on the two lots would cost more than the (bigger) one house you could build on the lot if you didn't split it. Each of the little houses would cost more than the big house, they say. And I'm like, how could that possibly be true?
"The unhoused are often suffering from a variety of problems in life and it can be tempting to get trapped by a “root causes” mentality that wants to focus on addiction, mental health, or employment services rather than housing. "
If you want to ensure the NIMBYs win then that should be your plan. It's vital that the drug addicted and mentally ill are required to be in treatment and if they become a burden on the community then they need to be sent to a locked supervised facility. When this doesn't happen, housing the formerly homeless in your community becomes a tremendous burden on that community.
I can't find the article right now but the LA Times did some great reporting on their housing first program and the burden it put on neighbors and the community was immense.
Obviously this argument is made to some extent in bad faith but clearly unhoused people are not the only ones who indicate excess demand for housing and would like to live in vacant units if they were commandeered. 43,000 people are supercommuting from Stockton and Modesto to the Bay Area every day. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of people are being priced out of the Bay Area and moving to places like Boise and Austin--many of them would surely stay if housing were more abundant. There are also many young people who are still in roommate situations or living with their parents but would like a place of their own. Everyone agrees that these are major problems in other contexts, but in the "unhoused > vacancies" point they are all completely whitewashed as indications that demand > supply.
The odd thing is that if you've ever spent time in the equities trading industry, you would know that a small float + tons of demand is always going to result in massive price spikes... every time. The whole vacancy leads to homelessness argument is so bad that I have a hard time believing it's not bad faith on it's face.
I live in Seattle where the homeless population is large and growing even though city goevernent is spending a lot of money trying to get people into housing. The Pandemic has hit the city hard, turning a vibrant downtown into boarded up storefronts, sidewalks unnavigable because of the tents and trash and empty office buildings. Apartment buildings are offering three months free rent and reducing lease pricing significantly. The cost of housing in the suburbs and even further out are skyrocketing. A decent three bedroom house in North Bend, about 30-45 minutes outside the city center can cost nearly a million dollars! And they sell fast with multiple offers. I hope office workers like those working at Amazon and Google will come back to the office towers to work but I suspect they may not return to the high rise apartment buildings. Maybe some of those buildings can be converted to low cost and subsidized buildings. I also think some of the office towers could be turned into low cost housing.
The pandemic and the rapid shift to work-from-home for tech employees here has really done some wild things to our housing costs here. North Bend doesn't shock me (it's beautiful and has been a bedroom community for MSFT employees for decades), but the price jumps in other areas outside of Seattle proper are mind-boggling, especially when you get just east of the mountains and find that you'd be paying close to two-years-ago Seattle prices for a fixer in Roslyn that would have gone for $125k in 2014.
I suspect you're right about many tech workers not returning to those newly-built luxury Downtown/SLU/Cap Hill apartments. I'm in tech, and right now, no one I know is expecting to go back to five days a week in the office in the foreseeable future, and commuting to SLU by bus or car (be it from Ballard, North Bend, or apparently now Roslyn or Cle Elum) is a lot less of a problem if you only have to do it once or twice a week. What that does long-term to the housing market--and housing planning--here post-pandemic, I've no clue.
Do you think it's more likely that the offices will refill while the apartments remain empty? My impression is that it's more likely the apartments will refill while the offices remain empty (and hopefully some of those offices can be converted to apartments).
I think the research on housing-first for homelessness is pretty sound. This could possibly be one of the thorniest electoral issues imaginable, and would only be more contentious in a market with housing supply scarcity.
A second-order problem that goes un-discussed: Managing the units occupied by the formerly homeless.
In this case, I am not talking about low-income families and individuals that have been pushed into homelessness due to affordability problems. For most landlords (including myself), they are fine tenants.
The bigger issue would be with the long-term homeless, where mental health and substance abuse is likely a problem. That is an entirely different kind of landlord than the kind who deals with low-income tenants. These landlords would need to be well paid (as a % on the revenue) and have pretty quick access to courts and other channels to deal with problem tenants. They would be extremely easy to demonize, even when they are doing the right thing. When you factor in the slow process of eviction in many blue, coastal states, you would find few people up for that job.
It's a shame because as awareness has grown, paradoxically, it seems as if capacity to deal with problems has gone down.
But in terms of problem tenants. If we have a housing first policy and a resident needs to be evicted, he or she needs to be institutionalized and not just put out on the street again.
Another way you can think about this discussion point is that vacant housing is a surplus. If there's no surplus, and all of the existing supply is consumed, then by definition you have a shortage - there's no unused supply available to purchase.
Vacant housing may be unoccupied, but it still plays a role within the housing markets because of this, and I would argue is the primary mechanism by which Yimbys should think about how boosting supply improves affordability. More empty homes in a city puts pressure on landlords and developers to compete on price and on quality, as they and consumers all know that consumers can more easily find an alternative. High vacancy rates give renters and homebuyers economic power, and turn a seller's market into a buyer's market.
I did a quick and dirty analysis for English cities here - we have super low long-term vacancy rates, including below 1 per cent in a number of cities, and the urban area with the highest vacancy rate, Burnley (a poor mining town in Northern England) still has a lower vacancy rate than Tokyo - https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/why-we-need-more-empty-homes-to-end-the-housing-crisis/ That's because our housing shortage is especially bad because the English town planning is especially bad, way worse than any zoning regime in the US except perhaps SF.
What are the policy solutions of people who blame developers? It's seems vacuous to me b/c developers don't have to crowd out more government intervention.
I have had multiple people say that to my face. As far as they’re concerned, if you end for-profit housing development, Red Vienna will immediately follow.
1. Penalize people who own housing that they don't live in
2. Upzone only for public housing, and build only public housing
They think developers are bad because developers are fatcats. It doesn't matter whether private development crowds out government intervention or not. It is bad in and of itself.
