YIMBYs keep winning. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

14 - 18 minutes

The YIMBY movement annoys a lot of people who are highly engaged with politics because we are living in a time of intense political polarization, and YIMBYism is not aligned with either pole.

But the core YIMBY thesis that quantitative restrictions on housing production are costly to the economy and harmful to society is true. The upshot of this is that a lot of smart, highly engaged people want to express negative sentiments about YIMBYism that don’t involve directly contradicting the core YIMBY thesis since they are too smart to deny its veracity. The result is a lot of tone-policing and concern-trolling where people express the idea that YIMBYs are doing this or that wrong, ideas that normally amount to “I wish you’d be less focused on your goal” or “I wish you’d do more to align yourself with my camp in the polarization dynamic.”

The truth, though, is that while YIMBYs have, of course, made mistakes, the YIMBY movement is enjoying a lot of success.

The precise qualities that generate this annoyance — genuinely prioritizing the topic at hand and trying to avoid polarization dynamics — are a big part of that success, and rather than concern-trolling, I think people who happen to be less interested in the topic should try to learn those general lessons. Whether your passion is health care or climate change or whatever else, you would make more progress if you tried to reconfigure yourself to be a bit more annoying in precisely those ways: more single-mindedly focused on your core goal and more deliberate about expanding the tent as much as possible.

I used to keep track of individual YIMBY policy wins, but at a certain point I stopped because there were just too many. I’m not the kind of person to offer “Twitter isn’t real life” lectures because obviously the internet is an important part of how people encounter and spread political ideas. At the same time, if people arguing on the internet is your primary news source, you can easily get the impression that everything is just the same old people arguing in circles. Actual policy change happens in state legislatures and city councils, and in an era of greatly diminished local media, people tend to only find out about it if it gets dragged into big, polarized national conversations.

Things like Cincinnati legalizing ADUs don’t make the national news. Nor does Tony Evers signing a bipartisan package of five modest housing reforms in Wisconsin.

In terms of Cincinnati, it’s maybe just not that interesting. You’re talking about the central city of the third-largest MSA in Ohio, a state that generally has very cheap housing and where the bulk of the demand is in the Columbus area. The Wisconsin housing reforms, though, are genuinely interesting because people sort of do pay a lot of attention to Wisconsin politics. The state was the Electoral College tipping point in 2016 and 2020, it’s ground zero for an important battle over gerrymandering, and the state legislature frequently leverages its entrenchment-via-gerrymander in an effort to undermine the governor’s basic authorities.

So the fact that Wisconsin is passing bipartisan reforms to encourage housing production actually is pretty interesting from the standpoint of the national narrative and in terms of understanding which movements are and aren’t successful. Wisconsin, of course, is not a huge deal from the standpoint of the national housing situation. But the Madison area really does have an affordability problem, and Wisconsin’s economy has generally been enjoying strong performance and really will benefit from accommodating more people. It’s just not, I think, in the interest of either Evers or his antagonists in the legislature to have out-of-state people know that they’re working together effectively on this problem. But for in-state purposes, almost every politician facing divided government does, in fact, want to be able to tell people, “here’s some stuff I got done.” And YIMBY stuff is a good way to go because YIMBYs have a broad menu of policy ideas that aren’t uniformly aligned with partisan national politics, so progress can co-exist with intense trench warfare on other topics.

I tasked Maya with compiling the most comprehensive list of YIMBY policy wins she could find, and she came up with 122 discrete successes over the past two-and-a-half years.

San Jose eliminated parking requirements and so did Bend, Oregon. But also Ron DeSantis signed a massive zoning preemption bill in Florida, which naturally has attracted much less national attention from the left or right than squabbles over a single line in a state history curriculum guideline. The Mercatus Center limited itself to state-level housing action and finds that so far this year, we’ve had housing supply reforms in 15 states.

