The Case for Progressive YIMBYism
Democrats have the power to fix the housing crisis
Note: This is an updated version of a Medium post I wrote two years ago, with new policies, data, and real-world examples along with my own new ways of thinking about the issue:
The Housing Shortage is Real
There is a real, significant, housing shortage in many parts of the country. This is an undeniable fact. While major coastal cities like New York, Boston, DC, SF, and LA are typically the face of the housing shortage, the reality is that those cities are exporting their housing shortage across the country to places like Fresno, Montana, and Texas. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when high-demand cities become too expensive for the working (and even middle) class, many of those people find other, more affordable places to live. Despite the common refrain that “people are fleeing California due to high taxes”, the data suggests the opposite: most of the people leaving California are poorer and less educated, while people moving to California are wealthier and subject to higher tax rates. The reality is that people are leaving these states due to high housing costs, not taxes.
Even worse, many people who cannot afford rent end up becoming homeless, whether that means couch-surfing, living in a car/RV, or living in a tent on the street. It’s unacceptable that a country with so much wealth allows this to happen, and we should attack the housing shortage at the root cause: the lack of housing.
Why is there a housing shortage? Well, the answer isn’t particularly complicated: it is difficult or illegal to build the housing we need. Existing homeowners, seeking to preserve their property values, parking, views, “neighborhood character”, etc., have implemented a wide suite of anti-housing provisions into law. Some examples include exclusionary zoning, parking minimums, excessive political or environmental review of multi-family housing, high impact fees, single-stair bans and more. The combined effect has been a wildly successful one (for those favoring exclusion): many coastal cities have seen a sharp decline in homebuilding, particularly multi-family homebuilding over the past 50 years.
As seen in the above graph, all of these laws have combined to make it impossible to build the housing we need, as zoning capacity has shrunk precipitously.
The Racist History of Exclusion
The laws mentioned in the above section are (like most things in American history) inextricably tied to racism. Berkeley was the first city in the US to implement exclusionary zoning, and their motive was explicitly racist: developers (correctly) assumed that denser homes would be cheaper, and therefore more accessible to minorities due to the large racial wealth gap. To this date, single-family zoning exists in many of these neighborhoods, which have stayed overwhelmingly white, driving residential segregation in Berkeley.
This trend can be found across the country, including close to where I grew up in suburban Maryland. In the early 20th century, Chevy Chase was a sundown town with restrictive covenants preventing Jews and Black people from living there, and it maintains this exclusion via low-density zoning that has kept it 82% white. It’s not a coincidence that infamous Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh currently lives there and his wife serves as a Town Manager.
Chevy Chase’s real estate salesmen always played to customers who considered themselves apart from the masses. The same 1916 sales pitch that welcomed the middle class advertised restrictions that would “protect property holders against the encroachment of undesirable elements.” And beginning in the 1920s, some deeds included restrictive covenants prohibiting sale or lease to “any person of negro blood” or “any person of the Semetic [sic] race.” — The Washington Post
NOTE: If you want to learn more about the racist history of single-family zoning, I would highly recommend The Color Of Law by Richard Rothstein
Dense, Urban Housing Fights Climate Change
If you want to read more about the intersection of housing and climate policy, read the above article I recently published. Here’s the TL;DR:
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was stunned at how car ownership was the expectation and that the second-largest city in the US had such a low rate of transit ridership. I was in one of the most progressive cities in the country, yet the norm was driving everywhere. It did not make sense to me.
I was surprised to see low-density, single-family homes just blocks away from mass transit in places like Pasadena, Culver City, and Santa Monica. The climate case for YIMBYism is a simple one — dense housing enables transit and transit enables dense housing. Transit is only successful when enough people live close to transit to be able to sustain good transit service. If you talk to a YIMBY, odds are they’re also a climate and transit nerd.
Switching from a personal car to mass transit is one of the best things people can do to reduce their carbon emissions. Building more housing makes that easier, and it’s a large part of the reason that so many YIMBY policies are also climate policies. The lowest hanging fruit for YIMBY policies is building more housing in exclusionary suburbs near mass transit (e.g., places like Santa Monica, Palo Alto, Long Island, Bethesda, and Newton).
Beyond transportation, housing and climate policy is deeply intertwined in ways that many existing climate plans do not address. For example, a recent study found that the switch from single- to multifamily housing reduces energy demand by 27–47% per household due to more efficient HVAC systems and land use.