One of the markets I always want to see compared when we talk about housing in the US is Germany. They have an incredibly high rental population and have managed to create an abundance of homes in urban areas that drives relatively inexpensive housing stock. What are they doing to achieve this in a relatively litigious and expensive first world country like ours?
My wife works in affordable housing. When she tells me about the families that end up moving into one of the units she develops, they usually weren't homeless before, but they often lived (and continue to live) in insufficient housing -- things like 5 person families in a one-bedroom apartment. Plus other negative factors (crime-ridden neighborhoods, lots of deferred maintenance on their units, etc. In one memorable case, no bathrooms in the unit. Safety code violations).
So there's a ladder, right? At one end, you have people who literally live on the street in cardboard boxes. One tiny step up from that, people who couch-surf or live in their cars. Another step up, people who live in extremely cramped or otherwise heavily compromised unit. Then you have people who aren't like four to a bedroom, but still live in very small units that have significant compromises. Then people who are like "well, the kids share a bedroom and the kitchen is a postage stamp." And so forth and so on, up to the level of "we have a beautiful large house with a big yard and nice views and..."
I think there's an understandable impulse to draw a line somewhere on that ladder and say, "Well, above this line, it's not really a problem and we don't care if people at that rung want to be a rung higher." And so you get lots of progressives who only want to talk about "affordable" housing to some definition of affordable, or who only want to talk about homelessness. But I think it's really important to see that crowded higher rungs put pressure on lower rungs.
My family is very fortunate when it comes to income. We have a nice house, nobody shares rooms, etc. But it's still a house that, when I was a kid, I would have associated with someone significantly lower income than we actually are -- because we live in the Bay Area and housing is ultra expensive. I'm not saying anyone should be crying about my life -- my house is nice. But because I bought this house for $1.6M, someone who has a six figure income, but not as nice a six figure income as I do is staying in a starter house, maybe a two bedroom. And you shouldn't cry for them either. But because they're in that house, someone else is staying in a condo. And there's nothing wrong with condos. But because that person is staying in a condo, someone else is in an apartment. And that means that someone else is in a smaller, dingier apartment where they're sharing rooms. And because that apartment is not available, someone else is crammed like sardines in a tiny little apartment.
Which all seems relatively obvious, but god, it doesn't seem to be very obvious to a lot of people.
I don't think any of this is wrong, but I think some left-liberals really do get turned off by this line of thinking because it "smells" to them like trickle-down economics. They see the same argument as yours in "if you lower taxes on the rich; they'll spend more at small businesses, enriching everyone." How do you respond to this sort of critique?
I mean, I'm I think way to the right of the median here, so you may not love my answer, but the basics are:
1. People lean heavily into the idea that new housing gets built that's "luxury" or "for the rich," but you have to understand that that's not really true. Developers like to build dense housing. The market we're unlocking is not "six bedroom manors with an acre of grounds around them," it's like "relatively spacious two and three bedroom apartments/condos with granite counters." It's serving a mass audience that happens to be a bit wealthier than average.
So to the extent that it does "trickle down," it doesn't have far to go. If we want to use a tax break analogy, we aren't talking about lowering taxes on the ultra wealthy 1%, we're talking about lowering taxes on the top 20% or so.
2. The more we remove barriers, the further downmarket we go. If you can only build housing for a few thousand people a year, you fight for the richest few thousand people in the city. But if you can build housing for 10,000 people or 20,000 people instead of 5,000 people, well, you're gonna have to start broadening the appeal of your new units. Right now, the restrictive policies actually *encourage* the building of only luxury housing. In the same way that when Tesla started making cars, it made $100k cars. Then when it got bigger, it started making $60k cars. Then when it got bigger yet, it started making $40k cars, and if it gets bigger yet we'll expect it to make $20k cars. There just are only so many $100k cars you can sell.
3. It's actually good that people can, in say 2030 buy housing that had all the amenities that a well-off person would expect in 2020. Housing is a durable good! The median person gets a nicer apartment if the apartment was originally built for a high-end audience.
4. The actual big one: the market is much better at meeting the demand of a complex market like housing. We just don't want big centralized government bureaucracies deciding How We All Should Live and stamping out a bunch of units, when the market is perfectly capable of doing a more nuanced job here. The government should only intervene at the very low end where it actually needs to.
you are totally right but i think its point "4" that is the doozy. hard to get lefties to agree that the market is good at blablabla. i think good pro-YIMBY propaganda would maybe center on vilifying preserve the neighborhood mentality. a bunch of super rich or privileged or whatever people want west village to stay super cute and if all the workers at the boutiques and restauraunts and whatnot have to live in a different state or whatever so be it. uglier more inclusive neighborhoods with high rises, that's what we want. and yes some developers will make money but so will some super wealthy penthouse owners lose quite a lot don't worry rich-people-haters ferris bueller and whatshername from sex and the city (didn't they flip condos or something at some point) are going to lose lots of money if you YIMBY a little. in short YIMBYs need better propaganda.
you are totally right but i think its point "4" that is the doozy. hard to get lefties to agree that the market is good at blablabla. i think good pro-YIMBY propaganda would maybe center on vilifying preserve the neighborhood mentality. a bunch of super rich or privileged or whatever people want west village to stay super cute and if all the workers at the boutiques and restauraunts and whatnot have to live in a different state or whatever so be it. uglier more inclusive neighborhoods with high rises, that's what we want. and yes some developers will make money but so will some super wealthy penthouse owners lose quite a lot don't worry rich-people-haters ferris bueller and whatshername from sex and the city (didn't they flip condos or something at some point) are going to lose lots of money if you YIMBY a little. in short YIMBYs need better propaganda.
Matt Y. said the issue is that the number one thing that is hard to get approved is the number of unites you build fewer unites and only rich unites. He gave the example of quotas on cars in the 80's and that is when Toyota made Lexus brand because if we can only sell a few then we need to sell nice ones.
