The (solvable) contradiction in the Party today is that reducing regulations around housing and allowing new construction will result in disfavored people -- developers, building owners, HVAC installers, various construction companies -- making money.
We are now the Party of the upper middle class and it is time we embraced it. We can help the poor, we can be in favor of a strong safety net. But we need to drop the anti-profit and anti-rich attitude.
That contradiction is so dumb. Opposing housing abundance because developers make money off it is like opposing SNAP because Walmart makes money off it.
That's a good point, but at the same time I'm pretty sure that if you asked the "Food is a human right" crowd what their ideal food distribution system looked like, it would involve government-run pantries providing free or nominally priced food.
politically, the trick is getting the “food is a human right” crowd to embrace smart, technocratic solutions rather than larping at amarco-syndicalism or central planning.
“I ain’t interested in none of that free government food y’all are pushing. I like my tasty diabetus food from Walmart; that’s what I’m used to, and I’m not about to change just ’cause you’re handing out some bland crap for free. I don’t need no charity if it means eating what I don’t like. So keep it, I’ll stick to my own damn food.”
It's also inconsistent in that if you oppose housing abundance to prevent developers from making money, then you are simultaneously *causing* landlords (including corporate landlords) to make more money. Yet no one seems to care about that.
But on the other hand, I think this reveals that the aversion to rich people making money probably isn't truly the root psychological fear that these progressives are trying to avoid. That's just what they think they're doing. In reality, they have a specific distaste for property *development* probably based on aesthetic preferences (e.g. they read The Lorax too many times as a kid and are disgusted by the idea of chopping down trees, or they hate seeing big construction equipment around, or whatever).
I wouldn’t discount the aversion to rich people making money too much. I’ve found that when I talk about this with lefty friends, making the argument that we’re just putting money in the pockets of landlords, and that we need to pit landlords and developers against each other (even if that means developers make money. Plus at least they’re actually building something, blah blah jobs for the working class). It’s probably the most consistently successful I’ve found.
So maybe it’s less that they know it’s inconsistent and don’t care, than that they haven’t thought much about it and you (global you, not you-you) need to raise the point in an on-your-side way that lets you be heard.
Not to mention that this would be a stealth transfer in as much as housing wealth (which for most middle-class Americans is at least a large portion of their wealth) would be equalized. Right now, anyone with a house, benefits from the difficulty in building new houses. This is baked into their net wealth in terms of their home. Adding significant stock would either reduce their home values or slow the increase in housing wealth, particularly for middle-class/upper-middle-class individuals relative to less affluent individuals who could then get into a home.
At the end of the day, everyone would benefit, but the more affluent would benefit more abstractly and might actually lose a little in some cases (such as homeowners in states or localities with high barriers to building new homes). To me, this would be very egalitarian and, in a limited way, overcome the difficulty of broad-based increases in tax rates for the middle/upper middle class.
Basically, a YIMBY-style house reform would act as a kind of transfer on the upperish middle classes. If it was coupled with higher income taxes at the top end of the income scale, you would have a more balanced approach to reducing disparities in wealth. So, in a sense, it is progressive, in fact, if not in rhetoric.
“Adding significant stock would either reduce their home values or slow the increase in housing wealth. . .” This is not necessarily true. If the increase in units is accomplished by increasing density, it’s likely that in many cases it would cause further increases in SFR home values. All else equal, increased allowable density results in increased land values.
"it would warm my neoliberal heart to see Democrats fulsomely embrace “corporate landlords”"
seems almost willfully obtuse, an example of putting economist-brain before heart. No consideration given here to the emotional valance of housing policy, and why so many people want to own their own. Why would it be better, and make people happier, to turn the housing sector into another one dominated by a few concentrated, distant corporations, instead of making better credit and mortgage options available to individuals? It just feels like forgetting what the end goal is here, which is, or should be, creating a society by and for the people -- and if that means anything, it means respecting what people actually want.
We don't have literal yeoman farmers anymore, independent citizens with the wherewithal and financial independence to exercise self-determination over their own lives. But homeownership today fills that place in the American psyche.
If you own your own home free and clear, you can live out your life on Social Security, Medicare, and whatever other money you may or may not have managed to save. There's great peace of mind for many people in knowing that. And that's not true in a nation of renters, at least not without some type of personalized Social Security savings plan, as a stand-in for the role homeownership currently plays in helping many people feel secure, of the sort GWB talked about, and that Nancy Pelosi killed before a serious national conversation about it even got off the starting line.
My hesitation with the owner-occupier model is that owners are ALSO incentivised to oppose further development and all their wealth is tied up in their homes, which means they benefit from house prices outpacing overall inflation. Noah Smith’s blog was about this a few days ago.
At least where I’m from, people assume they can retire on the value of their house. If its asset value doesn’t wildly outpace the returns to other assets (i.e. if it were equivalent, which I believe standard economic theory should predict), they’d have a fit.
Depends on the tradeoff and cost levels. I like owning my own home. But if renting was only $50/month for my large suburban spread, maybe I'd deal with renting and spend my money an interests elsewhere. But that number is anywhere near market rents in major US metros.
Maybe there’s a strain of the party that believes that but certainly seems like the mainstream democrat is fine with any of those groups profiting from a productive activity like home building.
I dunno, developers seem pretty widely reviled. HVAC installers and construction companies less so. I think the basic dynamic here is that people universally hate their landlords, thus developers are evil.
A corporate landlord is fine when it is consistent. But a family member has had their corporate landlord change at least four times in the 8 years he has been renting there, and it has been a nightmare every time the management/owner changes - losing rent, losing leases, changing portals, etc. The only saving grace has been that the maintenance people have remained the same, and now he talks directly to them rather than requesting service through the office.
I have had both mom & pop landlords and corporate landlords. All have been fine. The best was a mom & pop landlord who lived next door and would do things like make us cookies and snow blow out our car even though we had street parking. I guess I have been lucky.
I had one of those revolving door corporate landlords and it was legitimately a nightmare to deal with - including when we got a $1800 bill mailed to us over a year after we moved away because the various landlords screwed up tabulating the “included in the rent payment” utilities, charging us the wrong rent for years, losing leases, leaving units completely uninhabitable (as in, no running water) for weeks…some former residents are currently suing the most recent corporation to muscle in there.
Then again, I once had a mom and pop landlord who refused to speak to women for religious reasons, and I had to go through my male neighbors to request maintenance. So I’m agnostic on which one I prefer.
The variance of mom-and-pop landlords is very high. I’ve had one guy who was great, diligent and fair, and another guy I had to call the sanitation department on, move out early, make legal threats to get my deposit back.
BigCo landlords are much more predictable — you know what you’re getting, more or less.
My experience with mom and pop landlords is that they wouldn't ever pay for anything they didn't absolutely have to. There was a real vibe of the rental unit as a cash extraction operation and any reduction in cash flow would be horrific.
People love a villain narrative so much that "housing scarcity is caused by the people who build houses" is a mainstream view. Bit like "climate change is due to energy producers" and not the fact society consumes energy.
Climate change is not caused by energy producers, but they sure as shit exacerbated it over the last forty years by funding climate science denialism and lobbying against (rather than investing in) cleaner energy sources.
A question that I've always had and have never gotten a good answer to is, how much did that disrupt the clean energy transition? Would we have gotten more renewable energy sources if fossil fuel companies didn't contribute to the denial of climate change? Would our battery storage have gotten better? Transmission lines built?
Nuclear is something that if deployed at scale definitely could have weaned us off fossil fuels earlier, but I don't see the people who regularly blame Exxon for everything making that argument.
Fossil fuel companies did have a strong impact in reactions to the Oil Crisis and getting Carter our of office and replacing him with Reagan. That led to a large reduction in Federal R&D for solar panels and changes in government regulations. So it did have an impact on the rate of improvement and deployment of renewables. Germany actually spurred a lot of R&D and investment by mandating clean energy targets, while simultaneously hurting themselves by closing their nuclear power plants.
If fossil fuels companies didn't contribute to denial of climate change there would be less polarization and moralization of this issues and people could have focused on what was need to transition to a post-carbon economy. The climate change debate was about believing it climate change instead of building the necessary infrastructure like more transmission lines
The US goverement has supported and invested in many technological revolutions in the past. The US goverement invested in hydraulic fracturing technology in the 1970's and 80's. Fracking has made America the largest oil producer in the world. However the US government did not support batteries. Since it wasn't supported China is currently the leader in that technology. The US goverement didn't anticipate the importance of batteries because the didn't think about what would need in a post carbon economy.
I mean, in the Anglosphere, look at difference in three countries.
The US - Massive right-wing climate change denial
Australia - Some right-wing denial, but far more of a push for climate change bills.
UK - Even the Tories are pro-climate change.
The connection - no massively rich people in UK based off the extraction, the way a random crank who was less risk averse and lucky in 1946 can suddenly become massively wealthy and effect politics for the next 50 years, and there's like 50 of those types in Texas & Oklahoma.
Tangentially related but I just saw this ad from the Democrat in the Montana at-large congressional race. The Republican she is running against is legitimately a bad guy, but
The airbnb conversions are an issue in this state. When you have Montana being discovered in combination with impacts of Yellowstone film crews, demand for housing regardless of ownership is impacting work force housing. In my community we have had positions from deputy sheriffs to surgeons go unfilled due to unavailability/ housing cost. Tranel is a top notch candidate and Zinke has all the policy depth and integrity of a cookie sheet. This add is simply an appeal to the voters based on Zinke’s detachment from his constituents not an attack on landlords or corporations. Cities in the state are starting to address old housing regs in part due to state gov prodding and local demand but NIYB is alive and well.
Developers are reviled by planners and other local government officials and by NIMBYS who live next door to their new developments. They are not reviled (for the most part) by people who purchase their homes.
I think most people spend more time dealing with traffic patterns that go past developable land than they do purchasing homes. So they spend more time hating developers than appreciating them.
It's the NYC Democrat mentality. They sued Ed Koch for allocating money to pay private developers to build affordable housing in the 1980s because they felt like all of the budget money should just go to NYCHA: https://casetext.com/case/housing-justice-campaign-v-koch-1
Thankfully most Dems in the rest of the country is moving past this thinking.
I Agree that people not liking developers making money is a huge issue.
Which gets to a pet cause of mine: an underrated big win for YIMBY’s would be if we could somehow get Hollywood to stop typecasting developers as villains. I really think this leads to substantial amount of the anti-developer attitudes.
The last part gets to why I think most YIMBYs were more excited than Matt. Obama is not going to endorse in Bloomington Indiana city council races. But I have a new city councilor who got into politics via gun control advocacy and doesn't seem to have firm views on housing, although she's said some unfortunate NIMBY stuff. I'm confident, though, that she thinks Barack Obama is great. So him endorsing good policy will help move a lot of people in the right direction in high cost places across the country.
