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Category NIMBYism

contradictory anti-housing arguments

Over the years, I’ve heard a wide variety of arguments against new housing. One of them is the “mysterious foreign investor” argument. According to this theory, new urban housing will all be bought up by billionaire foreign investors, who will purchase the property and never rent it out, thus preventing the new housing from increasing supply. (I have rebutted the argument here).* A variation of the argument is that because some high-end housing is vacant, supply is therefore adequate to meet demand. (I have addressed this idea here). Another argument is that housing markets are segmented: that if you increase the supply at the top of the market, it will not help anyone who is not already at the top of the market. It seems to me that these arguments contradict each other: the first argument is based on the idea that high-end housing does affect the market as a whole (or would if rich people stopped using apartments as second homes); the second is based on the idea that high-end housing doesn’t affect the rest of the market at all. *In addition, I have recently published a much longer article in the New Mexico Law Review, discussing the pros and cons of high-end condos.

How YIMBYs used Ostrom to recruit conservatives

A major barrier to the market urbanist’s ability to make the case for building more housing is the question of aesthetics. When you refer to density in cities, it’s easy to picture large brutalist towers and the slum-like conditions that can be seen in much of the developing world. Of course, this isn’t what we advocate, but it is a problem we have to repeatedly address. Homeowners, whether we like it or not, are a powerful voter group and they want to live in areas that look nice.  Fortunately, the British Government has found the golden mean of housing plans by accepting the results of the Building Better, Building Beautifully Commission.. The key takeaway of this report is street-voting. This represents an excellent middle ground between the seemingly opposite need for housing to be popular, and the need for housing to be plentiful.  The current system used in England fails to provide a fair way of measuring public views on plans. This works by assessing the views of nearby residents through a consultation. This allows any resident to attend, or write in, laying out their views on the plan. It may sound democratic, but local consultations are notoriously unrepresentative of a community. Those who take part are overwhelmingly middle-class, property-owning white people who stand to benefit from a housing shortage. Rather than taking into account the views of the local area, this method merely measures the views of those who would be economically burdened by addressing the crisis.  The city as a commons What we’re left with is what social scientists would call the tragedy of the commons. This is where you have a common-pool resource where individual use of that resource depletes the stock for other parties. Cities can also be understood to be “the commons” in that they […]

Even NIMBYs should be YIMBYs

Jeremiah Moss, a New York blogger, just wrote a long article complaining about the bad habits of his new neighbors in the East Village. I suspect many, if not most readers, of his article would think: maybe we need to zone out new housing to keep out the yuppies! But it seems to me that this conclusion would be wrong. Here’s why: new buildings in the East Village are generally more expensive than old buildings.* So I suspect that if yuppies are moving into old buildings like Moss’s, it is probably because they cannot afford newer buildings, or more affluent neighborhoods like Tribeca. It logically follows that if more new buildings were allowed in Moss’s neighborhood, he would have less affluent neighbors, which presumably would make him happier. *I searched listings at streeteasy.com, and found that of about 170 pre-war one-bedrooms, 77 of them (or 45 percent) rented for less than $3000 per month. By contrast, of the 32 postwar one-bedrooms in the East Village, only 3 rent for under $3000.

For once I agree with the NIMBYs: please don’t turn my neighborhood into Dubai- because Dubai isn’t dense enough!

One common argument against new housing is that it will turn “[neighborhood at issue] into Dubai.” Evidently, some people think Dubai is a hellscape of super-dense skyscapers. In fact, Many Dubai neighborhoods aren’t very dense at all. There is one Dubai neighborhood that is more dense than most urban neighborhoods in North America: Ayal Nasir (which has about 200,000 people per square mile). But it looks far more like Paris than the popular stereotype of Dubai: streets are narrow, and most buildings are five or so stories high. The neighborhood next door, Al Murar, has 130,000 people per square mile and has a similarly human-scale urban fabric.