Excellent description of "filtering" and its absence. If more market-rate housing were available at all levels, the less desirable housing would filter down to the people now inadequately housed in crammed apartments, their cars or someone else's couch.
Would you mind if I reprinted this (with attribution) in a local newsletter?
Go for it. No attribution required.
My apologies for bringing partisanship into one of the first comments, but I was struck by the top 5 states for homelessness: New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. All deep blue, controlled by Democratic majorities. As one of the Matt's conservative readers, I find myself questioning my own pre-existing beliefs and biases in the face of some of his compelling arguments. I've even moved left on a few issues! I wonder if this happens for left-leaners on a topic like this?
NIMBYism is inherently conservative – they are standing athwart their neighborhoods yelling "stop". Even if it is practiced by otherwise liberal people who have no problem hanging a "black lives matter" sign next to a "preserve our neighborhood" one.
Some parts YIMBYism could be called conservative or at least libertarian - reduce regulation and let the market decide what to build – but wanting cities to progress is something a lot of us consider progressive.
Some of the most racist, nastiest comments I have ever heard in public forums came from retired ex-hippies in SF and Berkeley. Those areas are not right wing, but there is certainly a subset that are. They wear the symbols of being progressive (BLM sign, etc) - because those don't make parking spaces harder to find or represent people they don't like in line at their local coffee shop.
YIMBYs, at least, are very motivated by actual fairness concerns. People assume we are developer shills because - for a lot of people, it goes beyond their mental model that you could possibly advocate for something you personally would not benefit from.
i think the way to talk about it is that you gotta serve somebody and it might be the developer or it might be the investors that own expensive units in west village but you gotta serve somebody. and you might be giving in to developer interest but the idea is that 25 million dollar penthouse needs to come down to 15 million so that older condo down the street goes from 3 mill to 1.5 mill so that the rent a few block up goes from 5000 to 3000 so that at least out in freaking bed stuy the rent gets back down to a thousand or less. don't preserve west village, de-gentrify bed-stuy. i am literally the worst propagandist in history i will see my way out.
I was thinking more along the lines of questioning things like "developers bad, market solutions don't work, raising the minimum wage to $15/hr doesn't have bad effects on extremely low-skilled worker's opportunities, eliminating enforcement of low-level drug possession, closing down psych hospitals, environmental regulations that make building hard, gentrification is bad" rather than "NIMBY's are closet conservatives".
It's not really about specific things. I came to SlowBoring because I was already questioning a lot of things that liberals conventionally believe, all the things you mention. I’m responding more to the moralistic, contemptuous, and ultimately coercive social tone on the Left, because I know from history what it leads to in terms of disastrous policy for the rest of us. What I’m seeing is a repeat of the worst excesses of the Sixties, only this time as farce.
Here I have found a place that has a more thoughtful tone, where questions that I already had can be explored and deepened in a civilized fashion. I’ve thought more and have been more open-minded about policing, about market housing policy, about immigration, and about electoral politics since I came here, and can think with more integrity about all these things thanks to exposure to conservative ideas in a non-partisan way. It hasn’t turned me into a conservative but makes it easier for me to engage with conservative ways of thinking. And I think that’s essential because our country is in a mess and enough people need to be pulling together to get us out of it. We need to understand each other.
Yeah I'd say my beliefs are pretty uniformly progressive but not left-wing, depending on what you consider that to mean. As some others say, I am of the belief that YIMBY really should be considered progressive, but I guess it's not leftist. My questioning of the left is really centered on settling on single ideas, and then assuming no other system is acceptable. Many left-leaning people scoff at the idea of some sort of highly regulated private healthcare like many European systems rather than M4A. Getting to zero ghg emissions through private contracts rather than huge public employment is not okay. Basically, I agree with the good leftie ideas, and disagree with the bad ones like any true Slow Boring subscriber with all the objectively best beliefs.
I personally think the causality runs the other way. It’s not that democratic constituencies create urbanization-related social problems- it’s that urbanization creates social problems that conservatives doesn’t have a lot of answers for, and that drives urbanized populations towards liberalism.
As mentioned, the whole concept of NIMBYism is deeply conservative, and it seems clear that it drives a whole bunch of problems in cities! The fact that people who believe in it can also have BLM signs in their yard is a little annoying, but hey, people are inconsistent sometimes.
I suspect a lot of Yglesias readers are left-wing but willing to question bits and pieces of what's currently in vogue. That attitude is going to be more naturally open to YIMBYism.
I think coding NIMBYism as conservative is important precisely because this site's audience is niche and the average liberal doesn't want to stray far from the current consensus. Until it's widely accepted as 'the side Donald Trump is on' it's not seen as embarrassing for good normie liberals to fight housing development. You can see hints of this happening in the Bay Area - cities quickly shifting views on the issue as soon as the narrative became 'single family housing zoning is racist'.
I don't know that it's exactly conservative - I think there is a real desire to see progress and social change, just at someone *else's* expense. Tax someone richer than you to help the poor, build affordable housing but put it somewhere else, etc. From an individual family's perspective this would be a great deal - help others without it costing you anything! It's more of a "stingy liberalism" than actual conservatism, because it's not a desire to keep things the way they are so much as offload the cost of change onto someone else.
"offload the cost of change onto someone else" seems very Bernie Sanders
I'll give you an example. A new building was going up in my neighborhood and my very liberal environmentalist friend said, "Ugh, why are they building that." With an air of disgust." And I said, "Well, in order to reduce our carbon footprint they want to people to be able to live closer to work." "Oh." she said reluctantly.
I don't really understand the core of it. On an intellectual level they understand the need. But somehow to them "environmentalism" is some kind of utopia without any tradeoffs... or something. As I said I don't really get it.
I think people are hard-wired to believe in the free lunch. It takes continuous and deliberate effort to avoid that.