+100. I'm a board member of the Community Board that covers Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York. Next time we have to provide feedback to the city on a land use decision, I will 100% quote Obama and Harris saying we need to "build, build, build". And I think there's a decent chance at least some votes will be swayed!
Yep. I know a lot of people who have protested new housing at local community board meetings that also think Obama is really great. It was an incredibly helpful quote for local activists and I'm sure it will be read out at many meetings.
One thought regarding the potential polarization of housing policy: if YIMBYism is coded as blue, then it might finally drive housing reform in blue states that need it most to shore up their liberal cred. Red states can own the libs by...doing nothing but they already are basically pro-building. It might be one of the kicks in the pants blue America needs to MBAGA (Make Blue America Great Again).
I do worry that if YIMBYism becomes more blue coded, red states may begin intrenching single family zoning to own the libs. This is why I don't want it to become a polarized issue.
There's a part of me that wonders if some of the red areas that are generally seen as pro-building are setting themselves on a similar path to housing-dysfunctional areas like California -- if they're just further behind in the NIMBY lifecycle and now playing catching up.
It seems like as some of these "pro-building areas" in the sunbelt add units (often from greenfields rather than infill), the NIMBY sentiments grow and you see proposals for some of the same dysfunctional policies that mucked-up development in coastal areas like California (property tax "fixes" like prop 13, overly aggressive impact fees, an increased fixation on traffic and parking availability, general sentiment of "we're full" and "keep out newcomers," residence to density)
Houston, Dallas, and Austin all sprawl but they've also been densifying with lots of infill. Not sure how it'll shake out long term, but I haven't noticed a strong trend towards more successful NIMBYism in those cities over time.
Houston is already the 4th biggest city in the country, so that seems like it'd be pretty far along in the "lifecycle".
definitely good points! As a CA resident, I just hope Houston / Dallas / Austin / other growth areas don’t make the same mistakes our state made, because they’re hard to unwind
Obama is wasting his time being the respectful party elder. He should be a town hall heat seeking missile that intimidates NIMBY obstructionism and advances the abundance agenda.
Edit: This comment is generally in jest, but Obama should work behind the scenes to pressure mayors or endorse yimby candidates where is endorsement would be most effective. Basically, start wading into intra party disputes and use your power for good!
Be careful here. There are lots of Democratic voters in suburbia (especially here in California) who vote blue at the state and national levels and at least flirt with more conservative positions locally, especially when it comes to neighborhood issues (crime and housing). Having Obama et al jump into the local housing issue *may* bring them over but maybe it's more likely that they start thinking that the national Democratic party is not for them.
I like this argument and find it compelling, but I am curious about the possible worst case outcomes of further polarization. What tools would a Republican federal government have to stop Democratic state governments from pursuing a deregulatory YIMBY agenda?
Project 2025 says, “Congress should prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home.” What would that look like in practice? Could Congress stop state preemption of local zoning?
But this could lead to some toxic intra-state politics in the Blue States, like what we're seeing in New York -- Republicans take the popular "let local governments decide" NIMBY position, use it loudly to attempt to make gains against Dems in exurban/suburban seats, and those Dems then cover their flanks by going NIMBY -- resulting in Hochul's reform plans being shelved by the Democrats themselves.
If we had in New York Republicans with the attitude of their colleagues in Montana, pretty sure some big statewide housing reforms would have gotten done. But the Republicans here genuinely see NIMBY politics as a way to make statewide gains--and as helpful in suburban swing district races for Congress as well.
I recently posted a video on the NH subreddit about a developer/local employer that's building tiny homes in the area. The negative tone of the comments really surprised me. Some commentors made legitimate points about the history of employer provided housing, but overall the tone of the comments was very depressing. It looks like just 2 or 3 out of 100 comments thought this effort was a good idea.
Affordable housing activists don't just need to overcome NIMBYism, but also they'll need to fight off folks who take a strongly negative view of the compromises required to build affordable housing.
I grew up in Amherst, NH. I am sure my neighbors would have lose their minds if 40 mini-homes went up instead of 9 McMansions. But, NH does have a high property tax and a libertarian streak, so I would hope they would be more amenable to this type of thing.
A lot of the comments there actually seem to be complaining that they built tiny single-family homes instead of *townhouses*, which would be a better use of space.
Townhouses may have yielded higher density, but it's not clear they would yielded a lower cost per unit.
The parcel cost $500k and included an already built ranch house that had to be worth at least $200k (likely closer to $300k).
The 44 tiny homes cost $145k per unit to build all-in, including land. So that means the land cost couldn't have contributed more than $7k or 5% of the total cost of a unit.
Many things about Trump have disappointed me, but honestly you'd think that a professional developer would at least have Opinions about making it easier to build things instead of defaulting to whatever he thinks will pander best.
One of the thin silver linings to 2016 Trump is that he had a pretty famous background in building in dense, deep-Blue urban areas at a time housing costs were just starting to become an issue, and elected Democrats weren't yet YIMBY-pilled.
It's clear that he didn't have much involvement in the buildings with his name on them, as he hasn't spoken in large events with any detail (even in the imprecise way he speaks!) on development.
I too am concerned that deregulation will get swallowed up by "affordable" housing meaning unaffordable except with subsidies. I'd almost say any plan that requires funding for housing is bad. The Harris $25,000 down payment is borderline unless it is used as a carrot for reforms.
Program design for affordable housing has been really challenging. I’m not an expert in this area but my former NYC DCP colleague Eric Kober, now writing for the Manhattan Institute, is. I recommend his work for people interested in this topic.
Strongly doubt it'll be a carrot for reforms. Young families aiming to buy their first house likely tilt more left than older families changing houses or retirees downsizing, so it's a net win for a Democratic constituency. A ton of the subsidy will be swallowed by higher house prices, though conservatives saying "oh housing prices will just rise $25K" aren't doing math correctly (not everyone gets the $25K subsidy, so housing prices won't rise that much; if 50% of homebuyers get a $25K subsidy and nothing else changes, expect prices to rise up to $12.5K). Also, we already have programs for first-time homebuyers like FHA loans and no one's running around shrieking about how they have to be repealed.
I don’t think the subsidy will be that bad in markets with elastic supply. We Slow Borers mostly live in markets with inelastic supply, but I don’t think that’s true of most Americans.
Housing supply is pretty inelastic even in markets without lots of regulation because it takes many months to build a home. This means that a) the supply side cannot react quickly to changes in demand and b) builders are conservative about what they are willing to build because they don't want to sit on inventory -- predicting demand in 9-12 months is uncertain. So lots of developers want to work only on units where sales are upfront, before builds.
Short-term inelastic yeah, but long-term it seems quite elastic to me, given how much construction activity ramps up and down over time in response to the business cycle, lending standards, interest rates, etc.
The downpayment assistance program would presumably be an ongoing program, right, not a one-time thing?
Over at Noah’s substack he mentioned that for most people most of their wealth is tied up in their home. I thought that was a bit surprising as anyone who saves a decent amount of money in their 401k/IRA is always going to have more in savings than they have in home equity given the nature of an amortizing mortgage.
With GenX and GenZ doing so well now with automatic 401k signups, is there any chance that will reduce NIMBYism as people will have less of their identity and wealth tied up in their home?
I don't know what proportion of people think of their housing wealth as {cost of house - mortgage}, but my guess is is very low. People think of their housing wealth as {cost of house}. It's the same mentality that causes people to refer to rent as "throwing money away."
Seems pretty plausible to me given the housing market in recent years combined with a large percentage of people not actually saving anything approaching a decent amount of money in their 401K/IRA, if they have one at all.
If a new house averages somewhere in the $350k to $500k range, and the homeowner is slowly paying down the mortgage, they're working their way up to that much in equity, and a lot of 401ks I see have less than that, even for people in their 50s.
And the biggest financial argument for me towards owning vs renting is saving your principal is opt-out and but saving the difference between mortgage and rent is opt in
If you put $100K down on a $500K home and you then sold it for $600K, you just got roughly a 50% return on your initial investment, ceteris paribus. That's pretty good!
Is this true? Shouldn't you be considering the return on your deposit plus net mortgage payments to date? Most home purchases are highly leveraged so any increase in housing prices gives you a much better return than a 401K/IRA.
I suspect the compound interest aspect is important: if you start saving at, say, 22, you’ll have a lot more money later on than someone who waits to 32.
So by the time many (most?) people realize this, it’s too late to make up the lost ground. The super cheap leverage from a home mortgage provides a way to juice your returns even later in life.
In theory. If you bought a $500k house at age 50 with $100k down and a 15 year mortgage and sold it a year later for $600k sure you got a 100% return. If you keep paying until you’re 65 then there is no leverage benefit.
The money you're not investing in the house upfront (because the bank loaned you the balance of the purchase price) can be in other investments which pay a rate of return higher than the mortgage interest rate. So at the end of the mortgage term, you have the house + the return on those investments. (Plus of course the consumption value of 15 years in the house.)
Whether people actually do this, have the money, invest appropriately, etc, who knows.
In the US can you write off 100% of your mortgage interest? That seems like a major nudge towards owning similar in effect to Canada’s principal residence capital gains exemption. Both of those policies provide a rationalization for subsidizing renters. Why shouldn’t renters also get a break on housing costs?
For context, the biggest limit is that you can only deduct mortgage interest if you itemize. According to ChatGPT, after the Trump tax cuts, itemized returns dropped from 30% to 10%.
There's no rationalization in that for subsidizing renters as long the framing continues to be that a mortgage payment is seen as an "investment" and a rent payment is seen as an "expense".
Are we talking about work force housing? And who in this group of home seekers have a job with a 401K? Most are trying to save for a house, hoping no medical event will pop up threatening next month’s rent, savings or food budget.
This only applies in the world of people with 401K’s, if you are addressing people who need work force housing, they are hoping to cover next months rent and praying nobody in the family gets sick in the mean time.
Almost no one wants to make it harder to build dense developments. Yet fear of density is not irrational. Many progressives are so preoccupied by climate that they want to nudge or shove suburbanites into denser communities. This agenda is easily accomplished (indeed has been advanced) by limiting federal highway funding. Matt is part of this dynamic— I’ve never heard him plainly say that highway abundance would reduce congestion. Many progressives say that building roads won’t do any good because people will just commute further. This is cartoonish when the marginal propensity to commute is less than infinity. Telling a working dad he has to wake up at 5am to sit in traffic and his problem can never be fixed is political malpractice. It’s part of the reason most working dads prefer Trump.
It’s election time and y’all need our votes. We are perfectly happy to shove it to Palo Alto and Upper West side NIMBYs sitting on millions in equity. More puckish suburbanites (like me) would get off on reclaiming south San Francisco Bay to build affordable housing. However, we need more than schadenfreude. Give us some big, beautiful highways so we can live our suburban lifestyle dream in peace and stop pretending that transit will fix our problems.
