I think you are misreading public opinion here. A few silly polls can say whatever they want. I have spent time in college towns in the midwest, tiny towns in upstate NY, and the most gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Universally, the average person opposes new housing in any neighborhood they've lived in for a long time. Go to any town in America, sit down at the bar, and ask about the newest development in town. They will not be happy about it. Look up any new construction and google "<name of town> <zoning>" and you will find a website of concerned citizens fighting any change tooth and nail. It seems to me YIMBY is only going to get more and more unpopular as it gains traction, and this really is a difficult issue for the "MY Theory of Change".
I think they universally hate any development in their neighborhood, but they also moderately like the big things going up in other neighborhoods and other cities. The question is how to associate the public attitude with the million projects they like a little rather than the few projects they hate a lot.
RE: "how to associate the public attitude with the million projects they like a little rather than the few projects they hate a lot" - the fix is state-level legislation to remove veto points at the local level, which is going to be a lot easier than converting NIMBYs into YIMBYS (although as we've seen with CA SB50, it's still REALLY hard).
I think this is wrong. I've lived 40 years in Brooklyn, many of them in Brooklyn Heights which invented NIMBYism in the 1950's, and for the last 13 years on the border of Park Slope and Gowanus. Within 30 seconds of my door, four 15 story buildings have gone up in the past five years. If I walk another ten minutes north or south there are another 10. No one's complained about them that I know of. Living next to a construction site isn't pleasant, but we put up with it. As I write this there's another outside my window creating noise havoc I'll put up with another 12 months. But hey we need to make space for Matt's billion Americans to fend off the Chinese. Suck it up.
FWIW, I live in Vietnam and I've never seen any NIMBYism here. Now, some of that is no doubt due to generally truncated levels of activism/public complaining overall but even behind closed doors I've never really heard it.
And I'm talking about much bigger levels of change than anything remotely allowed in the US. I live in what you would call a residential neighbourhood, what was traditionally single family homes. Albeit large, multigenerational families.
My neighbour runs his company out of the ground floor of his house (5 or 6 employees) and rents out 1 or 2 bedrooms to lodgers. Another neighbour smashed down their house and are building a 5 or 6 story serviced apartment building with 20 or 30 units. At the entrance to my deadend road, a company bought four or five individual houses, smashed them down and built a 10 story office building about 5 years ago.
(Clearly there is nothing remotely like American zoning here lol)
All of that is within a 200 meter radius of my house. And I've never heard a neighbour complain about it.
I don't think NIMBYism is some fundamental force of the universe, though it absolutely seems to be that way in much of the world.
I don't pretend to know why it seems almost nonexistent here other than (somewhat ironically for a country that is nominally communist with, in theory, no concept of private land ownership) there is a VERY strong sense of you can do whatever you want on your land and your neighbours can't complain.
Maybe it is just as simple as: since there is no obvious local veto process (councils, local zoning, etc) people don't see a way to provide input and in a kind of Sapir-Worf way if they don't see the possibility of local input it never metastasised to NIMBYism.
Obviously there are some limits to that. I know someone who ran some kind of woodworking business out of their house and the neighbour complaints about the noise from the saws eventually forced them to relocate.
Maybe as Vietnam gets richer that will change. There has already been a sea change in the past 10 years about noise complaints (karaoke until 2am, multi-day funerals) so maybe that's the first step to eventual Western style NIMBYism.
I wonder if NIMBYism is a thing in, say, South Korea or Indonesia or India or South Africa?
But as housing prices get more and more unreasonable, it's going to gain more and more traction. We'll see if that means it gets infinitely unpopular, but I feel like the number of people who can't afford to live in town will get activated faster than the already-pretty-active current landowners, and there are more of the former.
In the abstract, I'm sure you can change the framing of these kinds of questions and get different answers. But when something is actually happening in your neighborhood, it's not abstract anymore and you're going to have an opinion about it based on the actual effect, or what you think the effect will be, not sticking it to whoever on the other side.
Which is precisely why these decisions should not be made by the neighborhood or anything on a similar scale, they should be made at the state level or larger.
Why, aside from sheer partisan rancor? TX and FL aren’t exactly going out of their way to stunt the growth of Austin or Miami, or to micromanage their density counterproductively.
Hell, there are a few other policy areas I wouldn’t mind Philadelphia not being allowed to play with and being preempted by the state…
The level at which the decision is being made doesn't affect whether you're going to make up your mind based on how it affects you and your neighborhood vs. what the ideological coding of the issue is.
That's demonstrably untrue. It is only possible to enact rules with diffuse benefits and concentrated harms, or to do away with those with diffuse harms and concentrated benefits, at large scale.
Not that it always happens, but it's impossible to do at small scale.
I'm not commenting on at what scale you should try to do this, I'm commenting that at some point you actually have to convince people this is a good idea for themselves and their neighborhoods, because the less abstract this and the more people know about it, the less they are going to rely on the wording of your poll or how it's being framed ideologically.
My point is that if the enabling laws are enacted at the state level, I don't really need to convince anyone that it's good for their neighborhood because very few people are actually going to live in neighborhoods that get substantially altered as a result. Harms will be diffused by the fact that all locales will be open to building, and benefits will be similarly diffuse both in terms of reducing housing costs and rents, and in terms of shoring up tax bases.
Most people will be unwilling to change the status quo once it's actually the status quo.
I don't think the people who keep a hawkeyed watch out to oppose new development in their neighborhood are likely to be fooled or talked into supporting a zoning reform they'd otherwise oppose just because it's for the whole state instead of only their town.
But at the state level, it's at least theoretically possible to get support from people outside the most NIMBY towns to override and preempt the wishes of the NIMBY towns - defeat them not convince them.
But even that's not likely. Take Pennsylvania. Wide swathes of the state could theoretically gang up on building restrictions in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, just like they did for a while to preempt municipal bans on plastic shopping bags. But why would they bother - what's in it for them? Most rural legislators would more likely come down on the side of municipal control when it comes to zoning. So whatever level of government, there's no way around having popular support.
I tend to be on the side of local devolution. The harms may be diffuse, but the benefits are concentrated and obvious. If you make your community a nice place, lots of people will want to move there, benefiting the existing home owners. This strikes me as a feature, not a bug. Not sure why we should be taking power away from communities to improve life for their town. If anything we should be encouraging more to do the same, and not moving decision-making to the state or higher level.
This only benefits me as a home owner if I want to _sell_ my place.
If I want to keep living there and not have the character of the neighborhood change, then having apartments put up in place of houses is bad for me until I want to sell(leaving property tax issues aside for the moment)
But of course I am free to gripe about the high cost of housing for my kids when they can't afford to live in my town (that I totally caused to be stuck with no development so they'd be priced out of the market)
I get where you're coming from in theory(and in principle I agree that often local control is better!) - but as David R. says, this isn't how it's working in practice.
“Bold land use reform could turn California or New York (or Oregon or Washington or Maryland or Massachusetts) into fast-growing, economically successful states. It could turn them into states that, thanks to more generous welfare programs, offer higher living standards for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.”
This is going to sound really harsh, but I think it zeroes in on the problem YIMBYS have. If you read a regular person the quoted paragraph, they would burst out laughing. Regular people - whatever politics they identify with, from DSA lefties to MAGA - know that the reason the places you have listed are desirable to live in is because they are too expensive for the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. Some people will freely articulate that belief, but most will couch this belief in euphemisms.
People do not want their local communities to be destroyed. More houses equals more risk.
I don’t think this is true at all. The high cost of living is a result of these places being desirable to live, not vice versa. You can see that in the fact that NYC and the Bay Area had major population inflows starting in the 80s (when it was more affordable) and slowing growth/outflows as it gets more expensive.
These are desirable places to live because they provide economic opportunities, and separately for NYC it is a desirable place to live because it has the greatest amenities in the entire country and it's where most important things in American culture happen.
You're right that there are *some* people who appreciate this, but I don't think it's even true in every case. San Francisco is a prohibitively expensive place where no transplanted poor person could even dream of owning home (or even renting an apartment). This, of course, doesn't stop San Francisco from having a reputation as a lawless wasteland filled with homeless people.
Wealthy retirement communities in Florida are desirable for the reason you mention. Cities are desirable because they have jobs, culture, and amenities. Obviously incumbents oppose changing anything, since they access those benefits AND get to have their net worth rise year over year. But it would be better for the city to build more housing.
"NYC it is a desirable place to live because it has the greatest amenities in the entire country and it's where most important things in American culture happen."
I think people (including Matt) dramatically oversell the importance of amenities, particularly cultural rather than geographic ones, to city desirability and housing costs. As a practical matter they just don't add much in the way of expected value for most folks. We can stipulate that, e.g., the Met (either one) or the Frick or the Guggenheim or whatever is an incredible cultural amenity, but it's a rare city resident indeed who takes advantage of its proximity more than a handful of times per year, and that's at the high end. The fact that there's a reduced travel overhead to visiting these kinds of amenities (and note that it's really travel time rather than access that at issue--it's not as if you couldn't make a day trip to the city if you were anywhere in the BosWash) seems like the kind of consideration that's not even a rounding error as against all the other more tangible determinations of choosing where to live.
Those are the flagship amenities, which, it’s true, most people don’t often use. But those flagships are just symbols of the much larger number of small amenities. You’ve got a corner store walking distance from your house, your favorite underappreciated genre of ethnic food, there’s a local club for people interested in knitting/board games/other weird niche interest, and there’s several other employers in your field in case your boss gets too annoying. These agglomeration advantages exist at all points in the social/cultural sphere, not just in terms of high art and the like.
