41 Comments

Hamilton,

Most of this article is right on target, but the repeated refrain of merely build more housing and the positive bow toward the YIMBY movement is misguided. This situation is perhaps best revealed in SF where this debate has reached a fairly sophisticated level, despite all the SF bashing in the national media. Studies, many based in reputable institutions in this area, have shown, that at least in higher desirable areas like SF (and NYC), merely building more market rate housing doe NOT translate into either lower rents or more housing availability for the majority working-class population. A lot of it is sucked up as luxury investments for all that excess capital sloshing around in the pockets of the 1% and used for pied a terres or a corporate apts or as short term rental a la Air BnB. What is needed is public policy to build a lot more affordable, especially low income, housing, which is mostly not profitable to build for capitalist developers or even for "non-profit" developers, some of whom have proven to be scam artists too, gaining public subsidies with various levels of fraud. What is needed is a full throated demand for government (at all levels) funded and built social housing that is outside the speculative market. This needs to be financed by progressive taxes on the 1% at all levels of government. this is very possible, both economically and politically and does not need to wait for socialism (though I too am a socialist). Thanks for the opportunity to comment as so many outlets have eliminated comments.

Expand full comment

As I say above, I support social housing and public housing and all of the things you name. What I'm asking for in this piece is just a shared agreement that we need to increase housing supply. All of those things will play a part, but building low income housing without ALSO increasing the supply of market rate housing is not going to solve the problem.

Expand full comment

That makes sense. I hadn't thought of that. If you don't increase market rate housing, then the people who could afford market rate housing would start moving into the cheaper public housing thereby driving up the prices of that housing. It's interesting that we still need to think in tiers here... maybe this is naïve on my part, because I don't know about these things, but perhaps we should start heavily taxing Corporate and individually held housing properties that are unoccupied. Something like 15% of its value annually wouldn't the incentive to avoid those taxes open up the housing market and seriously reduce house prices?

Expand full comment

That won't make a huge difference b/c vacancy rates in supply constrained cities is sub 5% most of the time. There isn't a large enough reserve of housing units that greedy landlords are keeping vacant for no reason to address the demand that exists.

You're going to have to build more housing at every price point; subsidized low-income and market-rate and "luxury" housing.

Additionally, if you build market-rate/luxury housing, eventually those units become older and thus command lower rents, transitioning from the high end of the housing spectrum to the lower end.

Expand full comment

This is where it's kind of awesome to live in Montgomery County, MD. The County literally built (bougie) public housing! It's a generic "luxury" apartment building, but it's housing supply that's not profit-driven and increases the total number of housing units available to the general public. More of this please!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

Expand full comment

> If your city is too expensive it is because there is not enough housing to meet the demand.

This is landlord propaganda and it is disappointing to see it reported here. There is fundamentally no evidence for a spike in demand concomitant with the massive spike in rents and house prices over the past several decades. There is far more evidence that landlords and developers have become better-organized, more politically powerful, and have begun to act as a more effective cartel--which means that the solution is political and not on the supply side.

I think you live in Brooklyn, so you probably know that the population of Brooklyn peaked in 1950. The 1950 and 2020 censuses recorded essentially the same population for Brooklyn (2020 had 2,000 fewer people).

The 1950 census recorded 814,134 housing units in Brooklyn (source: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/housing-volume-5/15870149v5p6ch02.pdf). The 2020 census recorded 1,077,654 (source: https://data.census.gov/profile?q=brooklyn,+ny&d=ACS+1-Year+Estimates+Detailed+Tables). So 2020 Brooklyn had 32% more housing units for a _lower_ population than 1950. I can't find Brooklyn-specific rents for the 50s but the average rent across NYC was $60/mo. (Note that NYC's population peaked earlier, in 1910!) That is $654 in 2020 dollars. Actual median asking rent in 2020 was $2,400 (it's now much higher even though Brooklyn has continued to lose population since Covid--source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-14/nyc-has-lost-546-000-residents-since-covid-even-as-exodus-slows?embedded-checkout=true).