It was worth re-reading that article. Matt is considerably more reasonable than many commentators and activists, but he stops way short of highway abundance.
Transportation abundance makes sense, but highway abundance does not. Transportation is the good - highways are just one means of providing it. And highways are actual nuisances, much more than most other forms of transportation. Sure, no mode of transportation is actually beautiful, but only highways and high-speed rails are actively obstacles to perpendicular transportation, and highways are much noisier than most transportation other than els.
An abundance agenda only makes sense when the thing you are talking about is the pure good - once you build in some harms, “abundance” is no longer the good framing. We want energy abundance, not gas power plant abundance; we want housing abundance, not dark shadowy condo canyon abundance; we want transportation abundance, not highway abundance.
Yeah the idea that anyone would describe highways as "beautiful" is absurd to me. Even putting aside the actual externalities they cause, just on an aesthetic level there is nothing "beautiful" about them. I find highways, especially urban highways, to be ugly concrete monstrosities that are stressful and alienating to drive on much of the time, and I avoid using them whenever possible.
Try driving down 280 by Crystal Springs, or up the Taconic amid the fall colors. And take an exit down a side road for an impromptu lunch. And do it all on your own schedule.
Or don't. There ain't no accountin' for taste. But if we're talking abundance, our horizons shouldn't be constrained to the walkable waddle, and we shouldn't be stuck waiting for a bus or a train.
Are you really saying that if we quadrupled the number of highways, people would just commute four times as far an congestion would remain static? Are you that stupid?
Clearly, induced demand is a thing. However, unless people are indifferent between commuting and leisure, less than 100% of the new capacity will be swallowed up by induced demand.
I think the argument is that quadrupling the number of highways would quadruple the number of people using them, not that they'd commute 4x as far.
Either way, though, I would argue it is a good thing to provide infrastructure that people want to use and induced demand is merely the name for an unmet need.
Most highway projects involve going from 3 lanes to 4, so quadrupling was just a figure of speech.
And the bottlenecks are also usually interchanges where merging becomes harder with more lanes, which requires more distance between exits. So the best way to make a highway move fast is to make the exits super far apart (along with having enough lanes). That's why traffic on the 280 is so much better than the 101.
It’s a thought experiment to prove that induced demand will not swallow 100% of new capacity.
Most highway projects might increase regional capacity by 2-10%. If there’s a lot of pent up demand, substantially all of that will be swallowed up by new commuting. Yet, as John says, that’s a legitimate choice. If Im willing to wake up at 5am and commute into Atlanta so my son can attend good, suburban schools, that means I’m a good dad. Making that possible for more people— and maybe letting them sleep in til 5:10, would be a win.
As others noted, Matt definitely has defended induced demand as a net good before. But besides that I think you're right a certain set of transit enthusiasts underrate how America has some of the *lowest* commute times among OECD countries thanks to its less walking-based transportation approach.
"Almost no one wants to make it harder to build dense developments"
This is completely false. There's a reason the vast majority of city land in the US is still zoned for single-family homes. In my own neighborhood (Bellevue/Redmond/Kirkland area east of Seattle), for example, the NIMBYs will regularly just to prevent cities from studying the impact of modest upzoning.
You missed my point. Almost no one is trying to tear down mid rises and build single family homes or forbid mid rise construction where it is currently allowed. However, the whole point of infill is to make existing communities denser. Transit only makes sense if things are pretty dense. The infill transit crowd generally oppose robust highway funding
That's also not true that "almost no one" wants to get rid of midrises. But that's not the main point of your argument, fair enough.
Yes, it is true that the infill transit crowd opposes "robust" highway funding. Tens of billions have been spent every year on federal highway funding for nearly a century and traffic is as bad as ever. Seems plenty reasonable to try to find and find more efficient modes of doubling down on this highly inefficient spending. It doesn't even require considering the negative externalities, such as noise or air pollution.
viewing my lifestyle as a negative externality codes as hostile even though objectively true. it’s also a bit of an exaggeration. most warming will occur in other countries and the US is well suited to mitigating the worst effects of climate change. 98 plus percent of the negative effect of suburban greenhouse emissions will be felt abroad. 100 percent of the positive effects of my suburban lifestyle dream (i’m only half ironic) will be enjoyed in american suburbs.
so basically, my emissions don’t hurt you all that much, but they piss you off because more people might die in floods in bangladesh (unless they build dikes) and polar bear populations will collapse.
so, do you want to tell me to take a lifestyle hit for your principles during an election year? i vote, i want more roads, i’m not alone, and i think a president who built lots of roads would be popular and a candidate who sounded interested and credible would get lots of votes. Can we be in a coalition together? I don’t think we’re alone here.
I may not be the strawman progressive of your imagination but I am concerned about climate change not primarily because of Bangladesh or Polar Bears or whatever, but because *gasp* I don't want my own climate to change. I don't like hot weather and I don't want more of it. I don't more extreme weather events, I don't want to deal with more heat waves or more hurricanes. Even if only 2% of the negative effect of suburban greenhouse emissions are felt in my area, that is still 2% more than I want. I take a "lifestyle hit" every time it is too hot outside to go for a walk or a run or a bike ride, every time I have to protect myself from the sun whenever I go outside, every time I bake in a hot asphalt parking lot trying to unload my groceries. The idea that none of will need to make any personal lifestyle adjustments due to climate change is absurd. What is even the point of the "suburban lifestyle" if you need to stay inside in the air conditioning to make it through the summer? I'm a lifelong Atlantan, but the weather may be the thing that eventually convinces me to move somewhere else.
If you don't like hot weather, what the f*ck are you doing in Atlanta, of all places? And then you complain if the temperature warms by 2°? Gimme a break!
You act like suburbanites have nothing to gain from upzoning other than "schadenfreude", when a major driver of the YIMBY movement is to make it more affordable for average "working" people to live near their jobs. If more people can afford to live closer to employment centers, then commute times will decrease and traffic congestion on the highways will ease up, regardless of whether or not more transit is involved. The end goal should be a new equilibrium where the only people who chose to live in the suburbs are people who have a strong preference for the "suburban lifestyle dream" and consciously make the tradeoff of longer commutes for more space, instead of people who are forced to move to the suburbs because urban neighborhoods are too expensive to raise a family in.
Speaking of which, it's fine that you prefer the "suburban lifestyle dream", but why should the government spend billions of dollars on infrastructure to subsidize your lifestyle preference, especially when it comes at a cost to existing urban residents? Highways have all sorts of negative effects on the existing residents of cities. Highways tear apart the urban fabric and disrupt the finely tuned network of neighborhoods and communities in existing city centers. They displace many existing residents and leave the remaining adjacent residents exposed to air and noise pollution. They use up valuable urban land that could be used for more housing. Elevated freeway overpasses create urban dead zones where only homeless people tend to congregate. I could keep going here. Point is, while all urban transportation system have tradeoffs, it seems absurd to expect the government to double down on a transportation system with this many negative externalities in order to prop up your self-proclaimed "lifestyle".
If we accept that nothing is going to change about transportation, NIMBYs are correct that most expensive places are built out as far as they should be & further density would makes everyone worse off.
It's not a dial with "more housing" on one end and "less housing" on the other, it's two fundamentally different system architectures with features that need to be internally coherent. Building shitloads of high-density housing in subdivisions off of random exurban highways would work about as well as expecting existing suburban communities to switch to transit.
Personally I would love it if a bipartisan group of congresspeople wrote a bill that explicitly named the hated-by-the-right cities of NYC, SF, LA, and Boston as the jurisdictions whose governments Uncle Same would own. Maybe we could even have a federal agency (exempt from local zoning!) buy land, build high-rises, sell them to the highest bidders, and generally run roughshod over the local Dems. But Democratic caucus leadership probably wouldn't allow that (Hakeem Jeffries - NYC, Kathleen Clark - Boston).
Pull a Squamish Nation in Vancouver BC, and get the BIA to buy some off reservation trust land in super urban areas to tribes to build housing on, and tell the NIMBYs to eat shit.
My mom lives in Vancouver and she hates the Squamish Nation building project. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I think it’s great to build more housing in Vancouver to meet demand!
Not only great to build housing, but a critical way to keep the Squamish Nation financially independent and allow their tribe more autonomy. I really think this project is so, so cool.
I do worry about this issue getting too much attention. People will literally turn away vaccines if they feel they are opposite party coded.
Given the limited policy levers of the president and very visible federal politicians maybe it's best if they just kept quiet. If this becomes a partisan issue we are totally screwed.
I agree, and I feel that this is an underrated problem. I regularly remind YIMBYs that we must avoid anything that even looks like banning low-density housing.
My best idea is stressing the "freedom to build" view.
If someone wants to buy up a block of skyscrapers to raze and replace with one detached single-family home surrounded by well-watered grass, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to react to the apartment building down the street by surrounding their house with a 12' wall topped with barbed wire, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to cover their front lawn with permeable pavers to park their cars on because street parking became more competitive, that should be allowed.
The sheer derangement this provoked from red rose Twitter made it worthwhile just from a comedy perspective even before getting to its impact on housing affordability.
One of the under-reported issues NIMBYs genuinely have is the conformity and blandness of new construction, and the genuinely negative effect it has on neighborhood character.
This is well illustrated in the fight over the Elizabeth Street garden in lower Manhattan, which has split even the most ardent NY YIMBYs because of the extremeness of the plan: wreck a charming park to build a corporate low income housing building.
Regardless of where you fall on valuing "neighborhood character", we can all acknowledge that build new BEAUTIFUL buildings that neighbors could possibly get excited about would reduce friction/resistance and ease passage of local laws that achieve the housing goals.
It's an unsolved problem because aesthetics are rarely discussed as a policy goal, but they should be.
Yep. I was explicitly told it was not a public park long before the housing was proposed. Honestly this one development is enough to make earnest serious people give up on politics altogether. So much blatant lying about this project.
Corporate developer is Pennrose. Go to their website to see their work.
It's been leased from the city for decades. The city could officially make it a park.
Your legalistic analysis of the situation illustrates my point. Not a convincing line of argument to stakeholders who aren't single-mindedly focused on units, so you get friction from those stakeholders.
Right, so we have to overwhelm or buy off the "stakeholders" who may or may not actually be real stakeholders, because their preferences are always for no change to the existing situation, which is bad and getting worse. I hate to break it to you, but with your comments, you are branding yourself as a NIMBY.
Beautiful buildings cost more money. I don’t think this comment has reckoned with the implicit costs in your approach. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Having neighbors weigh in on the design means you will typically get less units.