More evidence that sunlight is no crisis

In my email box today, I received a message from an anti-housing group, touting a study from the localize.city website* on sunlight on New York neighborhoods. The purpose of the study is to show which neighborhoods have the least sunlight. The study found that 27 of the city’s allegedly darkest neighborhoods are in Manhattan. More interestingly, the list of most sunlight-deprived Manhattan neighborhoods includes some of the city’s richest areas: Midtown, the Financial District, Tribeca, Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side. By contrast, the list of Manhattan’s ten sunniest areas include not only a few well off areas (like Hudson Yards and Battery Park City) but less pricey areas like Marble Hill and Inwood. Why does this matter? My interpretation of these facts is that people who can afford to live anywhere don’t really care very much about an extra hour or two of sunlight, which in turn suggests that sunlight is basically just an excuse to block new housing rather than something people actually care about in other contexts. To put the matter another way, New Yorkers may actually value shade over sunlight, if they care about the issue at all. *I note that if you really do care about sunlight more than I am suggesting that most people do, you can search an individual address at the Localize website.

Learning from Astor Street

One common argument against mixing housing types and densities is that if housing type A (for example, townhouses or single-family homes) is mixed with housing type B (for example, condos), the neighborhood will somehow be “ruined” for residents of the less dense housing types. Last week, my new wife and I visited Chicago for our honeymoon. The most interesting street we visited, on Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast, was Astor Street, just a block from high-rise dominated Lake Shore Drive. What is unusual about Astor Street is its mix of housing types. Although this street is dominated by large attached houses, it also has a few tall-ish buildings next to the townhouses, such as the 25-floor condo building at 1300 North Astor, the 20-story Astor Villas at 1430 North Astor, and the 27-story Park Astor condos at 1515 North Astor. Despite the tall buildings, this street felt like a quiet, beautiful, tree-shaded urban street. And the real estate market seems to agree: recent Zillow ads show a single-family house on Astor Street selling for over $2 million, and another one selling for over $3 million. By contrast, the average house in Astor Street’s zip code (60610) is valued at less than half a million dollars, and only 14.6 percent are worth over $1 million. Clearly, multifamily housing has not “ruined” Astor Street.

The Truth About “Red Vienna”: Its a YIMBY Paradise!

One common leftist argument against new housing is the “Red Vienna” argument: the claim that housing can only be affordable in places where the government dominates the housing market. Supporters of this claim like to mention Vienna, where (according to progressive lore) Big Brother builds lots and lots of super-affordable public housing, while the Big Bad Market is not involved. But a recent article about Vienna states that “one-third of the 13,000 new apartments built in Vienna each year are funded by the government and commissioned by the housing associations.” This means that about 8700 apartments are built every year by the private sector. In a city with 1.8 million people, that’s a lot. By contrast, in Manhattan (which has a comparable population) about 3000 housing units were built between 2014 and 2017- far less than Vienna. Even in Houston (which has a slightly bigger population) only 14,653 housing units of all types, or about 3700 per year, were built between 2014 and 2017. In other words, even if not a single unit of public housing had not been built, Vienna would still have built more than twice as many units as high-growth Houston, and about ten times as many as Manhattan. Vienna’s affordability is thus an argument in favor of lots more housing, not an argument in favor of NIMBYism.

Big Media Gets Big Buildings Wrong

While reading someone else’s work, I recently ran across an article by David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, claiming that overseas oligarchs  turning apartments all over the world into unused “ghost apartments”.  In this article, Johnston writes:  “In Paris, for instance, one apartment in four sits empty most of the time.” This claim struck me as so astonishing that as to be implausible, for the simple reason that in other “global” cities vacancy rates are much lower.  For example, in New York only 9 percent of housing units are vacant, and most of those units are currently for sale or rent.*  Even this vacancy level should not be particularly astonishing, since cheaper American cities often have higher vacancy rates.  For example, Houston has an 11 percent vacancy rate, and Atlanta has an 18 percent vacancy rate. After googling “one in four paris apartments vacant” I found an article claiming that 26 percent of apartments in four Paris arrondisements (neighborhoods) is vacant- a much narrower claim, comparable to an assertion that one in four midtown Manhattan apartments is vacant.   One would think that a journalist as distinguished as Johnston would know the difference between “Paris” and “some parts of Paris.” A more recent article claims that only 7.5 percent of Paris apartments are vacant- a lower vacancy rate than that of New York.   Moreover, we don’t know what the local media means by “vacant.”  Does this category limited to apartments that are unused 365 days a year?  What about units that are rented out now and then through Airbnb?  Or units that are currently being advertised for rent or sale?  I suspect that the true number of “ghost apartments” is far lower than 7.5 percent, since in London (another “global city”) less than 1 percent of housing units are […]

