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".
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.
“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.
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?
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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".
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.
“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.
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?
"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.
Speaking of well-run blue states, California is taking steps to make itself more attractive to employers by adopting a 32-hour work week.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.