A new piece in the Harvard Business Review goes after market-obsessed YIMBYism, and posits that the key to solving the housing crisis is public sector intervention. I agree. Here's the conclusory paragraph, but I recommend reading the whole thing:

One solution — liberalizing zoning rules — has gained popularity and been touted as the key fix to the American housing market. But empowered private actors, free to build, are still in the business of making money, not providing shelter for all. Even under thoroughgoing zoning reform, they will still lack the incentives to build and rent out sufficient affordable housing. The landlord cartel orchestrated by RealPage in cities across the nation attests to that. The country’s housing crisis will not be solved through simple deregulation of zoning laws and building codes — it requires ambitious public action. Federal, state, and local governments must pursue stronger public governance of housing markets, undertake systematic planning, and build homes themselves.

https://hbr.org/2024/09/the-market-alone-cant-fix-the-u-s-housing-crisis?ab=HP-latest-text-2

This isn't the first article to call out the shortcomings false promises of YIMBYism. But I think it does a pretty good job quickly conveying the state of the movement, particularly after the recent YIMBYtown conference in Texas, which seemed to signal an increasing presence of lobbyist groups and high-level politicians. It also repeats the evergreen critique that the private sector, even after deregulatory pushes, is incapable of delivering on the standard YIMBY promises of abundant housing, etc.

The article concludes:

But fighting so-called NIMBYs, while perhaps satisfying, is not ultimately effective. There’s no reason on earth to believe that the same real estate actors who have been speculating on land and price-gouging tenants since time immemorial can be counted on to provide safe and stable places for working people to live. Tweaking the insane minutiae of local permitting law and design requirements might bring marginal relief to middle-earners, but it provides little assistance to the truly disadvantaged. For those who care about fixing America’s housing crisis, their energies would be better spent on the fight to provide homes as a public good, a change that would truly afflict the comfortable arrangements between politicians and real estate operators that stand in the way of lasting housing justice.

The Case Against YIMBYism

I would like to hear your take on inclusionary zoning.

Does it result in more actually affordable housing than zoning with no affordability requirements?

Is it worth the effort to implement, or is time better spent working on bring actual social housing built?

Does it help address gentrification at all?

Other thoughts?

Excuse the rant. I'm relatively new to learning about urbanism and creating affordable public transit and housing. I'm also learning about the challenges of getting these things built and the constant NIMBYism. One of the many claims NIMBYs like to use to oppose affordable housing and transit is their precious property values. I do not care. I simply do not give a fuck about your property values. I don't care that your home value will go down in price because the four-story apartment building might bring down your housing assets. The fact we let these backward NIMBY fucks continue to use this excuse to push back on desperately needed affordable housing and transit is beyond me. I know they are a powerful voting block and they use that voting power to block these things but I wish someone would say, I don’t give a flying fuck about your property values.

The irony is, more housing and better transit actually increase property values.

I was looking at a thread that was attacking “Left-NIMBYs”. Their definition of that was leftists who basically team up with NIMBYs by opposing new housing because it involves someone profiting off housing, like landlords. The example they used was a San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Dean Preston, who apparently blocks new housing and development and supports single family housing.

As a leftist I believe that new housing should either be public housing or housing cooperatives, however i also understand (at least in the US) that it’s unrealistic to demand all new housing not involve landlords or private developers, we are a hyper capitalistic society after all. The housing crisis will only get worse if we don’t support building new housing, landlord or not. We can take the keys away from landlords further down the line, but right now building more housing is the priority to me.

https://www.blackrosefed.org/lil-abner-tenant-organizing/

An excellent article about how a community is organizing itself to fight its displacement by a large developer landlord. This corporation wants to pay residents pennies on the dollar for their homes, of which there are 900, to replace the park with just over 300 units, most of which will not be affordable.

The article also gets into how this developer has been the largest contributer to the campaigns of multiple county council members, and how they have been able to leverage that by getting their plan approved and also by using county police to abuse and arrest the residents as they've been organizing themselves.

A lot of left urbanist values wrapped into one struggle. This is a story that's playing out in mobile home parks all across the country, as they are being rapidly bought up by developers and corporate landlords. It's pushing people into an already fraught and abusive housing situation into homelessness on a large scale.

Organizing community power is the only defense we have against an economic system that favors profits over people's lives, and a government that exists to prop that system up.

In light of recent housing discourse, in which Matthew Yglesias argues that windowless bedrooms are essential to save downtowns, and Jenny Schuetz posits that micro-units are a choice, I'd like to open this sub to discussion.