Unfortunately in the neighborhood where I live, which is a 1920s era neighborhood full of bungalows, "neighborhood aesthetics" have undermined a lot of good projects. Haggling over aesthetics is costly and drives people away from building homes, not towards building homes.
I would be fine with new not-ugly buildings. There is one developer in my city who creates units that fit into the landscape and puts a little bit of detail that breaks up the eye when you look at the buildings, such as porches and curves. People still fight their buildings, but I enjoy having them in the neighborhood, and they are bringing younger people to the neighborhood.
There is another developer that builds cheap looking buildings that have zero landscaping and character. It not only makes walks around them boring, it is also very hot around them because the buildings are behemoths that take up a whole block and have no shade around them from either trees or overhangs. There is no difference in the rental prices of the two developers' buildings, so I am not even sure if the second developer is saving any money.
That is a long way of saying that although I never publicly voice opposition to these projects, I am sympathetic to the aesthetic arguments my neighbors make.
Nothing we do is going to make all buildings non-ugly. There is no process to do that. The best we can do, in my view, is to stay out of aesthetic concerns, because regulations that purport to make buildings turn out less ugly never work.
As I mentioned above, you can improve aesthetics via deregulation, too. More generally, I think it's important to acknowledge NIMBY criticisms like building aesthetics, and then to try and find ways to resolve them with good policy that doesn't introduce more veto points. Or put differently: make it easier for developers to supply beauty, and there will be more beauty.
There is no way to resolve NIMBY concerns over aesthetics, because it never works and the NIMBYs just move on to other objections.
Deregulation is good in itself, and it also would on average produce more beautiful buildings. But the only way to deal with NIMBYs is to defeat them. You cannot assuage them.
When we did a remodel on our house, it was subject to "design review". It basically opened the door for any busybody to challenge a remodel. Our remodel plans were faithful to the original design, but a busybody decided we needed extra windows to make it more faithful to the neighborhood. This design review meeting cost an extra $4000. Whether or not the windows or a better design is a matter of opinion, but this seems to me to be a glitch in the regulatory and permit process
You got away easily, if it only took one meeting and changing a few windows. In my city multi-family developers sometimes have to redesign the whole building and go through several iterations of approval hearings because of NIMBY busybodies. YIMBYs believe design review is worse than a glitch; it's a menace and should be prohibited.
That is one well-understood item on a laundry list of tenuously held complaints NIMBYs wield against new development. Then, when city development boards are given free reign to create technical requirements and review processes for aesthetics and end up with something that looks like this https://www.taxcreditcoalition.org/gallery/the-elwood/ people still complain. It turns out everyone has different opinions on aesthetics and nothing will make everyone happy!
That hasn't split YIMBYs at all. It is literally not a public park. I lived by it 10 years ago and it was fairly rare that it was even unlocked. They only pretended it was public after the housing proposal. I know hundreds of YIMBYs in NYC and to say they're split on this one is laughable.
Harris commented 2 weeks ago, one of her few comments, that you need to think about this from return on investment in terms of property tax. A major benefit of YIMBY is to reset base value of the property and capture more local property tax. My guess is the new found interest is more tax base than housing reform.
Home ownership for lower income does create a rigidity that makes it harder for people to move around as the economy shifts. It's worth talking about rental units to make it easier for labor markets to rebalance.
States like Florida don't have the kinds of house shortages as California. Despite large flows into Florida. It would be interesting tomdig into why.
I'm not that smart so can someone explain to me why a federal law that says "if you own land you can build residential housing there if you want" would be bad and/or ineffectual?
It’s not traditionally an area of federal regulation, and that would blow up hundreds of thousands of pages of local laws. I’m not against it, but status quo bias is a thing.
Actually, I could see an argument that it's not constitutional. As David Abbott said, zoning and most other land use regulation has historically very clearly been a matter of state and local control, so it could be considered a violation of the Tenth Amendment to simply order a change to that. A federal program that creates financial incentives for states or municipalities to change their laws on land use would almost certainly be a safer way to go.
Easy peasy. There is an interstate market for housing supplies, construction labor and housing finance. Local zoning laws fuck with these markets, therefore the federal government must ride to the rescue and lubricate the channels of interstate commerce
Yes, doubtlessly there are interstate commerce arguments. However:
(1) The current SCOTUS majority isn't likely to be looking for excuses to expand federal government control into areas that were historically viewed as the domain of state and local governments.
(2) I believe one or more of the concurrences in Department of Revenue of Kentucky v. Davis, 553 U.S. 328 (2008) (regarding discriminatory state tax treatment of municipal bond interest), basically indicated that, even if there's a really good argument for why state action violates the interstate commerce clause, the sheer inertia of settled expectations can weigh against finding a violation, which it seems like a pretty plausible argument in this context -- i.e., large numbers of people have doubtlessly made the biggest single investment of their lives on the premise that they would have major input on land use decisions in the surrounding community.
A federal law directly stating that property can be used for residential uses, bypassing state-local laws, would presumably be based on what... the interstate commerce regulatory power in the Commerce Clause? But would this court let that stand, given US vs Lopez and its progeny? I could also see a Thomas concurrence based on 18th-century practice protecting the states' powers to regulate property.
A law tying funding for existing programs (e.g., highway/transit funding) with new incentives (expanding housing) would have to deal with the Sibelius "coercion" doctrine, so could not be too onerous to avoid this court striking it down (or, alternatively, could create a totally new program/funding source to avoid "coercion" concerns).
I know we mostly ignore the concept that the federal government needs to have granted authority to pass a law, but just for funsies, what power are you suggesting the federal government has to preempt all local zoning laws?
The 5th Amendment Takings Clause? Maybe you could do something like the old proposed Private Property Protection Act, but instead of eminent domain make it about zoning. Or could you pass a federal statute that purports to set the required compensation level when localities try to enforce zoning or deny permits?
The Constitution is generally pretty friendly to private property I think.
I’ll note that the feds did this already for satellite dishes and cell phone towers. By federal law, localities are very constrained in how they can regulate these.
Communications facilities though have a direct and ongoing connection to interstate commerce and there was a long history of federal regulations relating to interstate communications infrastructure dating back to the 19th Century, so I'd be wary of relying too much on that precedent, especially if YIMBY/NIMBY becomes explicitly blue/red polarized.
Contra Matt, I think the cases he cites here -- Obama, Harris, the HOME Act, etc -- are in fact *bad* for the YIMBY cause.
We can point to, but don't need to emphasize, the fact that the federal government has few tools to address this form of the housing crisis. It's a state and local matter, especially when it comes to zoning and other restrictive regulations. The federal government can do its usual thing of attaching millions of mandates to its outlays but in the end the juiciest targets (the richest states and cities) will forego those funds before being forced to accept new regulations that they otherwise don't want.
But here's the real reason.
Matt talks a lot about the Secret Congress. Ezra Klein has written perceptively about how anytime the President dives into an issue, it becomes polarized and the chances of success go down. So here. Since the federal government has little practical power on the issue, all these types of things will do is to polarize the population. Everyone will retreat to their camps and the kind of bipartisan coalitions that Matt talks about here will become impossible to put together.
The YIMBY cause is making steady progress (there's that "slow boring of hard boards" thing again). Trying the short cut of having Congress and the White House set policy or at least define the terms of debate may be a sugar high but if anything will set the cause back. Obama, Harris: don't just do something, shut up.
The (solvable) contradiction in the Party today is that reducing regulations around housing and allowing new construction will result in disfavored people -- developers, building owners, HVAC installers, various construction companies -- making money.
We are now the Party of the upper middle class and it is time we embraced it. We can help the poor, we can be in favor of a strong safety net. But we need to drop the anti-profit and anti-rich attitude.
That contradiction is so dumb. Opposing housing abundance because developers make money off it is like opposing SNAP because Walmart makes money off it.
That's a good point, but at the same time I'm pretty sure that if you asked the "Food is a human right" crowd what their ideal food distribution system looked like, it would involve government-run pantries providing free or nominally priced food.
politically, the trick is getting the “food is a human right” crowd to embrace smart, technocratic solutions rather than larping at amarco-syndicalism or central planning.
Yeah but those people are extremely marginal and would be laughed out by normies in a way that isn't established yet with housing.
Hot take: "There do exist a few really dumb people in the world."
“I ain’t interested in none of that free government food y’all are pushing. I like my tasty diabetus food from Walmart; that’s what I’m used to, and I’m not about to change just ’cause you’re handing out some bland crap for free. I don’t need no charity if it means eating what I don’t like. So keep it, I’ll stick to my own damn food.”
It's also inconsistent in that if you oppose housing abundance to prevent developers from making money, then you are simultaneously *causing* landlords (including corporate landlords) to make more money. Yet no one seems to care about that.
But on the other hand, I think this reveals that the aversion to rich people making money probably isn't truly the root psychological fear that these progressives are trying to avoid. That's just what they think they're doing. In reality, they have a specific distaste for property *development* probably based on aesthetic preferences (e.g. they read The Lorax too many times as a kid and are disgusted by the idea of chopping down trees, or they hate seeing big construction equipment around, or whatever).
As I always say, as a landlord, nothing would own me more than vastly expanded supply sticking me with a ton of competition for my old house.
I wouldn’t discount the aversion to rich people making money too much. I’ve found that when I talk about this with lefty friends, making the argument that we’re just putting money in the pockets of landlords, and that we need to pit landlords and developers against each other (even if that means developers make money. Plus at least they’re actually building something, blah blah jobs for the working class). It’s probably the most consistently successful I’ve found.
So maybe it’s less that they know it’s inconsistent and don’t care, than that they haven’t thought much about it and you (global you, not you-you) need to raise the point in an on-your-side way that lets you be heard.
Bonus: those working class jobs are really good, from all major standpoints, they're not just blah blah!
Great rhetorical strategy - I'm going to start using this.
Possible. That has not been my experience arguing online, but who knows who these online randos are.
Not to mention that this would be a stealth transfer in as much as housing wealth (which for most middle-class Americans is at least a large portion of their wealth) would be equalized. Right now, anyone with a house, benefits from the difficulty in building new houses. This is baked into their net wealth in terms of their home. Adding significant stock would either reduce their home values or slow the increase in housing wealth, particularly for middle-class/upper-middle-class individuals relative to less affluent individuals who could then get into a home.
At the end of the day, everyone would benefit, but the more affluent would benefit more abstractly and might actually lose a little in some cases (such as homeowners in states or localities with high barriers to building new homes). To me, this would be very egalitarian and, in a limited way, overcome the difficulty of broad-based increases in tax rates for the middle/upper middle class.
Basically, a YIMBY-style house reform would act as a kind of transfer on the upperish middle classes. If it was coupled with higher income taxes at the top end of the income scale, you would have a more balanced approach to reducing disparities in wealth. So, in a sense, it is progressive, in fact, if not in rhetoric.