Reading Matt's takes on housing has definitely helped me appreciate free-market economics more. NIMBYism, some aspects of wokeism, and some reactions to One Billion Americans have made me more sceptical of some left-wing views.
The not-totally-fair pro-progressive take on this is that the coastal places have all the right jobs policies, and so the problems are showing up in the housing. The fact that some places like Texas are able to do decently on the jobs front while not having the same housing problem is a natural rejoinder to this, though I think there is still some discussion to be had about whether Texas is actually starting to get the housing problem in its cities (it certainly has it in Austin, though I would argue that the issue in Austin is that it's bad old urban planning means the cul-de-sacs start a mile from downtown, while Houston and Dallas still have miles of parking craters that are being filled in).
i think it is really hard to get people to believe that "developers are bad" is a bad take, and that public housing is a bad idea, and that some combination of public housing and increasing people's welfare aren't the right take on this issue. my just-build-some-public-housing-and-increase-welfare friends and family are very far from accepting or would never accept letting a real estate developer (aka trump) make millions building a skyscraper in a beautiful, trendy, "weird" neighborhood and ruin it. it hurts their hearts and they think about politics and economics with their hearts not their heads and there is plenty of propaganda geared to them for that.
I don't want to go too far into saying that all things partisan are to blame, since there are a lot of non-partisan, practical realities that create both homelessness and expensive barriers to solving it. But I will note that there is a 'bipartisan' consensus, or so to speak, that people should be able to live in single family homes and work close enough to them to make them practical.
This is speculative, but I have to imagine that the desire not to see the neighborhood you grew up in turn into a bunch of high-rise apartment buildings crosses party lines. Even so, the forces against that sort of development are ultimately contributing to housing shortages.
Having now lived in Los Angeles for 17 years, you start to notice a huge undercurrent of conservatism underneath the Blue State facade. Remember, this is the state of the Third Rail of Prop 13. The notion of "you can't change anything" is very strong here.
California is no different from any Red State, in that it built a sprawling, car-centric infrastructure - it just grew fast enough to run out of space sooner. Unfortunately, that undercurrent prevents real solutions to the problem, because no one is willing to change anything.
It doesn't help that many environmental laws (like CEQA) have been weaponized in the service of the NIMBY cause. Ironically, those protections prevent good building instead of enabling them.
Ultimately, I don't think it's a problem with left-wing ideology, so much as a desire to throw tax money at problems and simultaneously prevent meaningful, local change. That's a conservative sentiment, not a progressive one.
just wanting to take poor or homeless people and give them a home is such a powerful sentiment i think it is so hard to counteract even in people who are well-meaning, but then like you say people who own property do not want to see their capital decline and that is conservative whether the rest of your politics is left or right. so you can't say that you have to shroud it in anti-developer propaganda and preserve the character of the neighborhood propaganda and deregulation is yucky propaganda. and the problem is, which is frustrating for YIMBYs, this propaganda is effective and appealing and people battle this with focusing on the numbers but i don't think there is good pro-YIMBY propaganda that i've seen just rational arguments.
I was a bit NIMBY by default, but Matt has definitely made me reevaluate my priors. For example, my assumption that building slightly higher density housing a mile down the road would lower the value of my house.
As a Progressive person politically that's become a bit obsessed with housing and zoning, it becomes clear how easily some ideas for housing reform (ie. "make it legal to build apartments" = "DEREGULATION!", or "we should eliminated redundant construction expenses to make housing / transportation cheaper" = "UNIONS ARE BAD AND MAKING CONSTRUCTION COST PROHIBATIVE!") could *easily* be twisted by those further to the Left of you into basically being "Republican talking points!!!"... So, yeah, sorta
dude i agree how can you convince a new yorker that between trump trying to build a new tower and the folks that live in the neighborhood and hate high rises, that trump is in the right and the neighborhood normies are the bad guy? the arguments matt makes are great but the picture in people's heads are just hard to overcome.
I think at least part of what's going on there is that homelessness has an unfortunate property where you get punished for doing a good job at it.
If a place provides services for homeless people, those services could well be legitimately rehabilitative - i.e. they could be helping individual people they affect get back on their feet and reducing the national stock of destitute people. However, since those programs kind of by definition make it easier to be homeless in that city, homeless people as rational agents are going to try to go there. Thus, even if [insert blue city here] is improving homelessness overall, the actual number of homeless people *in that city* will paradoxically increase.
As an extreme alternate example, if you scrapped all homeless programs and encouraged your police force to torture and harass them, it's likely your homeless problem would get "better" as people fled to adjacent cities. But it's a zero sum game. You've just dumped part of the problem on someone else.
The game theory here just sucks for state and city level solutions.
I suspect whether panhandling works well is much more important to where the homeless decide to live and I’d wager the overwhelming factor is where they lived when they became homeless.
I think that explains a lot of the gap between cities and rural or suburban areas (density of people is probably a big factor in panhandling success) but explains less of the gap between blue and red cities.
What would the implication be, though?
Noah Smith’s take on this is worth reading: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-left-nimby-canon
Liked for "Yggy". I always misspell his name :(
It's not just that homeowners don't want new housing built, though, it's that they explicitly don't want housing prices to fall. And they tend to be more engaged in local politics than renters, so politicians are incentivized to listen to them and support pseudo-econ tall tales about how Nimbyism is really just fighting gentrification/racism/Manhattanization/etc.
How do you cut through that and get the politically engaged to want to build when if it has its intended effect it really will cut into their net worth?
I think the net worth argument is a distraction. The real issue is quality of life and the desire not to be displaced from their home places. People will get crazy about that. They don’t respond to the financial issue because that’s not the important issue.
YIMBY development will change the quality of life in low-density areas, and the key thing is that there is no trust that this will be for the better. Even careful, localized densification around the train station, or missing-middle development in a walkable urban neighborhood, brings up the whole question of losing control of the situation. “If there, why not on my block?” People don’t want to let the camel’s nose under the tent. They will fight like hell against that. This is a mathematical certainty. How do you start to build trust, when the approach is one of moralism and condemnation of normal human instincts?