The concentration of industries / employers I'll certainly grant you (although I think we could probably agree that while that's definitely an agglomeration effect it's not usually what people mean by "amenity," but the original comment did distinguish between "amenities" and "economic opportunities" so seems kind of moot except as to scope clarification), and there are some nits I might pick with the others without necessarily disagreeing in principle, but I do have to take this opportunity to engage in my personal crusade against what I perceive as the unwarranted lionization of the corner store (or, "bodega" as New Yorker insist on calling it).
Hot take: Bodegas suck and we need fewer of them. They can't *even in principle* benefit from economies of scale since they're definitionally small-scale, their selection is often lousy, their cleanliness is kind of joke (the "bodega cat" is a well-worn trope), and most importantly they represent the division of commercial space into a lot of low-value-added small commercial spaces whereas a few larger, scale-benefiting chains would offer better selection, higher cleanliness and lower prices.
And you don't even have to take my idiosyncratic word for it--Trader Joes in NYC, despite the compromises they have to make on the small commercial space available (e.g., exceptionally narrow aisles) often have lines *literally out the door* (not figuratively, literally) because there's so much demand for adequate selection at decent quality and low prices, and New York at large but *especially* micro-scale retail seems like it's doing kind of a rubbish job of addressing it, which is why these people aren't going to anywhere closer or with less of a wait. I'd rather see all the space currently occupied by bodegas coalesced into more TJ's or like an Aldi or Target or (perhaps somewhat implausibly given the typical scale) Costco or something.
The point of the corner store isn’t that it’s good but that it’s literally on your corner, so if you’ve started cooking and remember you need butter, you can leave the pot on while you walk over and grab it.
Obviously much better to have a TJ on your corner, but again that depends on high population density to support a larger business close to home.
But Trader Joe's are specifically urban amenities to many of us who live in NYC, and I never stand on a line out the door! During my pandemic move to my native rustbelt, I had to drive 40+ minutes to get to a TJs. Back in the city, I can walk to at least seven of them, including a wine-specific TJs. And that's a small part of a much bigger picture, including access to more niche grocery items, free or cheap activities that are not world-class museums (things like the Drawing Center and other small art spaces; also I'm a bird nerd and spent yesterday on a migration hike that I walked to and from) and decent health services. And sometimes a corner store, or crap chain drugstore, on your block can be a godsend (if you need, say, emergency Pedialyte when you have a horrific stomach virus on a major holiday, I can personally vouch for this benefit).
Sure, if you have a car and enjoy driving, you can find stuff like this in a lot of places if the economic agglomeration benefits aren't relevant to you. But not everyone fits that description.
(1) I am also pro-bird and would be very interested in your migration hike location if you're willing to share it.
(2) TJ's may be mostly (though not exclusively) an urban phenomenon but large, high-selection, high-cleanliness grocery stores in general definitely aren't -- in fact they're really the norm outside of NYC -- and it's just that TJ's occupies that niche in NYC. Part of what drives me nuts about bodega over-proliferation in New York (and I agree that while there is probably a place for small-scale retail but also there are *lots* of parts of NYC with like three-to-five bodegas selling the same goods on the same block) is that to all appearances *New Yorkers themselves* would prefer to shop at the same kind of grocery stores the rest of the country does but between the inefficient partition of commercial space (much of it given over to micro retail), TJ's over-cautious (IMO) approach to expansion, and the fact that other would-be retail competitors like Fairway or Key Foods seem incapable of providing the same level of price/quality/selection it's just not on offer.
This may be true for suburban communities. Where I live in NY there is a reasonably large amount of building, the zoning allows it. It’s still a rich neighborhood and the new construction just allows younger people who are becoming rich in for the most part. Opposition really centers around the construction itself which is very annoying! I’ve lived next to necessary (in my opinion) construction several times and knowing it’s for the long term good of the area can only make up for a tiny portion of the hassle of living next to it. Imo There needs to be less focus on blocking these projects through legal or administrative hearings about shadows and more explicit payoffs for the neighbors who have to live with the noise, pollution, and blight of the construction site.
I'm curious where you live in NY? One of my favorite fun facts (note: no actual fun guaranteed) about housing policy is that NY state and city both produce _fewer_ new units per capita than San Francisco.
Upper east side of Manhattan! emphasis on east. Some stuff gets built on Lexington but most of the action is 3rd Ave and east of there. I don’t know about the NET new units because strong demand causes a lot of the multi unit walk ups to get renovated down into single family, but we have certainly put up many towers. especially since the 2nd Ave subway finished—which was a big mess of its own.
"People do not want their local communities to be destroyed. More houses equals more risk."
Communities are defined by the people, not houses. If prices in an area rise so much that working class people can no longer afford to raise families there, how is that not destroying the community?
And 3 is absolutely impossible, which we all know, so most left-NIMBY's are effectively supporting 1, which just happens to coincide with most of their financial interests so thoroughly that one cannot help but assume that their public views are held in bad faith.
I think it's bad faith on the part of some, but also a lot of motivated reasoning. In my experience, people who (being normal) don't think a lot about housing policy are susceptible to left-NIMBY arguments based on this. Those arguments "feel true" to them, and because they are so often framed as "it's not affordable ENOUGH" new left-NIMBY recruits can continue to feel good about themselves while supporting their own (actually selfish) interests.
In good faith, I can either agree that residents should be able to block them (I give everyone the same right to block these things as me) or I can agree that in general nobody(including me) should be able to block them?
The first one of those leads to real problems, and there's definitely some blindness, but it's much harder to convince someone who is arguing in bad faith than someone who is just blind/misinformed, so I try not to assume bad faith (there are certainly _individuals_ who act in bad faith, but I'm trying not to assume it of larger groups)
As I said above, there's so much evidence out there that a lot of people know better and still profess to believe that we can or should give up #3 above. They hold that view in bad faith.
I would not care to wager on rough proportions within the NIMBY demographic, I have no idea.
"People do not want their local communities to be destroyed. More houses equals more risk."
Here in Los Angeles I think it's becoming clear to more and more people that building more housing isn't nearly as destructive to communities as not building more housing, the effects of which can be seen by counting the tents set up by homeless people in every neighborhood of the city.
Yeah unfortunately you're right. And some of the "oh the horror!" type reactions to the growth of quality of life issues (visible homeslessness, crime, etc) in places like Seattle can be traced to the fact that the median inhabitant there is increasingly higher and higher on the economic ladder. It's much less common to hear Rust Belters complain about rates of crime, etc.. as people just expect that it comes with the territory there.
Class-sorting doesn't happen at the state level in the USA. It happens more at the metro and smaller levels. California and NY have more than their fair share of poor people
And specifically, it often happens at the school district level. For many communities where people bought houses to be in a particular public school district or catchment area, I think there's no question they believe the reason their communities "are desirable to live in is because they are too expensive for the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder". Because for suburban public school districts, high housing prices serve a similar gatekeeping function of keeping our too many poor kids as high tuition at private schools.
""are desirable to live in is because they are too expensive for the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder"
To be fair, isn't that viewpoint sometimes true?
In my own experience, there seems to be a strong correlation between income levels and social behavior in the rust belt city metro I live in. I spend half my week in a lower-middle class, blue collar area and the other half in a white collar, upper middle class area. Most people are great in both, but the frequency of anti-social behavior, problem neighbors and people I want to stay away from my kids is definitely higher in the former.
I often get the sense this sort of thing is framed as simply an issue of snobbish, out-of-touch, rich a-holes who don't want to associate with those beneath them. I'm sure sometimes it is that, but I suspect it's more frequently people simply doing what's best for themselves and their families. I don't want to live right next to people with. decaying trash in their yards, or drug dealers shooting at customers, both of which happened in the last few years on my mom's block but are unlikely to happen on my block.
Interestingly, or oddly, depending on your perspective, I didn't really observe the same correlation when I lived in LA. In LA it often felt like there were more anti-social behaviors in higher income zones.
"Most people are great in both, but the frequency of anti-social behavior, problem neighbors and people I want to stay away from my kids is definitely higher in the former."
My observations point to a bit of a bell curve, I think.
Working-class neighborhoods have many of the maladies you describe, in my experience. Middle-income neighborhoods make me, personally, quite comfortable. Then you get to upper-class neighborhoods and I feel like we're back to "vaguely threatening disputes around parking", with added passive-aggressive "mow your lawn or I'll call 311 on you six times in a week" and "how dare you allow your 8-year old out unsupervised to bike down the street."
The nuisances are the exact opposite, but they make me damned near as uncomfortable as the non-violent irritants in lower-income places.
I'd probably be a bit more comfortable in a safe working-class neighborhood than in a posh one, despite having the "correct" kind of job in terms of income and status.
Well, to be more accurate it only happened once. The customer tried to rob the dealer because the dealer was living with a stripper so it was thought they might have some petty cash laying around. But he brought a knife to a gun fight and ended up pistol-whipped and lucky to not have been shot (a car in the alleyway was not so lucky).
Interestingly, the dealer's brother is a doctor, his sister runs a yoga studio and his cousin is a broadway dancer.
Not everyone is actually optimizing their distance from poor people. In fact, I'd say people are more commonly trying to stay away from economic competitors nearer to their own class, rather than just the poor.
