These statistics are genuinely astonishing to me. I live in a suburban house, valued around $0.5 million, with 4 bedrooms, a traditional lawn (front and back), a swing set, a jungle gym, trees, a patio with pergola and fire place, etc - and the lot size is 8,800 square feet. How could *most* SFH-zoned land in America mandate more than 40,000 sf??!
“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.“
My only comment about this piece, which is otherwise very good, is that I don't understand what our host means when he says he is 'torn' between two arguments. Usually people are 'torn' when they have a decision to make, but there seems to be no decision? You just have to have both arguments.
This is a slow boring into the issues at its best. Excellent incorporation of historical analysis that offers reasonable proscriptions for making housing more affordable over the long run.
For most of my life I was a Democrat but became an independent in the late 2010s after the progressive movement, in my view, pushed the party left on a range of economic and social issues.
If Yglesias-style moderates were on the menu I'd consider joining the Ds again (the Republicans are not to my taste either), but if we have moderates in name only like Biden (whose progressive staffers ran the show) or anti-progress let's-have-the-government-run-everything progressives to choose from who knows who I'll vote for next.
"The United States is, needless to say, a much richer country than it was in the 1950s".
The irony of that statement when less and less can afford housing, college, and medical care. Granted, we've greatly reduced outright poverty and TVs are cheaper but....
Good article, though familiar to long time readers. Just wanted to plug the Argument piece from this morning also responding to Sherkin and Sharfstein. It’s considerably angrier and sharper and more direct, and I enjoyed it throughly.
On the substance, I think one of the main things you need to reassure people about regarding “let’s keep the suburbs but allow smaller lots and some multi family” is on parking and traffic. I can tell you that the immediate response around where I live to “we are not changing the character, just letting in another 10 to 20 percent more people” is “sounds terrible—traffic on Road X Y Z is already nuts and I can never find parking at the city center at lunch time” etc.
My proposal is parking anti-permits: you can build a building with inadequate parking, but no one who lives or works there can park on the street anywhere in town.
That’s a good solution for already super dense places where people are fighting over street parking for their apartments or condos or whatever.
We are talking about making the suburbs denser. The parking people are worried about is at the commercial zones, city center, parks and entertainment complexes and such. Not in front of their houses, which all have driveways.
Agree, although I do think the parking problem is temporary - autonomous taxis will cost less than parking in many places (as they do now in central Austin), and as they are adopted people will use them to avoid the hassle of finding a parking place. But that is a tough sell today, since most people have never ridden in one and fear them.
Matt writes: "And is it really true that tweaking the budget to spend more on social housing ...is a more imaginative solution than revisiting the decision to make it illegal to build housing?"
Even if increased federal spending on housing wasn't just tweaking, but were massive in scale as recommended by leftists, we'd still need to sweep away various kinds of housing construction bans and restrictions. You can't just run roughshod over state and local laws.
Maybe it would be constitutional for Congress to engage in a national pruning of state and local housing restrictions. Perhaps!
But if we did manage to make it legal again to build a lot more housing in a lot more places, is there any plausible scenario whereby we do so, *and only PUBLICLY-funded housing construction* is allowed to proceed (but private house builders are told to pound sand)?
That's nuts!
If one day we're able to abolish the laws that make it illegal to meet market demand for housing, it would be utterly nonsensical to allow only public housing to be built.
It might be legal - the federal government can exempt federal land from some state laws, so it could buy up land (either on the market or via eminent domain) and then disregard state regulations to build housing on it and then rent out that housing.
I can't see that being politically feasible, but I suspect that there are some leftists that would want to do that and who are much more optimistic about what is politically viable.
An interesting question might arise as to whether the federal government would be able to sell land that has construction on it that is not state-legal. Once it's been sold, it would cease to be federal land and would again be subject to state law. That might mean that the state would then order the destruction of the now-illegal building.
So ... I could see a case where state/federal demarcation means that the federal government can only do it when renting out the property and not when selling it, nor can it permit private actors to do it on their own.
The same rules that make it difficult to build private housing make it difficult to build public housing. Lefties advocating for public or social housing should work with YIMBYs to reduce the zoning restrictions, environmental review, "community" boards and other endless veto points if they actually want to see people get housed.