“Adding significant stock would either reduce their home values or slow the increase in housing wealth. . .” This is not necessarily true. If the increase in units is accomplished by increasing density, it’s likely that in many cases it would cause further increases in SFR home values. All else equal, increased allowable density results in increased land values.
I mean there was a huge discourse about how a generous social safety net with a low minimum wage amounts to a taxpayer subsidy for low wage employers.
As I've said before, to paraphrase Mencken, progressivism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be making money.
I agree with this. However this:
"it would warm my neoliberal heart to see Democrats fulsomely embrace “corporate landlords”"
seems almost willfully obtuse, an example of putting economist-brain before heart. No consideration given here to the emotional valance of housing policy, and why so many people want to own their own. Why would it be better, and make people happier, to turn the housing sector into another one dominated by a few concentrated, distant corporations, instead of making better credit and mortgage options available to individuals? It just feels like forgetting what the end goal is here, which is, or should be, creating a society by and for the people -- and if that means anything, it means respecting what people actually want.
We don't have literal yeoman farmers anymore, independent citizens with the wherewithal and financial independence to exercise self-determination over their own lives. But homeownership today fills that place in the American psyche.
If you own your own home free and clear, you can live out your life on Social Security, Medicare, and whatever other money you may or may not have managed to save. There's great peace of mind for many people in knowing that. And that's not true in a nation of renters, at least not without some type of personalized Social Security savings plan, as a stand-in for the role homeownership currently plays in helping many people feel secure, of the sort GWB talked about, and that Nancy Pelosi killed before a serious national conversation about it even got off the starting line.
My hesitation with the owner-occupier model is that owners are ALSO incentivised to oppose further development and all their wealth is tied up in their homes, which means they benefit from house prices outpacing overall inflation. Noah Smith’s blog was about this a few days ago.
At least where I’m from, people assume they can retire on the value of their house. If its asset value doesn’t wildly outpace the returns to other assets (i.e. if it were equivalent, which I believe standard economic theory should predict), they’d have a fit.
I suspect that if Democrats did embrace corporate landlords, it would be "fulsomely."
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fulsomely
Depends on the tradeoff and cost levels. I like owning my own home. But if renting was only $50/month for my large suburban spread, maybe I'd deal with renting and spend my money an interests elsewhere. But that number is anywhere near market rents in major US metros.
Maybe there’s a strain of the party that believes that but certainly seems like the mainstream democrat is fine with any of those groups profiting from a productive activity like home building.
I dunno, developers seem pretty widely reviled. HVAC installers and construction companies less so. I think the basic dynamic here is that people universally hate their landlords, thus developers are evil.
I feel like most renters I know hate their mom and pop landlord and love their automated company
A corporate landlord is fine when it is consistent. But a family member has had their corporate landlord change at least four times in the 8 years he has been renting there, and it has been a nightmare every time the management/owner changes - losing rent, losing leases, changing portals, etc. The only saving grace has been that the maintenance people have remained the same, and now he talks directly to them rather than requesting service through the office.
I have had both mom & pop landlords and corporate landlords. All have been fine. The best was a mom & pop landlord who lived next door and would do things like make us cookies and snow blow out our car even though we had street parking. I guess I have been lucky.
I had one of those revolving door corporate landlords and it was legitimately a nightmare to deal with - including when we got a $1800 bill mailed to us over a year after we moved away because the various landlords screwed up tabulating the “included in the rent payment” utilities, charging us the wrong rent for years, losing leases, leaving units completely uninhabitable (as in, no running water) for weeks…some former residents are currently suing the most recent corporation to muscle in there.
Then again, I once had a mom and pop landlord who refused to speak to women for religious reasons, and I had to go through my male neighbors to request maintenance. So I’m agnostic on which one I prefer.
The variance of mom-and-pop landlords is very high. I’ve had one guy who was great, diligent and fair, and another guy I had to call the sanitation department on, move out early, make legal threats to get my deposit back.
BigCo landlords are much more predictable — you know what you’re getting, more or less.
My experience with mom and pop landlords is that they wouldn't ever pay for anything they didn't absolutely have to. There was a real vibe of the rental unit as a cash extraction operation and any reduction in cash flow would be horrific.
People love a villain narrative so much that "housing scarcity is caused by the people who build houses" is a mainstream view. Bit like "climate change is due to energy producers" and not the fact society consumes energy.
Climate change is not caused by energy producers, but they sure as shit exacerbated it over the last forty years by funding climate science denialism and lobbying against (rather than investing in) cleaner energy sources.
A question that I've always had and have never gotten a good answer to is, how much did that disrupt the clean energy transition? Would we have gotten more renewable energy sources if fossil fuel companies didn't contribute to the denial of climate change? Would our battery storage have gotten better? Transmission lines built?
Nuclear is something that if deployed at scale definitely could have weaned us off fossil fuels earlier, but I don't see the people who regularly blame Exxon for everything making that argument.
Fossil fuel companies did have a strong impact in reactions to the Oil Crisis and getting Carter our of office and replacing him with Reagan. That led to a large reduction in Federal R&D for solar panels and changes in government regulations. So it did have an impact on the rate of improvement and deployment of renewables. Germany actually spurred a lot of R&D and investment by mandating clean energy targets, while simultaneously hurting themselves by closing their nuclear power plants.
That's probably because there's a lot of overlap between people who blame Exxon for everything and people who don't like nuclear power.
If fossil fuels companies didn't contribute to denial of climate change there would be less polarization and moralization of this issues and people could have focused on what was need to transition to a post-carbon economy. The climate change debate was about believing it climate change instead of building the necessary infrastructure like more transmission lines
The US goverement has supported and invested in many technological revolutions in the past. The US goverement invested in hydraulic fracturing technology in the 1970's and 80's. Fracking has made America the largest oil producer in the world. However the US government did not support batteries. Since it wasn't supported China is currently the leader in that technology. The US goverement didn't anticipate the importance of batteries because the didn't think about what would need in a post carbon economy.
I mean, in the Anglosphere, look at difference in three countries.
The US - Massive right-wing climate change denial
Australia - Some right-wing denial, but far more of a push for climate change bills.
UK - Even the Tories are pro-climate change.
The connection - no massively rich people in UK based off the extraction, the way a random crank who was less risk averse and lucky in 1946 can suddenly become massively wealthy and effect politics for the next 50 years, and there's like 50 of those types in Texas & Oklahoma.
Tangentially related but I just saw this ad from the Democrat in the Montana at-large congressional race. The Republican she is running against is legitimately a bad guy, but
https://x.com/MonicaTranel/status/1828426369535242259
Actually that's MT-1; we got a second congressional district in the last census.
The airbnb conversions are an issue in this state. When you have Montana being discovered in combination with impacts of Yellowstone film crews, demand for housing regardless of ownership is impacting work force housing. In my community we have had positions from deputy sheriffs to surgeons go unfilled due to unavailability/ housing cost. Tranel is a top notch candidate and Zinke has all the policy depth and integrity of a cookie sheet. This add is simply an appeal to the voters based on Zinke’s detachment from his constituents not an attack on landlords or corporations. Cities in the state are starting to address old housing regs in part due to state gov prodding and local demand but NIYB is alive and well.
All my corporate landlords have been somewhere between fine and great!
Developers are reviled by planners and other local government officials and by NIMBYS who live next door to their new developments. They are not reviled (for the most part) by people who purchase their homes.
I think most people spend more time dealing with traffic patterns that go past developable land than they do purchasing homes. So they spend more time hating developers than appreciating them.
It's the NYC Democrat mentality. They sued Ed Koch for allocating money to pay private developers to build affordable housing in the 1980s because they felt like all of the budget money should just go to NYCHA: https://casetext.com/case/housing-justice-campaign-v-koch-1
Thankfully most Dems in the rest of the country is moving past this thinking.
There is a strain of progressivism that is deeply uncomfortable with the ways of blue collar men.
I Agree that people not liking developers making money is a huge issue.
Which gets to a pet cause of mine: an underrated big win for YIMBY’s would be if we could somehow get Hollywood to stop typecasting developers as villains. I really think this leads to substantial amount of the anti-developer attitudes.
No no no [insert long argle-bargle about Red Vienna here]
The last part gets to why I think most YIMBYs were more excited than Matt. Obama is not going to endorse in Bloomington Indiana city council races. But I have a new city councilor who got into politics via gun control advocacy and doesn't seem to have firm views on housing, although she's said some unfortunate NIMBY stuff. I'm confident, though, that she thinks Barack Obama is great. So him endorsing good policy will help move a lot of people in the right direction in high cost places across the country.
+100. I'm a board member of the Community Board that covers Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York. Next time we have to provide feedback to the city on a land use decision, I will 100% quote Obama and Harris saying we need to "build, build, build". And I think there's a decent chance at least some votes will be swayed!
Yep. I know a lot of people who have protested new housing at local community board meetings that also think Obama is really great. It was an incredibly helpful quote for local activists and I'm sure it will be read out at many meetings.
One thought regarding the potential polarization of housing policy: if YIMBYism is coded as blue, then it might finally drive housing reform in blue states that need it most to shore up their liberal cred. Red states can own the libs by...doing nothing but they already are basically pro-building. It might be one of the kicks in the pants blue America needs to MBAGA (Make Blue America Great Again).
I do worry that if YIMBYism becomes more blue coded, red states may begin intrenching single family zoning to own the libs. This is why I don't want it to become a polarized issue.
There's a part of me that wonders if some of the red areas that are generally seen as pro-building are setting themselves on a similar path to housing-dysfunctional areas like California -- if they're just further behind in the NIMBY lifecycle and now playing catching up.
It seems like as some of these "pro-building areas" in the sunbelt add units (often from greenfields rather than infill), the NIMBY sentiments grow and you see proposals for some of the same dysfunctional policies that mucked-up development in coastal areas like California (property tax "fixes" like prop 13, overly aggressive impact fees, an increased fixation on traffic and parking availability, general sentiment of "we're full" and "keep out newcomers," residence to density)
Houston, Dallas, and Austin all sprawl but they've also been densifying with lots of infill. Not sure how it'll shake out long term, but I haven't noticed a strong trend towards more successful NIMBYism in those cities over time.
Houston is already the 4th biggest city in the country, so that seems like it'd be pretty far along in the "lifecycle".
definitely good points! As a CA resident, I just hope Houston / Dallas / Austin / other growth areas don’t make the same mistakes our state made, because they’re hard to unwind
Hear, hear! If Obama and Harris say it’s cool to be YIMBY, that may help get CA to 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps back territory.
Obama is wasting his time being the respectful party elder. He should be a town hall heat seeking missile that intimidates NIMBY obstructionism and advances the abundance agenda.