Even just to meet this claim on its own terms, I think it's widely regarded that the main downside of living in San Francisco or New York - other than cost - is petty crime. The downscale people who do petty crimes are obviously here in numbers still, as hard as it may be for them.
"I've never heard anyone say or imply that CA or NY are good places to live because poorer people find it unaffordable."
Right—on the contrary, it's pretty clear that the more unaffordable the areas have been for poor people, the worse the problems we've had with homelessness, public safety, and general quality of life.
Matt – thanks for making the final point in this column on blue states and good governance. It has always been baffling to me that proponents of active government don’t marry that with a demand and push for good governance. Seems like it would be self-evident that addressing an issue isn’t enough – the solution has to work. Further strikes as an obvious way to attract people to the cause is demonstrating care and concern that government institutions and policy can, in general, effectively deliver needed goods and services to citizens. As two examples among many, it’s always struck me as unconscionable that the government entities you point at fail to deliver reasonable educational opportunities to children in their jurisdictions despite relatively high levels of spending, or have more efficiently run mass transit systems that would disproportionately benefit lower-income residents despite relatively high taxes.
I agree with the discussion about Congress being more bipartisan, functional and pragmatic on more workaday yet important issues than most people realize. But that seems like a separate article about the functioning of Congress, and oddly shoehorned in here to this discussion of land use and zoning laws about housing --- a quintessential local issue if there ever was one.
The states where local laws are blocking new construction and making housing less affordable (mainly Democratic states) are fully capable of addressing that issue on their own, without any involvement of Congress. They are the ones experiencing the consequences of those laws, good or ill, and if they don't want to change it, why is this a federal issue that Congress should even be discussing?
Congress should be discussing it because NIMBY politics are bad for the country as a whole, preventing the efficient allocation of labor. Not building houses in desireable areas affects people not living there yet, thus not getting a vote.
That being said, the legislation tends to be nudges in the right direction as specific policy proposals that would be effective are very local.
Debating local land use policy in Congress seems like a recipe for turning it into another polarized, nationalized, everyone-in-the-whole-country-should-agree-with-me issue that gets grandstanded by people like Trump talking about how the other party wants to "outlaw suburbs".
And are California's NIMBY policies actually bad for, say, Texas? Seems like the opposite might be true, and at the least that the difficulty of supporting sweeping statements about what position on this issue is "bad for the country as a whole" means this is a topic with a strong argument for deferring to State-level preferences. If not even this topic is suited for a live and let live attitude towards local variation, is any topic?
While I mostly agree, very much worth mentioning that the federal govt implicitly promotes NIMBYism through subsidies. Transportation funding is heavily car-centric, for instance.
But it's even more true for the literal trillions of dollars we spend subsidizing homeownership, which does tend to turn people into NIMBYs. But I'd assume that it's still politically very popular so maybe not viable to change course there.
Congress doesn’t, but state legislatures do. State legislatures all created zoning with their own laws, and they could revise these laws and how zoning works in every municipality if they wanted. But these laws copied the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act published by the Department of Commerce in 1921. If the federal government incentivized states to change, most of them would.
+1. More than 100 years on, it's time to revisit the enabling acts. How do 10-year master plans make any kind of sense at this point for many/most communities?!
"Lina Khan got a lot of Republican votes in her confirmation as FTC Chair."
The first part of this sentence is right - Lina Khan did get a lot of Republican votes in her confirmation. But the second part - as FTC Chair - is not right: the Administration pulled a bait-and-switch with her nomination by waiting until after she was confirmed to designate her as Chair. This procedure was perfectly legitimate, of course - the President can designate any commissioner as Chair at any time. But past practice was consistently to identify the Chair prior to the confirmation vote, and the Admin's failure to do that with Khan was a signal that she WASN'T going to be Chair. My (pretty strong) view is that she would have received fewer R votes had she been designated Chair prior to the vote.
Currently the FTC is deadlocked 2-2 between Ds and Rs. The third D's nomination has been held up for months. One hypothesis is that this holdup is payback for the Lina Khan bait-and-switch. Who knows if that hypothesis is true, but it seems plausible.
God, why does the Senate have the power to confirm *so* many executive branch officials? It's not just the high-level cabinet secretaries, there are so many lower level positions I've never heard of that also have to get confirmed. Voting on all of these appointments takes so much of the Senate's time that could be spent on legislation. It should not take half of the President's term just to fully staff the administration. And that's not even getting into how this creates a bunch more veto points in a system of government already full of veto points.
I have some sympathy for your general point but the FTC isn’t an example of it. The FTC is an independent agency, with quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative authority. The president can remove Commissioners only for cause. It’s not part of the executive branch. Whatever you think of advice and consent of the Senate generally, it seems especially important for institutions like the FTC.
This is a real thing? Who is pushing for this and why? I googled it and the article I found made it seem like businesses are supporting it. But that seems far-fetched; if a business wants a 32 hour work week they can have one very easily without the state getting involved.
Is this basically a backdoor way to increase pay for hourly workers or get more people hired as salary?
Yeah I got that you were being sarcastic originally - I mentioned "it can't be businesses wanting it" only because of the article I found from my google search was pitching it that way. Hopefully I'm parsing the sarcasm reference correctly, haha.
Can the federal government do anything on YIMBY that's more direct than attaching strings to federal grants?
I understand that this is a vague question, since the Constitution means whatever five Supreme Court justices say it means. But hypothetically, if HUD said "We hereby find that parking mandates and minimum lot sizes imposed by local governments violate the Fair Housing Act", would that be likely to hold up as a lawful use of agency authority?
The only strings that Congress has on local regulations is tying it to federal money. That being said, they spend lots of money so there is a lot of pull with well designed legislation.
HUD, like all executive branch agencies, is subject to the Administrative Procedure Act. Your hypothetical certainly sounds arbitrary and capricious and would be vulnerable to a legal challenge.
I don't understand why you wouldn't read his comment and assume that HUD would make that announcement AFTER having gone through the APA required procedures....then answer the more interesting question of what federal influence should be in this sphere.
My own thought would be that federal rule making of that type should be discouraged as its too high level - state government seems much more appropriate place for such decisions.
Presidential administrations love to bypass the APA whenever they can though. See: the Obama administration's "Dear Colleague" letter, the Trump administrations attempted rescinding of DACA, the Biden administration's current efforts to not defend a Trump-era immigration regulation in court in order to get rid of it.
I think its reasonable to think that HUD or DOT could go through an APA process and come out with YIMBY requirements. Are you saying they couldn't do a policy such as "to receive funding, you must permit multi unit housing within 5 miles of any DOT funded project?" What would be the legal objection?
I'm looking online and I can't tell at first glance whether the Act applies to regulatory actions by state and local governments as well as specific acts of discrimination. If it does, HUD could argue that these rules have a racially disparate impact.
Matt has pointed out that using a racial framing for policy reforms that aren't overtly race-related tends not to work well. So it would be better if Congress simply outlawed these types of land-use regulation. But again, I don't know whether the courts would object on states'-rights grounds.
It does or doesn't, depending on what the Supreme Court says. To strike down such a law they'd have to read the interstate-commerce clause much more narrowly than it's been read in recent decades.
Existing precedent is that almost all economic activities (including employment discrimination, which is arguably more local than land-use policy) are subject to congressional authority because they affect interstate commerce at least indirectly. Perhaps the current court shouldn't be encouraged to reopen that debate.
Another option would be for the Supreme Court itself to declare zoning unconstitutional, on the grounds that it impairs landowners' property rights and violates the Fifth Amendment. But I agree with Matt that this is usually a terrible way to make public policy, even when you happen to like the results.
They can plainly and obviously outlaw such regulations in effect, by mandating that federal transportation funding not be allocated to projects in areas which maintain them.
Please, Ken, you're fully capable of being less literal-minded than this, please *do so*, for the love of God.
Matt made this point a few years ago. The congressional power of the purse is so enormous that states' rights can almost always be overruled in practice, as Obama did with education policy:
I think the Supreme Court has almost never acted to limit this practice. In "South Dakota v. Dole" they allowed Congress to use conditions on federal highway funding to force states to raise the drinking age to 21... even though the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed Prohibition, explicitly gave the states sovereign authority over alcohol regulation.
The only exception I'm aware of is "NFIB v. Sebelius", in which the Court decided that strings attached to Medicaid funding were too "coercive" and threw out the element of the ACA that was meant to force all states to expand Medicaid eligibility.
If conservatives end up getting as emotional over zoning as they did over Obamacare, the Court might do the same thing and protect states' rights in land-use policy. That goes back to Matt's point: it's very important to have Republicans on board with YIMBY.
Hopefully the Supreme Court would invalidate any such action on the basis that “funding conditions must be related to the purposes of the federally funded program or activity.”
"Current levels of transport infrastructure funding per capita are not sustainable. The federal government has a relevant and compelling interest in mandating that municipalities and counties permit higher density construction around infrastructure projects with federal funding to maximize benefit and utility received by the citizenry from such funding, and to reduce future funding needs elsewhere."
Add legalese.
May or may not work, but there's no clear partisan reason why not at present.
As someone who asked a version of this question in last week’s mailbag, I’m sorry for annoying you. Seriously—I really appreciate reading your thoughts here and on Twitter, and I hate to have annoyed you. But I think today’s column gets two things wrong. One, this debate happens mostly locally. The column focuses on the national parties (and to a lesser extent the state parties). It’d be great if they got more involved (and in the non-/bi-partisan manner you hope for) to deal with the spillover effects of municipal policies. But those effects exist because, two, there’s a lot of evidence these ideas are unpopular. That’s a big part of why we have this problem. Fischel’s “homevoters” and Einstein, Palmer, and Glick’s “neighborhood defenders” remain a dominant force in local politics.