If getting people housed is what they actually want. It seems they'd rather critique housing or not do anything until capitalism ends.
But the benefits of overcomming NIMBY-ism as well one of the _means_ is to expand those areas where people want to live with improvements in crime an disorder control and more good, fewer dysfunctional public schools.
I find myself a little confused by this isn’t going to upend the apple cart and build Manhattans all around but also it’s so super ambitious.
It feels a bit like yimbys say different things to different audiences. On the one hand it’s going to somehow change everything and very little. And it should be exciting, and transformative and not scary all in the same claim. Personally I’m excited for the transformative potential but without actually building the huge incredible American cities and just adding some apartments in suburbia it’s hard to really say it’s an exciting transformative vision.
I don't think it's confusing but it is an awkward messaging problem. The 10% national number is also slightly beside the point. There's no national housing market, there are a bunch of local markets.
True YIMBY-ism would be transformative in San Francisco and New York, LA and Boston. It would be marginal in a lot of other places and not noticeable in others.
Having said that, YIMBY-ing all of California would be both less jarring and more impactful than doing only San Jose.
It would build 10 million homes, increasing the supply of homes by 10% and bring home ownership within reach of tens of millions of Americans decades earlier than currently possible.
Would adding 10% more homes to your current city turn it into Manhattan?
Anyway, Manhattan has approximately 1 million dwellings. Turning 10 cities into another Manhattan would close the housing gap entirely. 10 Manhattans is not "Manhattans everywhere". Even if they were somehow eventually distributed 80% of US states wouldn't have one.
The leftists you mention want to implement socialism. You and us fellow YIMBYs want a market economy with private ownership. These things are incompatible, and support for taxation and an expanded safety net are insufficient to bridge the gap.
I don't have an answer to the takeover of the Party by those with a socialist agenda. But it worries me immensely.
It seems to be more a lazy anarchism, I don't think these people would be happy with centrally planned government housing with strict rules and allocations based on government dictat.
I'm not one, but left-YIMBYs are absolutely a thing. The Y in YIMBY means Yes to building, whether that happens from for-profit developers, the government, or social whatevers. I think private developers are the best option since they have all the money and capitalism is good actually, but NIMBYism does just as much to inhibit something like Red Vienna style social housing or housing built by nonprofits.
I don’t understand how anyone who has lived through recent decades as an adult can honestly believe that the federal government could possibly effectively mount and sustain such an effort, even if it was a good idea (which it isn’t).
It is one of the depressing and baffling things about modern government, building a million homes is something the Eisenhower administration could easily and competently do, but probably utterly beyond the capacity of recent governments.
Yeah! Grift and graft and corruption is so absent elsewhere. Just focus on Trump. Literally nobody keeps track of him, so glad you can hypothesize on what he would have done! Obviously we can totally trust the Harris/ walz ticket. Wish they’d won. After all Joe was sharp and Walz has been dogged about fighting corruption. So too are those that pass the nick shirley act - ensuring no one should catch fraudsters - and burned teslas as musk began identifying loads of graft and fraud. We just hate Trump! Everything was literally honest and efficient pre Trump and luckily once he’s gone - utopia will once again shine through in our country. I’ve called Nancy Pelosi for stock tips and Gavin newsom for help in combating homelessness. I’ve contacted Walz and hochul on how to completely stop fraud because they’ve not gotten donations and are super honest. Looking forward to 2029 when things will be amazing. Thanks guys. You nailed the problem.
Well if you can remove regulatory barriers by fiat when you're doing statist things like that, it just doesn't do anything useful for the price of money (which just keeps getting more expensive).
Since we're already have the most socialist president we've ever had I don't feel optimistic about the results.
Letting people do with their property what increases its value -- housing or commercial deveopment -- does not require a "bold vision." [I agree that it woud be a radical change.]
It would help, however, if "everyone" realzes that they, too, benefit from allowing more mutually beneficial transactions between other people. NIMBY-ism is bad for exactly the same basic reason that tariffs are bad, deporting immigrants is bad, deficts are bad, and not attracting more immigrants with high income earning potential is bad: it slows down creating more mutually beneficial transactions.
