Beware the YIMBY
The left-wing variety has a hidden agenda that doesn’t actually help housing.
By Aaron M. Renn, senior fellow at American Reformer
Housing prices have been going up and there’s a culprit that’s been fingered by both the Right and the Left: zoning restrictions. A libertarian-oriented movement has grown up in response, the so-called YIMBY movement, for Yes in My Backyard, the opposite of the notorious anti-growth NIMBY.
Zoning restrictions are indeed a serious problem, particularly in blue states, but YIMBYism, particularly its left-wing variety, comes with a hidden agenda.
While a lot of the YIMBY talk is about allowing more high-density development in high demand urban centers, especially near transit, the actual agenda is much more expansive. One of the core goals of many YIMBYs is to prevent any neighborhood anywhere from being zoned exclusively for single family homes. They want apartment buildings such as fourplexes to be legal wherever single-family homes are allowed.
Far from just wanting more density in their own neighborhoods, they want to fundamentally transform the nature of suburban development as well. It’s as much “Yes in Your Back Yard” as much as it is their own. In a sense, this is just the same old leftist anti-suburban agenda in new packaging. The solution now, as before, is more density everywhere.
This is not an exaggeration. YIMBYs have actually implemented their vision in some places. For example, Oregon passed a law that eliminated the ability for cities to have areas zoned for only single family homes in any municipality with more than 10,000 people—that requirement shrinks to 1,000 people in metro Portland.
This is the YIMBY playbook: preempt local control over zoning by using state law to impose their preferred land use regime everywhere, not just urban centers or near rail transit stops. Again, many YIMBYs are explicit on this point. The pundit Matthew Yglesias, a major YIMBY figure, believes state legislatures, not local governments, should set land use rules.
The Oregon example shows that the left YIMBY agenda is not really about liberalizing zoning in order to reduce prices, making it easier for more Americans to own a home. It leaves in place urban containment policies like Portland’s urban growth boundary that prevent suburban expansion. Indeed, many left YIMBYs support urban containment, even though preventing urban areas from expanding naturally will drive up housing prices. Again, this is the same old anti-suburban, anti-single family home agenda as it ever was.
Left YIMBYism also works synergistically with other leftist housing prescriptions. For example, many on the Left want to ban so-called “source of income discrimination.” In other words, they want to require all landlords to accept Section 8 tenants. So first the YIMBYs force you to allow fourplex apartments in your existing suburban subdivision, then they require those fourplexes to accept Section 8 tenants. In other words, the plan is to push the urban poor out to the suburbs.
Some may argue that this is a good policy, that we should be distributing low-income housing throughout the country, but is certainly a far cry from how YIMBYism is sold.
YIMBYs are right that housing prices are about supply and demand. But, as is the case in so many leftist policy priorities, they put all the emphasis on supply and the way zoning limits it. They largely fail to touch the demand side of the equation.
Take immigration. America is closing in on 50 million foreign born residents, not including the US born children of recent immigrants; a permissive approach to immigration that most YIMBYs appear to support. This is a huge source of demand that contributes to high housing prices. When Texas started busing migrants to New York City, it created a crisis for that city even though the total number was fewer than 50,000—a tiny fraction of the new arrivals to states like Texas or Arizona. Over 36% of New York’s population is foreign-born. That has to play at least some role in the city’s housing costs. Even if the city allowed a building free-for-all, growing its housing stock by over a third would be an enormous undertaking. With the Biden administration running a de facto open borders policy, it’s not hard to see that immigration—not just zoning—has played a role in prices here.
We might also ask why economic activity has become so unbalanced, with highly paid jobs clustered in a relatively small number of “superstar” cities and Sunbelt boomtowns, while many American communities languish. Hence, housing demand and prices are extremely high in some areas, while others struggle with vacant and abandoned housing. Some of this is undoubtedly related to factors like agglomeration economics for knowledge economy industries like technology. But it’s also the case that we’ve changed public policy in recent decades in ways designed to permit much greater levels of economic concentration in many industries. With industrial consolidation comes geographic consolidation, with many negative consequences.
In short, housing prices are a result of a more complex set of factors than just zoning. Other public policy choices have played a role as well.
But it is too difficult to build housing, especially in blue cities and states. There should be zoning liberalization—a significant amount of it in many places. Some densification of the suburbs may be desirable. Many suburban cities, such as the one I live in, have actively been working to create dense, walkable downtown-like nodes—while retaining single family subdivisions too.
But the YIMBY agenda, particularly in its Left variety, is anti-localist and anti-suburbia (as traditionally understood). Free-market conservatives should think twice before embracing this movement.