*Currently*, these issues are handled at the local level, but I believe Matt would prefer that state governments exert more control over land use regulations. Municipal control will tend toward bad outcomes in this area for the reasons you describe, but if done at the state level, the hyper-local collective action problem doesn’t get in the way of policies that benefit the state. Josh Barro wrote about this several weeks ago in a way I found very clarifying:
Echoing @Joey5Slice a bit, yes, this is why those of us who hold these views in blue states think the overwhelmingly Democratic legislatures need to take them up at the state level. While I personally think the positive effects of housing reform would end up making them politically popular when you take out the collective action problem, let's say voters get angry about them. Then the outcome is either new Democrats get in via primaries, or the Democratic tilt in the legislature goes from like 90%-10%, to 80%-20%. The stakes are incredibly low.
This is what some people don't seem to understand about the different dynamic between state and national politics. In national politics, the consequences really are dire of picking the wrong fight and ending up underwater because the difference between 50.1% D and 50.1% R at a national level is highly consequential - and in fact catastrophic if you care about progressive priorities.
At the state level, using Massachusetts or California as an example, if they passed a bunch of bills that are good on the merits but potentially unpopular and got some members in hot water in their districts, there would still be overwhelming Dem majorities. And if they passed bills that are good on the merits and addressed the problems facing these states, it would long-run be better for Democrats both in the state and nationally.
People, in general, are in favor of more and cheaper housing. They just don't want it in *their* neighborhood. That's why it is a good thing for Congress to act on - because they aren't proposing to build in *your* neighborhood - just neighborhoods generally.
As much as I support housing reform personally, I feel like trying to nationalize the issue is going to do more harm than good.
In the worst case, I imagine the issue driving suburbs back into the arms of the GOP, leaving Democrats a permanent minority (like it or not, Democrats cannot win national elections without NIMBY votes; there are just too many of them). And, of course, red states pre-empting blue cities from unzoning their own neighborhoods, just like they prevent such cities from banning plastic bags, regulating guns, or doing anything else the GOP doesn't like.
By all means, fix zoning at the local level. But, turning it into an R vs. D issue could very well backfire.
Might as well drop in a plug for libertarianism. When free markets and property rights are compromised, supposedly for the "greater good", the results will usually serve not a greater good but the selfish interests of the loudest, well-connected voices.
Without NIMBY zoning, subsidized mortgages, and eminent domain to clear wide paths for publicly funded highways, more of us might be living in the high density, affordable, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods that progressive types advocate. Also note that the early "public" transit systems were often private enterprises - until they were rendered unprofitable by government subsidized sprawl.
What's the libertarian position on HOAs? Specifically, its position on whether property should be able to be perpetually tied up in CC&Rs that can enforce anything ranging from the equivalent of NIMBY zoning, to something more infamous like racial discrimination.
I live in a country with little or no NIMBY zoning and zero subsidised mortgages. There is eminent domain but I've never seen it used in the way you imply.
Despite that, nothing here is affordable, walkable, or transit oriented.
Which makes me think your diagnosis of the problem is probably oversimplistic.
Here in Oregon, we have many YIMBY policies, but I'm not sure that they are working. Single-family zoning is banned state-wide. ADUs are everywhere. Airbnbs are restricted. The state will not let cities expand their UGBs until the space within them is highly utilized, and then the state lets them add surrounding open space within their UGBs. Cities are therefore motivated to densify, then expand, then densify, then expand. We seem to be a YIMBY-policy dream come true. I'm in favor of it all.
Through all this, housing prices have been soaring. People from out of state are flocking here, buying up all this new housing, outbidding less-affluent locals (we just got another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives). Homelessness keeps increasing.
Do YIMBY policies really work? I'm not seeing it, but of course that isn't an analysis.
Wouldn't the outbidding happen, with or without the YIMBY policies?
But on the one hand, if you're against population growth I think you've identified the achilles heal of YIMBY-ism. In a nice part of a nice country there will always be a potential immigrant to fill an unfilled spot. So LA, for example, will never YIMBY themselves out of population growth in our lifetime, absent much stricter curbs on immigration.
On the other hand, YIMBY oregon is probably slowing housing price growth in Idaho, in Seattle, etc, by drawing people who might have otherwise stayed put.
Then we are using our beautiful open space and exhausting our precious water resources only to make everything very crowded with people from elsewhere. Perhaps no one should go YIMBY until everyone does.
Fortunately, Oregon outlawed sprawl in 1973 (Portland has sprawl on the Washington side of the Columbia River). Otherwise, I think you are right. Thanks.
I think it's useful to just look at *actual housing production* which as far as I'm aware, hasn't gone up a lot in Portland, relative to years of under-building.
I'd also note that there are a TON of tools in the NIMBY toolbelt--zoning is just one. You have height limits, minimum lot sizes, parking minimums, setbacks, and on and on. Removing SFZ is great but if the market wants 40 units and you only allow 3, you are still going to have a huge problem.
I don't think housing is a partisan issue because the vast majority of people are NIMBY's in practice and the solutions all require action at the state and local level.
The polling on this I think reflects vague kind of positive support for the idea, but like many other ideas (M4A), suddenly becomes very unpopular once the tradeoffs for individuals are known. And I'm one of those people. I like the idea of YIMBY and more and more affordable housing, but the extent to which I'd support efforts in my own single-family-home neighborhood would really depend on the details.
In my own area (highly suburban with a majority of single-family homes and low-rise apartments and condos), increasing density would require several inter-related things:
- local authorities changing zoning laws
- state governments decimating the authority of HOA's.
- The ability for utilities to change and invest in the necessary infrastructure to support those efforts
- Other infrastucture projects like roads to ensure there is enough capacity.
So fundamentally this is an issue that can't be addressed by federal efforts or federal legislation. Sure, the feds can provide incentives (ie. money with strings attached) to try to bend the curve in a particular direction but the bulk of any work needs to happen at the community and state level.
And in another example, here in Colorado, mountain communities have different circumstances and factors that DC, LA or NYC. Here's a local story about Vail Resorts trying to build affordable housing for employees and being blocked by the town of Vail because of wildlife concerns:
Yes. I believe this was to avoid giving an issue to her from-the-right primary challenger Tom Suozzi, who is currently the co-chair of the Problem Solvers caucus and is The Worst.
My contrarian defense of George W. Bush is: what happened in Iraq was that the American establishment decided to got to war. Some very establishment Democrats dissented, Obama and Pelosi will always deserve credit on this score (so does Jacques Chirac, I guess). But the craziness that lead to the war wasn't unique to Bush or to the so-called neocons. The war was supported by Gordon Brown, Michael Ignatieff, Chuck Schumer and Angela Merkel.
Bush deserves blame in a buck-stops-here sense, but it wasn't some idiosyncrasy of his persona or his brand of politics that got us stuck in Iraq. The people who were most annoyed by Bush's personality were people who thought the war would have been won by Tony Blair, Hilary Clinton or John McCain. Or even by John Kerry: Kerry did optimize for fundamentals in 2004 but he voted for the war and as SoS pulled gave imitation Winston Churchill speeches to draw us deeper into war in Syria.
Bush is long gone, so is his style of politics. His enablers (Kerry, Schumer, Biden) are still there and aren't very sorry. To be fair, Biden does seem to have learned more from the Iraq debacle than Kerry, Schumer, or HRC.
I think you are misreading public opinion here. A few silly polls can say whatever they want. I have spent time in college towns in the midwest, tiny towns in upstate NY, and the most gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Universally, the average person opposes new housing in any neighborhood they've lived in for a long time. Go to any town in America, sit down at the bar, and ask about the newest development in town. They will not be happy about it. Look up any new construction and google "<name of town> <zoning>" and you will find a website of concerned citizens fighting any change tooth and nail. It seems to me YIMBY is only going to get more and more unpopular as it gains traction, and this really is a difficult issue for the "MY Theory of Change".
I think they universally hate any development in their neighborhood, but they also moderately like the big things going up in other neighborhoods and other cities. The question is how to associate the public attitude with the million projects they like a little rather than the few projects they hate a lot.
RE: "how to associate the public attitude with the million projects they like a little rather than the few projects they hate a lot" - the fix is state-level legislation to remove veto points at the local level, which is going to be a lot easier than converting NIMBYs into YIMBYS (although as we've seen with CA SB50, it's still REALLY hard).
NIMBY=YITBY (yes in their backyard)
I think this is wrong. I've lived 40 years in Brooklyn, many of them in Brooklyn Heights which invented NIMBYism in the 1950's, and for the last 13 years on the border of Park Slope and Gowanus. Within 30 seconds of my door, four 15 story buildings have gone up in the past five years. If I walk another ten minutes north or south there are another 10. No one's complained about them that I know of. Living next to a construction site isn't pleasant, but we put up with it. As I write this there's another outside my window creating noise havoc I'll put up with another 12 months. But hey we need to make space for Matt's billion Americans to fend off the Chinese. Suck it up.
I spend a lot of time in Brooklyn heights... and I've heard complaints
FWIW, I live in Vietnam and I've never seen any NIMBYism here. Now, some of that is no doubt due to generally truncated levels of activism/public complaining overall but even behind closed doors I've never really heard it.