Edit: This comment is generally in jest, but Obama should work behind the scenes to pressure mayors or endorse yimby candidates where is endorsement would be most effective. Basically, start wading into intra party disputes and use your power for good!
But have you considered the fact his is old and likes being retired?
Imagine if Obama showed up to community meetings in Chicago, reporters in tow, and testified about why it’s important to approve this zoning variance
Be careful here. There are lots of Democratic voters in suburbia (especially here in California) who vote blue at the state and national levels and at least flirt with more conservative positions locally, especially when it comes to neighborhood issues (crime and housing). Having Obama et al jump into the local housing issue *may* bring them over but maybe it's more likely that they start thinking that the national Democratic party is not for them.
This is probably true.
"Heat sealing missiles" lock the freshness in -- permanently!
I like this argument and find it compelling, but I am curious about the possible worst case outcomes of further polarization. What tools would a Republican federal government have to stop Democratic state governments from pursuing a deregulatory YIMBY agenda?
Project 2025 says, “Congress should prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home.” What would that look like in practice? Could Congress stop state preemption of local zoning?
Can't Congress basically do anything if they tie it to highway spending or something?
Not according to the deal John Roberts cut with liberals in the Affordable Care Act case.
I don't think you want to go to that well too often.
Oh I agree, it's absolutely against the spirit of the Constitution if not the letter.
But this could lead to some toxic intra-state politics in the Blue States, like what we're seeing in New York -- Republicans take the popular "let local governments decide" NIMBY position, use it loudly to attempt to make gains against Dems in exurban/suburban seats, and those Dems then cover their flanks by going NIMBY -- resulting in Hochul's reform plans being shelved by the Democrats themselves.
If we had in New York Republicans with the attitude of their colleagues in Montana, pretty sure some big statewide housing reforms would have gotten done. But the Republicans here genuinely see NIMBY politics as a way to make statewide gains--and as helpful in suburban swing district races for Congress as well.
I like to tell NY NIMBY Left folks that they are responsible for Trump getting elected because they oppose housing.
Huh?
Guessing he means that if NY had less restrictions on housing it would have a lot more electoral votes. Also true of California, I guess
I don’t like what this does to the city councils of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach and other Republican-led suburbs in dense parts of California.
I think what happens is state governments continue to reform zoning at the state level like what's happening in California already.
Yimbyism looks bluer when paired with “affordable housing” requirements.
Still needs to pencil out. Nobody's going to develop any housing unless they can make some money doing so.
I recently posted a video on the NH subreddit about a developer/local employer that's building tiny homes in the area. The negative tone of the comments really surprised me. Some commentors made legitimate points about the history of employer provided housing, but overall the tone of the comments was very depressing. It looks like just 2 or 3 out of 100 comments thought this effort was a good idea.
Affordable housing activists don't just need to overcome NIMBYism, but also they'll need to fight off folks who take a strongly negative view of the compromises required to build affordable housing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/newhampshire/comments/1f20wpa/dover_nh_the_lot_fit_9_mcmansions_they_built_44/
I grew up in Amherst, NH. I am sure my neighbors would have lose their minds if 40 mini-homes went up instead of 9 McMansions. But, NH does have a high property tax and a libertarian streak, so I would hope they would be more amenable to this type of thing.
A lot of the comments there actually seem to be complaining that they built tiny single-family homes instead of *townhouses*, which would be a better use of space.
Townhouses may have yielded higher density, but it's not clear they would yielded a lower cost per unit.
The parcel cost $500k and included an already built ranch house that had to be worth at least $200k (likely closer to $300k).
The 44 tiny homes cost $145k per unit to build all-in, including land. So that means the land cost couldn't have contributed more than $7k or 5% of the total cost of a unit.
If they knocked down the ranch, you have to spread that out over the new units.
Many things about Trump have disappointed me, but honestly you'd think that a professional developer would at least have Opinions about making it easier to build things instead of defaulting to whatever he thinks will pander best.
One of the thin silver linings to 2016 Trump is that he had a pretty famous background in building in dense, deep-Blue urban areas at a time housing costs were just starting to become an issue, and elected Democrats weren't yet YIMBY-pilled.
It's clear that he didn't have much involvement in the buildings with his name on them, as he hasn't spoken in large events with any detail (even in the imprecise way he speaks!) on development.
I too am concerned that deregulation will get swallowed up by "affordable" housing meaning unaffordable except with subsidies. I'd almost say any plan that requires funding for housing is bad. The Harris $25,000 down payment is borderline unless it is used as a carrot for reforms.
Program design for affordable housing has been really challenging. I’m not an expert in this area but my former NYC DCP colleague Eric Kober, now writing for the Manhattan Institute, is. I recommend his work for people interested in this topic.
Strongly doubt it'll be a carrot for reforms. Young families aiming to buy their first house likely tilt more left than older families changing houses or retirees downsizing, so it's a net win for a Democratic constituency. A ton of the subsidy will be swallowed by higher house prices, though conservatives saying "oh housing prices will just rise $25K" aren't doing math correctly (not everyone gets the $25K subsidy, so housing prices won't rise that much; if 50% of homebuyers get a $25K subsidy and nothing else changes, expect prices to rise up to $12.5K). Also, we already have programs for first-time homebuyers like FHA loans and no one's running around shrieking about how they have to be repealed.
I don’t think the subsidy will be that bad in markets with elastic supply. We Slow Borers mostly live in markets with inelastic supply, but I don’t think that’s true of most Americans.
Housing supply is pretty inelastic even in markets without lots of regulation because it takes many months to build a home. This means that a) the supply side cannot react quickly to changes in demand and b) builders are conservative about what they are willing to build because they don't want to sit on inventory -- predicting demand in 9-12 months is uncertain. So lots of developers want to work only on units where sales are upfront, before builds.
Short-term inelastic yeah, but long-term it seems quite elastic to me, given how much construction activity ramps up and down over time in response to the business cycle, lending standards, interest rates, etc.
The downpayment assistance program would presumably be an ongoing program, right, not a one-time thing?
"Nothing else changes"? I suspect there would be a positive impact on supply. How big is hard to say.
Agreed except the 'almost' part.
Over at Noah’s substack he mentioned that for most people most of their wealth is tied up in their home. I thought that was a bit surprising as anyone who saves a decent amount of money in their 401k/IRA is always going to have more in savings than they have in home equity given the nature of an amortizing mortgage.
With GenX and GenZ doing so well now with automatic 401k signups, is there any chance that will reduce NIMBYism as people will have less of their identity and wealth tied up in their home?
I don't know what proportion of people think of their housing wealth as {cost of house - mortgage}, but my guess is is very low. People think of their housing wealth as {cost of house}. It's the same mentality that causes people to refer to rent as "throwing money away."
It’s not that surprising, for 98% of Americans the only leveraged bet they will ever make is through the house.
Seems pretty plausible to me given the housing market in recent years combined with a large percentage of people not actually saving anything approaching a decent amount of money in their 401K/IRA, if they have one at all.
It’s certainly true. But moving to opt in vs opt out has resulted in a lot more participation. So it’s not as bad as it used to be.
If a new house averages somewhere in the $350k to $500k range, and the homeowner is slowly paying down the mortgage, they're working their way up to that much in equity, and a lot of 401ks I see have less than that, even for people in their 50s.
“ even for people in their 50s.”
Right because when they started working 401k were opt in rather than opt out and many people never got around to opting in.
And the biggest financial argument for me towards owning vs renting is saving your principal is opt-out and but saving the difference between mortgage and rent is opt in
If you put $100K down on a $500K home and you then sold it for $600K, you just got roughly a 50% return on your initial investment, ceteris paribus. That's pretty good!
Yeh, if that’s what you do. If you buy and pay off the mortgage eventually there is no leverage benefit.
Is this true? Shouldn't you be considering the return on your deposit plus net mortgage payments to date? Most home purchases are highly leveraged so any increase in housing prices gives you a much better return than a 401K/IRA.
At first! As you pay the mortgage down, the leverage ratio declines and so does the return on the (progressively larger) amount invested.
It’s the opposite time course of the “buy stocks long+unleveraged” strategy, where the returns come mostly later with compounding.
Leverage only works if you sell. And each mortgage payment reduces your leverage.
I suspect the compound interest aspect is important: if you start saving at, say, 22, you’ll have a lot more money later on than someone who waits to 32.
So by the time many (most?) people realize this, it’s too late to make up the lost ground. The super cheap leverage from a home mortgage provides a way to juice your returns even later in life.
In theory. If you bought a $500k house at age 50 with $100k down and a 15 year mortgage and sold it a year later for $600k sure you got a 100% return. If you keep paying until you’re 65 then there is no leverage benefit.
Hmm. I don't think this follows?
The money you're not investing in the house upfront (because the bank loaned you the balance of the purchase price) can be in other investments which pay a rate of return higher than the mortgage interest rate. So at the end of the mortgage term, you have the house + the return on those investments. (Plus of course the consumption value of 15 years in the house.)
Whether people actually do this, have the money, invest appropriately, etc, who knows.
I was responding to the “goose returns” comment which, to me, implied limited funds.
Obviously buying a house for cash on 2020 and not getting a mortgage and investing the difference would have been a terrible decision.
In the US can you write off 100% of your mortgage interest? That seems like a major nudge towards owning similar in effect to Canada’s principal residence capital gains exemption. Both of those policies provide a rationalization for subsidizing renters. Why shouldn’t renters also get a break on housing costs?
“ In the US can you write off 100% of your mortgage interest”
Not any more. It has several limits such that the vast majority of people are no longer in a position to deduct it.
For context, the biggest limit is that you can only deduct mortgage interest if you itemize. According to ChatGPT, after the Trump tax cuts, itemized returns dropped from 30% to 10%.
*Cries in Californian*
There's no rationalization in that for subsidizing renters as long the framing continues to be that a mortgage payment is seen as an "investment" and a rent payment is seen as an "expense".
Are we talking about work force housing? And who in this group of home seekers have a job with a 401K? Most are trying to save for a house, hoping no medical event will pop up threatening next month’s rent, savings or food budget.
This only applies in the world of people with 401K’s, if you are addressing people who need work force housing, they are hoping to cover next months rent and praying nobody in the family gets sick in the mean time.
They don’t strike me as the core NIMBY.
Very interesting question! Fingers crossed...
The contrarian nihilists who make up the current GOP are going to start burning down houses just to spite Obama.
"If you love green space so much, why are you complaining that we're turning your house into a field, huh? Cry more libs"
Almost no one wants to make it harder to build dense developments. Yet fear of density is not irrational. Many progressives are so preoccupied by climate that they want to nudge or shove suburbanites into denser communities. This agenda is easily accomplished (indeed has been advanced) by limiting federal highway funding. Matt is part of this dynamic— I’ve never heard him plainly say that highway abundance would reduce congestion. Many progressives say that building roads won’t do any good because people will just commute further. This is cartoonish when the marginal propensity to commute is less than infinity. Telling a working dad he has to wake up at 5am to sit in traffic and his problem can never be fixed is political malpractice. It’s part of the reason most working dads prefer Trump.
