Housing abundance beyond my backyard. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Housing abundance beyond my backyard

Matthew Yglesias

14 - 17 minutes

The YIMBY movement was started by, and remains closely associated with, people who are a lot like me.

What are we like? Well, like many of us, I have an affective preference for walkable urbanism. I graduated from college and moved to Washington, D.C. in 2003, a very particular moment in the history of urban America. For 20 years after the end of World War II, affordable automobiles plus heavy federal investment in highway building induced population loss in traditional city centers that had been built around a geometry of trains and walking. Then, rather than leveling off, this process was exacerbated by a large increase in crime that persisted for a long time. As a result, raising children in a walkable urban neighborhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s was an eccentric choice but not necessarily a super expensive one. The neighborhood I grew up in wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t astronomical either. Lots of people with very normal jobs lived there — most people didn’t particularly want that kind of life, so it was accessible to those who did.

But by 2003, things had changed. Crime had fallen quite a bit in New York, D.C., and most other big cities.

A bunch of Manhattan-based sitcoms depicted urban living as a desirable 20-something lifestyle choice to a cohort of kids growing up in the suburbs. Shifting patterns of economic production concentrated lucrative white-collar career opportunities in a handful of metro areas that happened to include both the northeastern megalopolis and the densest, most walkable western city.

And as a result, when people like me moved to cities like D.C., we tended to find that the neighborhoods inhabited by the white-collar professionals who’d stuck it out during the urban decline were no longer affordable on our entry-level salaries. We instead found ourselves living alongside working-class people in neighborhoods that for one reason or another seemed appealing in cities with newly rising prices. These neighborhoods were described as “up-and-coming” by realtors and boosters, though the influx of newcomers and our trail of yoga studios and hipster coffee shops also attracted darker labels. These neighborhoods not only featured rising prices, but due to the nature of the urban crisis in the last third of the 20th century, they frequently had vacant buildings or even empty lots. Where I live, significant portions of the 14th Street and 7th Street commercial corridors literally burned down in 1968, and much of it had not yet been rebuilt 35 years later.

Change is always controversial. Land use is always politicized. And the influx of new residents, new businesses, and new physical and financial capital created both problems and opportunities.

There were a lot of arguments about the new physical capital — new buildings that were going up on what had been parking lots or vacant buildings — and whether those buildings were part of the problem (however defined) or part of the solution. The core, sociologically, of the YIMBY movement consisted of those of us who said the new physical capital was good and believed it was possible to maximize benefits while minimizing downsides by easing the pathway through which financial capital turns into actual construction. A lot of arguments playing out in this context specifically focus on the question of whether new upscale construction raises or lowers rents in adjacent properties. And us YIMBYs were, insofar as this was the debate, pretty literally talking about our backyards.

But of course these gentrification frontier neighborhoods are a minority of the neighborhoods in any given city.

And central cities are home to a minority of the people (and an even bigger minority of the land) in any given metro area. And pricey metro areas are a minority of American communities. Yet everywhere you go there are policy changes that could boost housing abundance, allowing communities to reap economic benefits.

Regulations setting a minimum size for a residential lot are very much not a significant issue in my actual backyard.

We have rules about this. The RF zone my house is in requires lots at least 18 feet wide and at least 1800 square feet in total size. But these minimums are pretty small, and given the overall economics of the situation, the lot size rules don’t seem particularly binding. It’s also just clearly the case that the kind of dense, walkable urbanism that I personally enjoy is perfectly compatible with minimum rules of 18 feet of frontage and 1800 total square feet.

That said, New Hampshire recently became the latest state to complete a comprehensive zoning atlas, and the results are striking:

    Thirty-nine percent of the land in the state is totally non-buildable, either because it’s a lake (good reason) or because it’s protected wetlands (could be a good reason, could be a pretext).

    On the buildable land, 90% allows single-family housing by right. 

Okay, it’s New Hampshire. It’s not for us urbanists, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much demand for dense urbanism there. But how about “normal” detached single-family housing — a house and a yard that’s near another house with another yard? Well, it turns out that lots smaller than one acre are only allowed on 16% of the state’s buildable land.

So in this case it’s not smart, walkable urbanism that’s been banned across the majority of New Hampshire — it’s suburbanism.

In terms of my personal preferences, small-lot suburbanism is probably my least-favorite housing scenario. If I can’t walk to the supermarket, I’d like to have a big-ass lot with plenty of space. But different people have different feelings and preferences, and of course different people also have different amounts of money. There is an extremely straightforward sense in which a small house on a half-acre plot is going to be cheaper than a small house on a one-acre plot because land costs money. Towns in New Hampshire are supposed to allow you to build an ADU on your property, but on a majority of the buildable land, each ADU is required to come with two or more off-street parking spaces — some towns require three or even four! Now, look, it’s New Hampshire and people are going to drive. But if you’re a single person with not that much money, renting a small ADU with one parking spot and having the occasional visitor park on the street is a perfectly reasonable option.

The point is that even though New Hampshire is far away from my literal backyard and doesn’t have that much to do with urbanist concerns, it’s still a big issue from the standpoint of housing abundance. If you’re concerned about things like extended adolescence and young adults continuing to live with their parents, the fact that you can’t build a small, cheap house on a small, cheap lot in the suburbs of Manchester is a big deal.

If I’m totally honest with myself, the cause of the starter home in Bedford, New Hampshire does not particularly sing to my soul. But there is more to life than personal preferences. All across the United States, bad rules restrict the placement of manufactured housing and huge swathes of the country prohibit small lots. But a manufactured home on a small lot is, in most cases, the cheapest possible form of housing. Is it for everyone? Of course not. Almost everyone aspires to get richer than that and own a bigger, nicer home. But it’s good, in general, for people to be able to get cheap stuff if they need or want it.