It would help everyone realize that "they too benefit from more mutually beneficial transactions between other people" if that were actually true most of the time.
My boss and some global-brained consultant deciding that you can outsource two of my colleagues jobs to India, and since I'm paid a salary, so I can work 80 hours a week instead of 40 to cover for the fact that they're not done competently, might well work well for my boss and the consultant. It certainly wasn't good for me and my colleagues.
My city council selling off the park my kids play in to some well-connected developer, or letting someone build an apartment building without sufficient parking on the grounds that people can just park in front of my house, is similar: it's generally the case that you can have mutually-beneficial transactions between party and and party B that make party C worse off, legally or illegally.
The snarky side of me would say that if you are really willing to work twice as much for the same salary, it's good in general that your employer has figured this out and has determined the market clearing rate for your job. It is bad in general for employers to pay above-market labor rates as it robs more productive industries of talent.
That said, I love a good rant, but the reality is the overwhelming majority of interactions in our society are positive-sum, even when you take externalities into account. We should be willing to challenge the "everyone is out to screw the little guy" narrative, as the distrust of institutions that it engenders does more harm than good.
These statistics are genuinely astonishing to me. I live in a suburban house, valued around $0.5 million, with 4 bedrooms, a traditional lawn (front and back), a swing set, a jungle gym, trees, a patio with pergola and fire place, etc - and the lot size is 8,800 square feet. How could *most* SFH-zoned land in America mandate more than 40,000 sf??!
“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.“
My only comment about this piece, which is otherwise very good, is that I don't understand what our host means when he says he is 'torn' between two arguments. Usually people are 'torn' when they have a decision to make, but there seems to be no decision? You just have to have both arguments.
This is a slow boring into the issues at its best. Excellent incorporation of historical analysis that offers reasonable proscriptions for making housing more affordable over the long run.
For most of my life I was a Democrat but became an independent in the late 2010s after the progressive movement, in my view, pushed the party left on a range of economic and social issues.
If Yglesias-style moderates were on the menu I'd consider joining the Ds again (the Republicans are not to my taste either), but if we have moderates in name only like Biden (whose progressive staffers ran the show) or anti-progress let's-have-the-government-run-everything progressives to choose from who knows who I'll vote for next.
Matt for YIMBY Pope!
"The United States is, needless to say, a much richer country than it was in the 1950s".
The irony of that statement when less and less can afford housing, college, and medical care. Granted, we've greatly reduced outright poverty and TVs are cheaper but....
That and basically all of that is more value for money than it was in the 1950s (college is a mixed bag).
My grandparents may as well have lived in dire poverty.
Not to mention that little $40 trillion national debt. At $350,000 per working taxpayer are we really still such a rich country?
Part of being rich is being able to sustain a lot of debt; people just bend over backwards to loan you money.
That said at some point you end up with too much debt and as you point out we're probably almost there.
How close are you following the sweeping change in regulation in Cambridge? Wild wild west right now with developers going door to door.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/23/business/cambridge-passed-most-ambitious-housing-reform-us-now-comes-building-backlash/
I live in Cambridge. Everything seems about the same/normal.
Good article, though familiar to long time readers. Just wanted to plug the Argument piece from this morning also responding to Sherkin and Sharfstein. It’s considerably angrier and sharper and more direct, and I enjoyed it throughly.
On the substance, I think one of the main things you need to reassure people about regarding “let’s keep the suburbs but allow smaller lots and some multi family” is on parking and traffic. I can tell you that the immediate response around where I live to “we are not changing the character, just letting in another 10 to 20 percent more people” is “sounds terrible—traffic on Road X Y Z is already nuts and I can never find parking at the city center at lunch time” etc.
I do not have a good solution to this objection.
My proposal is parking anti-permits: you can build a building with inadequate parking, but no one who lives or works there can park on the street anywhere in town.
Interesting idea. Hard to enforce though. And doesn’t help the “rush hour traffic will get worse” which is the biggest objection where I live.
Property rights in street-parking permits? Matt's proposed that a couple times.