If rents are a simple result of supply and demand, why have they (at least) quadrupled in real terms over this period where supply increased by a third and demand stayed constant?

(People sometimes like to talk about changes in household size as an explanatory factor. If you look at the census data above and divide population by housing units you will see that household size did slightly decrease from 1950 to 2020, from 3.4 to 2.5. That's about a 25% decrease, less than the increase in housing units over the same period. Did this change have some affect on asking rents? Maybe. Is it sufficient to explain a fourfold increase? No way.)

At a certain point you have to go beyond Econ 101 just-so stories and look at reality. The reality is that landlord-backed YIMBY groups have pushed through upzoning in many places across the country over the past decade--and this period has been the period of greatest rent inflation since WWII. There are no examples of successfully YIMBYing one's way out of a housing crisis that is fundamentally about the capture of the political system by real estate special interests. "Give it time," the YIMBYs say. How much time? For how many more decades should we wait patiently with nothing to show for it? When a prophecy fails over and over again, sensible people stop listening to the prophet.

Expand full comment

This is a really good comment. One thing missing from this general article is attention to the housing cartels. Ownership cartels, and rental cartels are driving up prices on both sides. Local state and government on on the federal level could do a real service by breaking up and restraining these cartels. Sometimes owner and rental cartels withhold housing from the market to drive up prices. This has to stop. Build more housing, yes, but don’t neglect what happens when the housing has been constructed.

Expand full comment

To me it seems that housing deteriorated when it started to be considered an investment by big property managers instead of a human right. This seems like a fatal flaw.

Expand full comment

I think that the whole YIMBY/NIMBY thing is a classic false dialectic, in the sense that its purpose is to quietly constrain the range of allowable opinions to the benefit of those doing the constraining. Of course we desperately need to bring the cost of housing down, and we need to build to do so, and we need zoning and regulatory reform to build, and supply and demand is a thing, etc etc etc. But also, there's a reason that the YIMBY King is Matt Yglesias. It's a fundamentally neoliberal movement which has an internal social culture where being anti-left is prized and where government interventions into the economy of almost any kind are dismissed out of hand. And the reality is that while those really core points I made above address the most important issues, there are also a lot of edge cases and policy specifics that matter and where there's legitimate room for disagreement. That's where YIMBY addiction to neoliberalism hurts the most. They're addicted to acting as though every question is entirely simple and already settled, for rhetorical purposes.

For example, we have careful empirical work that demonstrates that Airbnb has driven up the price of housing in urban spaces. People did that research. But YIMBYs are forever dismissing the role of Airbnb because it doesn't comport with their major contention, which is that housing is just about supply and demand and supply and demand is just about zoning and regulation. (Which contributes to a larger anti-regulatory project.) You can't rebut empirical research with appeals to first principles! But they do, in order to maintain their monopoly on the policy conversation. I find it deeply frustrating.

Expand full comment

Saying YIMBYs deny that Airbnb has a negative effect on housing supply is not true in my experience. More accurate to say Airbnb is not the *leading cause*, which is very different. I would be fine with drastic restrictions on Airbnb, which is mostly a parasite in many cities. The main "YIMBY" point, I think, would be: you could eliminate Airbnb altogether and still not solve the problem. We need a large increase in housing supply period. I don't really care what label is assigned to that, it's a fact.

Expand full comment

The way neoliberal governance works is you create a base of private investors and promise them the values of their assets will continue to rise forever. It's a substitute for earlier forms of public social insurance. Liberal parties built themselves a constituency of people with a stake in the market, now they're finding that this group of people is levying a set of demands on them which they no longer have the capacity to meet.

The left has to challenge the entire logic of this arrangement, which is difficult, because there's a large and highly mobilised bloc of voters who believe that they're entitled to enormous gains from property investment. We've got too many people trying to make too much free money off the property market. It's bubble behaviour and will not last. At the end of the day we need buying a house to operate like buying a car - it's got to be worth less when you sell it then when you buy it.