I live in a liberal City neighborhood. I am a liberal and an urban planner and knowledgeable and believe in more housing abundance. Nevertheless I will likely show up at meetings and write my representatives to resist the upzoning and low-income housing being proposed for my neighborhood. My neighborhood is already as dense as any outside of Manhattan, it works for me, it’s fine the way it is (except around the edges). Why should I suffer when there are vast redevelopable areas in the City built up at low density near transit lines, within a mile or two of my house? But of course those areas are also filled with people for whom their neighborhood also works. This kind of development pits people against each other in the most direct way. It’s inevitable, and very difficult to manage.
The whole message from the City and the mayoral candidates is “privileged people are immoral and have had it too good and now need to take their medicine.” Given the state of the city at this moment, there is a clearly perceptible racial edge to this which makes this proposition even more distasteful. Before the planners even get here to make their case, it is probably *already* too late for persuasion. This is how the left ruins the possibility for good.
Too much local control does not always produce the best overall results, especially on issues like land use. Most changes, even those for the greater good, will gore somebody's ox, and the only way to prevent those people from stopping everything is for decisions to be made with a little more distance and broader perspective.
I think the federal government is too far away for most of this, but there is a real need for rejuvenation of State-level governance.
Local control at the neighborhood level is the ultimate place where tyranny of the local majority can occur. At some level, it is somewhat fascinating, as it is the level of government where a mediocre and deeply corruptible politician can ply their craft (think condo board head who steers maintenance contracts to their friends, corrupt HOAs, etc).
At least at higher levels of govt (county, state) there are more checks and balances against a lot of the worst abuses.
It surprises me that people haven't figured the connection between hyper-local control and corruption.
You’ve got a good point. My dad was head of his HOA. He always made sure that my kids and their friends could have (pretty expensive) summer pool passes, all for free!
Yup - it's not usually corruption at the level that will even make the local news. Just small things like what you describe. Here in SF, it is often incumbent business owners doing micro-astroturf campaigns to stop competitors from moving in, but same dynamic applies.
When I lived in Chicago, I had a friend who ran a small theatre. In order to get anything done on his property, he noted it was local custom just to call the local Alderman and get the approved vendor who would make sure the appropriate people got paid off. It was barely hidden - even in the 2000s.
It's called "counselmanic prerogative" in Philadelphia, which is trending in the direction of having as many zoning codes as council districts. And it has been a corruption problem.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/councilmanic-prerogative-kenyatta-johnson-philadelphia-20200217.html
In some ways the scale of potential corruption goes up the further up the chain of government you go. Look at the complexity of the federal tax code vs your local sales tax. There's just so much more room for special interest carve outs.
I would agree that, from a scale standpoint, it certainly does. Local corruption is small scale and almost trivially easy to get away with. Corruption at higher levels has stronger controls / more governance - but also a much higher "blast radius" when it does happen.
That said, I suppose it depends on how you define corruption. There may be special interest carve outs. But those are a consequence of legal but ethically questionable processes. If you make lobbying for a carve out and receiving the benefit in your formal definition of corruption, I would agree. My POV is both are bad, but the local stuff you could argue has far more impact on day to day life for many ppl.
I can see where you are coming from. This is the argument of the Neighbourhood Defenders literature - we know that house prices are not what drives Nimby opposition to development. Rather, it's a desire to monopolise local amenities. And the way urban planning works at the moment (concentrating pockets of high density redevelopment instead of more gentle redevelopment across the entire urban area https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/pockets-of-dense-construction-in-a-dormant-suburban-interior), vindicates the Nimbys for the reason you've set out.
This to me says that the argument needs to be about changing the rules overall, so that every part of an urban area can make a small contribution to new housing which when added up is quite large. This requires the state government to be a tough referee which writes the zoning code to be flexible and have lots of by-right provisions and takes local governments to task to make sure it is done properly. We can't get systemic change without systemic reform, and trying to tell voters one-by-one that "this one big development right next door to you will make the housing crisis better" is unconvincing even if econometrically true.
“Monopolize urban amenities” is a pretty harsh and judgmental way to put it. I would certainly resist with all my powers someone who came to me describing the proposition like that. If development is allowed to run rampant, those urban amenities will disappear. New buildings displace neighborhood businesses and have new storefronts at high rents, that get filled with banks and drugstores. Parks get shadows. Parking disappears. So arguing that we should “share” amenities doesn’t work. They won’t be there.
I agree that by-right private-sector development is the key and that the right thing to do is to apply the principles across the board, so neighborhoods are not singled out. This is comprehensive planning, which is theoretically the legal basis of zoning. I would much rather be told “everybody gets so many units based on x criteria, and that means you take x units and here’s some options on how we can do that.” That’s much better than “you are rich and white and you’re bad if you don’t let me do what I want.”
I’m in favor of some targeted statewide preemption policies - for example, elimination of single-family zoning in all areas that fit certain rational planning criteria. But you just multiply enemies if you try to do this coercively. It still requires persuasion of voters, one-by-one, which starts with respect.
Affordable housing policy desperately needs to be reformed. It will never, ever build enough units to meet even a fraction of the need. The Section 8 program could do a lot to integrate a range of incomes into neighborhoods, if it weren’t so anti-landlord and if it didn’t force the unit into the affordable housing pool permanently. Let it just be a simple cash aid program with some anti-discrimination rules. Build a track record of solid working-class tenants who don’t trash the place or ruin the neighborhood, and tolerance for more of this will increase.
We will have to give up the idea that the most desperate, disordered families should be prioritized for state-supported housing. We need to go back to what the housing projects used to be, which were heavily-screened working-class communities that people felt lucky to live in.
No state government that I know seems likely to give the sort of results you want. I think you’re stuck trying to persuade people block by block.
