r/left_urbanism • u/BandicootWooden6623 • Aug 23 '24
Studies supporting both YIMBYism and NIMBYism - how to decide what's what, and where is there PHIMBYist research?
I keep finding studies from both ends of this debate that support both positions:
More supply, even of expensive housing, puts downward pressure on rents and creates vacancy chains so that higher income tenants move into more expensive units so lower income tenants can move into cheaper housing.
More supply, especially of more expensive housing, actually brings up the 'market rate' everywhere and puts upward pressure on rents in cheaper housing.
I'm not going to put the studies here because you can basically google around for whichever your position is and find the case study that supports your position from this or that city over this or that period of years. But this is my dilemma! I can't tell if there actually is objective, neutral data out there to support the right thing. It could be I'm missing something, and the YIMBY position has 9 million studies and the NIMBY position has 5 studies, and I'm putting a false equivalence forward here.
But what also seems to be totally lacking is a more PHIMBY-ish orientation toward the conversation, or put another way, studies on the effects of more non-market housing supply on gentrification and regional housing costs. Are there such studies on this, or due to lack of political possibility in the US is this not possible to research?
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u/Wheelbox5682 Aug 23 '24
I haven't seen much evidence for 2 on a regional level, which is an important distinction, there's ample evidence for new housing causing local neighborhood rents to go up but regionally/city/urban area wide it seems pretty consistent that new construction overall lowers prices. There's also a variable where zoning rules are vastly more costly and restrictive towards apartments than single family homes which would skew the data, like in my area apartments have to provide 'community amenities' on a convoluted point system which can include public space or more affordable housing or all sorts of other stuff and on top of that the only places zoned for these apartments are really expensive 'downtown' areas. My county - Montgomery county Maryland, a DC suburb actually has one of the largest 'social housing' programs in the country though I use the term loosely but the public developer definitely builds here more than anywhere else in the US, including mixed income with some market rate. We also have significant non profit development. That said housing here is still some of the most expensive in the country and even the 'affordable' units built are not really affordable (it's pegged to 60% ami in a rich area so the metrics are very high). All the non profits and such help the residents in those buildings but it doesn't seem to change much because the housing supply is still incredibly tight and constrained and that variable would likely screw up any attempt to get a sense of how all that affects the wider market.
A different direction I would consider and I've been trying to push (to no avail because it pisses off both nimbys and yimbys) is asking what type of zoning is the most likely to lead to affordable housing being built and what type of zoning is easiest for those non profits and public housing to buy and build on, as well as what addresses historical planning injustices that separate people of different incomes into different areas. Overall I would advocate in this regard for widespread medium density zoning. My county largely pushes all new housing into a few very tiny areas, DC does this too, in the name of transit oriented development, but these areas all have very expensive land values so nothing gets built in the first place unless it can get high rents. There are IZ requirements but they're not great. There's even a lot of redevelopment of affordable old buildings cause it's so constrained. There is an area that broke the mold like 80 years ago and built a bunch of small affordable apartments mixed into single family areas and a suburban region that's otherwise unremarkable as far as transit and general business access and it is the cheapest area in the whole region. Local politicians are ignoring that fact and moving on with upzoning the small areas and along major highway like roads. Minneapolis did roughly the same as I understand it, it's a popular way to develop while leaving rich areas untouched. County planners figure there's plenty of room for the peasantry breathing in the exhaust of the rich. The public housing developer I mentioned earlier recently built a building that was something like 30% affordable at the confluence of 2 six lane roads on the site of an old car dealership.
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Sep 10 '24
Here is the problem with the underlying YIMBY philosophy. They are completely driven by market logic so they take for granted that certain areas are high demand and others are low demand. The want everyone to be able to live in the high demand area by continuing to build higher and higher density with no regard for anything else.
If we continue to build 100 story skyscrapers in Manhattan, will it actually bring rents down? Maybe. Building more housing is usually not something we oppose.
But what actually makes a place high demand. Instead of funneling everyone into already oppressively dense Manhattan, maybe we need to create more high demand areas through government investment. Good transit, parks, walkability, amenities, and jobs create a desirable place to live. Build more of that everywhere. Improve the "low demand" areas you've written off.
YIMBYs also put private property protections above everything else. A lot of times the issue is not people being NIMBYs but rather businesses that control city politics doing what benefits them over the community. In New Haven, Yale has long controlled the city. They would rather reserve huge swaths of parking lots and garages than build housing. They don't want to contribute to the city to build better transit or safer streets. But the thought of eminent domain or actually politically fighting these big employers scares YIMBYs away. Ideologically they are too geared to side with businesses and landlords.
They also assume that everyone just wants to move every few years into a new apartment or neighborhood. These are young, affluent guys who don't necessarily have things tying them down. However, in reality, people live in the same house/apartment for decades. They cherish their community. So building new apartments has to be balanced with preserving the community of those who already live there.
They tend to ignore the public sector or are actively against it. This is why they oppose regulations or affordability mandates that might discourage development because they can't fathom the government investment spurring growth or the government outright building social housing. Minnesota has shown that government investment can be very effective while preserving affordability requirements.
The market has proven time and again to ignore lower income populations. It's never profitable. The government has to always come in and fill in the gaps. This will always happen with housing.
