Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Category NIMBYism

YIMBYism: Its Not Just For Conservatives

Last week, I posted about an attack on YIMBYs (activists who favor less zoning and more housing) that used the term “alt-right”; the authors of that blog post recently doubled down with a slightly more moderate op-ed that still tarred YIMBYs as  “aligned with conservative right-wing libertarianism.” In fact, the Obama Administration is on the same side as YIMBYs; I recently published an article about their 2016 policy paper on urban housing.  Read all about it here.

An Attack on Market Urbanism

The far-left “TruthOut” web page recently published an attack on YIMBYs,* describing them as an “Alt-Right” group (despite the fact that the Obama Administration is pro-YIMBY).  I was surprised how little substance there was to the article; most of it was various ad-hominem attacks on YIMBY activists for cavorting with rich people.   I only found two statements that even faintly resembled rational arguments. First, the article suggests that only current residents’ interests are worth considering in zoning policy, because “the people who haven’t yet moved in” most often means the tech industrialists, lured by high salaries, stock options and in-office employee benefits like massage therapists and handcrafted kombucha.” This statement is no different than President Trump’s suggestion that Mexican immigrants “[are] bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” – that is, it is an unverifiable (if not bigoted) generalization about large numbers of people.  Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense. The “tech industrialists” have the money to outbid everyone else, so they aren’t harmed by restrictive zoning. Second, the article states that academic papers aren’t as relevant as the actual experiences of San Franciscans displaced by high housing costs.  In response to the argument that less regulation means cheaper housing, it states  “tell that to people like Iris Canada, the 100-year-old Black woman who had used local regulations to stay in her home of six decades, only to be evicted in February.” So in other words, somebody was evicted in San Francisco, therefore San Francisco’s restrictive zoning prevents eviction. I don’t see how the latter follows from the former.  The whole point of the YIMBY/market urbanist argument is that if there was more housing, there would be lower housing costs, hence fewer evictions. *For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, YIMBY means “Yes In My Back Yard”, a […]

Richard Florida and Market Urbanism

I just finished reading Richard Florida’s new book, The New Urban Crisis.  Florida writes that part of this “crisis” is the exploding cost of housing in some prosperous cities.  Does that make him a market urbanist?  Yes, and no. On the one hand, Florida criticizes existing zoning laws and the NIMBYs who support them.  He suggests that these policies not only raise housing prices, but by doing so harm the economy as a whole.  For example, he writes that if “everyone who wanted to work in San Francisco could afford to live there, the city would see a 500 percent increase in jobs… On a national basis, [similar results] would add up to an annual wage increase of $8775 for the average worker, adding 13.5 percent to America’s GNP – a total gain of nearly $2 trillion” (p 27). On the other hand, Florida is not ready to endorse the idea that  “we can make our cities more affordable… simply by getting rid of existing land use restrictions” because “the high cost of land in superstar neighborhoods makes it very hard if not impossible, for the private market to create affordable housing in their vicinity.  Combine the high costs of land with the high costs of high-rise construction and the result is more high-end luxury housing.”  (p. 28).  I don’t find his point persuasive, for a variety of reasons.  First, as I have written elsewhere, land prices are often quite volatile.  Second, the overwhelming majority of any region’s housing is not particularly new; even in high-growth Houston, only 2 percent of housing units were built after 2010.  Thus, new market-rate housing is likely to affect rents by affecting the price of older housing, rather than by bringing new cheap units into the market. Florida also writes that “too much density can […]

Four Warnings For Los Angeles On Measures S

The alternative title for this piece was: “Ballot Box Zoning: Where Needed Housing Goes to Die.” Next month, Los Angeles will be voting on Measure S, a proposed 2-year policy that will effectively serve as a moratorium on new construction.  That is, Measure S will require a public vote on any new development that does not fit within existing zoning.  Most of the city’s major leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have come out against the measure, and the Los Angeles Times followed suit just a few days ago. I’m not going to rehash arguments for or against the measure.  Instead, I’m going to offer several warnings based on the experience of Davis, CA, which passed its own Ballot Box Zoning Measure in 2000.   Measure J, our ballot box zoning measure, requires voter approval on any attempt to change the zoning designation of open space or agricultural land that sits on the community’s edges.  The law also explicitly names two particular parcels that must be voted on prior to approval.  So for the purposes of this piece, consider it a ballot box zoning law targeting sprawl. Warning 1: These Measures Are Hard To Roll Back Measure J passed in Davis with just 53.6% percent of the vote in a March primary when residents cast just 19,000 votes (in a city with at least 49,000 voting-age residents).  The law contained a renewal clause, and when it came up for renewal in 2010, support jumped to 76.7% percent.   This increased support may be an artifact of how the opposition attempted to stall the measure’s renewal.  Opponents of the renewal made a NIMBY argument the centerpiece of their case: they argued that slowing growth at the edge of town meant more infill pressure in the city’s core, threatening the character of neighborhoods.  As I’ll discuss in a […]