Oregon has done stuff around this - North Carolina is doing so as we speak. England is currently embarked on major land-use planning reforms too.
I think there's a common misreading where people look at the fact zoning/planing policy hasn't changed in fifty years and conclude that it's because it's too politicially difficult to change, when it's probably more the case that town planning is just really boring to everyone except town planners and no politicians cared about the issue until recently. Now that policymakers have started to care and wonks have started to propose solutions, we are seeing reforms because these existing zoning frameworks exist mainly because of institutional inertia rather than because they are genuinely popular.
Oregon is a special case because urban development competes with high-value agricultural development that is very important to the State's economy and that has a strong political power behind its defense. It's very interesting. I haven't kept up with it lately, I don't know how the interesting cooperative process they set up is working.
Personally, I have literally never met a homeowner (and I know a lot of them) who has expressed anything approaching the sentiment that they don't want more development because of its impact on housing. Maybe it's there, but it feels like a shorthand that everyone just keeps assuming.
I have personally met a *ton* of people who express dismay at the idea of congestion, traffic and greed developers. It's like an irrefutable point to these people. That generic notion plus the activation that occurs around the downsides (but not upsides) to any given project explain (to me) almost everything about our inability to approve new construction.
> I have literally never met a homeowner (and I know a lot of them) who has expressed anything approaching the sentiment that they don't want more development because of its impact on housing prices.
I am one. I had incorrectly assumed lower-priced housing in my area would pull down values and higher-priced housing would push up values. This was one reason I wasn't enthusiastic about a proposed development nearby (only in my head, I didn't actually do or say anything), combined with the potential traffic concerns.
they are ALL pro-development...as long ad the "right" people and the "right" businesses are the ones developing, of course!
oops. "…because of its impact on housing *prices*…"
actually, I've heard a couple people express that they wish there was more development so that their kids could eventually afford to live nearby.
>> personally met a *ton* of people who express dismay at the idea of congestion, traffic and greed developers.<<
Me too.
Over and over I hear homeowners complaining about the latest development — particularly mid and high development—and all the ills of congestion etc they think they’ll bring.
Then with almost the next breath the same person will bemoan the lack of lower priced and affordable housing.
It seems in some respects contradictory. The more housing is built the lower prices should be. (Of course true affordable housing is a different issue altogether.)
This only for the specific case, but research shows that building new appt buildings and affordable housing units in heavily suburban areas, does not actually decrease home values. In this case, it's just good because in certain areas the only housing available are massive single family homes, but the apartments just provide smaller units, thus cheaper units, without affecting the home values. In some cases, this added density can increase the value of their homes, as the increased density attracts more commercial businesses.
I know we're talking mostly about urban environments here, but I think NIMBY sentiments in suburbs are stronger but go a little unnoticed in this conversation. Urban centers of course need to better, but suburban areas doing some extremely modest rezoning that doesn't hurt their existing residents home prices at all could help the affordability problem. Especially if suburbia has some limited space for appt. renters and cities need to compete with the pricing.
yeah, I agree. it's just that the "homeowners oppose development because of it lowers prices" is *such* a common talking point, it seems so odd to me that I've never heard that concerns expressed.
To me, there's such a profound status quo bias. Everyone loves visiting charming, dense cities and then turns around and opposes anything resembling that in their own area.
"[homeowners] tend to be more engaged in local politics than renters"
Isn't this an issue that renters can very much do something about?
A little bit, but not much. Very naturally, people who just moved into a neighborhood tend to wait several months, or a year or two, before thinking themselves knowledgeable enough to directly engage. Just based on the economics of the situation, renters tend to move more often than homeowners. As a result, at any given moment, a significant fraction of renters in a neighborhood are in the less-engaged phase of their time, while a lower fraction of homeowners are in that phase.
At the extreme, some renters treat the local government the way they treat the washer/dryer or fridge that came with the unit, and very reasonably so.
What most renters care about is that their rents stay constant, so they tend to vote for rent control, even though it reduces development. And renters aren't immune to the arguments about traffic congestion, etc....
Hot take: Matt needs to extends his advocation for denser housing past zoning reform to housing regulations such as legal requirements about the amount of space per person in an apartment. We need to bring back flophouses and rooming houses as those would actually provide affordable housing. It's better for a someone to live in a flophouse than on the streets. Considering the high cost of construction, even with much looser zoning rules, we still wouldn't be able to build cheap enough housing that the homeless could afford them. We need true naturally affordable housing and with such more regulations on what makes housing legal to rent, there's little way for that to occur.
https://slate.com/business/2013/07/sros-flophouses-microapartments-smart-cities-are-finally-allowing-the-right-kind-of-housing-for-the-poor-young-and-single.html
The problem here is that for an enormous population that cuts across traditional political lines, _moving_ is an act that ranges from intrinsically suspicious to explicitly hostile and damaging, so any set of market and policy conditions that enables it is to be opposed at all costs. The unifying goal of both suburban reactionaries and urban “neighborhood defenders” is that _you_ should stay the hell away and neither actively nor passively create even a tiny bit of visual change in their precious built environments.
I’m not sure that talking about the desirability of functional housing markets really is likely to change any of their minds.
This is why these regulations need to be at the state or federal level - you're not going to convince individuals about their neighborhood. Great example from CA here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-25/can-granny-flats-fill-california-s-housing-gap
We absolutely need more affordable housing but the homeless problem is much more complicated than that. When we are talking about homelessness, I wish people would specify which classes of the homeless they are talking about. In the Bay Area, it's clear to me that when people complain about homelessness , they are complaining about people with mental health or drug abuse problems who spend their days in the streets (some of who aren't actually unhoused). They aren't so much worrying about homeless people living out of their cars b/c their jobs don't pay them enough to afford housing. This population needs far more than just housing to be properly treated.
The vast majority of this population is peaceful but there's many several recent high profile incidences where members of this population have randomly assaulted people. In a Seattle , a social worker in a housing first project, was stabbed to death by one of her clients.