That’s a good solution for already super dense places where people are fighting over street parking for their apartments or condos or whatever.
We are talking about making the suburbs denser. The parking people are worried about is at the commercial zones, city center, parks and entertainment complexes and such. Not in front of their houses, which all have driveways.
Agree, although I do think the parking problem is temporary - autonomous taxis will cost less than parking in many places (as they do now in central Austin), and as they are adopted people will use them to avoid the hassle of finding a parking place. But that is a tough sell today, since most people have never ridden in one and fear them.
Matt writes: "And is it really true that tweaking the budget to spend more on social housing ...is a more imaginative solution than revisiting the decision to make it illegal to build housing?"
Even if increased federal spending on housing wasn't just tweaking, but were massive in scale as recommended by leftists, we'd still need to sweep away various kinds of housing construction bans and restrictions. You can't just run roughshod over state and local laws.
Maybe it would be constitutional for Congress to engage in a national pruning of state and local housing restrictions. Perhaps!
But if we did manage to make it legal again to build a lot more housing in a lot more places, is there any plausible scenario whereby we do so, *and only PUBLICLY-funded housing construction* is allowed to proceed (but private house builders are told to pound sand)?
That's nuts!
If one day we're able to abolish the laws that make it illegal to meet market demand for housing, it would be utterly nonsensical to allow only public housing to be built.
It might be legal - the federal government can exempt federal land from some state laws, so it could buy up land (either on the market or via eminent domain) and then disregard state regulations to build housing on it and then rent out that housing.
I can't see that being politically feasible, but I suspect that there are some leftists that would want to do that and who are much more optimistic about what is politically viable.
An interesting question might arise as to whether the federal government would be able to sell land that has construction on it that is not state-legal. Once it's been sold, it would cease to be federal land and would again be subject to state law. That might mean that the state would then order the destruction of the now-illegal building.
So ... I could see a case where state/federal demarcation means that the federal government can only do it when renting out the property and not when selling it, nor can it permit private actors to do it on their own.
This might be true but I don't think it's a smart argument to make; it just serves to harden the ideological battle lines.
The same rules that make it difficult to build private housing make it difficult to build public housing. Lefties advocating for public or social housing should work with YIMBYs to reduce the zoning restrictions, environmental review, "community" boards and other endless veto points if they actually want to see people get housed.
If getting people housed is what they actually want. It seems they'd rather critique housing or not do anything until capitalism ends.
But the benefits of overcomming NIMBY-ism as well one of the _means_ is to expand those areas where people want to live with improvements in crime an disorder control and more good, fewer dysfunctional public schools.
I find myself a little confused by this isn’t going to upend the apple cart and build Manhattans all around but also it’s so super ambitious.
It feels a bit like yimbys say different things to different audiences. On the one hand it’s going to somehow change everything and very little. And it should be exciting, and transformative and not scary all in the same claim. Personally I’m excited for the transformative potential but without actually building the huge incredible American cities and just adding some apartments in suburbia it’s hard to really say it’s an exciting transformative vision.
I don't think it's confusing but it is an awkward messaging problem. The 10% national number is also slightly beside the point. There's no national housing market, there are a bunch of local markets.
True YIMBY-ism would be transformative in San Francisco and New York, LA and Boston. It would be marginal in a lot of other places and not noticeable in others.
Having said that, YIMBY-ing all of California would be both less jarring and more impactful than doing only San Jose.
A 10% increase in the number of houses would be both
1) very large, both in absolute numbers and relative to how many houses are built now
2) not require building Manhattans all around
What's confusing?
It would build 10 million homes, increasing the supply of homes by 10% and bring home ownership within reach of tens of millions of Americans decades earlier than currently possible.
Would adding 10% more homes to your current city turn it into Manhattan?
Anyway, Manhattan has approximately 1 million dwellings. Turning 10 cities into another Manhattan would close the housing gap entirely. 10 Manhattans is not "Manhattans everywhere". Even if they were somehow eventually distributed 80% of US states wouldn't have one.
