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YIMBYs and liberals

The pro-housing movement (more colloquially known as “YIMBYs” as an acronym for “Yes In My Back Yard” can’t catch a break from either the Left or the Right. On the Left, pundits like to “expose” them as supporters of big business. But conservatives don’t always embrace YIMBYs either; both on this page and on Planetizen I have discussed conservatives who are lukewarm about zoning reform. So are YIMBYs liberals or libertarians? I have been at least somewhat active in New York’s YIMBY group, Open New York, for the past few years. There are some center-right people in the group, but my sense is that the membership tends to be more liberal than not, and that many members are more likely than I am to support regulations designed to protect tenants from landlords. Why might this be? First, New York City is to the left of the nation, and the most expensive and highly educated parts of the city (i.e. Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn) are especially liberal. So naturally, any organization (other than one focused on conservative policies) is going to have more liberals than conservatives. If there were YIMBY groups in more conservative places, they would probably be less liberal-dominated. Second, Open New York tends to be dominated by people under 50; older people are more likely to have purchased houses or condos, and thus aren’t really that interested in lower rents. In recent decades, younger voters have been well to the Left of older voters. So naturally, our group leans a bit left. Third, New York is dominated by the Democratic Party, and our city’s Democrats have arguably swung to the left over the past decade or so; a group that takes conservative positions is not going to find it easy to build coalitions or to get the attention […]

An Anti-Anti-NIMBY article

During the Trump Administration, liberals sometimes criticized conservatives for being anti-anti-Trump: that is, not directly championing Trump’s more obnoxious behaviour, but devoting their energies to criticizing people who criticized him. Similarly, I’ve seen some articles recently that were anti-anti-NIMBY*: they acknowledge the need for new housing, but they try to split the difference by focusing their fire on YIMBYs.** A recent article in Governing, by Aaron Renn, is an example of this genre. Renn agrees with “building more densely in popular areas like San Francisco and the north side of Chicago, in other cities along commercial corridors, near commuter rail stops, and in suburban town centers.” Since I am all for these things, I suspect I agree with Renn far more than I disagree. But then he complains that YIMBYs “have much bigger aims” because they “want to totally eliminate any housing for exclusively single-family districts- everywhere.” What’s wrong with that? First, he says (correctly) that this would require state preemption of local zoning. And this is bad, he says, because it “would completely upend this country’s traditional approach to land use.” Here, Renn is overlooking most of American history: zoning didn’t exist for roughly the first century and a half of American history, and in some places has become far more restrictive over the last few decades. Thus, YIMBY policies are not a upending of tradition, but a return to a tradition that was destroyed in the middle and late 20th century. To the extent state preemption gives Americans more rights to build more type of housing, it would actually recreate the earlier tradition that was wiped out. Moreover, even if the status quo was a “tradition”, that doesn’t make it the best policy for the 21st century. For most of the 20th century, housing was far cheaper than […]

Would the Vienna strategy work here?

Progressives often argue that American cities should imitate Vienna’s 1920s strategy of building enormous amounts of public housing while controlling rents paid to private landlords. But a look at the birth of Vienna’s public housing system shows why that system is not easily replicated. A book supported by the city government points out that the city had an enormous housing shortage after World War I, and that the working classes “began reclaiming the land surrounding the cities” (p. 13). The city then “offered its support in the form of the redesignation and purchase of sites”. Settlers received housing in return for committing to work on the building site (id.) Obviously, this strategy cannot be replicated today; there is not a huge amount of unowned or extremely cheap land that people can just commandeer and build on, and I am not sure many people can easily become construction workers in exchange for housing. In addition, the city financed housing in ways that are not easily replicated today. The book notes that tax revenue for housing came from a 1923 “tax on housing development .. a simple working-class apartment was taxed at an average annual rate of 2.083% of its pre-war rentable value, this went up to 36.4 for luxury homes.” This might have worked in 1923 because city residents had no suburbs to flee to; however, today, city residents can easily respond to large tax increases by moving. Moreover, in 1923 there was no zoning or environmental review or “community engagement” to give Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) activists a chance to delay or prevent housing construction. Today, even if government can afford to build new housing somewhere, the bureaucratic obstacles to such housing might made it politically impossible to build in some places, or expensive and time-consuming to build […]

Is affordability just, “You get what you pay for”?