What Should YIMBYs Learn From 2018?

Believe it or not, the YIMBY movement won a lot in 2018. It kicked off with January’s high of California State Senator Scott Wiener’s introduction of SB 827, which would have permitted multifamily development near transit across the state, but fell to a low after its eventual defeat in committee, invariably followed by a flurry of think pieces about how the pro-development movement had “failed.” At the time, I made the case for optimism over on Citylab, but that didn’t stop the summer lull from becoming a period of soul searching within the movement. And then, a strange thing happened: YIMBYs started winning, and winning big. In August, presidential-hopeful Senator Cory Booker released a plan to preempt exclusionary zoning using Community Development Block Grant funds, quickly followed by a similar plan from Senator Elizabeth Warren in September. Also in August, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson unexpectedly outed himself as a YIMBY. Then, in December, things really got crazy: two major North American cities, Minneapolis and Edmonton, completely eliminated single-family zoning. States like Oregon soon started talking about doing the same. In the same month, California kicked into overdrive: San Francisco—ground zero for the YIMBY movement—scrapped minimum parking requirements altogether. State Senator Wiener introduced a newer, sharper version of SB 827. And rolling into 2019, elected officials at every level of California government—from the state’s new Democratic governor to San Diego’s Republican mayor—are singing from the YIMBY hymn sheet. All in all, it wasn’t a bad year for a movement that’s only five years old. But what really made 2018 such an unexpected success for YIMBYs? Focus on Citywide Reform Over Individual Rezonings Showing up and saying “Yes!” to individual projects that are requesting a rezoning, variance, or special permit is bread-and-butter YIMBY activism. And while YIMBYs should still […]

New and Noteworthy: Randy Shaw’s Generation Priced Out

In Generation Priced Out, housing activist Randy Shaw writes a book about the rent crisis for non-experts.  Shaw’s point of view is that of a left-wing YIMBY: that is, he favors allowing lots of new market-rate housing, but also favors a variety of less market-oriented policies to prevent displacement of low-income renters (such as rent control, and more generally policies that make it difficult to evict tenants). What I liked most about this breezy, easy-to-read book is that it rebuts a wide variety of anti-housing arguments. For example, NIMBYs sometimes argue that new housing displaces affordable older housing. But Shaw shows that NIMBY homeowners oppose apartment buildings even when this is not the case; apartments built on parking lots and vacant lots are often controversial. For example, in Venice, California, NIMBYs opposed “building 136 supportive housing units for low-income people on an unsightly city-owned parking lot.” NIMBYs may argue that new housing will always be for the rich. But Shaw cites numerous examples of NIMBYs opposing public housing for the poor as well as market-rate housing for the middle and upper classes. NIMBYs also claim that they seek to protect their communities should be protected against skyscrapers or other unusually large buildings. But Shaw shows that NIMBYs have fought even the smallest apartment buildings. For example, in Berkeley, NIMBYs persuaded the city to reject a developer’s plan to add only three houses to a lot. On the other hand, market urbanists may disagree with Shaw’s advocacy of a wide variety of policies that he refers to as “tenant protections” such as rent control, inclusionary zoning, increased code enforcement, and generally making it difficult to evict tenants.   All of these policies make it more difficult and/or expensive to be a landlord, thus creating costs that may either be passed on to tenants […]

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