Notably, the wins include Dem trifecta states (Oregon, Washington, Maine, Colorado, Rhode Island, New Jersey) along with GOP trifecta states (Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Ohio, Idaho, Montana) and divided governments (Arizona, Wisconsin, Vermont).

I should say that most of these housing reforms are pretty modest.

Texas in particular is a case that I followed closely, and a lot of good big ideas there ended up on the cutting room floor. And even the states like Washington and Montana that did advance really ambitious reform packages still ended up short of where I personally think that we need to go. That said, politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards, so you absolutely have to accept incremental change. One major lesson from California’s experience with zoning reform is that anything you pass to try to force cities to allow more housing can be undermined by stubborn and creative cities. You end up needing to pass more laws and do a bit of whack-a-mole across multiple sessions to really unlock change. So to an extent, you are necessarily playing a long game in which progress is going to be incremental.

Either way, the point is that YIMBY successes depend on pragmatism and compromise. One of the big failures this year came in New York, where Kathy Hochul endorsed a really ambitious set of reforms that then all fell apart. The more common and more successful model involves a layered approach to reform, where the most ambitious ideas don’t pass but some smaller stuff gets done as wavering legislators want to show that they aren’t totally indifferent to the issue.

YIMBYs have mostly avoided, though, what I call activist chum.

The chum comes from the following political organizing playbook that is widely followed in progressive circles:

    Always be asking for something.

    Ask for something of someone empowered to give it to you.

    Ask for something from someone who cares what you think. 

This 1-2-3 got us the intense focus during Barack Obama’s second term on the Keystone XL pipeline. Blocking Keystone was not important to climate change, and it was definitely not a cost-effective means of reducing CO2 emissions. But it was a thing that Obama had the authority to do, and unlike the Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives, he had to care what climate activists did. Just saying “well, there’s nothing we can do unless we persuade Republicans” would be boring, so instead they focused on Keystone and eventually won. Kevin Carey has a good new piece out at Vox about how progressive advocacy on higher education came to be so monomaniacally focused on debt cancellation that involves a similar dynamic. One-off debt cancellation, whatever its merits, obviously can’t fix anything forward-looking about higher education. But it was (until the Supreme Court stepped in) something you could demand of Joe Biden.

YIMBYs have mostly avoided this. They are trying instead:

    To help YIMBY candidates defeat NIMBY candidates in races that have clear YIMBY/NIMBY stakes.

    To help YIMBY champions achieve upward mobility in politics to increase their power and shift incentives

    To pass the best bills possible given the actual configuration of actual legislatures. 

This does not always work. But it does sometimes work. And it will hopefully, over time, seed the higher reaches of politics with more and more YIMBY politicians and unlock more and bigger possibilities. Meanwhile, though, you need to work with the elected officials you have.

I flagged the fact that YIMBYs have won in red states, in blue states, and in purple states, but an interesting point the Mercatus report makes is that bipartisanship seems to matter even in unified control states.

In New York, for example, the Hochul zoning reforms became a point of intense partisan criticism from the state’s Republican minority. That was not on its own enough to cause their failure. But it did seem to make a lot of Democrats in the legislature very worried that the proposals would cause backlash or be unpopular with their constituents. Something similar happened in the other direction with the most ambitious proposals in Texas. Here, Democrats were mostly against the GOP-backed deregulatory initiatives. Texas Republicans obviously have the ability to outvote Democrats and are often happy to do so. But in this case, the Democratic opposition alarmed a lot of Republicans who I think worried that it would accelerate the blue-ing of Texas Triangle suburbs, and dominant-party solidarity broke down.

I think this is a general pattern.

Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was structured as a bipartisan bill because that was the only way to get around the Senate filibuster. If you imagine a world in which filibuster reform already happened, then formally speaking you wouldn’t have needed a bipartisan IIJA, and theoretically some of the stuff that was in there as a concession to Republicans could have been taken out. In the real world, though, I bet there were many frontline Democrats who were happy to vote for “a bipartisan infrastructure bill” who would’ve gotten the willies about a big deficit-financed spending bill, even though the bipartisan infrastructure bill was, in fact, a big deficit-financed spending bill. The content of legislation matters, of course, but the process also matters — especially when you’re talking about matters that aren’t at the heart of the partisan agenda.