And I'm talking about much bigger levels of change than anything remotely allowed in the US. I live in what you would call a residential neighbourhood, what was traditionally single family homes. Albeit large, multigenerational families.
My neighbour runs his company out of the ground floor of his house (5 or 6 employees) and rents out 1 or 2 bedrooms to lodgers. Another neighbour smashed down their house and are building a 5 or 6 story serviced apartment building with 20 or 30 units. At the entrance to my deadend road, a company bought four or five individual houses, smashed them down and built a 10 story office building about 5 years ago.
(Clearly there is nothing remotely like American zoning here lol)
All of that is within a 200 meter radius of my house. And I've never heard a neighbour complain about it.
I don't think NIMBYism is some fundamental force of the universe, though it absolutely seems to be that way in much of the world.
I don't pretend to know why it seems almost nonexistent here other than (somewhat ironically for a country that is nominally communist with, in theory, no concept of private land ownership) there is a VERY strong sense of you can do whatever you want on your land and your neighbours can't complain.
Maybe it is just as simple as: since there is no obvious local veto process (councils, local zoning, etc) people don't see a way to provide input and in a kind of Sapir-Worf way if they don't see the possibility of local input it never metastasised to NIMBYism.
Obviously there are some limits to that. I know someone who ran some kind of woodworking business out of their house and the neighbour complaints about the noise from the saws eventually forced them to relocate.
Maybe as Vietnam gets richer that will change. There has already been a sea change in the past 10 years about noise complaints (karaoke until 2am, multi-day funerals) so maybe that's the first step to eventual Western style NIMBYism.
I wonder if NIMBYism is a thing in, say, South Korea or Indonesia or India or South Africa?
But as housing prices get more and more unreasonable, it's going to gain more and more traction. We'll see if that means it gets infinitely unpopular, but I feel like the number of people who can't afford to live in town will get activated faster than the already-pretty-active current landowners, and there are more of the former.
To all you young hotties in Brooklyn, why have none of you primaried Nydia Valezquez?? More interested in partying hard than local politics?
In the abstract, I'm sure you can change the framing of these kinds of questions and get different answers. But when something is actually happening in your neighborhood, it's not abstract anymore and you're going to have an opinion about it based on the actual effect, or what you think the effect will be, not sticking it to whoever on the other side.
Which is precisely why these decisions should not be made by the neighborhood or anything on a similar scale, they should be made at the state level or larger.
If you live in a blue city in a red state, you do not want the state micromanaging decisions about your neighborhood.
Why, aside from sheer partisan rancor? TX and FL aren’t exactly going out of their way to stunt the growth of Austin or Miami, or to micromanage their density counterproductively.
Hell, there are a few other policy areas I wouldn’t mind Philadelphia not being allowed to play with and being preempted by the state…
The level at which the decision is being made doesn't affect whether you're going to make up your mind based on how it affects you and your neighborhood vs. what the ideological coding of the issue is.
That's demonstrably untrue. It is only possible to enact rules with diffuse benefits and concentrated harms, or to do away with those with diffuse harms and concentrated benefits, at large scale.
Not that it always happens, but it's impossible to do at small scale.
I'm not commenting on at what scale you should try to do this, I'm commenting that at some point you actually have to convince people this is a good idea for themselves and their neighborhoods, because the less abstract this and the more people know about it, the less they are going to rely on the wording of your poll or how it's being framed ideologically.
My point is that if the enabling laws are enacted at the state level, I don't really need to convince anyone that it's good for their neighborhood because very few people are actually going to live in neighborhoods that get substantially altered as a result. Harms will be diffused by the fact that all locales will be open to building, and benefits will be similarly diffuse both in terms of reducing housing costs and rents, and in terms of shoring up tax bases.
Most people will be unwilling to change the status quo once it's actually the status quo.
I don't think the people who keep a hawkeyed watch out to oppose new development in their neighborhood are likely to be fooled or talked into supporting a zoning reform they'd otherwise oppose just because it's for the whole state instead of only their town.
But at the state level, it's at least theoretically possible to get support from people outside the most NIMBY towns to override and preempt the wishes of the NIMBY towns - defeat them not convince them.
But even that's not likely. Take Pennsylvania. Wide swathes of the state could theoretically gang up on building restrictions in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, just like they did for a while to preempt municipal bans on plastic shopping bags. But why would they bother - what's in it for them? Most rural legislators would more likely come down on the side of municipal control when it comes to zoning. So whatever level of government, there's no way around having popular support.
I tend to be on the side of local devolution. The harms may be diffuse, but the benefits are concentrated and obvious. If you make your community a nice place, lots of people will want to move there, benefiting the existing home owners. This strikes me as a feature, not a bug. Not sure why we should be taking power away from communities to improve life for their town. If anything we should be encouraging more to do the same, and not moving decision-making to the state or higher level.
But causality is the opposite, no?
I make my community a nice place, but then make it impossible for folks to move there by casting it in amber the way it was when I moved there.
This only benefits me as a home owner if I want to _sell_ my place.
If I want to keep living there and not have the character of the neighborhood change, then having apartments put up in place of houses is bad for me until I want to sell(leaving property tax issues aside for the moment)
But of course I am free to gripe about the high cost of housing for my kids when they can't afford to live in my town (that I totally caused to be stuck with no development so they'd be priced out of the market)
I get where you're coming from in theory(and in principle I agree that often local control is better!) - but as David R. says, this isn't how it's working in practice.
“Bold land use reform could turn California or New York (or Oregon or Washington or Maryland or Massachusetts) into fast-growing, economically successful states. It could turn them into states that, thanks to more generous welfare programs, offer higher living standards for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.”
This is going to sound really harsh, but I think it zeroes in on the problem YIMBYS have. If you read a regular person the quoted paragraph, they would burst out laughing. Regular people - whatever politics they identify with, from DSA lefties to MAGA - know that the reason the places you have listed are desirable to live in is because they are too expensive for the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. Some people will freely articulate that belief, but most will couch this belief in euphemisms.
People do not want their local communities to be destroyed. More houses equals more risk.
I don’t think this is true at all. The high cost of living is a result of these places being desirable to live, not vice versa. You can see that in the fact that NYC and the Bay Area had major population inflows starting in the 80s (when it was more affordable) and slowing growth/outflows as it gets more expensive.
These are desirable places to live because they provide economic opportunities, and separately for NYC it is a desirable place to live because it has the greatest amenities in the entire country and it's where most important things in American culture happen.
You're right that there are *some* people who appreciate this, but I don't think it's even true in every case. San Francisco is a prohibitively expensive place where no transplanted poor person could even dream of owning home (or even renting an apartment). This, of course, doesn't stop San Francisco from having a reputation as a lawless wasteland filled with homeless people.
Wealthy retirement communities in Florida are desirable for the reason you mention. Cities are desirable because they have jobs, culture, and amenities. Obviously incumbents oppose changing anything, since they access those benefits AND get to have their net worth rise year over year. But it would be better for the city to build more housing.
"NYC it is a desirable place to live because it has the greatest amenities in the entire country and it's where most important things in American culture happen."
I think people (including Matt) dramatically oversell the importance of amenities, particularly cultural rather than geographic ones, to city desirability and housing costs. As a practical matter they just don't add much in the way of expected value for most folks. We can stipulate that, e.g., the Met (either one) or the Frick or the Guggenheim or whatever is an incredible cultural amenity, but it's a rare city resident indeed who takes advantage of its proximity more than a handful of times per year, and that's at the high end. The fact that there's a reduced travel overhead to visiting these kinds of amenities (and note that it's really travel time rather than access that at issue--it's not as if you couldn't make a day trip to the city if you were anywhere in the BosWash) seems like the kind of consideration that's not even a rounding error as against all the other more tangible determinations of choosing where to live.
Those are the flagship amenities, which, it’s true, most people don’t often use. But those flagships are just symbols of the much larger number of small amenities. You’ve got a corner store walking distance from your house, your favorite underappreciated genre of ethnic food, there’s a local club for people interested in knitting/board games/other weird niche interest, and there’s several other employers in your field in case your boss gets too annoying. These agglomeration advantages exist at all points in the social/cultural sphere, not just in terms of high art and the like.
The concentration of industries / employers I'll certainly grant you (although I think we could probably agree that while that's definitely an agglomeration effect it's not usually what people mean by "amenity," but the original comment did distinguish between "amenities" and "economic opportunities" so seems kind of moot except as to scope clarification), and there are some nits I might pick with the others without necessarily disagreeing in principle, but I do have to take this opportunity to engage in my personal crusade against what I perceive as the unwarranted lionization of the corner store (or, "bodega" as New Yorker insist on calling it).
Hot take: Bodegas suck and we need fewer of them. They can't *even in principle* benefit from economies of scale since they're definitionally small-scale, their selection is often lousy, their cleanliness is kind of joke (the "bodega cat" is a well-worn trope), and most importantly they represent the division of commercial space into a lot of low-value-added small commercial spaces whereas a few larger, scale-benefiting chains would offer better selection, higher cleanliness and lower prices.
And you don't even have to take my idiosyncratic word for it--Trader Joes in NYC, despite the compromises they have to make on the small commercial space available (e.g., exceptionally narrow aisles) often have lines *literally out the door* (not figuratively, literally) because there's so much demand for adequate selection at decent quality and low prices, and New York at large but *especially* micro-scale retail seems like it's doing kind of a rubbish job of addressing it, which is why these people aren't going to anywhere closer or with less of a wait. I'd rather see all the space currently occupied by bodegas coalesced into more TJ's or like an Aldi or Target or (perhaps somewhat implausibly given the typical scale) Costco or something.