It’s election time and y’all need our votes. We are perfectly happy to shove it to Palo Alto and Upper West side NIMBYs sitting on millions in equity. More puckish suburbanites (like me) would get off on reclaiming south San Francisco Bay to build affordable housing. However, we need more than schadenfreude. Give us some big, beautiful highways so we can live our suburban lifestyle dream in peace and stop pretending that transit will fix our problems.
In fact, Matt has repeatedly pointed out the induced demand means that more people get to travel. (The rest of your comment is similarly inaccurate.)
The article in question: https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-does-induced-demand-really-amount
It was worth re-reading that article. Matt is considerably more reasonable than many commentators and activists, but he stops way short of highway abundance.
Transportation abundance makes sense, but highway abundance does not. Transportation is the good - highways are just one means of providing it. And highways are actual nuisances, much more than most other forms of transportation. Sure, no mode of transportation is actually beautiful, but only highways and high-speed rails are actively obstacles to perpendicular transportation, and highways are much noisier than most transportation other than els.
An abundance agenda only makes sense when the thing you are talking about is the pure good - once you build in some harms, “abundance” is no longer the good framing. We want energy abundance, not gas power plant abundance; we want housing abundance, not dark shadowy condo canyon abundance; we want transportation abundance, not highway abundance.
Yeah the idea that anyone would describe highways as "beautiful" is absurd to me. Even putting aside the actual externalities they cause, just on an aesthetic level there is nothing "beautiful" about them. I find highways, especially urban highways, to be ugly concrete monstrosities that are stressful and alienating to drive on much of the time, and I avoid using them whenever possible.
Try driving down 280 by Crystal Springs, or up the Taconic amid the fall colors. And take an exit down a side road for an impromptu lunch. And do it all on your own schedule.
Or don't. There ain't no accountin' for taste. But if we're talking abundance, our horizons shouldn't be constrained to the walkable waddle, and we shouldn't be stuck waiting for a bus or a train.
How would you describe what achieves that abundance that you're talking about?
1) build highways
2) understand that the time and financial costs of commuting are high enough to deter most of the externalities it creates
You'll be thrilled to know that highways already exist!
Are you really saying that if we quadrupled the number of highways, people would just commute four times as far an congestion would remain static? Are you that stupid?
Clearly, induced demand is a thing. However, unless people are indifferent between commuting and leisure, less than 100% of the new capacity will be swallowed up by induced demand.
I think the argument is that quadrupling the number of highways would quadruple the number of people using them, not that they'd commute 4x as far.
Either way, though, I would argue it is a good thing to provide infrastructure that people want to use and induced demand is merely the name for an unmet need.
More than 25% of people drive on a highway to get to work. Quadrupling the number of auto commuters is mathematically impossible.
Most highway projects involve going from 3 lanes to 4, so quadrupling was just a figure of speech.
And the bottlenecks are also usually interchanges where merging becomes harder with more lanes, which requires more distance between exits. So the best way to make a highway move fast is to make the exits super far apart (along with having enough lanes). That's why traffic on the 280 is so much better than the 101.
It’s a thought experiment to prove that induced demand will not swallow 100% of new capacity.
Most highway projects might increase regional capacity by 2-10%. If there’s a lot of pent up demand, substantially all of that will be swallowed up by new commuting. Yet, as John says, that’s a legitimate choice. If Im willing to wake up at 5am and commute into Atlanta so my son can attend good, suburban schools, that means I’m a good dad. Making that possible for more people— and maybe letting them sleep in til 5:10, would be a win.
As others noted, Matt definitely has defended induced demand as a net good before. But besides that I think you're right a certain set of transit enthusiasts underrate how America has some of the *lowest* commute times among OECD countries thanks to its less walking-based transportation approach.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/family-database/lmf2_6_time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf
"Almost no one wants to make it harder to build dense developments"
This is completely false. There's a reason the vast majority of city land in the US is still zoned for single-family homes. In my own neighborhood (Bellevue/Redmond/Kirkland area east of Seattle), for example, the NIMBYs will regularly just to prevent cities from studying the impact of modest upzoning.
You missed my point. Almost no one is trying to tear down mid rises and build single family homes or forbid mid rise construction where it is currently allowed. However, the whole point of infill is to make existing communities denser. Transit only makes sense if things are pretty dense. The infill transit crowd generally oppose robust highway funding
That's also not true that "almost no one" wants to get rid of midrises. But that's not the main point of your argument, fair enough.
Yes, it is true that the infill transit crowd opposes "robust" highway funding. Tens of billions have been spent every year on federal highway funding for nearly a century and traffic is as bad as ever. Seems plenty reasonable to try to find and find more efficient modes of doubling down on this highly inefficient spending. It doesn't even require considering the negative externalities, such as noise or air pollution.
viewing my lifestyle as a negative externality codes as hostile even though objectively true. it’s also a bit of an exaggeration. most warming will occur in other countries and the US is well suited to mitigating the worst effects of climate change. 98 plus percent of the negative effect of suburban greenhouse emissions will be felt abroad. 100 percent of the positive effects of my suburban lifestyle dream (i’m only half ironic) will be enjoyed in american suburbs.
so basically, my emissions don’t hurt you all that much, but they piss you off because more people might die in floods in bangladesh (unless they build dikes) and polar bear populations will collapse.
so, do you want to tell me to take a lifestyle hit for your principles during an election year? i vote, i want more roads, i’m not alone, and i think a president who built lots of roads would be popular and a candidate who sounded interested and credible would get lots of votes. Can we be in a coalition together? I don’t think we’re alone here.
I never said your life was a negative externality, so I'm not sure what the point of your little rant is?
I may not be the strawman progressive of your imagination but I am concerned about climate change not primarily because of Bangladesh or Polar Bears or whatever, but because *gasp* I don't want my own climate to change. I don't like hot weather and I don't want more of it. I don't more extreme weather events, I don't want to deal with more heat waves or more hurricanes. Even if only 2% of the negative effect of suburban greenhouse emissions are felt in my area, that is still 2% more than I want. I take a "lifestyle hit" every time it is too hot outside to go for a walk or a run or a bike ride, every time I have to protect myself from the sun whenever I go outside, every time I bake in a hot asphalt parking lot trying to unload my groceries. The idea that none of will need to make any personal lifestyle adjustments due to climate change is absurd. What is even the point of the "suburban lifestyle" if you need to stay inside in the air conditioning to make it through the summer? I'm a lifelong Atlantan, but the weather may be the thing that eventually convinces me to move somewhere else.
If you don't like hot weather, what the f*ck are you doing in Atlanta, of all places? And then you complain if the temperature warms by 2°? Gimme a break!
I seem to remember something about Biden signing an infrastructure bill?
You act like suburbanites have nothing to gain from upzoning other than "schadenfreude", when a major driver of the YIMBY movement is to make it more affordable for average "working" people to live near their jobs. If more people can afford to live closer to employment centers, then commute times will decrease and traffic congestion on the highways will ease up, regardless of whether or not more transit is involved. The end goal should be a new equilibrium where the only people who chose to live in the suburbs are people who have a strong preference for the "suburban lifestyle dream" and consciously make the tradeoff of longer commutes for more space, instead of people who are forced to move to the suburbs because urban neighborhoods are too expensive to raise a family in.
Speaking of which, it's fine that you prefer the "suburban lifestyle dream", but why should the government spend billions of dollars on infrastructure to subsidize your lifestyle preference, especially when it comes at a cost to existing urban residents? Highways have all sorts of negative effects on the existing residents of cities. Highways tear apart the urban fabric and disrupt the finely tuned network of neighborhoods and communities in existing city centers. They displace many existing residents and leave the remaining adjacent residents exposed to air and noise pollution. They use up valuable urban land that could be used for more housing. Elevated freeway overpasses create urban dead zones where only homeless people tend to congregate. I could keep going here. Point is, while all urban transportation system have tradeoffs, it seems absurd to expect the government to double down on a transportation system with this many negative externalities in order to prop up your self-proclaimed "lifestyle".
If we accept that nothing is going to change about transportation, NIMBYs are correct that most expensive places are built out as far as they should be & further density would makes everyone worse off.
It's not a dial with "more housing" on one end and "less housing" on the other, it's two fundamentally different system architectures with features that need to be internally coherent. Building shitloads of high-density housing in subdivisions off of random exurban highways would work about as well as expecting existing suburban communities to switch to transit.
Personally I would love it if a bipartisan group of congresspeople wrote a bill that explicitly named the hated-by-the-right cities of NYC, SF, LA, and Boston as the jurisdictions whose governments Uncle Same would own. Maybe we could even have a federal agency (exempt from local zoning!) buy land, build high-rises, sell them to the highest bidders, and generally run roughshod over the local Dems. But Democratic caucus leadership probably wouldn't allow that (Hakeem Jeffries - NYC, Kathleen Clark - Boston).
Pull a Squamish Nation in Vancouver BC, and get the BIA to buy some off reservation trust land in super urban areas to tribes to build housing on, and tell the NIMBYs to eat shit.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/03/the-bold-new-plan-for-an-indigenous-led-development-in-vancouver
My mom lives in Vancouver and she hates the Squamish Nation building project. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I think it’s great to build more housing in Vancouver to meet demand!
Not only great to build housing, but a critical way to keep the Squamish Nation financially independent and allow their tribe more autonomy. I really think this project is so, so cool.
It's also so based--they did not give a flying fuck about what White people wanted them to care about.
“These aren’t indigenous ways of being!!!” scream white people at indigenous people any time they aren’t doing some Paleolithic tabula rasa cosplay.
More useful than a land acknowledgement, for sure!
I do worry about this issue getting too much attention. People will literally turn away vaccines if they feel they are opposite party coded.
Given the limited policy levers of the president and very visible federal politicians maybe it's best if they just kept quiet. If this becomes a partisan issue we are totally screwed.
I agree, and I feel that this is an underrated problem. I regularly remind YIMBYs that we must avoid anything that even looks like banning low-density housing.
My best idea is stressing the "freedom to build" view.
If someone wants to buy up a block of skyscrapers to raze and replace with one detached single-family home surrounded by well-watered grass, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to react to the apartment building down the street by surrounding their house with a 12' wall topped with barbed wire, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to cover their front lawn with permeable pavers to park their cars on because street parking became more competitive, that should be allowed.
Mostly agree...not sure about barbed wire though. Not too much an issue on a 12 foot wall but it poses some safety dangers.
I want more corporate landlords. Can we get Amazon or Walmart in on the game? They seem pretty good at driving consumer cost down.
