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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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:
For what it's worth, Oregon's land-use reform already started, and there's not much of a NIMBY contingent. I just got a letter from our city telling us that the state law that banned exclusionary zoning was about to be enacted here with an update to local zoning ordinance. Neighborhoods have to allow duplex/triplexes/whatever, ADUs, etc.
Also, we have UGBs here and infill development is...the way of it.
Could the state be better governed? Sure...but it's not a housing issue here.
"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.
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.
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.
I am admittedly conflicted about this. I generally support YIMBYism, I think people should be allowed to build ADUs and basement apartments if they want to, I think developers should be allowed to build more apartments near transit, and I don't like incredibly restrictive zoning laws for developers. But I also don't want every American city to be Hong Kong and I don't want suburbs bulldozed (nor do I like eminent domain), which from what I understand is the dream of fervent YIMBYs and urbanists. There has to be line somewhere, I am just struggling figuring out where to draw it. And I think where that line gets drawn has the potential to get pushed into the realm of polarization if the parties and activists aren't careful.
Probably the least regulated American city in terms of land use is Houston, and it's also the city that is probably the least like Hong Kong. The good thing is America has a lot of land, most of it underdeveloped. Hong Kong does not.
As a YIMBY, I do not want suburbs bulldozed. I want there to be more opportunity for people to live where they want. Right now to live in a nice urban area you need to be quite wealthy. Some want to live in high density urban areas. Some in the suburbs, so they can raise their kids with a yard. Some want to be miles away from anyone. The good news is America has all of these! The bad news it's damn near impossible to transition a section of one type to another given the current set of regulations and incentives.
YIMBYs don’t want suburbs bulldozed, as long as what happens in the suburbs stays in the suburbs. The problem is that suburbanites have used the law to impose their vision on big tracts of urban land too. If a particular location becomes desirable for whatever reason, then the owners of that land should be allowed to bulldoze a few houses and put up bigger buildings. But this won’t threaten 90% of the suburbanized land.
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'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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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 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?
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?!
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".
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.
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 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'm not sure how to categorize something like this. On one hand it feels wrong, but on the other it feels necessary, especially if the services provided are genuinely helpful. And the lease is effectively a tax on the local homeowners even if it should and could be higher here.
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.
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.
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.
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 also also do not think it would be desirable for land use reform to become the kind of highly polarized issue"
But it is, and it is very desirable.
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 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.
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.
This is a pretty concise illustration of housing as a collective action problem.
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 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/
For what it's worth, Oregon's land-use reform already started, and there's not much of a NIMBY contingent. I just got a letter from our city telling us that the state law that banned exclusionary zoning was about to be enacted here with an update to local zoning ordinance. Neighborhoods have to allow duplex/triplexes/whatever, ADUs, etc.
Also, we have UGBs here and infill development is...the way of it.
Could the state be better governed? Sure...but it's not a housing issue here.
"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.
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.
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.
I am admittedly conflicted about this. I generally support YIMBYism, I think people should be allowed to build ADUs and basement apartments if they want to, I think developers should be allowed to build more apartments near transit, and I don't like incredibly restrictive zoning laws for developers. But I also don't want every American city to be Hong Kong and I don't want suburbs bulldozed (nor do I like eminent domain), which from what I understand is the dream of fervent YIMBYs and urbanists. There has to be line somewhere, I am just struggling figuring out where to draw it. And I think where that line gets drawn has the potential to get pushed into the realm of polarization if the parties and activists aren't careful.
Probably the least regulated American city in terms of land use is Houston, and it's also the city that is probably the least like Hong Kong. The good thing is America has a lot of land, most of it underdeveloped. Hong Kong does not.
As a YIMBY, I do not want suburbs bulldozed. I want there to be more opportunity for people to live where they want. Right now to live in a nice urban area you need to be quite wealthy. Some want to live in high density urban areas. Some in the suburbs, so they can raise their kids with a yard. Some want to be miles away from anyone. The good news is America has all of these! The bad news it's damn near impossible to transition a section of one type to another given the current set of regulations and incentives.
YIMBYs don’t want suburbs bulldozed, as long as what happens in the suburbs stays in the suburbs. The problem is that suburbanites have used the law to impose their vision on big tracts of urban land too. If a particular location becomes desirable for whatever reason, then the owners of that land should be allowed to bulldoze a few houses and put up bigger buildings. But this won’t threaten 90% of the suburbanized land.
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'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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 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
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?!
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".
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.
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
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)
To all you young hotties in Brooklyn, why have none of you primaried Nydia Valezquez?? More interested in partying hard than local politics?
I'm not sure how to categorize something like this. On one hand it feels wrong, but on the other it feels necessary, especially if the services provided are genuinely helpful. And the lease is effectively a tax on the local homeowners even if it should and could be higher here.
https://www.kcra.com/article/sacramento-homeless-campsite-cleared-agreement-lease-land/39696117 (non-paywalled)
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/homeless/article260319215.html (paywall)