YIMBYs already have a bold vision for solving the housing crisis

Don’t listen to the haters — there’s nothing narrow about this.

A businesswoman looks out over a dense city skyline. (Photo by Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images)

YIMBYs, people in the housing abundance movement, do not have a pope or a set of sacred authoritative texts you can consult to find out what we think about things.

But if you asked me what YIMBYism is, I would say our big idea is that if some land is zoned for human development (i.e., not a park or a nature preserve or similar) and the person who owns the land would like to build housing on that land, he or she should be allowed to do so, subject to bona fide regulations related to building safety and environmental externalities.

This is a radical idea.

There is literally nowhere in the United States of America (no, not even Houston) where it works like that.

It’s such a radical idea that, in practice, the vast majority of concrete YIMBY work focuses on incremental steps in that direction. Here we’re rolling back a staircase requirement whose safety rationale is bogus. There we’re legalizing accessory dwelling units as a homeowner-friendly form of land-use reform. Elsewhere, we’re liberalizing the regulations on manufactured housing. YIMBYs somewhere might be pushing for a fourplex bill or parking reform or a corridor or transit-oriented upzoning.

The status quo is so incredibly far from “it should be legal to build safe structures in places where there is market demand for them” that the list of specific reforms YIMBYs advocate for is practically infinite.

Because our analysis of the situation is correct, though, the circle of opponents who explicitly argue against the YIMBY agenda keeps shrinking.

Plenty of people have serious concerns about new housing in their backyard, and no one likes to have their existing veto rights taken away, so the actual politics of working toward housing abundance are difficult. But it’s become increasingly rare to see a writer or intellectual just saying, “There’s no downside to banning new housing in the places where demand is high.”

But there is a deep reluctance, notably among leftist intellectuals, to admit that we are just correct and a radical program of land-use-law reform would largely solve the single biggest economic problem facing the country.

Because if we can solve the single biggest economic problem facing the country with a liberalizing reform, that calls into question the larger project of overthrowing “neo”-liberalism and replacing it with a new post-liberal economic order.

This line of thinking is how you get takes like this one from Christopher Serkin and Daniel Sharfstein who dismiss arguments “about the local regulations governing what and where people can build” as an illustration of “how narrow our imagination has become” and propose instead that we embark on a mass program of federally financed housing construction. But the regulatory reform conversation isn’t narrow at all — it’s exceptionally radical and also a necessary precondition to everything they’re arguing for.

The regulatory landscape was different in the past

The central sleight of hand in the piece (a common one in the anti-abundance literature) is to say that instead of talking about regulatory issues, we should return to the good old days of midcentury progressive politics, when “the federal government responded by treating housing as critical national infrastructure” and “the government directly built housing itself.”

That would be great! But guess what? The post-World War II housing-boom era they’re talking about took place before the modern regulatory landscape came into being.

Los Angeles cut its zoned capacity by 60 percent between 1960 and 1990. New York City did a massive downzoning in 1961 and as recently as Michael Bloomberg’s administration was downzoning on net.

The original Levittown suburbs featured lot sizes of 6,000 square feet. The National Zoning Atlas finds that 56 percent of existing single-family-home land is zoned to require lots of at least 40,000 square feet. Just 4 percent of single-family land is zoned to allow lots of less than 10,000 square feet. A ton of YIMBY activism and leading YIMBY thinkers came out of central cities and “urbanist” thinking, but a lot of what we’ve learned as this policy area has developed is how hostile the contemporary land-use environment has become to traditional suburban development patterns as well.

The United States is, needless to say, a much richer country than it was in the 1950s, so you wouldn’t see the same level of demand for Levittown-scale structures. It’s totally fine if a large share of the population prefers to purchase larger lots and larger homes. But it doesn’t make sense to propose a return to the policy framework that sparked the postwar housing boom as an alternative to regulatory reform.

Zoning was much laxer back then. Fire codes were less strict. NEPA didn’t exist.

In 1976, Harvey Molotch published his groundbreaking article, “The City as a Growth Machine,” observing — and complaining — that municipal politics was dominated by a mix of real estate interests, construction interests, labor interests, and downtown business interests, all of which favored more building, more population growth, more jobs, and more customers. And over the course of the ’70s and ’80s, the pro-growth political coalition Molotch described was repeatedly defeated across the Pacific Coast and the northeastern United States by an explicit “growth control” movement. The Sun Belt, meanwhile, remained more growth-friendly but also embedded low-density presuppositions that generally banned both walkable urbanism and Levittown-scale suburbs.

