Don’t Beware the YIMBY

Strange bedfellows can help tackle working-class Americans’ heaviest burden.

Collin Slowey writes on politics, culture, and religion for Public Discourse, Mere Orthodoxy, and Evangelization & Culture, among other outlets.

Aaron Renn makes a strident case in these pages that the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, dedicated to loosening zoning restrictions in order to increase the housing supply, is “anti-localist,” “anti-suburbia,” and therefore, implicitly, anti-conservative. Indeed, there is truth to all three of these accusations. But that doesn’t mean YIMBYs aren’t worth partnering with because the conservative case for zoning reform is, if anything, even stronger and more urgent than its liberal counterpart.

First, it’s important to concede that many YIMBYs are leftists. Their attraction to centralized power is apparent in their preference for federal or state coercion of local governments. They do little to hide their disgust for middle-class suburbanites, whose intransigence they blame on xenophobia, racism, and any number of other -isms. Moreover, they are ready and willing to fold their ostensibly nonpartisan activism into broader attacks on President Trump.

But to end the discussion there ignores the degree to which YIMBYs and conservatives should be, at least provisionally, aligned. What the YIMBY movement is fundamentally about, after all, is easing the heaviest financial burden on working- and middle-class Americans: the cost of housing. Housing is among the most basic of human necessities, yet it is more expensive now than at any other time in the United States’ history. The consequence is a punishingly high cost of thriving that forces the American Dream out of countless families’ hands, even to the point of preventing those families from having children.

YIMBYs are some of the few Americans with concrete plans to ameliorate this problem. If the New Right writes them off, it will do tremendous disservice to its most crucial constituency. And though Renn is correct that mass immigration and industrial consolidation have also contributed to rising home prices, zoning reform (i.e. a reevaluation of how land use is governed) remains the lowest-hanging fruit. By opening the door to incremental, lot-by-lot development, local governments have the power to redress housing crises in their communities on their own terms and initiative.

Roughly two out of three American homes are single-family homes. Roughly two out of three American households consist of only one or two people. This mismatch means there is tremendous potential to gently convert underutilized property into starter homes or small-scale rental units. Instead, the housing market favors the construction of more single-family homes plus the occasional mega apartment complex. This is not because such development is sufficiently justified by demand, but because it is the only development most zoning codes readily permit. Duplexes, triplexes, backyard cottages, rowhouses: each of these building types, though wildly popular in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, is now either illegal or extremely difficult to construct in the average neighborhood.

The housing market is also biased by financialization, which has transformed housing from what is properly understood as a necessity into a mere financial asset. The long-term mortgage in particular, created to help ordinary Americans put roofs over their heads during the Great Depression, now exists more to sustain Wall Street than it does to help local communities. Recurring expansions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have enabled investors to base a major portion of our economy on the bundling, buying, and selling of mortgages on secondary markets. Though this process began for understandable reasons, it has given Big Finance and federal regulators powerful motives to increase the housing supply without decreasing home prices.

The conservative commentator Chuck Marohn refers to this predicament as the “housing trap” because long-term mortgages are naturally a poor investment vehicle. When interest rates fall, borrowers refinance; when rates rise, homeowners hold on tight, doing everything they can to not upset the value of their property. Either way, investors are left with the short end of the stick. “The reason investors accept such bad payoff asymmetry,” Marohn writes, “is [that] the federal government is committed to keeping housing prices elevated.” With each bubble that bursts, Washington, D.C. steps in to ensure a swift Wall Street recovery and a bigger bubble begins, expensing younger Americans out of the market altogether. 

This part of the puzzle is a common blind spot for YIMBYs to which New-Right conservatives, who are no strangers to financialization’s costs, can and should make rejoinders. But rehauling the nation’s economy is outside local governments’ purview; zoning reform is not. Right now, one of the easiest things municipal leaders can do to reduce the cost of thriving for their citizens is exactly what many YIMBYs want them to do: permit the construction of more starter homes, backyard cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and more on single-family home-zoned properties.

Unlike mega apartment complexes, these “missing middle” building types can be financed by local actors who lack the deep pockets and perverse incentives of Wall Street. They also have the potential to respond to housing crises more quickly than can large-scale developments. Let’s say a single five-over-one, the kind of block-sized, yuppie-oriented complex going up in virtually every American metro takes over a year to build and provides only 100 or so housing units. Conversely, a single neighborhood of single-family homes could expand its housing supply by hundreds of units in as little as six months, simply though the construction of backyard cottages.

Is this, as Renn writes, really a “Yes in Your Backyard” proposal that runs roughshod over ordinary people? Only if we assume each individual has the right to control what his neighbors do with their private property, even to the point of depriving his community of badly needed housing stock. If we, as conservatives, seek a society where young people feel more free to get married, settle down, and build families, instead of postponing the good life until the age of 36, we must not be afraid to tackle the housing trap head-on. One need not be “anti-suburbia” to oppose what is clearly a dysfunctional system.

Meanwhile, there are countless ways that zoning reform would equally benefit the average suburbanite. To quote Marohn again:

How many families are close to affording a home but, if they could have a rental cottage in the backyard, could use that income to make up the difference? What about the family that wants to pay for a year of college by splitting their lot and selling part to another family who wants to build a home? How many people would love the opportunity to have an elderly relative—or a younger relative—live in a separate cottage unit on their property?

Writing to a reflexively YIMBY-friendly audience, Marohn concludes: “There are so many common life experiences where building more housing also empowers existing homeowners that it is silly—and counterproductive—to make existing homeowners the villains.” Hear, hear. But by the same logic, it is silly and counterproductive to villainize the average YIMBY. He may not be a conservative, but he shares meaningful common ground with the New Right. And that ground is worth exploiting.