Costco Housing!
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/costco-housing-apartments-south-la-19541521.php
The sheer derangement this provoked from red rose Twitter made it worthwhile just from a comedy perspective even before getting to its impact on housing affordability.
I could not live there. My food intake would become like 80% $1.50 hot dogs and then I would die.
Given how obnoxious Amazon has made finding certain things, or figuring out who's selling them, not sure I'd rent an apartment from them.
One of the under-reported issues NIMBYs genuinely have is the conformity and blandness of new construction, and the genuinely negative effect it has on neighborhood character.
This is well illustrated in the fight over the Elizabeth Street garden in lower Manhattan, which has split even the most ardent NY YIMBYs because of the extremeness of the plan: wreck a charming park to build a corporate low income housing building.
Regardless of where you fall on valuing "neighborhood character", we can all acknowledge that build new BEAUTIFUL buildings that neighbors could possibly get excited about would reduce friction/resistance and ease passage of local laws that achieve the housing goals.
It's an unsolved problem because aesthetics are rarely discussed as a policy goal, but they should be.
In fact it hasn't split YIMBYs because it's not a park it's a private space, and it's not a corporate building it's being built by a non profit.
Yes—it’s senior housing! And the “park” is hardly ever open.
Aesthetics can never be a policy goal because they are subjective. NYC desperately needs housing, and it’s appropriate that this takes priority.
I lived right by that park. Can confirm, it is never open. Also, it's small and can't accomodate that many people.
Yep. I was explicitly told it was not a public park long before the housing was proposed. Honestly this one development is enough to make earnest serious people give up on politics altogether. So much blatant lying about this project.
I do remember the activists at the park always giving pizza out and they gave my girlfriend a pin. Super nice people, just with bad politics.
Corporate developer is Pennrose. Go to their website to see their work.
It's been leased from the city for decades. The city could officially make it a park.
Your legalistic analysis of the situation illustrates my point. Not a convincing line of argument to stakeholders who aren't single-mindedly focused on units, so you get friction from those stakeholders.
My "legalistic analysis" is pointing out that the things you said were incorrect. Which NYC YIMBYs are opposed to this project?
I know hundreds and not a single one opposes this project. Honestly most of the opposition is just explicitly incorrect about the facts here.
Right, so we have to overwhelm or buy off the "stakeholders" who may or may not actually be real stakeholders, because their preferences are always for no change to the existing situation, which is bad and getting worse. I hate to break it to you, but with your comments, you are branding yourself as a NIMBY.
Beautiful buildings cost more money. I don’t think this comment has reckoned with the implicit costs in your approach. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Having neighbors weigh in on the design means you will typically get less units.
You can get more beautiful buildings via deregulation, too. E.g. if you allow single staircase buildings, then new construction will be less uniform.
Unfortunately in the neighborhood where I live, which is a 1920s era neighborhood full of bungalows, "neighborhood aesthetics" have undermined a lot of good projects. Haggling over aesthetics is costly and drives people away from building homes, not towards building homes.
I would be fine with new not-ugly buildings. There is one developer in my city who creates units that fit into the landscape and puts a little bit of detail that breaks up the eye when you look at the buildings, such as porches and curves. People still fight their buildings, but I enjoy having them in the neighborhood, and they are bringing younger people to the neighborhood.
There is another developer that builds cheap looking buildings that have zero landscaping and character. It not only makes walks around them boring, it is also very hot around them because the buildings are behemoths that take up a whole block and have no shade around them from either trees or overhangs. There is no difference in the rental prices of the two developers' buildings, so I am not even sure if the second developer is saving any money.
That is a long way of saying that although I never publicly voice opposition to these projects, I am sympathetic to the aesthetic arguments my neighbors make.
Nothing we do is going to make all buildings non-ugly. There is no process to do that. The best we can do, in my view, is to stay out of aesthetic concerns, because regulations that purport to make buildings turn out less ugly never work.
As I mentioned above, you can improve aesthetics via deregulation, too. More generally, I think it's important to acknowledge NIMBY criticisms like building aesthetics, and then to try and find ways to resolve them with good policy that doesn't introduce more veto points. Or put differently: make it easier for developers to supply beauty, and there will be more beauty.
There is no way to resolve NIMBY concerns over aesthetics, because it never works and the NIMBYs just move on to other objections.
Deregulation is good in itself, and it also would on average produce more beautiful buildings. But the only way to deal with NIMBYs is to defeat them. You cannot assuage them.
That would be fighting the "Damn it I just don't want it." box in the housing compass [https://external-preview.redd.it/oiUGJA2jKw1JYpsf_ThgHpX9tUAt12rWAJzjRPdbd1U.jpg?width=766&auto=webp&s=a9658e01128f7a2c5eb9638b5909482a3747e82e]
"I hate the noise. Or the business. Or the workers. Or the traffic. Or just change at all. Go away."
First time I have seen this particular axes graphic. Thanks for sharing.
When we did a remodel on our house, it was subject to "design review". It basically opened the door for any busybody to challenge a remodel. Our remodel plans were faithful to the original design, but a busybody decided we needed extra windows to make it more faithful to the neighborhood. This design review meeting cost an extra $4000. Whether or not the windows or a better design is a matter of opinion, but this seems to me to be a glitch in the regulatory and permit process
You got away easily, if it only took one meeting and changing a few windows. In my city multi-family developers sometimes have to redesign the whole building and go through several iterations of approval hearings because of NIMBY busybodies. YIMBYs believe design review is worse than a glitch; it's a menace and should be prohibited.
That is one well-understood item on a laundry list of tenuously held complaints NIMBYs wield against new development. Then, when city development boards are given free reign to create technical requirements and review processes for aesthetics and end up with something that looks like this https://www.taxcreditcoalition.org/gallery/the-elwood/ people still complain. It turns out everyone has different opinions on aesthetics and nothing will make everyone happy!
That hasn't split YIMBYs at all. It is literally not a public park. I lived by it 10 years ago and it was fairly rare that it was even unlocked. They only pretended it was public after the housing proposal. I know hundreds of YIMBYs in NYC and to say they're split on this one is laughable.
Harris commented 2 weeks ago, one of her few comments, that you need to think about this from return on investment in terms of property tax. A major benefit of YIMBY is to reset base value of the property and capture more local property tax. My guess is the new found interest is more tax base than housing reform.
Home ownership for lower income does create a rigidity that makes it harder for people to move around as the economy shifts. It's worth talking about rental units to make it easier for labor markets to rebalance.
States like Florida don't have the kinds of house shortages as California. Despite large flows into Florida. It would be interesting tomdig into why.
I'm not that smart so can someone explain to me why a federal law that says "if you own land you can build residential housing there if you want" would be bad and/or ineffectual?
It’s not traditionally an area of federal regulation, and that would blow up hundreds of thousands of pages of local laws. I’m not against it, but status quo bias is a thing.
Right it would blow up those laws and thus may be unpopular, but it would still be constitutional and would lead to more housing supply, no?
Actually, I could see an argument that it's not constitutional. As David Abbott said, zoning and most other land use regulation has historically very clearly been a matter of state and local control, so it could be considered a violation of the Tenth Amendment to simply order a change to that. A federal program that creates financial incentives for states or municipalities to change their laws on land use would almost certainly be a safer way to go.
Easy peasy. There is an interstate market for housing supplies, construction labor and housing finance. Local zoning laws fuck with these markets, therefore the federal government must ride to the rescue and lubricate the channels of interstate commerce
Yes, doubtlessly there are interstate commerce arguments. However:
(1) The current SCOTUS majority isn't likely to be looking for excuses to expand federal government control into areas that were historically viewed as the domain of state and local governments.
(2) I believe one or more of the concurrences in Department of Revenue of Kentucky v. Davis, 553 U.S. 328 (2008) (regarding discriminatory state tax treatment of municipal bond interest), basically indicated that, even if there's a really good argument for why state action violates the interstate commerce clause, the sheer inertia of settled expectations can weigh against finding a violation, which it seems like a pretty plausible argument in this context -- i.e., large numbers of people have doubtlessly made the biggest single investment of their lives on the premise that they would have major input on land use decisions in the surrounding community.
A federal law directly stating that property can be used for residential uses, bypassing state-local laws, would presumably be based on what... the interstate commerce regulatory power in the Commerce Clause? But would this court let that stand, given US vs Lopez and its progeny? I could also see a Thomas concurrence based on 18th-century practice protecting the states' powers to regulate property.
A law tying funding for existing programs (e.g., highway/transit funding) with new incentives (expanding housing) would have to deal with the Sibelius "coercion" doctrine, so could not be too onerous to avoid this court striking it down (or, alternatively, could create a totally new program/funding source to avoid "coercion" concerns).
I know we mostly ignore the concept that the federal government needs to have granted authority to pass a law, but just for funsies, what power are you suggesting the federal government has to preempt all local zoning laws?
The 5th Amendment Takings Clause? Maybe you could do something like the old proposed Private Property Protection Act, but instead of eminent domain make it about zoning. Or could you pass a federal statute that purports to set the required compensation level when localities try to enforce zoning or deny permits?
The Constitution is generally pretty friendly to private property I think.
constitutional precedent on preemption
Is there anything that the federal government could not preempt?
I’ll note that the feds did this already for satellite dishes and cell phone towers. By federal law, localities are very constrained in how they can regulate these.
Communications facilities though have a direct and ongoing connection to interstate commerce and there was a long history of federal regulations relating to interstate communications infrastructure dating back to the 19th Century, so I'd be wary of relying too much on that precedent, especially if YIMBY/NIMBY becomes explicitly blue/red polarized.
Us ham radio operators have been trying for years to get a similar exception for ham radio antennas.
Contra Matt, I think the cases he cites here -- Obama, Harris, the HOME Act, etc -- are in fact *bad* for the YIMBY cause.
We can point to, but don't need to emphasize, the fact that the federal government has few tools to address this form of the housing crisis. It's a state and local matter, especially when it comes to zoning and other restrictive regulations. The federal government can do its usual thing of attaching millions of mandates to its outlays but in the end the juiciest targets (the richest states and cities) will forego those funds before being forced to accept new regulations that they otherwise don't want.
But here's the real reason.
Matt talks a lot about the Secret Congress. Ezra Klein has written perceptively about how anytime the President dives into an issue, it becomes polarized and the chances of success go down. So here. Since the federal government has little practical power on the issue, all these types of things will do is to polarize the population. Everyone will retreat to their camps and the kind of bipartisan coalitions that Matt talks about here will become impossible to put together.
The YIMBY cause is making steady progress (there's that "slow boring of hard boards" thing again). Trying the short cut of having Congress and the White House set policy or at least define the terms of debate may be a sugar high but if anything will set the cause back. Obama, Harris: don't just do something, shut up.