NIMBYism is Inherently Reactionary
If you go to a planning meeting about a new housing development in affluent areas, the primary opponents are almost never justice advocates or progressives. It’s wealthy, reactionary homeowners.
This came to a head in the 2020 election, when Donald Trump made himself the defender of “The Suburban Lifestyle Dream” and accused Joe Biden of wanting to “Abolish the Suburbs”. This was a running theme, as the St. Louis Gun Couple gave an RNC speech about protecting exclusionary single-family zoning.
In 2021, President Biden included provisions to encourage denser zoning as part of his infrastructure bill. The number one foe of that provision? You guessed it, white nationalist Tucker Carlson. We need a united left front to support the bill and these pro-housing provisions against racist GOP attacks.
The same dynamic could be seen in New York, where Republican lawmakers fiercely opposed a bill to legalize more housing near transit, and where rich homeowners use Q-Anon-style conspiracies as a justification for opposing more housing. (seriously, read this article, it’s eye-opening to see the reactionary impulses behind NIMBYism)
YIMBY Means Yes to Social Housing
Social housing is becoming increasingly popular amongst the left and YIMBYs alike, and it’s easy to see why: dense, mixed-income, municipally owned housing would be an incredibly valuable tool to fight our housing shortage. Furthermore, government-funded social housing would be immune to recessions, making it able to engage in counter-cyclical homebuilding, preventing the status quo where private funding for homebuilding plummets during recessions even as housing demand continues to grow. This can already be seen in Montgomery County, Maryland, where the local government provides low-interest rate funding to help build affordable housing, even as our current high-interest rate environment is dampening private homebuilding.
Additionally, you may notice that social housing in Vienna is tall. It’s dense. It’s affordable. It would also be nearly impossible to build in almost all of California due to exclusionary zoning laws that prevent dense housing from being built and give NIMBYs plenty of avenues to file frivolous lawsuits to delay (and therefore drive up construction costs of) new housing. Any successful social housing program will have to bypass these NIMBY roadblocks and get shovels in the ground to efficiently and cost-effectively build more homes. If you live in California, call your State Senator and ask them to support AB309, Alex Lee’s bill to create a social housing authority.
YIMBY Policies Work!
As more and more places across the world are enacting YIMBY policies, we can already see positive outcomes. For example, Minneapolis was the first major metro area to reach the Fed’s 2% inflation target. How? By enacting YIMBY policies that created more housing, driving down rents.
has done great analysis highlighting how increasing housing prices are a major contributor to inflation, as seen in the graph above, and I would recommend reading his deeper analysis of the issue below (and subscribing to his substack, )
Another example of a successful YIMBY policy was in Auckland, New Zealand, where almost all of the city was upzoned in 2016. The result was reduced rents for everyone, particularly families. A further example is California’s SB35 - this bill streamlined affordable housing construction and led to the construction of over 18,000 new homes. While it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the 3 million homes California needs, it’s still an extremely positive outcome.
At the end of the day, YIMBY policies work. And studies that look across many cities find that “Zoning changes and other land-use reforms can increase the supply of housing, help control prices, and boost local tax bases.” Even so, many YIMBY policies in America are half-measures that only attack one element of exclusionary zoning rather than multiple levers at once. For example, San Francisco abolished parking mandates, which is great, but the city still has an incredibly lengthy, convoluted approval process that serves as a massive barrier to building housing. On the other hand, we know for a fact that NIMBY policies create unaffordable rents and homelessness.
Progressive cities need to be beacons of opportunity
Liberal, coastal cities have been victims of their own success. We have made such a strong economy, with such desirable cities, that things have become unaffordable for most normal people. The demand to live in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, is incredibly high, and that should be a good thing - it should drive a strong economy and innovation. However, these cities have all enacted NIMBY policies that make it impossible for housing supply growth to keep up with increased demand. As a result, despite being some of the wealthiest places on the entire planet, the cities are unaffordable for many, with a recent study finding that the higher wages in these cities are entirely eaten away by the high cost of housing.
And Republicans are noticing this. NIMBYism is fundamentally a failure in government that Republicans are happy to exploit. Ron DeSantis is making California’s homelessness a central part of his campaign messaging (even though DeSantis is guilty of pushing for the exact same NIMBY policies that got California into this mess to begin with). Additionally, Republican Governors are bussing migrants to blue cities with housing shortages across the country, and there simply aren’t enough homes available to house everyone. But this nuance is lost on most observers - they simply think that Democrats don’t know how to govern. Basically, “progressive” Democrats are being hamstrung by conservative NIMBY policies, but to the average voter, the takeaway is that progressivism doesn’t work.