Calling things “infrastructure” doesn’t solve the problem

In their piece, Serkin and Sharfstein argue that in the good old days, Americans “understood that housing was not just another commodity” but rather treated it like “essential infrastructure for a functioning society.”

This strikes me as much too optimistic about the status quo!

If housing were treated like just another commodity, then obviously you’d be allowed to build extra dwellings on your lot and rent them out. That wouldn’t mean no regulations — there might be rules about what kinds of dwellings are considered safe. And you’d need to pay property taxes, obviously. But while cars are highly regulated across many dimensions, they’re also just another commodity. If you want to buy a car, you can go buy a car. You don’t need to ask your neighbors if they think your car fits with the general vibe of the neighborhood. If your family wants two cars or three or seven, nobody’s going to stop you. It’s a commodity.

Housing is nothing like that.

I’d also note that calling things infrastructure doesn’t speak to the relevant questions here. A garbage dump or a sewage treatment plant is infrastructure. That certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy to get a new garbage dump or sewage treatment plant built.

If anything, housing has been treated too much like infrastructure — treating the mere existence of new homes as a kind of necessary evil that communities need to be protected against. After all, while it’s true that the federal government has gotten out of the business of directly funding public-housing construction, it’s just not the case that all of housing has been privatized and commoditized. The United States has lots of nonprofit affordable-housing developers, a federal tax credit subsidizes these projects, and more progressive states and cities have affordable-housing production funds.

It’s fine to debate spending more on these kinds of programs. But the fact is that America already spends meaningful money on social housing — Americans just also make it illegal to build on most parcels of land.

And is it really true that tweaking the budget to spend more on social housing (instead of on health care or education or national defense or clean energy or child care or any other worthy cause) is a more imaginative solution than revisiting the decision to make it illegal to build housing?

The two big challenges

I’m torn because YIMBYs are stuck confronting two big challenges simultaneously.

I think the main thing we need to do is to reassure normal people who are aware that housing is a big problem but who also mostly like living in the suburbs and are somewhat fearful of change.

Altering the rules so that it’s generally possible to build dense housing where there’s demand for it doesn’t mean that the typical American neighborhood would suddenly look like Manhattan. Even using a high-end estimate of the total scale of the housing shortage in the United States, we’re probably talking about a 10 percent expansion of the national housing stock. A lot of that would be greenfield or brownfield, a lot of it would be infill in places that are already “urban,” and a lot of the suburban infill would be A.D.U.s or smaller lots rather than big buildings.

Spreading the liberalization widely generates a large shift in the housing stock over time without triggering unduly dramatic change in most places.

There are also a lot of non-policy limits to how rapidly the housing stock can expand. If all regulatory barriers were eliminated, there would still be finite amounts of skilled labor and construction equipment. The point of land-use reform is to reach a new, better equilibrium over time, not to suddenly transform the built environment of every single American community.

But then there’s the second challenge.

As the housing abundance movement keeps plugging away, doing the slow boring of hard boards and reassuring and persuading and deal-making, we keep getting stabbed in the back by high-level progressive takesters like Paul Glastris who insist that our ideas are too “meager” in scale to meet the moment.

My main issue with this is that it’s not true.

Housing is, objectively, the largest sector of the economy and the number one source of youth economic pessimism.

Beyond the direct burden on consumers, undue barriers to housing construction are a major blockage of economic growth. Unlocking housing abundance would create new job opportunities for blue-collar men as the economy tried to address the skilled-labor bottleneck that would emerge if zoning restrictions were eased — a topic that’s obsessively discussed in the media. Housing abundance is also a great way to make it easier for people to have kids that does not involve curbing women’s rights or autonomy.

Money and attention matter in politics. If donors and politicians keep hearing that talking about the regulations that underlie the basic structure of where and how everyone lives and works and commutes is “narrow” and boring, then they start spending their time on other, allegedly sexier, topics. And that’s bad.

It’s also a little pointless, because the public-housing enthusiasts genuinely have no conflict with the YIMBYs and land-use reformers.

Our ideas make it easier to execute their ideas. If your main policy goal is to get the federal government to invest more money directly in non-market housing, then the argument you have is with the advocates of spending money on other causes.

But the idea that investing more money directly in non-market housing is a bigger, broader, more exciting concept than rewriting the rules that govern all the residential land in every American community is ridiculous. If you’re looking for a bold, expansive vision of a better world, get on the housing abundance bandwagon, because scarcity is a deliberate policy choice the consequences of which we all now regret.