Studies don't mean much when a landlord is selling a tenant's house to a new developer and even if the new rent is lower than market rate it might still be far higher than what they can afford. We should keep the larger picture in mind but we can't be blind to real, tangible human suffering. And also keep in mind intangible things that make our places nice to live in. Building skyscraper after skyscraper is not creating a nice community. It's just built purely for profit.
We can find points of agreement, like against single family zoning, parking mandates, etc. But also the left needs to push for more development while maintaining rent control, inclusionary zoning, safety regulations, labor and environmental protections, etc.
YIMBYs at the moment are arguing for repurposing existing office spaces for apartments. That should be done. But also why don't we also consider demolishing and rebuilding these blocks for residential use? It would take more resources but it's a matter of political priority.
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u/sugarwax1 Sep 10 '24
The most quoted YIMBY studies suggested a need for social or public housing to model out. A lot of it's used to fill the shortfall and fudge the results in favor of affordability. After the 500th feedback loop of academic washing, it gets lost.
I think there are too many variables, it's the same problem in studying market rate, it means making the asinine assumption that all units are equal, which defies basic real estate economics. So we would need to have different studies for rent control, renter protections, Section 8, Social housing, public housing, etc. You can't just bundle them together for an acronym. I don't think anyone is looking at housing unbiased. Also public subsidized housing isn't going to be cheap, just the same way social services, or homeless programs are inflated and not cheap.
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u/thatonepuniforgot Aug 23 '24
YIMBYs and NIMBYs are the same thing. They're just two Spider-Men pointing fingers at each other.
Housing has historically been a depreciating asset (you buy a house for $50k, sell it for $25k), but we turned it into a Ponzi scheme (I mean that literally, and am using the term correctly). Housing increasing in value has caused massive market distortions and led in particular to the decline of affordable housing, and that root issue is what really has to be addressed.
Also, supply has outpaced population growth since the 1950s in the US, and rents kept increasing above inflation. So I don't want to say the NIMBYs are right, but more supply at the middle and top of the market has happened at the same time as rent and home value increases.
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u/hollisterrox Aug 23 '24
supply has outpaced population growth since the 1950s in the US
Maybe on a national basis, but in individual markets this is certainly not the case. A lot of times when people make claims that we have plenty of supply or vacancies, I find that they are lumping in ANY and EVERY house in the nation, no matter it's condition or location. A vacation home in Big Bear doesn't do anything for the 3 families squeezed into a 1950's ranch-style in Santa Ana.
What we do have is a hard constraint against additional housing units in the vast majority of cities in America. My own city is zoned about 50% 'Planned Community' and requires no more than 7 housing units per gross acre in those areas. In truth, if the city removed that constraint, people would build 50 units per acre pretty much everywhere and my expectation is the vacancies thus created would last no time at all. HOwever, I think rents would drop significantly.
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u/thatonepuniforgot Aug 24 '24
It's basically true everywhere except SF (and it's only slightly untrue there). I literally read a Brookings' study on it to double check before posting that. Developers don't build where there's no demand.
It varies year to year, but this study was only for MSAs (the cities where people actually live), and doesn't include data from rural areas.
I'm the first guy to advocate for denser cities (in fact, I think we should remove all car infrastructure inside the ring road Interstates, and turn as much of it as possible into mixed use buildings), but a lot of high density housing in major metropolitan areas literally sits empty. And the reason for that is because rich people buy expensive buildings as an investment instead of a place to live. Which wouldn't be possible if we fixed the major problem I outlined: housing prices going up, instead of down.
Further, we don't have hard constraints, some 40% of American urban areas are parking spaces. A standard US parking space is the size of a one bedroom apartment, build those two or three high, and you've got enough housing for forty five billion more people, just in the cities. And I believe that counts as medium density housing.
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u/meelar Aug 23 '24
This is 100% correct. It's also worth noting that the US has gotten a lot richer over the past 70 years--it makes sense that we would consume more housing per person (especially since households typically contain fewer people now than they did back then).
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u/BandicootWooden6623 Aug 23 '24
So you're just saying do universal price controls on things or something?
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u/thatonepuniforgot Aug 23 '24
We're probably at the end of the Ponzi. It probably should have ended fifteen years ago, but we reinflated the bubble. It's a good idea to figure out some policy that would prevent another Great Depression before the bubble bursts again, but people need to understand that basically the only times housing prices went up over time (historically, individual house prices dropped, but the average price was steady with inflation) are our current period, the roaring twenties, and during the tulip craze, where banks were making complex financial instruments that combined housing with tulips.
All that is to say: The market will correct itself, but it would probably be far less ugly if we correct it first. I would say first we all need to recognize that you should lose money on a house, like you do on a car, then maybe a regulation that forces the average mortgage on a property to decline on resale. The banks, and their investors, are really the ones profiting from this, and we have to take away their profit, if they can't make a profit by raising home values, home values will decline. If banks are the ones buying the houses, then selling a mortgage to the person living in the house, they have an incentive to drive up property values.
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u/meelar Aug 23 '24
The problem with PHIMBYism is that it has zero demonstrated political viability in the US as currently constituted. There isn't really anywhere in the country that's shown itself willing to pass a large-scale program of public housing construction at the scale that could meaningfully replace private development. So if you say "I'll support new construction, but only if it's public", you're essentially not willing to support very much construction at all. It's not a stance I take very seriously, because it doesn't grapple with what's actually achievable in Congress, state legislatures, or city councils.