In the Bay Area, cities have tried to implement Housing First problems but they have seemed to do little to stem the problem. For example, in SF, many homeless have rejected placements in SF's permanent supportive housing units. There's a sense of frustration among people that they have repeatedly approved ballot measures to fund homelessness programs but the problem has continued to worsen instead of improving.
This was also my experience volunteering in a homeless shelter in New Hampshire. I'd guess about 80-90% of the residents either had substance abuse or appeared to have mental health issues. After that, the next most common residents were young adults that got kicked out of their parents' house or just left and ran out of couches to surf on. Next, and few and far between, were single parents or families with kids.
One thing I could never get my head around was that many occasional residents of the shelter preferred to be on the street over staying at the shelter. They'd "check in" for a while when it got really cold, but as soon as it became tolerable outside, they left. One guy told me once that he didn't like having to live by anyone else's rules and that he felt much freer living on the street. He said he liked that life better than dealing with the responsibilities that came with any other way.
For one thing, if you've lived outside for a while, you've got belongings. To move into a shelter, you have to abandon your belongings. You might have a dog or cat, and you'd have to abandon them. You'd be separated from your friends. Often you'd be stuck in a room with other people. If I were homeless, I wouldn't accept that.
"he didn't like having to live by anyone else's rules"
Is that a form of personality disorder? Like if your oppositional defiant disorder is so out of control that you're living on the street in New Hampshire! Doesn't that imply that you're too mentally ill to make choices for yourself?
It's way above my pay grade to answer either of your questions. That said, from my admittedly limited experience this person's view on this is not atypical.
The shelter I was at ran a sort of "overflow" wing in the winter that was just two large sex-segregated rooms with cots. For these beds, we would basically accept any adult for the night with almost no questions asked and minimal other requirements (eg no social worker consults, no household responsibilities, etc). My experience is of course anecdotal, but I'd guess most of this population had similar views about hating all rules and preferring to live on the street versus in a shelter unless it's so cold staying outside would be deadly.
As a corollary to this, the homeless people living out of their cars b/c their jobs don't pay them enough to afford housing, by definition, have jobs and need to live near those jobs. So giving them vacation houses at the beach won't help them either.
Abundant housing doesn't solve the problem of large encampments and agitated individuals on the street entirely on its own, but anecdotally the West Coast cities with significant housing shortages have the biggest rough sleeping encampments. Whereas Dallas/Midwestern/southern cities don't have these as much despite being poorer and having worse social programs.
New York has managed the problem in the opposite direction by putting like 65,000 people without permanent housing in hotels. This is a bad solution for a lot of reasons but does succeed in keeping people off the streets at the rate you see in SF/LA/Seattle.
"Housing First" strikes me as a decentralized form of what use to be institutionalizing the severely dysfunctional. It's ok if it helps people get back on their feet or creates a tolerable situation for those too impaired to fully regain autonomy. It also points to people who may need to be involuntarily committed.
For those that are curious for some discussion from some of the folks directly involved, I've found the Dwellings podcast produced by the San Jose Housing Department to be remarkably good.
https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-offices/housing/about-us/dwellings-podcast
This is a well-argued rebuttal of left-NIMBYism that gives a good overview of the YIMBY/left-NIMBY debate for people who aren't already super into the housing issue. However, from observing how YIMBY Twitter characterizes the left-NIMBY position and the vacancy issue in particular, I think the gap between those two camps is larger than most YIMBYs realize.
The left-NIMBYs fundamentally refuse to recognize the fact that the housing market operates according to supply and demand. They take the high prices in large metro areas as an unchangeable fact of life. They espouse a theory of gentrification where building more housing raises rather than lowers rents.
A large part of this seems to me to stem from the idea that housing *shouldn't* be subject to supply and demand; that we should "decommodify" housing by I guess having the state own all of it.
I don't think YIMBYs quite realize this. For example, I've seen knowledgeable YIMBY Twitter folks question why left-NIMBYs want homelessness to be higher than vacancy. They'll say, given that some amount vacancy is natural, isn't it better that there be fewer homeless rather than more?
But that misses the real homeless/vacancy point, which is, given that building more won't lower rents, the fact that the are numerically enough vacant units to match each homeless person means we should not build more. They think not having sufficient housing is not the problem.
YIMBYs, because they believe in supply-and-demand, seemingly can't even comprehend this line of reasoning. Obviously rents are high because there is demand to move to the area and if you gave all the vacant units to the homeless that would solve the homeless issue but exacerbate the housing cost issue.
Left-NIMBYs use the same vacancy to counter calls to upzone as well. There's enough housing for everyone, so why upzone? Of course it doesn't make sense to say, there's enough housing as is, so it's fine to build single-family homes but not apartments. It's just a leverage point that's "free" for them to use because they don't believe more supply will alleviate housing costs (it'll all become vacant luxury investments or something). According to their thinking, any benefit only accrues to developers.
A lot of this stuff makes more sense when you fully grasp the consequences of left-NIMBYs really, truly not believing in supply and demand.
They seriously don't. There's a proposed law in California that would allow a homeowner to split a lot in a single family area into two lots. (Once only.) And left NIMBYs say, each of the two new houses you could build on the two lots would cost more than the (bigger) one house you could build on the lot if you didn't split it. Each of the little houses would cost more than the big house, they say. And I'm like, how could that possibly be true?
"The unhoused are often suffering from a variety of problems in life and it can be tempting to get trapped by a “root causes” mentality that wants to focus on addiction, mental health, or employment services rather than housing. "
If you want to ensure the NIMBYs win then that should be your plan. It's vital that the drug addicted and mentally ill are required to be in treatment and if they become a burden on the community then they need to be sent to a locked supervised facility. When this doesn't happen, housing the formerly homeless in your community becomes a tremendous burden on that community.