The leftists you mention want to implement socialism. You and us fellow YIMBYs want a market economy with private ownership. These things are incompatible, and support for taxation and an expanded safety net are insufficient to bridge the gap.
I don't have an answer to the takeover of the Party by those with a socialist agenda. But it worries me immensely.
Do they actually want socialism?
It seems to be more a lazy anarchism, I don't think these people would be happy with centrally planned government housing with strict rules and allocations based on government dictat.
I'm not one, but left-YIMBYs are absolutely a thing. The Y in YIMBY means Yes to building, whether that happens from for-profit developers, the government, or social whatevers. I think private developers are the best option since they have all the money and capitalism is good actually, but NIMBYism does just as much to inhibit something like Red Vienna style social housing or housing built by nonprofits.
I don’t understand how anyone who has lived through recent decades as an adult can honestly believe that the federal government could possibly effectively mount and sustain such an effort, even if it was a good idea (which it isn’t).
It is one of the depressing and baffling things about modern government, building a million homes is something the Eisenhower administration could easily and competently do, but probably utterly beyond the capacity of recent governments.
Imagine if they had gotten their way and Trump was in charge of the Federal Housing Development Corporation.
Would it become a source of massive graft or would he just say only people born in America -- and white South Africans -- are eligible to live in one?
Yeah! Grift and graft and corruption is so absent elsewhere. Just focus on Trump. Literally nobody keeps track of him, so glad you can hypothesize on what he would have done! Obviously we can totally trust the Harris/ walz ticket. Wish they’d won. After all Joe was sharp and Walz has been dogged about fighting corruption. So too are those that pass the nick shirley act - ensuring no one should catch fraudsters - and burned teslas as musk began identifying loads of graft and fraud. We just hate Trump! Everything was literally honest and efficient pre Trump and luckily once he’s gone - utopia will once again shine through in our country. I’ve called Nancy Pelosi for stock tips and Gavin newsom for help in combating homelessness. I’ve contacted Walz and hochul on how to completely stop fraud because they’ve not gotten donations and are super honest. Looking forward to 2029 when things will be amazing. Thanks guys. You nailed the problem.
Both, definitely both.
Well if you can remove regulatory barriers by fiat when you're doing statist things like that, it just doesn't do anything useful for the price of money (which just keeps getting more expensive).
Since we're already have the most socialist president we've ever had I don't feel optimistic about the results.
And therefore they get really feisty when people tell them LESS government regulation would be the right solution.
As you say, this becomes an ideological battlefield rather than a pragmatic problem solving exercise :(
Letting people do with their property what increases its value -- housing or commercial deveopment -- does not require a "bold vision." [I agree that it woud be a radical change.]
It would help, however, if "everyone" realzes that they, too, benefit from allowing more mutually beneficial transactions between other people. NIMBY-ism is bad for exactly the same basic reason that tariffs are bad, deporting immigrants is bad, deficts are bad, and not attracting more immigrants with high income earning potential is bad: it slows down creating more mutually beneficial transactions.
Not all surplus generation and consumption is transaction-mediated. Hence the notion of imputed rents.
It would help everyone realize that "they too benefit from more mutually beneficial transactions between other people" if that were actually true most of the time.
My boss and some global-brained consultant deciding that you can outsource two of my colleagues jobs to India, and since I'm paid a salary, so I can work 80 hours a week instead of 40 to cover for the fact that they're not done competently, might well work well for my boss and the consultant. It certainly wasn't good for me and my colleagues.
My city council selling off the park my kids play in to some well-connected developer, or letting someone build an apartment building without sufficient parking on the grounds that people can just park in front of my house, is similar: it's generally the case that you can have mutually-beneficial transactions between party and and party B that make party C worse off, legally or illegally.
The snarky side of me would say that if you are really willing to work twice as much for the same salary, it's good in general that your employer has figured this out and has determined the market clearing rate for your job. It is bad in general for employers to pay above-market labor rates as it robs more productive industries of talent.
That said, I love a good rant, but the reality is the overwhelming majority of interactions in our society are positive-sum, even when you take externalities into account. We should be willing to challenge the "everyone is out to screw the little guy" narrative, as the distrust of institutions that it engenders does more harm than good.