In a tweet this week, the Welcoming Neighbors Network recommended that pro-housing advocates keep supply-and-demand arguments in their back pockets and emphasize simpler housing composition arguments: This advice makes an economist’s mind race. We know, after all, that supply and demand work. But we’re not so sure about composition changes. If “affordability” is achieved by building units that people don’t want (in bad locations, too small, lacking valued attributes), then the price-per-unit can be low without actually benefiting people on their own terms. Even if existing homes are bigger than many people want, at least some of the price decline from building smaller homes is the “you get what you pay for” effect. (Incidentally, this is the opposite concern from that held by econ-skeptics concerned about gentrification: they worry that new housing will be too good or that investment will upscale neighborhoods. This inverts the trope that economists “only care about money”.) A few days later, a Maryland state senator asked me that very supply-and-demand question: “What’s the evidence that large-scale upzoning leads to affordability?” This is a tough question. First, large-scale upzonings are very scarce. Second, even if one occurs, it’s not in an experimental vacuum. Three kinds of affordability Let’s specify that an upzoning likely promotes affordability in three ways: Supply and demand You get what you pay for Only pay for what you want The first channel is obvious – it explains why Cleveland is cheaper than Boston. The second source of affordability is valuable for people at risk of homelessness, but doesn’t make most people better off. The third source – what WNN recommends advocates emphasize – is that many regulations require people to pay for more housing (or pricey attributes) that they don’t want. In a lot of cases, the last two effects will go […]

How big is the housing shortage?

Two new estimates of the national housing shortfall offer a seeming contradiction. But we can synthesize the demand and supply models to get close to the truth: High-priced places should build much more housing than Up For Growth estimates and moderate-priced places will build much less housing than the JEC predicts.

Long-term renters ARE short-term renters (maybe)

One reason local governments are often hostile to Airbnb and similar home-sharing websites is that politicians believe that the interests of short-term renters and long-term renters are opposed- that is, that Airbnb wastes housing units that could be used by long-term renters. This claim is of course based on the assumption that the interests of long-term renters are more important, because short-term renters are usually rich tourists with plenty of money to spend. If short-term rents were always as high as those of fancy hotels, this argument might make sense. But in fact, some Airbnb rents are comparable to rents in the long-term market, and some Airbnb landlords in fact will rent property for months. I discovered this while playing around with Airbnb listings in New York City. In particular, I looked at rentals for the entire month of August. I found rents as low as $827 per month (for a furnished room in Hollis, Queens). Even after limiting my search to full-fledged apartments (as opposed to sharing a room in someone’s house) I found some listings that were comparable to those in the long-term rental market. I found a listing for $1800 in Staten Island, and $1826 in Midwood (in southern Brooklyn) – far less than what I pay. The cheapest Manhattan listing (a walk-up in Murray Hill) was $2400, about what I paid before I got married. I did another search for 3-month tenacies (from Aug 1-Oct 1) and found comparable results: the cheapest fully private space rented for $1752 (in East New York) and the cheapest Manhattan listing rented for $2453. The cheapest roommate arrangement was $736- in Bensonhurst. In sum, it appears that if you can afford a traditional apartment, you can probably afford a low-end Airbnb listing- despite the regulatory obstacles that government uses against […]

Review: Homelessness is a Housing Problem

In Homelessness is a Housing Problem, Prof. Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Page Aldern seek to answer the question: why is homelessness much more common in some cities than in others? They find that only two factors are significant: 1) overall rents and 2) rental vacancy rates. Where housing is scarce and rents are high, lots of people are homeless. Where rents are lower, fewer people are homeless, even in very poor places. (In fact, high city incomes correlate positively with homelessness, because more and better jobs lead to higher demand for housing). By contrast, many other factors that one might think are related to homelessness in fact are not correlated on a citywide basis. For example, since homeless people are generally poor, one might think that places with high poverty rates or high unemployment rates have lots of homelessness. The authors show that this is not the case. Where most people are poor, there is less demand for housing, which translates into lower rents and less homelessness. One might also think that places with warm weather have lots of homelessness, because homeless people might be attracted to them. But high-rent cold cities like Boston have above-average levels of homelessness, while cheaper warm-weather cities like Orlando and Charlotte do not. However, homeless people are more likely to have temporary shelter in cold cities than in expensive warm-weather cities like San Diego- either because city governments are less motivated to build homeless shelters when no one is at risk of freezing to death, or because the homeless themselves are less eager to use shelters. I suspect that if the authors focused only on highly visible unsheltered homelessness, they might have found a stronger correlation with weather). It might be argued that shelters themselves (or other social services) attract the destitute. […]

