More Housing In Your Neighborhood Is a Progressive Value

Liberal homeowners, wake up.

Build up or we’re fucked. (Photo: Getty)

One fun little quandary that many people have woken up to in the wake of the depressing presidential election is the fact that, because of population trends, the Congressional map is going to get even worse for Democrats. Projections for the 2030 Congressional reapportionment show that blue state strongholds of California, New York, and Illinois will lose four, three, and two representatives, respectively, while the gainers will all be red states: Texas will gain four representatives, Florida three, and several other red states one.

Why is this happening? Because these red states are gaining population, while the blue states are losing population. And why is that happening? Because those red states build a lot of housing, and the blue states don’t. Pretty simple. The NIMBYism that is the biggest blind spot of many liberals is going to sap their political power on a national scale. Sad, for all of us.

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I have written before about the extremely well-documented fact that America’s affordable housing crisis is rooted in a housing shortage of millions of units nationwide. (There are many good reporters who write almost exclusively about this topic.) We have, collectively, failed to build enough housing to keep up with population growth for decades now, and as a result, housing prices have skyrocketed and the middle class has been priced out of many of the most desirable cities in America. Lots of people cannot afford to live in LA or San Francisco or New York. So where do they go? They go to wherever is building lots of cheap housing: Texas, the deserts of Arizona, the sweltering swamps of Florida. In the long run, people will leave places they can’t afford, and people will also not move to those places, and those people will instead move to places where housing is cheaper, and so the populations will change, and the expensive places will end up losing Congressional representatives. That is happening now. It will continue to happen until the expensive blue states build a ton of housing.

The honest reason why most desirable cities have failed to build enough housing to keep up with demand is that once people buy a home in a nice neighborhood they want to keep it how it is. They don’t want a whole lot of new stuff built that would ruin their nice neighborhood. And because zoning and housing permitting are mostly local issues, homeowners have a lot of ability to achieve this goal. This impulse is human nature, but multiplied by the entire country, it produces a massive housing shortage. This shortage, unfortunately, raises the home prices of those homeowners who helped to cause the crisis in the first place, giving them a financial reward for behavior that is detrimental to society. Perhaps because a home carries such emotional heft—and because of the money at stake—this is the one issue where people who consider themselves progressive most commonly fall prey to reactionary, conservative, selfish actions.

Los Angeles is an excellent example of this dynamic. This is the biggest city in the state that is projected to lose more Congressional representatives than anywhere else. LA’s failure to build enough housing is shifting America’s entire political balance to the right. Many state politicians in California, to their credit, understand this. In 2022, state regulators ordered the city of LA to rezone to accommodate 250,000 new housing units. The city commissioned a study to help them do this, and you can read that study, thanks to the LA Times. “Angelenos pay more of their income on housing, live in more overcrowded conditions, and have the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness of any city in the country,” the study says. “Los Angeles has the second lowest number of homes per adult of all major US cities. This shortage has developed primarily since the 1980s, as population growth outpaced the creation of new housing. This occurred alongside the downzoning of Los Angeles to reduce density or scale - a process that was not equally applied across neighborhoods. Shortages of available homes benefit existing homeowners at the expense of renters and would-be homebuyers through rising prices.”

Beverly Hills, the epicenter of liberal values.

Zoning laws established in the first part of the 20th century worked hand in hand with deed restrictions and other tools to maintain racial segregation. Indeed, as the study makes clear, racism (along with classism) was the driving purpose for the establishment of those zoning laws in the first place. Today, 72% of Los Angeles is zoned for single-family homes—plainly absurd, in the face of such a terrible housing shortage. In case this is not clear enough already, the study concludes: “City planning and homeowner activism have long promoted the ideal of Los Angeles as a suburban city, dominated by low density residential construction. Detached single-family residences cover a disproportionate amount of the land zoned residential. This has resulted in an unaffordable housing market due, in part, to a pervasive lack of supply and the fact that single family homes are more expensive than multifamily residences.”

If you are a single family homeowner in LA, it is not your fault that the racist roots of zoning have produces an urgent housing crisis today, but it is your responsibility, once you understand all of this, to support the construction of a lot of new housing, and be willing to share the burden in your own neighborhood.

But do you want to know some crazy shit that illustrates how hard this problem is to fix? Even in the face of all of this evidence, and even with a state mandate to rezone the city for 250,000 new units, the political power of homeowners is so great that the City of LA has proposed exempting single-family zoned neighborhoods from having any of that new housing. Exempting 72% of the city! And, by the way, the 72% with the least density! Just imagine trying to justify that any other way besides “we don’t want to inconvenience the neighborhoods where all the rich people with political power live.” It is insane on its face. And today, a new analysis of that plan finds that—while it will satisfy the letter of the law, and meet the state’s mandate—it will, in fact, produce far less housing than is necessary. “Housing production citywide now is about a third of what’s needed to meet the goal,” the LAT reports. “Taking into account costs of development and other factors, the rezoning only increases the realistic capacity for new construction by about 30%, the study determined.”

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This little vignette is an illustration of how hard it is to overcome the stubborn, self-centered refusal of homeowners to allow new housing in their nice neighborhoods. Severe housing crisis! Homeless people on the streets! Millions of your fellow citizens financially struggling due to burdensome rents! And on top of that, a housing-driven shift in Congressional apportionment that will assist the Republican control of Washington! All of that is not enough to convince the people in the neighborhoods that are home to some of the biggest Democratic donors in America to allow the city to build some apartment buildings on their block. The self-concept of liberals as generous people willing to help others falls apart on the issue of housing. On this issue, there is still nothing but castles with broad moats.

I must admit that nothing I have written here is new. Nothing at all. There is not a single novel thought in today’s column. Everything I have said has been thoroughly researched and documented by housing experts and painstakingly explained by housing reporters for years and years. Yet it is important to periodically resurrect and write about this issue again, just to make the point, to people who consider themselves progressive and are also homeowners: This is a moral issue. This is a humanitarian issue. This is an issue of great political salience. This is an issue that is changing our political map and our national balance of power and is causing harm to future generations and, most of all, is causing great pain right now for our fellow citizens, ranging from those priced out of the bottom end of the housing market and forced to sleep in their cars, to young people forced to live with their parents longer than they want to because they can’t afford an apartment, to all of the people forced to stay renting because they can’t afford homes. It is imperative that we all recognize our shared responsibility to aid and encourage the construction of enough housing to ease our housing shortage. If you live in a single-family neighborhood in a city with great demand for housing, part of that responsibility is to support more density in your own neighborhood.

These conclusions are all common sense. They flow naturally from progressive ideals. Stop coming up with new and creative ways to deny that they exist.

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More

• Related reading: Housing Is a Labor Issue; Housing Is The Economy; How to Be a Good Citizen During a Housing Crisis.

• One of the very few labor-centric news outlets down south is The Valley Labor Report, a cool radio program that I have spoken to several times. They are doing a fundraising drive right now, and if you are inclined to support labor journalism, they are a great place to donate to. Also, if you are a member of any union, there is still time to get your FREE subscription to In These Times magazine! Do it now!

• I wrote a book this year called “The Hammer,” about how the labor movement can save America. The election results, I think, make the point of the book more relevant than ever, and maybe I will write something more about that before the year is over. But in the meantime, I have a couple of book events left this year that you should absolutely come to if they are in your area. Let’s get together, my people:

  Thursday, December 5: Baltimore, MD. 7 PM at Red Emma’s. In conversation with Max Alvarez. Event link here.

  Saturday, December 28: Gainesville, FL. 6 PM at The Lynx Books. In conversation with Sara Nelson. Event link here.