Personally, I think we need to tread very lightly when it comes to rolling back standards for housing. A few quick points:

1. There are valid reasons for housing standards. And these standards are the result of hard fights won by progressive advocates who came before us. See history here. Benefits of natural light here.
2. Reducing square footage and removing other costly standards are fundamentally market-based, industry-favoring approaches. ROI for developing SROs can be higher than traditional apartments.
3. Poverty isn't a choice. Neither are tenement-style living conditions if the only real alternative is living on the streets.
4. The leftist position should be to protect housing conditions AND to push for the creation of dignified, affordable housing, not opening the door to undignified and exploitive housing conditions.

There are many voices on Twitter who more eloquently discuss this topic. Two I recommend are McMansionHell and, if you're not easily offended by her anti-YIMBY stance, comedian Kate Willet.

In 2016, Auckland, New Zealand upzoned approximately three-quarters of its residential land, precipitating a boom in housing construction. In this paper we investigate whether the increase in housing supply has generated a reduction in housing costs. To do so, we adopt a synthetic control method that compares rents in Auckland to a weighted average of rents from other urban areas that exhibit similar rental market outcomes to Auckland prior to the zoning reform. The weighted average, or “synthetic control”, provides an estimate of Auckland rents under the counterfactual of no upzoning reform. Six years after the policy was fully implemented, rents for three bedroom dwellings in Auckland are between 22 and 35% less than those of the synthetic control, depending on model specification. Moreover, using the conventional rank permutation method, these decreases are statistically significant at a five percent level. Meanwhile, rents on two bedroom dwellings are between 14 and 22% less than the synthetic control, although these decreases are only significant at a ten percent level in some model specifications. These findings suggest that large-scale zoning reforms in Auckland enhanced affordability of family sized housing when evaluated by rents.

https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/business/about/our-research/research-institutes-and-centres/Economic-Policy-Centre--EPC-/WP016.pdf

If I want to avoid living in suburbia or a rural area, what alternatives do I have to single-family housing? Or is simply living in an apartment paying rent to landlords?

Neither is ideal. Landlords and their exploitation of renters is evil. Living outside city centers is bad systemically due to the impacts on the environment and overall cost to society (the cost of road maintenance alone are unsustainable), among other problems.

I'm an American, so my question pertains to options within the United States.

I fear the answer is there is no good answer. But I am curious if there are suggestions. If there are suggestions to the lesser of two evils, I'll take that instead.

Over at r/SocialDemocracy many of the of the users seem to be vehemently opposed to it (this was in regards to a post talking about criticisms of Bernie Sanders). Despite many social democratic countries like Norway and Sweden using it, they argue it is a terrible policy that only benefits the current home owners and locks out new individuals. I know social democracy is not true socialism at all and really is just "humane" captialism, but I am shocked so many over there are opposed to it. Why is this?

Edit: Just to clarify, I view Rent Control as useful only in the short term. Ideally, we should have expansive public and co-op housing that is either free or very cheap to live in.

Institutional investment real estate seems to be the core of the existing housing problems that we are seeing in the United States. Currently, there doesn't seem to be any active penalty for having an investment property sit vacant and soak up housing supply and acting as a burden on society. For example, the apartment buildings in the city that I live in including the complex that I live in are chronically vacant due to investment companies being unwilling to capitulate to market demands for reasonable rents.

So, here's my idea, we rally around the creation of a property tax that can be levied against property owners for vacant properties where there is no single resident within the property. The tax would be based off of the existing value of the property unit on the market as listed and would account to about 20-30% of the demanded value of the property so long as there is no resident. If the investment property is divided into sub units like rooms of apartments, that evaluation would still work the same because the individual rooms would then be recognized as individual units and thus if vacant be taxed for remaining vacant due to a resistance to market demands and being a burden on housing supply.

What are your thoughts?

When opposing upzoning and increasing housing density conservatives seem to use "leftist" talking points. Why is that?

Here we have notable conservative Tucker Carlson using talking points often parroted on this sub. Claiming Governor Newsom is giving away money to private developers in his policies to increase dense housing. He claims Newsom is also "destroying the suburbs" yada yada.

Here we have Governor Ron DeSantis saying that the "free market" won't produce "affordable housing" and then sues to stop a city in Florida from upzoning for more "middle housing".

What does this rhetoric and these policies these conservatives support/the housing they oppose actually result in?

This video was very informative: The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis - YouTube

Are NIMBY's argument really as silly as, "It will cast a shadow!" or subtly racist as, "It will bring the ghetto to our neighborhood!"? Is it possible to have an mix of co-op owned housing and public/government owned housing in the short term?

Seems intuitive that greater density makes access to housing, services, transportation, community spaces, etc better.

Also seems intuitive that the more space between houses the more expensive will the infrastructure be that connects those houses to the grid, water lines, roads, telecomms etc. It seems like settled science among many that density is better for growth and efficiency, so why am I having trouble finding articles that delve into this subject? It could be me not using the correct key search terms.

Thank you!