The point of the corner store isn’t that it’s good but that it’s literally on your corner, so if you’ve started cooking and remember you need butter, you can leave the pot on while you walk over and grab it.
Obviously much better to have a TJ on your corner, but again that depends on high population density to support a larger business close to home.
But Trader Joe's are specifically urban amenities to many of us who live in NYC, and I never stand on a line out the door! During my pandemic move to my native rustbelt, I had to drive 40+ minutes to get to a TJs. Back in the city, I can walk to at least seven of them, including a wine-specific TJs. And that's a small part of a much bigger picture, including access to more niche grocery items, free or cheap activities that are not world-class museums (things like the Drawing Center and other small art spaces; also I'm a bird nerd and spent yesterday on a migration hike that I walked to and from) and decent health services. And sometimes a corner store, or crap chain drugstore, on your block can be a godsend (if you need, say, emergency Pedialyte when you have a horrific stomach virus on a major holiday, I can personally vouch for this benefit).
Sure, if you have a car and enjoy driving, you can find stuff like this in a lot of places if the economic agglomeration benefits aren't relevant to you. But not everyone fits that description.
(1) I am also pro-bird and would be very interested in your migration hike location if you're willing to share it.
(2) TJ's may be mostly (though not exclusively) an urban phenomenon but large, high-selection, high-cleanliness grocery stores in general definitely aren't -- in fact they're really the norm outside of NYC -- and it's just that TJ's occupies that niche in NYC. Part of what drives me nuts about bodega over-proliferation in New York (and I agree that while there is probably a place for small-scale retail but also there are *lots* of parts of NYC with like three-to-five bodegas selling the same goods on the same block) is that to all appearances *New Yorkers themselves* would prefer to shop at the same kind of grocery stores the rest of the country does but between the inefficient partition of commercial space (much of it given over to micro retail), TJ's over-cautious (IMO) approach to expansion, and the fact that other would-be retail competitors like Fairway or Key Foods seem incapable of providing the same level of price/quality/selection it's just not on offer.
Bodegas are basically convenience stores. The benefit is not selection or price. It's that they're nearby and easy to pick things up at 24/7.
In principle it's serves the same function as a suburban 7-11 or whatever except:
• They don't come with an attached gas station
• They're even more convenient (more of them and closer to walk to)
There are three 7-Elevens in my neighborhood. None has gas pumps.
Counterpoint: Walmart doesn’t sell loosies.
By this logic you would think that homelessness is a desirable trait as CA and NYT have, by far, the highest homeless populations in the country.
The correct logic is that NY and CA are desirable to live because one contains NYC and the other contains lots of sun and beaches (and no hurricanes).
This may be true for suburban communities. Where I live in NY there is a reasonably large amount of building, the zoning allows it. It’s still a rich neighborhood and the new construction just allows younger people who are becoming rich in for the most part. Opposition really centers around the construction itself which is very annoying! I’ve lived next to necessary (in my opinion) construction several times and knowing it’s for the long term good of the area can only make up for a tiny portion of the hassle of living next to it. Imo There needs to be less focus on blocking these projects through legal or administrative hearings about shadows and more explicit payoffs for the neighbors who have to live with the noise, pollution, and blight of the construction site.
I'm curious where you live in NY? One of my favorite fun facts (note: no actual fun guaranteed) about housing policy is that NY state and city both produce _fewer_ new units per capita than San Francisco.
Upper east side of Manhattan! emphasis on east. Some stuff gets built on Lexington but most of the action is 3rd Ave and east of there. I don’t know about the NET new units because strong demand causes a lot of the multi unit walk ups to get renovated down into single family, but we have certainly put up many towers. especially since the 2nd Ave subway finished—which was a big mess of its own.
"People do not want their local communities to be destroyed. More houses equals more risk."
Communities are defined by the people, not houses. If prices in an area rise so much that working class people can no longer afford to raise families there, how is that not destroying the community?
If a place becomes desirable, then these three things become incompatible:
1. The housing stock stays the same.
2. The resident community stays the same.
3. People are allowed to choose where they live on the basis of price and desirability.
Left NIMBYs say we should give up 3. YIMBYs say we should give up 1. Gentrification is when we give up 2.
And 3 is absolutely impossible, which we all know, so most left-NIMBY's are effectively supporting 1, which just happens to coincide with most of their financial interests so thoroughly that one cannot help but assume that their public views are held in bad faith.
I think it's bad faith on the part of some, but also a lot of motivated reasoning. In my experience, people who (being normal) don't think a lot about housing policy are susceptible to left-NIMBY arguments based on this. Those arguments "feel true" to them, and because they are so often framed as "it's not affordable ENOUGH" new left-NIMBY recruits can continue to feel good about themselves while supporting their own (actually selfish) interests.
My initial assumption/heuristic is "rich left-NIMBY=full of shit, poor left-NIMBY=just ignorant."
Does it have to be bad faith?
I don't want an apartment next to me.
In good faith, I can either agree that residents should be able to block them (I give everyone the same right to block these things as me) or I can agree that in general nobody(including me) should be able to block them?
The first one of those leads to real problems, and there's definitely some blindness, but it's much harder to convince someone who is arguing in bad faith than someone who is just blind/misinformed, so I try not to assume bad faith (there are certainly _individuals_ who act in bad faith, but I'm trying not to assume it of larger groups)
As I said above, there's so much evidence out there that a lot of people know better and still profess to believe that we can or should give up #3 above. They hold that view in bad faith.
I would not care to wager on rough proportions within the NIMBY demographic, I have no idea.
Doing away with 3 as a bunch of left-NIMBYs want is impossible, sorry.
"People do not want their local communities to be destroyed. More houses equals more risk."
Here in Los Angeles I think it's becoming clear to more and more people that building more housing isn't nearly as destructive to communities as not building more housing, the effects of which can be seen by counting the tents set up by homeless people in every neighborhood of the city.
Yeah unfortunately you're right. And some of the "oh the horror!" type reactions to the growth of quality of life issues (visible homeslessness, crime, etc) in places like Seattle can be traced to the fact that the median inhabitant there is increasingly higher and higher on the economic ladder. It's much less common to hear Rust Belters complain about rates of crime, etc.. as people just expect that it comes with the territory there.
Class-sorting doesn't happen at the state level in the USA. It happens more at the metro and smaller levels. California and NY have more than their fair share of poor people
And specifically, it often happens at the school district level. For many communities where people bought houses to be in a particular public school district or catchment area, I think there's no question they believe the reason their communities "are desirable to live in is because they are too expensive for the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder". Because for suburban public school districts, high housing prices serve a similar gatekeeping function of keeping our too many poor kids as high tuition at private schools.
""are desirable to live in is because they are too expensive for the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder"
To be fair, isn't that viewpoint sometimes true?
In my own experience, there seems to be a strong correlation between income levels and social behavior in the rust belt city metro I live in. I spend half my week in a lower-middle class, blue collar area and the other half in a white collar, upper middle class area. Most people are great in both, but the frequency of anti-social behavior, problem neighbors and people I want to stay away from my kids is definitely higher in the former.
I often get the sense this sort of thing is framed as simply an issue of snobbish, out-of-touch, rich a-holes who don't want to associate with those beneath them. I'm sure sometimes it is that, but I suspect it's more frequently people simply doing what's best for themselves and their families. I don't want to live right next to people with. decaying trash in their yards, or drug dealers shooting at customers, both of which happened in the last few years on my mom's block but are unlikely to happen on my block.
Interestingly, or oddly, depending on your perspective, I didn't really observe the same correlation when I lived in LA. In LA it often felt like there were more anti-social behaviors in higher income zones.
"Most people are great in both, but the frequency of anti-social behavior, problem neighbors and people I want to stay away from my kids is definitely higher in the former."
My observations point to a bit of a bell curve, I think.
Working-class neighborhoods have many of the maladies you describe, in my experience. Middle-income neighborhoods make me, personally, quite comfortable. Then you get to upper-class neighborhoods and I feel like we're back to "vaguely threatening disputes around parking", with added passive-aggressive "mow your lawn or I'll call 311 on you six times in a week" and "how dare you allow your 8-year old out unsupervised to bike down the street."
The nuisances are the exact opposite, but they make me damned near as uncomfortable as the non-violent irritants in lower-income places.
I'd probably be a bit more comfortable in a safe working-class neighborhood than in a posh one, despite having the "correct" kind of job in terms of income and status.
“…drug dealers shooting at customers…”
That can’t be good for business.
Well, to be more accurate it only happened once. The customer tried to rob the dealer because the dealer was living with a stripper so it was thought they might have some petty cash laying around. But he brought a knife to a gun fight and ended up pistol-whipped and lucky to not have been shot (a car in the alleyway was not so lucky).
Interestingly, the dealer's brother is a doctor, his sister runs a yoga studio and his cousin is a broadway dancer.
Talented family.
Not everyone is actually optimizing their distance from poor people. In fact, I'd say people are more commonly trying to stay away from economic competitors nearer to their own class, rather than just the poor.
Even just to meet this claim on its own terms, I think it's widely regarded that the main downside of living in San Francisco or New York - other than cost - is petty crime. The downscale people who do petty crimes are obviously here in numbers still, as hard as it may be for them.