The concept of “density” sometimes induces confusion because it can be achieved in a lot of different ways.

If two parents and a kid live in a one-bedroom apartment with the living/dining room used as a bedroom for the kid at night, that’s a very high-density mode of living compared to the same family living in a house with two bedrooms, a family room, an office, and a dining room. But in this case, “density” just means “low living standards.” So it’s not surprising that a lot of people, upon entering into the urbanist discourse, think it’s insane that there are people out there actually advocating for higher density. Normal people want square footage!

Alfred Twu has tried, with the graphic below, to draw a distinction between crowding and density, which I think is a good step.

But the real issue relates to a concept that’s a little unfamiliar to most people called floor area ratio.

FAR is how much square footage of building you are allowed to put on a piece of land. When you allow for more FAR, then you allow for less crowding. And that’s the policy goal of housing abundance: more dwelling space for each household, not more “density.”

After all, in strict population density terms, the impact of policy changes is pretty ambiguous. If you allowed smaller lots in New Hampshire, then some specific towns would get denser — more people per square mile. But those people would presumably be coming from somewhere else, possibly someplace that’s denser than small-town New Hampshire. So in that sense, density could be going down. What’s definitely increasing is the supply of housing, both the number of units and the total amount of square feet. Now I think that if you fully close the loop on this, more abundant housing would lead people to have somewhat more babies — the size of this effect is not clear, but I think the direction of the change is — and also to a political climate that is somewhat more favorable to immigration. So at the end of the day, a pro-building policy framework raises population density by increasing the population. But the idea is for individual human beings to enjoy more space on average.

This is important because some jurisdictions, I think, have started tripping too much over the metaphysics of single-family zoning versus allowing duplexes or quadplexes or whatever plexes. The number of units you’re allowed to have in a given structure is obviously a relevant policy variable. But the size of the structure you’re allowed to build matters just as much, if not more. In Twu’s graphic, they’re not turning the overcrowded single-family home into a fourplex — they’re replacing it with a different, much larger structure.

If your whole town allows FAR to quadruple, it’s possible that single-family homes would be replaced by large, multi-family structures on some parcels of land. But there are also going to be people who just build themselves a bigger house — and that has value, too. Not everyone craves square footage, but some people do, and preventing them from building it is socially and economically costly.

I’ve been reading about Philadelphia mayor-elect Cherelle Parker. Her public safety platform seems good, and I think she could be an ideal public face for the notion that police officers should be deployed to the neighborhoods that need them most rather than sprinkled around at random.

It turns out, though, that she was a big NIMBY as a member of the city council:

    A developer had purchased one of the detached homes with brick-and-stone facades, lawns, and driveways that distinguish her corner of Philadelphia. He planned to raze it and build two duplexes, clad in vinyl siding.

    To Parker, adding density and “cheap” materials was an insult to the neighborhood, so she rallied with neighbors to block contractors’ access to the construction site.

    “We did the old-fashioned civil rights chain,” Parker, now a candidate for mayor, said in late March from campaign headquarters in East Mount Airy.

I don’t agree with that worldview or that approach. But it is also worth saying that Parker’s backyard is almost certainly not where Philadelphia housing demand is highest, and therefore it’s not the place where the economic value of deregulating land use is largest. It might be true that the most practical way to achieve land use deregulation in high-value areas is to deregulate it everywhere. But it also might be the case that the opposite is true — that a coalition of councilmembers representing the poorer sections of the city could try to upzone the richer neighborhoods.

I’m not sufficiently versed in Philadelphia politics to have a real opinion about that.

What I do think is true is that substantively, it wouldn’t matter that much. If you take any given city and upzone all of it, construction will be concentrated in the most expensive neighborhoods. There are only so many trained construction workers and so much construction equipment, and it will naturally migrate toward the highest-value uses, which are projects in the highest-demand neighborhoods. So if exempting certain lower-demand neighborhoods gets a deal done, then there’s very little substantive economic cost and you don’t need to persuade Parker’s neighbors that they want more development in their backyard.

In fact, even my Logan Circle backyard is somewhat ambiguous. It’s plenty expensive and I’m sure more stuff would get built if the zoning allowed it. But it’s also already pretty dense, and at this point we are almost (though not entirely) out of vacant lots and derelict buildings. The lowest hanging fruit, development-wise, is probably far to my west in the neighborhoods that my cohort of YIMBYs couldn’t afford 20 years ago, which is partly what set this whole thing in motion. It becomes a question of scale. Arguably, if you upzoned not just D.C. but every American city while also allowing midrise apartments in expensive suburbs and also also allowing small-lot housing all across the country and also also also easing the path for manufactured homes, then it’s possible that demand for my neighborhood and neighborhoods like it would plummet.

That would make me sad in that I personally enjoy my neighborhood.

On the other hand, I have plenty of friends who live in cheaper neighborhoods around the city, and maybe they’d move nearby and we’d all have a lot of fun. Who knows?

The point is that while the intellectual history of YIMBYism was obviously influenced by the revival of interest in walkable urbanism, the particular economics of the early 21st century, and the debates over gentrification, I’m not sure how closely aligned any of that is with the actual policy agenda today. It’s not clear whether the country would end up with a larger or smaller share of the population living in walkable neighborhoods under conditions of true housing abundance.

What the economics and the policy analysis tell us is that allowing for more flexibility and less deadweight loss will have large benefits — and that stands regardless of how anyone personally feels about what happens in their backyard.