Only In California: Twisting an Anti-Exclusionary Law To Rationalize Exclusion

As a Market Urbanism reader, you are hopefully fluent in the problems of exclusionary zoning.  If you’re new to the term, there are some good pieces on the topic here and here.  Basically: exclusionary zoning is the use of zoning to price people out of a community.  The classic example is minimum lot sizes or minimum unit sizes: cities only zone parcels big enough to ensure low-income families cannot afford the housing.  When subsidies for affordable housing require specific unit attributes, like reduced parking ratios, a community can simply require parking ratios above that threshold (although states can move swiftly to stamp out such practices). States have also responded to exclusionary zoning practices with a wide array of policy interventions known collectively as “anti-snob laws.”  One key component of California’s anti-exclusionary efforts is called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA).  The law requires each jurisdiction in the state to produce a Land Inventory (or Adequate Sites Inventory, or Sites Inventory, or Buildable Land  Inventory) that demonstrates the jurisdiction possesses space to accommodate anticipated housing needs at adequate densities.  Read “adequate densities” as dense enough to produce affordable units. Scott Wiener, the state senator representing San Francisco, is pushing to give the RHNA some real teeth. The most contentious component of the process is the definition of “need” for each jurisdiction.  The state calculates anticipated need based on population and jobs projections for each region.  Regional councils of government (COGs) are then empowered to distribute the regional need to each jurisdiction within that region.  Need is quantified in terms of units, and these needed units are further categorized into four groups: units affordable to Very Low Income, Low Income, Moderate Income, and Above Moderate Income households. Regional agencies had some flexibility in making these allocations in the past.  Thanks to SB 375, which passed in […]

When NIMBYs Use Renters’ Health To Stop Rental Housing

Davis, CA, is a small college town a twenty minutes’ drive outside of Sacramento (on a good day).  It has a vacancy rate on par with Manhattan despite being surrounded by flat, developable farmland.  Some critics attribute this absurd vacancy rate to Measure R, a ballot initiative approved by Davis residents in 2000 that requires a public vote on any peripheral development.  Since it’s passage, three developments went up for a vote, and all of them failed. The group that defends Measure R is known as the “Citizens for Responsible Planning” or CRP.  Throughout various development battles, CRP has strategically utilized air quality concerns to push new development further away from existing neighborhoods. They opposed the most recent Measure R development, Nishi Gateway, because toxic air quality made the site virtually uninhabitable, at least in their minds! In fairness: the site is sandwiched between railroad tracks and a major highway, Interstate 80.  So it’s a real concern. But fast-forward just six months later, and CRP is demanding the University of California, Davis, the area’s largest employer, dramatically expand its on-campus housing options for students, staff, and faculty.  In an effort to appear proactive, they produce a map of optimal sites to locate student housing on the UC Davis Campus.  One of the sites they select is adjacent to the Nishi parcel they so aggressively opposed development on just six months earlier.  Another parcel they suggest building housing on is also sandwiched between the same railroad tracks and highway that Nishi sat between, but just a couple miles further south (and further from existing neighborhoods).  You can see all of this in a map provided below, where the Nishi site they killed at the ballot is marked in red and the sites they claim to support student housing on are colored in blue: […]