"I've never heard anyone say or imply that CA or NY are good places to live because poorer people find it unaffordable."
Right—on the contrary, it's pretty clear that the more unaffordable the areas have been for poor people, the worse the problems we've had with homelessness, public safety, and general quality of life.
Matt – thanks for making the final point in this column on blue states and good governance. It has always been baffling to me that proponents of active government don’t marry that with a demand and push for good governance. Seems like it would be self-evident that addressing an issue isn’t enough – the solution has to work. Further strikes as an obvious way to attract people to the cause is demonstrating care and concern that government institutions and policy can, in general, effectively deliver needed goods and services to citizens. As two examples among many, it’s always struck me as unconscionable that the government entities you point at fail to deliver reasonable educational opportunities to children in their jurisdictions despite relatively high levels of spending, or have more efficiently run mass transit systems that would disproportionately benefit lower-income residents despite relatively high taxes.
I agree with the discussion about Congress being more bipartisan, functional and pragmatic on more workaday yet important issues than most people realize. But that seems like a separate article about the functioning of Congress, and oddly shoehorned in here to this discussion of land use and zoning laws about housing --- a quintessential local issue if there ever was one.
The states where local laws are blocking new construction and making housing less affordable (mainly Democratic states) are fully capable of addressing that issue on their own, without any involvement of Congress. They are the ones experiencing the consequences of those laws, good or ill, and if they don't want to change it, why is this a federal issue that Congress should even be discussing?
Congress should be discussing it because NIMBY politics are bad for the country as a whole, preventing the efficient allocation of labor. Not building houses in desireable areas affects people not living there yet, thus not getting a vote.
That being said, the legislation tends to be nudges in the right direction as specific policy proposals that would be effective are very local.
Debating local land use policy in Congress seems like a recipe for turning it into another polarized, nationalized, everyone-in-the-whole-country-should-agree-with-me issue that gets grandstanded by people like Trump talking about how the other party wants to "outlaw suburbs".
And are California's NIMBY policies actually bad for, say, Texas? Seems like the opposite might be true, and at the least that the difficulty of supporting sweeping statements about what position on this issue is "bad for the country as a whole" means this is a topic with a strong argument for deferring to State-level preferences. If not even this topic is suited for a live and let live attitude towards local variation, is any topic?
Which is why bipartisan, low-stakes collaboration is the right path forward.
"And are California's NIMBY policies actually bad for, say, Texas?"
They are unquestionably good for people that live in Texas that would like to move to California.
Just what I was wondering! See below
While I mostly agree, very much worth mentioning that the federal govt implicitly promotes NIMBYism through subsidies. Transportation funding is heavily car-centric, for instance.
But it's even more true for the literal trillions of dollars we spend subsidizing homeownership, which does tend to turn people into NIMBYs. But I'd assume that it's still politically very popular so maybe not viable to change course there.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/home-ownership-is-the-wests-biggest-economic-policy-mistake
A very fundamental aspect of almost every federal policy (and many states policies) is that they subsidize demand and restrict supply.
Congress doesn’t, but state legislatures do. State legislatures all created zoning with their own laws, and they could revise these laws and how zoning works in every municipality if they wanted. But these laws copied the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act published by the Department of Commerce in 1921. If the federal government incentivized states to change, most of them would.
https://www.planning.org/growingsmart/enablingacts/
+1. More than 100 years on, it's time to revisit the enabling acts. How do 10-year master plans make any kind of sense at this point for many/most communities?!
"Lina Khan got a lot of Republican votes in her confirmation as FTC Chair."
The first part of this sentence is right - Lina Khan did get a lot of Republican votes in her confirmation. But the second part - as FTC Chair - is not right: the Administration pulled a bait-and-switch with her nomination by waiting until after she was confirmed to designate her as Chair. This procedure was perfectly legitimate, of course - the President can designate any commissioner as Chair at any time. But past practice was consistently to identify the Chair prior to the confirmation vote, and the Admin's failure to do that with Khan was a signal that she WASN'T going to be Chair. My (pretty strong) view is that she would have received fewer R votes had she been designated Chair prior to the vote.
Currently the FTC is deadlocked 2-2 between Ds and Rs. The third D's nomination has been held up for months. One hypothesis is that this holdup is payback for the Lina Khan bait-and-switch. Who knows if that hypothesis is true, but it seems plausible.
God, why does the Senate have the power to confirm *so* many executive branch officials? It's not just the high-level cabinet secretaries, there are so many lower level positions I've never heard of that also have to get confirmed. Voting on all of these appointments takes so much of the Senate's time that could be spent on legislation. It should not take half of the President's term just to fully staff the administration. And that's not even getting into how this creates a bunch more veto points in a system of government already full of veto points.
I have some sympathy for your general point but the FTC isn’t an example of it. The FTC is an independent agency, with quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative authority. The president can remove Commissioners only for cause. It’s not part of the executive branch. Whatever you think of advice and consent of the Senate generally, it seems especially important for institutions like the FTC.
Okay, point taken. I forgot that the FTC is an independent agency like the Federal Reserve.
Speaking of well-run blue states, California is taking steps to make itself more attractive to employers by adopting a 32-hour work week.
This is a real thing? Who is pushing for this and why? I googled it and the article I found made it seem like businesses are supporting it. But that seems far-fetched; if a business wants a 32 hour work week they can have one very easily without the state getting involved.
Is this basically a backdoor way to increase pay for hourly workers or get more people hired as salary?
Totally a real thing. Sarcasm doesn’t work in comment section tho.
Yeah I got that you were being sarcastic originally - I mentioned "it can't be businesses wanting it" only because of the article I found from my google search was pitching it that way. Hopefully I'm parsing the sarcasm reference correctly, haha.
Can the federal government do anything on YIMBY that's more direct than attaching strings to federal grants?
I understand that this is a vague question, since the Constitution means whatever five Supreme Court justices say it means. But hypothetically, if HUD said "We hereby find that parking mandates and minimum lot sizes imposed by local governments violate the Fair Housing Act", would that be likely to hold up as a lawful use of agency authority?
The only strings that Congress has on local regulations is tying it to federal money. That being said, they spend lots of money so there is a lot of pull with well designed legislation.
HUD, like all executive branch agencies, is subject to the Administrative Procedure Act. Your hypothetical certainly sounds arbitrary and capricious and would be vulnerable to a legal challenge.
I don't understand why you wouldn't read his comment and assume that HUD would make that announcement AFTER having gone through the APA required procedures....then answer the more interesting question of what federal influence should be in this sphere.
My own thought would be that federal rule making of that type should be discouraged as its too high level - state government seems much more appropriate place for such decisions.
Presidential administrations love to bypass the APA whenever they can though. See: the Obama administration's "Dear Colleague" letter, the Trump administrations attempted rescinding of DACA, the Biden administration's current efforts to not defend a Trump-era immigration regulation in court in order to get rid of it.
I did assume they’d go through the required process. But the process doesn’t confer legitimacy on any imaginable policy.
I think its reasonable to think that HUD or DOT could go through an APA process and come out with YIMBY requirements. Are you saying they couldn't do a policy such as "to receive funding, you must permit multi unit housing within 5 miles of any DOT funded project?" What would be the legal objection?
The legal objection would be that Congress hadn’t given the agency the authority to do that.
I'm looking online and I can't tell at first glance whether the Act applies to regulatory actions by state and local governments as well as specific acts of discrimination. If it does, HUD could argue that these rules have a racially disparate impact.
Matt has pointed out that using a racial framing for policy reforms that aren't overtly race-related tends not to work well. So it would be better if Congress simply outlawed these types of land-use regulation. But again, I don't know whether the courts would object on states'-rights grounds.
“So it would be better if Congress simply outlawed these types of land-use regulation”
Congress has no such authority.
It does or doesn't, depending on what the Supreme Court says. To strike down such a law they'd have to read the interstate-commerce clause much more narrowly than it's been read in recent decades.
Existing precedent is that almost all economic activities (including employment discrimination, which is arguably more local than land-use policy) are subject to congressional authority because they affect interstate commerce at least indirectly. Perhaps the current court shouldn't be encouraged to reopen that debate.
Believe it our not the current Supreme Court tends to treat the Constitution as if it means what it says.
Another option would be for the Supreme Court itself to declare zoning unconstitutional, on the grounds that it impairs landowners' property rights and violates the Fifth Amendment. But I agree with Matt that this is usually a terrible way to make public policy, even when you happen to like the results.
They can plainly and obviously outlaw such regulations in effect, by mandating that federal transportation funding not be allocated to projects in areas which maintain them.
Please, Ken, you're fully capable of being less literal-minded than this, please *do so*, for the love of God.
Matt made this point a few years ago. The congressional power of the purse is so enormous that states' rights can almost always be overruled in practice, as Obama did with education policy:
https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed
I think the Supreme Court has almost never acted to limit this practice. In "South Dakota v. Dole" they allowed Congress to use conditions on federal highway funding to force states to raise the drinking age to 21... even though the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed Prohibition, explicitly gave the states sovereign authority over alcohol regulation.
The only exception I'm aware of is "NFIB v. Sebelius", in which the Court decided that strings attached to Medicaid funding were too "coercive" and threw out the element of the ACA that was meant to force all states to expand Medicaid eligibility.
If conservatives end up getting as emotional over zoning as they did over Obamacare, the Court might do the same thing and protect states' rights in land-use policy. That goes back to Matt's point: it's very important to have Republicans on board with YIMBY.