In Hochul’s case, regardless of the exact merits of how that package came together, I think the reality is that next time, housing bills need to be developed in collaboration with at least someone on the GOP side.

Florida, again, is an interesting example where the bill has a lot of stuff like tax credits for affordable housing and an inclusionary zoning rule that seem like concessions to Democrats, and this is the main thing DeSantis emphasized in his press release. Even a governor who is obviously not afraid of partisan warfare is a lot happier to act on housing if it can be a bipartisan, kumbaya story.

Closer to home, bitter losers continue to fight Arlington County’s recently passed Missing Middle initiative. A question I have asked in the past is, “who is the racial justice case for zoning reform for?” and in the specific context of Arlington, I think it’s very effective.

I have met actual human beings living in Arlington who read Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law,” found that it genuinely changed their mind, and now are eager to fight the legacy of white supremacy by opening the door to expanding housing supply. I think that’s great! I’m really glad to see Rothstein’s book featured prominently in the bookstore that recently opened up around the corner from my house, because I think its arguments are likely to be persuasive to some of my neighbors, as well.

But over in Montana, the Frontier Institute campaigned for zoning reform by saying “it’s time to end California-style zoning in Montana.” I think it would probably be a mistake for Montana politicians to position themselves as tearing down the shackles of white supremacy, and also a mistake for reformers in Arlington to talk about how great Greg Gianforte is.

Slow Boring has a fairly technically minded audience, so the point I would make is that zoning generates enormous amounts of deadweight loss, so zoning reform unlocks a large surplus. That surplus means there are a lot of different benefits to zoning reform, and also that the surplus can be deliberately redistributed in a bunch of different ways. That means that there are a lot of different possible legislative coalitions and rhetorical strategies that align with the basic goal of reducing regulatory barriers to housing supply. Which ones are best and in which places depends on both the objective structure of public opinion and also who holds seats in the legislature. Calling out Long Island NIMBYs as racist is probably counterproductive, but Arlington NIMBYs are a different breed and it works there.

The big point I want to make here, really, is that to a larger extent than most people realize, the precipitous rise in political polarization that we’ve seen in the United States is an elite-driven choice.

In part, it’s a good choice that was made by midcentury liberals to break the sordid political compromise that kept white supremacists inside the Democratic Party by gifting them the ability to keep civil rights bills off the floor. But it’s much less clear to me that the trend toward aligning all environmental concerns with broader partisan affiliation (documented in David Karol’s book “Red, Green, and Blue”) was a good idea or that the concurrent extensions of totalizing partisan conflict to gun control, abortion rights, and immigration have been productive. YIMBYs have deliberately tried to make the opposite choice, and I think that’s been wise.

And to be clear, this is actually something I’ve changed my mind about.

I used to think that the problem of housing politics in the United States was that YIMBYism naturally “reads” as right-wing deregulation but the biggest need for policy changes is in large blue state cities and their inner-ring suburbs. So I thought deliberately aligning YIMBYism with progressive politics would be a good idea. The people actually doing the work mostly disagreed with me, and I think events have proven them right. One issue is that regulatory constraints on housing supply are actually incredibly widespread, even if the problem is most severe in a handful of deep blue metros. But the other is that, in practice, it’s more productive to treat this as a state-level issue rather than as dozens of separate local dogfights, and in state politics it’s helpful to be bipartisan — even in New York or Texas.

I fully concede that resistance to letting the issue become part of totalized partisan conflict inevitably rubs some people the wrong way. But I think in practice, we are seeing that the depolarized approach is more productive and that advocates on a wider range of issues should consider developing strategies to depolarize what they are doing.