7 Reasons To Oppose Los Angeles’ Neighborhood Integrity Initiative

[This piece was originally published on the site Better Institutions.] On March 7th, Los Angeles is going to vote on the type of city it wants to be. The vote will be over Measure S, formerly known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative (NII), which seeks to limit housing development in the city. Backers of the initiative claim that City Council is too beholden to developers, and that the pace of new housing and commercial development in the city is out of control. They also express concern that “mega projects” are making Los Angeles less affordable, since few new homes are being targeted at low and moderate income households.   It’s a really bad plan, but calling Measure S “bad” doesn’t go nearly far enough. It is, in fact, the Donald Trump of ballot initiatives. It’s a cynical effort to co-opt a legitimate sense of frustration—frustration felt by those who haven’t shared in the gains of an increasingly bifurcated society—and to use that rage and desperation for purely selfish purposes. It invites us to vent our frustrations and, in so doing, to further enrich those who helped to engineer our ill fortune. And as with Trump, a Measure S victory will roll back the clock on years of steady progress. Since I think there are a lot of folks out there who genuinely haven’t made up their minds about the initiative, or aren’t yet familiar with it, I’d like to summarize some of the most important reasons to oppose it when it comes time to vote this March. 1. IT WILL MEAN FEWER AFFORDABLE HOUSING UNITS FOR LOW INCOME HOUSEHOLDS. The Coalition to Preserve LA, which is backing the initiative, is turning this into a referendum on housing development in Los Angeles. They’re arguing that new homes have “wiped out thousands of […]

Kotkin And The Atlantic- Spreading ‘Localism’ Nonsense Together

The Atlantic Magazine’s Citylab web page ran an interview with Joel Kotkin today.  Kotkin seems to think we need more of something called “localism”, stating: “Growth of state control has become pretty extreme in California, and I think we’re going to see more of that in the country in general, where you have housing decisions that should be made at local level being made by the state and the federal level too. You have general erosion of local control.” In fact, land use decisions are generally made by local governments–which is why it is so hard to get new housing built.  This is as true in California as it is anyplace else; when Gov. Brown tried to make it easier for developers to bypass local zoning so they can build new housing, the state legislature squashed him.   Local zoning has become more restrictive over time, not less.  And the fact that state government has added additional layers of regulation doesn’t change that reality. But did the Atlantic note this divergence from factual reality, or even ask him a follow-up question? No, sir.  Shame on them!    

NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism

In his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin tries to use NIMBYism as an argument against urbanism.  He cites numerous examples of NIMBYism in wealthy city neighborhoods, and suggests that these examples rebut “the largely unsupported notion that ever more people want to move ‘back to the city’.” This argument is nonsense for two reasons. First, the NIMBYs themselves clearly want city life and a certain level of density–otherwise they would have moved to suburbia.  In cities like Los Angeles and New York, a wide range of housing choices exist for those who can afford them. Second, the fact that some people want to prohibit new housing does not show that there is no demand for new housing.  To draw an analogy: the War on Drugs prohibits many drugs.  Does that mean that there is no demand for drugs?  Of course not.  If anything, it proves that there is lots of demand for drugs; otherwise government would not bother to prohibit it. For my more in-depth review of The Human City, read:  Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America

Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor

People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example. My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of real estate for the poor. I’d like to share a few of our findings with you. Zoning One kind of regulation that was actually intended to harm the poor, and especially poor minorities, was zoning. The ostensible reason for zoning was to address unhealthy conditions in cities by functionally separating land uses, which is called “exclusionary zoning.” But prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, some municipalities had race-based exclusionary land-use regulations. Early in the 20th century, several California cities masked their racist intent by specifically excluding laundry businesses, predominantly Chinese owned, from certain areas of the cities. Today, of course, explicitly race-based, exclusionary zoning policies are illegal. But some zoning regulations nevertheless price certain demographics out of particular neighborhoods by forbidding multifamily dwellings, which are more affordable to low- or middle-income individuals. When the government artificially separates land uses and forbids building certain kinds of residences in entire districts, it restricts the supply of housing and increases the cost of the land, and the price of housing reflects those restrictions. Moreover, when cities implement zoning rules that make it difficult to secure permits to build new housing, land that is already developed becomes more valuable because you no longer need a permit. The demand for such developed land is therefore artificially higher, and that again raises its price. Minimum lot sizes Other things equal, the larger the lot, the more you’ll pay for it. Regulations that specify minimum lot sizes — that say you can’t build on land smaller than that minimum […]

Trending now

gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation
The Great American Streetcar Myth
O’Toole Under More Fire