Hopefully the Supreme Court would invalidate any such action on the basis that “funding conditions must be related to the purposes of the federally funded program or activity.”
"Current levels of transport infrastructure funding per capita are not sustainable. The federal government has a relevant and compelling interest in mandating that municipalities and counties permit higher density construction around infrastructure projects with federal funding to maximize benefit and utility received by the citizenry from such funding, and to reduce future funding needs elsewhere."
Add legalese.
May or may not work, but there's no clear partisan reason why not at present.
As someone who asked a version of this question in last week’s mailbag, I’m sorry for annoying you. Seriously—I really appreciate reading your thoughts here and on Twitter, and I hate to have annoyed you. But I think today’s column gets two things wrong. One, this debate happens mostly locally. The column focuses on the national parties (and to a lesser extent the state parties). It’d be great if they got more involved (and in the non-/bi-partisan manner you hope for) to deal with the spillover effects of municipal policies. But those effects exist because, two, there’s a lot of evidence these ideas are unpopular. That’s a big part of why we have this problem. Fischel’s “homevoters” and Einstein, Palmer, and Glick’s “neighborhood defenders” remain a dominant force in local politics.
*Currently*, these issues are handled at the local level, but I believe Matt would prefer that state governments exert more control over land use regulations. Municipal control will tend toward bad outcomes in this area for the reasons you describe, but if done at the state level, the hyper-local collective action problem doesn’t get in the way of policies that benefit the state. Josh Barro wrote about this several weeks ago in a way I found very clarifying:
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/what-pj-orourke-taught-me-about-housing
Echoing @Joey5Slice a bit, yes, this is why those of us who hold these views in blue states think the overwhelmingly Democratic legislatures need to take them up at the state level. While I personally think the positive effects of housing reform would end up making them politically popular when you take out the collective action problem, let's say voters get angry about them. Then the outcome is either new Democrats get in via primaries, or the Democratic tilt in the legislature goes from like 90%-10%, to 80%-20%. The stakes are incredibly low.
This is what some people don't seem to understand about the different dynamic between state and national politics. In national politics, the consequences really are dire of picking the wrong fight and ending up underwater because the difference between 50.1% D and 50.1% R at a national level is highly consequential - and in fact catastrophic if you care about progressive priorities.
At the state level, using Massachusetts or California as an example, if they passed a bunch of bills that are good on the merits but potentially unpopular and got some members in hot water in their districts, there would still be overwhelming Dem majorities. And if they passed bills that are good on the merits and addressed the problems facing these states, it would long-run be better for Democrats both in the state and nationally.
Laws that are good on the merits and address local/regional problems are good for everyone (not Dems alone)!
People, in general, are in favor of more and cheaper housing. They just don't want it in *their* neighborhood. That's why it is a good thing for Congress to act on - because they aren't proposing to build in *your* neighborhood - just neighborhoods generally.
As much as I support housing reform personally, I feel like trying to nationalize the issue is going to do more harm than good.
In the worst case, I imagine the issue driving suburbs back into the arms of the GOP, leaving Democrats a permanent minority (like it or not, Democrats cannot win national elections without NIMBY votes; there are just too many of them). And, of course, red states pre-empting blue cities from unzoning their own neighborhoods, just like they prevent such cities from banning plastic bags, regulating guns, or doing anything else the GOP doesn't like.
By all means, fix zoning at the local level. But, turning it into an R vs. D issue could very well backfire.
If national Democrats are indeed sleepwalking into a decade out of power, Make Blue America Great Again becomes another now more than ever thing.
Might as well drop in a plug for libertarianism. When free markets and property rights are compromised, supposedly for the "greater good", the results will usually serve not a greater good but the selfish interests of the loudest, well-connected voices.
Without NIMBY zoning, subsidized mortgages, and eminent domain to clear wide paths for publicly funded highways, more of us might be living in the high density, affordable, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods that progressive types advocate. Also note that the early "public" transit systems were often private enterprises - until they were rendered unprofitable by government subsidized sprawl.
What's the libertarian position on HOAs? Specifically, its position on whether property should be able to be perpetually tied up in CC&Rs that can enforce anything ranging from the equivalent of NIMBY zoning, to something more infamous like racial discrimination.
Interesting question. When does a contractual arrangement among property owners evolve into a "government"? I'm reading up on that.
I live in a country with little or no NIMBY zoning and zero subsidised mortgages. There is eminent domain but I've never seen it used in the way you imply.
Despite that, nothing here is affordable, walkable, or transit oriented.
Which makes me think your diagnosis of the problem is probably oversimplistic.
Here in Oregon, we have many YIMBY policies, but I'm not sure that they are working. Single-family zoning is banned state-wide. ADUs are everywhere. Airbnbs are restricted. The state will not let cities expand their UGBs until the space within them is highly utilized, and then the state lets them add surrounding open space within their UGBs. Cities are therefore motivated to densify, then expand, then densify, then expand. We seem to be a YIMBY-policy dream come true. I'm in favor of it all.
Through all this, housing prices have been soaring. People from out of state are flocking here, buying up all this new housing, outbidding less-affluent locals (we just got another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives). Homelessness keeps increasing.
Do YIMBY policies really work? I'm not seeing it, but of course that isn't an analysis.
Wouldn't the outbidding happen, with or without the YIMBY policies?
But on the one hand, if you're against population growth I think you've identified the achilles heal of YIMBY-ism. In a nice part of a nice country there will always be a potential immigrant to fill an unfilled spot. So LA, for example, will never YIMBY themselves out of population growth in our lifetime, absent much stricter curbs on immigration.
On the other hand, YIMBY oregon is probably slowing housing price growth in Idaho, in Seattle, etc, by drawing people who might have otherwise stayed put.
They only “work” to keep prices down if they’re implemented widely enough to do it.
Otherwise any local gains are eaten by how far behind homebuilding is relative to population growth nationwide.
Then we are using our beautiful open space and exhausting our precious water resources only to make everything very crowded with people from elsewhere. Perhaps no one should go YIMBY until everyone does.
This is a pretty concise illustration of housing as a collective action problem.
That’ll just make it worse still, the price appreciation faster, the sprawl bigger.
There’s no real way to be selfish on this issue.
Fortunately, Oregon outlawed sprawl in 1973 (Portland has sprawl on the Washington side of the Columbia River). Otherwise, I think you are right. Thanks.
I think it's useful to just look at *actual housing production* which as far as I'm aware, hasn't gone up a lot in Portland, relative to years of under-building.
I'd also note that there are a TON of tools in the NIMBY toolbelt--zoning is just one. You have height limits, minimum lot sizes, parking minimums, setbacks, and on and on. Removing SFZ is great but if the market wants 40 units and you only allow 3, you are still going to have a huge problem.
I don't think housing is a partisan issue because the vast majority of people are NIMBY's in practice and the solutions all require action at the state and local level.
The polling on this I think reflects vague kind of positive support for the idea, but like many other ideas (M4A), suddenly becomes very unpopular once the tradeoffs for individuals are known. And I'm one of those people. I like the idea of YIMBY and more and more affordable housing, but the extent to which I'd support efforts in my own single-family-home neighborhood would really depend on the details.
In my own area (highly suburban with a majority of single-family homes and low-rise apartments and condos), increasing density would require several inter-related things:
- local authorities changing zoning laws
- state governments decimating the authority of HOA's.
- The ability for utilities to change and invest in the necessary infrastructure to support those efforts
- Other infrastucture projects like roads to ensure there is enough capacity.
So fundamentally this is an issue that can't be addressed by federal efforts or federal legislation. Sure, the feds can provide incentives (ie. money with strings attached) to try to bend the curve in a particular direction but the bulk of any work needs to happen at the community and state level.
And in another example, here in Colorado, mountain communities have different circumstances and factors that DC, LA or NYC. Here's a local story about Vail Resorts trying to build affordable housing for employees and being blocked by the town of Vail because of wildlife concerns:
https://coloradosun.com/2022/04/18/vail-resorts-mountain-affordable-housing-opposition/
Even NY didn’t Hochul cave in to Long Island Dems so nothing changed on housing?
Yes. I believe this was to avoid giving an issue to her from-the-right primary challenger Tom Suozzi, who is currently the co-chair of the Problem Solvers caucus and is The Worst.
After watching VA's elections last year, make that D+10.
My contrarian defense of George W. Bush is: what happened in Iraq was that the American establishment decided to got to war. Some very establishment Democrats dissented, Obama and Pelosi will always deserve credit on this score (so does Jacques Chirac, I guess). But the craziness that lead to the war wasn't unique to Bush or to the so-called neocons. The war was supported by Gordon Brown, Michael Ignatieff, Chuck Schumer and Angela Merkel.
Bush deserves blame in a buck-stops-here sense, but it wasn't some idiosyncrasy of his persona or his brand of politics that got us stuck in Iraq. The people who were most annoyed by Bush's personality were people who thought the war would have been won by Tony Blair, Hilary Clinton or John McCain. Or even by John Kerry: Kerry did optimize for fundamentals in 2004 but he voted for the war and as SoS pulled gave imitation Winston Churchill speeches to draw us deeper into war in Syria.
Bush is long gone, so is his style of politics. His enablers (Kerry, Schumer, Biden) are still there and aren't very sorry. To be fair, Biden does seem to have learned more from the Iraq debacle than Kerry, Schumer, or HRC.