I can't find the article right now but the LA Times did some great reporting on their housing first program and the burden it put on neighbors and the community was immense.
Obviously this argument is made to some extent in bad faith but clearly unhoused people are not the only ones who indicate excess demand for housing and would like to live in vacant units if they were commandeered. 43,000 people are supercommuting from Stockton and Modesto to the Bay Area every day. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of people are being priced out of the Bay Area and moving to places like Boise and Austin--many of them would surely stay if housing were more abundant. There are also many young people who are still in roommate situations or living with their parents but would like a place of their own. Everyone agrees that these are major problems in other contexts, but in the "unhoused > vacancies" point they are all completely whitewashed as indications that demand > supply.
The odd thing is that if you've ever spent time in the equities trading industry, you would know that a small float + tons of demand is always going to result in massive price spikes... every time. The whole vacancy leads to homelessness argument is so bad that I have a hard time believing it's not bad faith on it's face.
I live in Seattle where the homeless population is large and growing even though city goevernent is spending a lot of money trying to get people into housing. The Pandemic has hit the city hard, turning a vibrant downtown into boarded up storefronts, sidewalks unnavigable because of the tents and trash and empty office buildings. Apartment buildings are offering three months free rent and reducing lease pricing significantly. The cost of housing in the suburbs and even further out are skyrocketing. A decent three bedroom house in North Bend, about 30-45 minutes outside the city center can cost nearly a million dollars! And they sell fast with multiple offers. I hope office workers like those working at Amazon and Google will come back to the office towers to work but I suspect they may not return to the high rise apartment buildings. Maybe some of those buildings can be converted to low cost and subsidized buildings. I also think some of the office towers could be turned into low cost housing.
The pandemic and the rapid shift to work-from-home for tech employees here has really done some wild things to our housing costs here. North Bend doesn't shock me (it's beautiful and has been a bedroom community for MSFT employees for decades), but the price jumps in other areas outside of Seattle proper are mind-boggling, especially when you get just east of the mountains and find that you'd be paying close to two-years-ago Seattle prices for a fixer in Roslyn that would have gone for $125k in 2014.
I suspect you're right about many tech workers not returning to those newly-built luxury Downtown/SLU/Cap Hill apartments. I'm in tech, and right now, no one I know is expecting to go back to five days a week in the office in the foreseeable future, and commuting to SLU by bus or car (be it from Ballard, North Bend, or apparently now Roslyn or Cle Elum) is a lot less of a problem if you only have to do it once or twice a week. What that does long-term to the housing market--and housing planning--here post-pandemic, I've no clue.
Do you think it's more likely that the offices will refill while the apartments remain empty? My impression is that it's more likely the apartments will refill while the offices remain empty (and hopefully some of those offices can be converted to apartments).
I think the research on housing-first for homelessness is pretty sound. This could possibly be one of the thorniest electoral issues imaginable, and would only be more contentious in a market with housing supply scarcity.
A second-order problem that goes un-discussed: Managing the units occupied by the formerly homeless.
In this case, I am not talking about low-income families and individuals that have been pushed into homelessness due to affordability problems. For most landlords (including myself), they are fine tenants.
The bigger issue would be with the long-term homeless, where mental health and substance abuse is likely a problem. That is an entirely different kind of landlord than the kind who deals with low-income tenants. These landlords would need to be well paid (as a % on the revenue) and have pretty quick access to courts and other channels to deal with problem tenants. They would be extremely easy to demonize, even when they are doing the right thing. When you factor in the slow process of eviction in many blue, coastal states, you would find few people up for that job.
It's a shame because as awareness has grown, paradoxically, it seems as if capacity to deal with problems has gone down.
But in terms of problem tenants. If we have a housing first policy and a resident needs to be evicted, he or she needs to be institutionalized and not just put out on the street again.
What if this conversation started with a graph of homelessness vs temperate climate/distance to ocean?
Then the correlation would be pretty good! https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/homelessness-in-americas-metros-18cf6aecf35b
Another way you can think about this discussion point is that vacant housing is a surplus. If there's no surplus, and all of the existing supply is consumed, then by definition you have a shortage - there's no unused supply available to purchase.
Vacant housing may be unoccupied, but it still plays a role within the housing markets because of this, and I would argue is the primary mechanism by which Yimbys should think about how boosting supply improves affordability. More empty homes in a city puts pressure on landlords and developers to compete on price and on quality, as they and consumers all know that consumers can more easily find an alternative. High vacancy rates give renters and homebuyers economic power, and turn a seller's market into a buyer's market.
I did a quick and dirty analysis for English cities here - we have super low long-term vacancy rates, including below 1 per cent in a number of cities, and the urban area with the highest vacancy rate, Burnley (a poor mining town in Northern England) still has a lower vacancy rate than Tokyo - https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/why-we-need-more-empty-homes-to-end-the-housing-crisis/ That's because our housing shortage is especially bad because the English town planning is especially bad, way worse than any zoning regime in the US except perhaps SF.
What are the policy solutions of people who blame developers? It's seems vacuous to me b/c developers don't have to crowd out more government intervention.
"People who can't afford to live here should move somewhere else." I've had that said to me many times.
“End all real estate development.”
I have had multiple people say that to my face. As far as they’re concerned, if you end for-profit housing development, Red Vienna will immediately follow.
1. Penalize people who own housing that they don't live in
2. Upzone only for public housing, and build only public housing
They think developers are bad because developers are fatcats. It doesn't matter whether private development crowds out government intervention or not. It is bad in and of itself.
One of the markets I always want to see compared when we talk about housing in the US is Germany. They have an incredibly high rental population and have managed to create an abundance of homes in urban areas that drives relatively inexpensive housing stock. What are they doing to achieve this in a relatively litigious and expensive first world country like ours?
Uh, the facile and probably wrong answer is that continental Europe is way, way less litigious than the US.
The real answer is that Germany's national bird is the Crane.