Instead of serving as a cautionary tale, Democrats in these cities need to serve instead as a positive beacon. We need to build more housing so that cities become more affordable, homelessness goes down, and immigrants get housed.
Oh, and one more thing: blue-state NIMBYism is putting us at a long-term disadvantage in redistricting. New York came up 89 people short on redistricting. That means that if New York built one more apartment building, the state would literally have another congressperson. And the 2030 redistricting forecast looks even more dire for blue states.
Some Housing Mythbusting:
Myth 1: The problem is that we have too much LUXURY DEVELOPMENT! While many claim that “luxury developments” are the reason for increased housing prices, the above chart makes it clear that the development isn’t driving up prices — it’s the scarce land. “Luxury” is just a marketing term used to sell homes, and in areas without a housing shortage, you can rent a brand new “luxury” 2-bed, 2-bath apartment for under $2,000. What makes homes in the Bay Area and LA so expensive, rather, is the exorbitant land costs that stem from the housing shortage. Furthermore, the best way to minimize land costs for each new home is to build as many homes as possible on a single plot of land — density!
Myth 2: This will just help big real estate developers! While YIMBY policies are anti-racist and pro-climate, a common refrain against YIMBYs is that we’re “developer shills”. However, the reality is that many of the most vocal NIMBYs are, quite literally homeowners and landlords. And the people getting rich off our housing crisis aren’t usually developers — it’s those same homeowners and landlords reaping the windfalls of speculation. The above chart from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis is stunning in contrast — property owners are making orders of magnitude more money than developers in a state with a housing shortage. A similar pattern can be seen in Cambridge, MA.
And yes, YIMBYs and developers are often on the same side of building more housing, but that doesn’t mean YIMBYs are always supporting developers. For example, YIMBYs in California have supported the Housing Accountability Act which prevents developers from demolishing renter-occupied housing without protecting tenants. Additionally, many YIMBYs have opposed the Tejon Ranch development ~90 miles from LA due to the high fire risk and climate impacts. YIMBYs frequently oppose major greenfield suburban sprawl developers like Toll Brothers, instead supporting dense, infill housing in transit-rich urban areas.
Furthermore, the arbitrary, discretionary restrictions on homebuilding in many cities essentially shut out smaller homebuilders, giving large corporate developers a leg up and incentivizing corruption. Progressive LA Councilmember Nithya Raman recently had a great overview of how many NIMBY policies in the city end up favoring the biggest, most unsavory developers. Pro-housing YIMBY policies level the playing field and enable smaller homebuilders to build so-called “missing middle” projects of modest density and reasonable rents.
Myth 3: New housing causes gentrification!
Another common anti-YIMBY refrain is that “new homes = gentrification”. In order to rebut this, it’s worth being precise with language — I prefer to use the concrete term “displacement” rather than the more nebulous “gentrification”. Displacement is bad, it’s when people are forced out of their homes due to rising rents. On the other hand, “gentrification” is often used to refer to aesthetic complaints about new housing, and has resulted in some pretty absurd cases of people vilifying affordable senior housing.
When looking at the actual impact of building more homes, a recent paper from UC Berkeley found that building more homes is one of the top strategies to prevent displacement. This aligns with the overwhelming research finding that new market-rate housing does not increase rents — in fact, it lowers them.
Additionally, new housing is a lagging indicator of displacement in housing-constrained cities, with home prices skyrocketing in high-demand neighborhoods far before a shiny new apartment building goes up - a metaphor I like to use is that blaming a new apartment building for increasing rents is like blaming an umbrella for the rain. We need to fix the underlying systemic cause of high rents by building more homes, rather than continuing the status-quo anti-housing policies that led us to this point in the first place.
Even though building more homes lowers rents and reduces displacement, it’s important to note that YIMBYism is wholly compatible with other tenant protections. YIMBY groups strongly supported AB1482 in California, a rent cap and just cause eviction law. Most YIMBYs recognize that anti-displacement measures are not going to solve the housing crisis on their own, rather we view tenant protections and building more housing as two key tools in taking power away from landlords and returning it to renters.
Myth 4: We don’t need to build more housing, we have enough vacant homes!