The YIMBY liberals want to deregulate their way back to a state of endless growth, which I think is unlikely to happen for a bunch of reasons. But I also think too much of the left has gotten negatively polarised against the idea of deregulation and is now just opposing it on principle. A YIMBY win wouldn't actually hurt the left or the country in any way, we should just let them do it and not worry too much about the underlying ideology.

Expand full comment

You are confusing asset price growth with growth in the number of housing units for people to live in. Infinite asset price growth is the goal of NIMBYism not YIMBYism.

Expand full comment

I'm actually not, but I see how the way I phrased it could have been confusing.

Expand full comment

I just wanted to say before I forgot- your hack to save money on popcorn at movie theaters is still one of my favorite things I've read recently. Maybe my favorite thing so far on Flaming Hydra. You reminded me when you mentioned your new recipe.

I'm on a couple of city planning advisory committees (lol, I'm a masochist), and it is incredible the number of NIMBYs that simultaneously acknowledge that a better world could exist and yet NOT THAT WAY.

Expand full comment

Thank you Christina.

Expand full comment

Out of honest curiosity, do the NIMBYs ever have alternative solutions to the issue instead of the way detailed above?

Expand full comment

It's more like, the same people I saw in those advisory committees that agreed about mixed use zoning or a new apartment complex will come out against it when the rubber hits the road. Because the better world sounds better, in theory!

Most of the time, those people already have their houses, as was mentioned above, and they have to protect that asset, which means eff you I got mine kind of mindset. They're sad about their grandkids not being able to afford to "live in their hometown," but not sad enough to vacate their houses for senior living or create more housing.

Expand full comment

Everybody's in favor of more affordable housing so long as three conditions are met:

1) No one builds any of it near them, and no one can build anything near them that's worth less than the current value of their home;

2) They don't have to pay more in taxes to do build this affordable housing "over there";

3) The values of their home keeps going up no matter what..

Expand full comment

"They're sad about their grandkids not being able to afford to 'live in their hometown,' but not sad enough to vacate their houses for senior living or create more housing."

That's one of the saddest things I've read in days, which says something considering this current news cycle.

Expand full comment

I couldn't agree more. I am both a renter and a homeowner (renting where I currently live, own where I used to live and am renting that place out).

With that out of the way...

Yes, we need more multi family housing. We could house so many more people in MetroWest Boston with multifamily housing, and we also have a lot of it.

You know what we don't have? Builders willing to shoulder the burden of trying to get multifamily housing built. Never mind that we don't have enough of the skilled trades at all, let alone the volume we need to build the housing we need. It is faster and easier and thus more profitable for them to build single family housing.

We also need to figure out systems of local governance where the homeowners can't outvote the renters (see Brookline, MA)

Expand full comment

The builder shortage is a huge underestimated part of the whole problem. Here in Queensland as well. We could deregulate the whole thing until we're building walls out of cardboard and we still wouldn't have enough people to actually put them up.

Expand full comment

That's why the government needs to do it...Once the profit motive comes into play the whole thing gets fucked by late stage capitalism bullshit...People in it to make money don't BUILD affordable housing...for obvious reasons

Expand full comment

"Non-homeowners. They would like to buy houses, but they can’t, because houses are too expensive. Since they can’t buy houses, they stay in the rental market, which is also restricted by the lack of new housing construction, and rents skyrocket as well. "

No credit to the cartel that seems to have jacked rents across the nation via price-fixing apps? See ProPublica's recent article...

Expand full comment

The “live in the real world” attitude towards public housing coming from a socialist is absolutely crap. All the cities yimbys point to in Europe as “dense enough” have loads of public housing and usually also rent control, plus piles of regulations to ensure that what does get built isn’t *just* luxury condos. Plus historic protections, somehow. The actual denial going on here is in the minds of self-identified “left-yimbys”, who think they can ally themselves with the most powerful political lobby in NY and come out winners. And yet we still don’t have good cause eviction protections, for all that playing along. Weird! We didn’t get to upzone White Plains or anything either. I would love to see the actual wealthy suburbs forced to integrate but the notion that just cutting regulations will do that is the real magical thinking. I live in Harlem where yimbys helped harass my Black socialist CM out of office and called elderly Black Harlem residents “climate arsonists” because they drive (amazing.) Without more tenant protections and supportive housing (I’m disabled) it will continue to lose its older population for young mostly white well-heeled people who want to live in brand new studios, like the rest of Manhattan.