Reasons to be a Census skeptic

Over the past week, the press was chock full of 2020-style headlines like “Census Bureau Confirms Pandemic Exodus from SF.” That’s because according to the Census Bureau, virtually every urban county in the U.S. (even urban counties in growing metros like Dallas and Atlanta) lost population between July 2020 and July 2021. But is the hype justified? I suspect not, for a variety of reasons. First of all, Census Department estimates have, in recent years, tended to underestimate urban populations, at least in some cities. For example, in 2019 the Census estimated Manhattan’s population as 1.628 million, while the actual count of 2020 showed 1.694 million residents- an underestimation of over 65,000 people. The Census estimated Brooklyn’s population at 2.559 million, but the actual count showed 2.736 million- an underestimate of over 150,000. (On the other hand, the 2020 population count was actually a bit lower than the 2019 estimates for Washington and San Francisco). Second, even the 2020 Census probably undercounted cities more than it undercounted suburbs. How do we know this? Because according to the Census Bureau itself, it undercounted Blacks by 3 percent and Hispanics by 5 percent, while slightly overcounting whites. These groups tend to be more urban than suburban (at least compared to whites) – so if the Census undercounted these groups, it probably undercounted urban population generally. Third, the timing of the Census Bureau’s estimates does not quite make sense to me. By July 2021, rents had already began to rise in Manhattan; the low rents of February and March were already disappearing. This suggests that by July, population (and thus demand) was increasing. Fourth, even if the Census Bureau’s population estimates were valid for the summer of 2021, they certainly aren’t valid any more. How do we know? It seems pretty obvious that […]

Do HOAs justify zoning?

At a recent webinar, Prof. Christopher Serkin of Vanderbilt Law School made an interesting argument. He pointed out that a) Sun Belt cities tend to have less restrictive zoning than northern cities; b) Sun Belt cities also have more homeowners’ associations (HOAs) with restrictive rules; and therefore (c) perhaps zoning reform will fail because homeowners will react to restrictive zoning by creating more HOAs, which will limit density and housing supply just as much as zoning. It seems to me that this argument has some weak links. The most obvious is that it is not clear that the correlation he points out really exists. Admittedly, northern and midwestern states have fewer HOAs than the rest of the nation. In the Northeast, only 29 percent of new homes are part of HOAs, as opposed to 47 percent in the Midwest, and 2/3 in the South. But not all southern and western states are the same- and if we go state-by-state, the correlation between HOAs and strict zoning starts to disappear. In particular, California metros are notorious for strict land use regulation and high housing costs. But 64.9% of California homeowners belong to an HOA, well above the national average. In fact, only three states (Vermont, DC and Florida) have higher HOA participation rates than California. On the other hand, Texas metros tend to be less restrictive, but only 1/3 of Texas homeowners belong to a HOA. Similarly, only 15 percent of Tenneseee homeowners belong to an HOA. So its not quite clear that metros with lower housing costs and/or less zoning have higher HOA participation rates. ( On the other hand, this data would be more useful if we were able to a) distinguish between new subdivisions and the rest of the housing market, b) distinguish between HOA participation rates for […]

Where investors invest

One argument I have run across recently is that the high cost of housing is caused by mysterious corporate investors are buying up real estate and forcing up the cost. The stupidest version of this argument is that investors are hoarding all the real estate. Why is it stupid? Because corporations like to make money, and a corporation that doesn’t sell or rent out real estate is making no money from it. A more sensible version of the argument is that the existence of investors adds demand for housing, and thus that their presence thus increases housing costs.* But even if this true, are these investors really a significant factor in the housing market? In today’s Washington Post, an article supplies data for 40 metro areas. If investors are really the problem, one might think that the most expensive metros have the highest investor share. But this is simply not the case. In San Francisco, only 6 percent of for-sale houses are being purchased by investors (about the same as the 2015 share). In metro New York and Los Angeles, that share is around 10-11 percent. The most investor-heavy markets are in growing, medium-cost Sun Belt markets like Atlanta (25 percent), Charlotte (25 percent), Jacksonville (22 percent) and Phoenix (21 percent). And within those markets, investors are not buying in the most expensive areas. In Atlanta, the highest investor shares are in the lower-income Southside, and low and moderate-income southern and western suburbs. In Jacksonville, the mostly lower-income Northside and the working-class Westside have higher investor shares than the more middle-class Southside. This pattern seems to hold in less investor-heavy metros as well: even though some affluent Manhattan zip codes have high investor shares, most of the high-investor zip codes are in East Harlem, the South Bronx, and other poor […]

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