Have YIMBYs like Tordillos and Mamdani identified the right problem, but come up with the wrong solution?
Spiked online suggests that Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY), pro-high density housing advocates are correct in calling out the slow pace of housing production as key to our national affordability crisis. But wonder why cities where their policies are adopted keep getting more and more expensive.
But if YIMBYs have diagnosed a key problem, their solutions – wherever imposed – have tended to make things worse. High-density development, often seen as the alternative to urban sprawl, does not solve the problem of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees.
Throughout the English-speaking world, the most expensive housing tends to be found in places embracing the urbanist YIMBY script: Sydney, Vancouver, Adelaide, Honolulu, Melbourne and Brisbane. But nowhere is this connection clearer than in California, where the YIMBY movement was born.
This is not simply a case of high property prices creating converts to YIMBYism. Over the past several years, YIMBYs and their California allies have passed hundreds of supposedly pro-development housing laws. But housing production has nevertheless declined. Since 2020, California has consistently lagged in construction not just of single-family housing, but multi-family housing, too. Not one California metropolitan area was among the top 50 in housing growth last year; Texas had six areas on that list, Florida 11. Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, didn’t crack the top 200.
The result has been ruinously high housing prices that have diminished opportunities for ownership. One study found the median family in San Jose or San Francisco would need 125 years (150 in Los Angeles) to save enough for a down payment on a median-priced home. In Atlanta or Houston, the figure is 12 years. Not surprisingly, California has the second-lowest homeownership rate in the nation, at 56 per cent, while New York has the lowest, at 55 per cent.
Of course, this might not bother leftist YIMBYs who have minimal interest in such bourgeois aspirations as home ownership. They seem fine with the notion of lifelong renting – particularly if there’s sufficient rent control. To them, notes Christopher LeGras, a perceptive analyst of NIMBYism in Los Angeles, ‘housing is housing’, and they ignore the preferences of different groups. They expect renting, and similar types of home, to appeal to single hipsters, seniors, people with children or migrants from other countries.
People change with time. As they grow older, most – although not necessarily the pro-Mamdani urban types – seek more family-friendly housing. Today, almost two-thirds of US millennials (those aged 25 to 44) aspire to be owners. To accomplish this, they now tend to move to smaller cities or further-out suburbs. They have good reasons: homeowners are not only more affluent than renters – they are also physically and mentally healthier, vote more often and their children achieve higher levels of education.
YIMBYism, even its more moderate version laid out in Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, largely ignores the suburbs and exurbs where most Americans live, and mostly steers clear of questions of ownership. As attorney Jennifer Hernandez suggests, there is ‘an ugly elitist underbelly’ to the abundance agenda, reflecting the values of hipster professionals while eschewing ‘even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centres, who want to be able to buy a detached, single-family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odours with their neighbours’.
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