Expand full comment

Those who find it mysterious that people don’t think the economy is that great must not know anyone whose rent went up 30% in the past four years, or who has had to move and downsize at least twice in that period because they couldn’t afford the rent hikes. I guess if they only talk to rich people they wouldn’t hear about such things.

Expand full comment

This is probably obvious but high housing prices aren't great for homeowners either! They make you pay more each year in property taxes, more in gains tax when you sell your house and presuming you haven't died you'll just have to buy another place to live at an inflated price.

Imo a carrot/stick we could try here is to allow folks to deed restrict the resale value of their house to their purchase price + inflation in exchange for having it be taxed at this new lower valuation. No more neighbors doing capitalism on their communities in exchange for a tax break seems like a good trade to me.

Expand full comment

A curious aspect of the housing crisis - this may vary on the coasts - but here in the Great Lakes Rust Belt region we have had a new phenomenon of 'Land Banks' entering the stage post 2008.

Thousands of urban lots in Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, were gobbled up by 'quasi governmental'(?) Land Banks during the 2008 housing crisis. This takes cheap land off the market, helping keep property values artificial high. Re-entry into the market for these lots is very tightly controlled by a planning bureaucracy with a somewhat narrow vision about who and what can get built on these lots. I do not know to what extent this is a national phenomenon, but it is I believe a significant player regionally in a lot of areas.

The other aspect is big finance sector entities getting into the housing market, becoming large corporate renters. Housing market fuedalism.

We are at a point where we seriously need to be thinking about the entire physical structure of our communities, but we seem to be blindly forging ahead, hoping some kind of 1950's single nuclear family suburban house with a two car garage is going to be the ideal sustainable model indefinitely. When it is already just not affordable for milllions and relied on cheap easily accessible fossil fuel energy.

Expand full comment

This is what happened in post-Katrina New Orleans as well. The city bought thousands of flood-damaged properties and held them off the market for years.

Expand full comment

The thing is that in recent decades in this absurdly rich country with our vast amounts of surplus wealth sloshing around housing became a prize asset, more reliable than the stock market, and so oceans of money have been poured into and wildly inflated its value. It's predatory self-devouring capitalism at its worst. In a place like the Bay Area where rent and houses cost probably three times what a "civilized" price would be, it fucks up the large majority of peoples lives. I think only straight up socialism can fix it. Your article assumes that capitalism these days is actually sorta functional ! It's not ! It's a crazy making waste based despair inducing inequality machine death cult travesty of the rational efficient thing it pretends to be. Just to rant a little.

Expand full comment

Not sure how you could write a whole article about housing from the city of New York and not mention the housing justice for all campaign or one of its leaders, Cea Weaver.

Expand full comment

Lotta smart people in the comments, so maybe one of them can answer this (which might have been answered already but I don't see it)

There's a lot of people who are leveraged to the hilt on their houses.

Here's where I break to say fuck these guys, the corner they painted themseleves in shouldn't be our problem.

However.

If we got a magic wand that put rents and house prices back to 1990 levels, (or even 2019 levels) there's tons of these people, who as you mention, are municipally the most powerful political entities who will be wiped out. Why rent their shitty 1br at 2500 when theres a 600 option? Who is gonna pay a premium on the 500k they paid if theres a house as good (probably better) for 100k?

Given the average politics of your average homeowner, I got to imagine the debate gets violent in direct proportion to how close we actually get to a solution.

Ive got no solutions, just hoping a smarter person can say "we've already thought of this and here's how we keep Frank from the HoA from shooting up a city council meeting or tenants rights org meeting"

I mean short of eat the rich, which I endorse, but you know, non thunderdome solutions.

Expand full comment

Donald Trump is a NIMBY, a scab, a convicted felon, a rapist in the eyes of the law, and a billionaire who wants to perpetuate tax breaks for himself.

Expand full comment