A common claim used to counter YIMBYism is that “there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people”. While this can be true in some cases, the implicit conclusion to that argument is usually “so we should focus on reducing vacancies instead of building more housing”. However, this misses the mark for a variety of reasons:
Most vacancies aren’t where people want to live
As seen in the above map, the highest vacancy rates are in low-demand places: primarily rural areas with few good job opportunities. On the other hand, you can see that the lowest vacancy rates are in high-demand areas on the West Coast and Northeast. Telling someone who works in the Bay Area that there’s an abandoned home in Biloxi or Lubbock that they can move into isn’t a solution.
2. Vacancies are not all the same
Around half of the vacancies in LA are “market vacancies”, which are “the inevitable gaps in tenancy that occur when a lease is ended, a home goes on the market to be resold, or a new building opens and hasn’t yet leased or sold all its units”. Unless you think it’s possible for new housing to be 100% sold the day it is built, and that each tenant who moves out is instantly replaced by one who moves in, these vacancies are to be expected.
For the rest of the vacancies (non-market vacancies), there are a wide range of reasons including renovations, foreclosures, and condemned properties. The number of homes that are intentionally left vacant due to market speculation is quite low, and it makes sense — the way that landlords make money is by renting out homes, so keeping them vacant means foregone income.
3. Higher vacancy rates = downwards pressure on rents
Landlords love low vacancy rates because it gives them more market power. This makes sense — landlords have a monopoly on existing housing, and the last thing they want is to face more competition. But don’t take my word for it, here’s Blackstone (a massive private equity firm) admitting in their annual report that high vacancy rates reduce their profit margins.
Like many renters, I actually experienced this firsthand during the pandemic: our upstairs neighbors left and our landlord had to lower the rent to find a new tenant. We used the new lower rent for the upstairs unit along with the wide range of cheaper apartments on the market as leverage and received a 10% rent reduction.
4. A vacancy rate of zero is… not a good thing
Imagine a world with no housing vacancies. Like, actually try to envision it. The only way you could move is by finding someone else to swap houses with. Immigration? Forget about it. Want your kids to move out of the house? Sorry, you’re out of luck.
Our country is growing, and we should try to welcome all of those who want to live here. Furthermore, many marginalized communities view left-leaning cities like SF and New York as a mecca where they can escape persecution and enjoy the benefits that come from LGBTQ rights and legal, safe abortion. We shouldn’t let a lack of homes shut people out and prevent them from living where they want.
And what’s the worst thing that happens if we end up building too many homes? Landlords will be tripping over each other to lower rent and compete for tenants — sounds pretty good to me!
5. Vacancy taxes can be good, but they’re not a silver bullet
Vancouver actually implemented a vacancy tax in 2017 and it went… okay. The tax was 1% of the property value for each year in which the property was left unoccupied a majority of the time. The next year, the number of vacancies fell from 1,085 to 922. Yes, it was a significant 15% drop, but it was also only 163 homes that were returned to the market.
In Vancouver, a city with 310K homes and a severe housing shortage, 163 homes are great but pales in comparison to the tens of thousands of homes that are needed. Furthermore, the tax raised ~$20–$35M/year, enough to subsidize ~100 affordable homes.
Ironically, the benefits from a vacancy tax (more homes on the market, including more affordable homes) could be achieved at a far greater scale by simply… legalizing more housing. Vacancy taxes are, at best, a small-scale, incremental tweak around the edges for an issue that requires big, bold solutions.
Note: for more detail on vacancy rates (with a focus on LA), I would recommend this paper by Shane Phillips at UCLA, along with this article
Myth 5: There’s not enough water to support more housing. This one sounds reasonable on the surface but is utterly wrong when you look at the data in a drought-prone state like California.
Urban water use is a small fraction of the total, which is largely used for agricultural purposes. And while many assume this agricultural use is a necessity, large portions of it are used to grow alfalfa that will be used to feed cattle… in Saudi Arabia. It makes no sense and happens in large part because California artificially subsidizes agricultural water use, encouraging low-value alfalfa farming. Fixing this policy would save far more water than is used for individual consumption. Additionally, denser infill housing requires far less water use per capita than suburban sprawl where people water their lawns every day.
The water argument is wrong on many levels and should not be viewed as a good-faith criticism of building more housing.
Nice overview. It's difficult to argue against Progressive YIMBYism (and I doubt many of your subscribers would be quick to do so anyway). What would be helpful are some concrete steps that can be taken to advocate for YIMBY policy making at a local level. It will of course differ from state to state and city to city, but a general "How-To" for those looking to get involved might be impactful now that you've made the case.
I just wanted to say thank you! I've come back to this post multiple times to find links. Super helpful summary of the main arguments and why YIMBYism is so important.