The Problem With YIMBY Economics
YIMBYs are right that the US needs a major expansion of its housing supply. Unfortunately, eliminating restrictions on private housing development won’t do much to get us there.
Twenty years ago, “the hot-button issue of land use” was a phrase that could only have been uttered as a joke. Today, it would barely raise an eyebrow. Jacobin contributor Ross Barkan, writing in New York magazine last year, described the “YIMBY war breaking out on the Left,” in which “progressives and outright socialists find themselves on all sides,” as one of the fiercest ongoing. Even for those most inured to online Sturm und Drang, the sheer vitriol that’s unleashed these days at the first breath of terms like “zoning,” “density,” or “YIMBY/NIMBY” can be jarring.
Lately the fight has become a war of movement. The center of gravity of left opinion has shifted rapidly and unambiguously: away from what used to be a widespread, rather unreflective antidevelopment position (driven partly, as Barkan put it, by a desire to “keep bucolic, low-lying neighborhoods as they are”) to a much more intellectually considered support for pro-density public policy.
In the process, the Left has become more receptive to certain ideas once primarily associated with economists and policy writers, like Ed Glaeser or Matt Yglesias, who could — accurately and nonpejoratively — be classed as “neoliberals.” According to their line of thinking, the main obstacle to plentiful and affordable big-city housing is the restrictiveness of metro-area land-use policies. These policies, which favor single-family, low-rise homes, severely curtail the construction of apartment buildings and other density-friendly types of development. Eliminate the restrictions, these voices insist, and more affordable housing will proliferate.
[Read the rest at Jacobin.]