Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

> In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing.

Yeah, see, this mindset is exactly the problem.

Letting anyone put a granny flat on their property if they have space for it is radical? Come on, that's a moderate change at most.

And yeah, that kind of thing is never going to make a big difference over the short or even medium term. You want a big impact quickly, you need bigger changes: allow for higher density "missing middle" housing across the whole city, drastically streamline the approval process to be "as of right", get rid of all mandatory parking minimums, invest tens of millions of tax dollars every year into new public housing, etc.

>* There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.*

This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters).

YIMBYism is having a much greater impact in red states.

Noah Smith (left wing blogger) has a fascinating article on it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta...

In Austin, TX, rent has been falling for 2 years because they've been building so much new supply: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

It’s more about long term, but I see what you mean about lighting a fire under butts.

One of the most eye opening discoveries for me on my urbanism journey is how Amsterdam got better. It wasn’t always a bicycle paradise; its city center had massive parking lots, huge roads, and a poor pedestrian environment.

But today it’s much different — because policies were enacted decades ago which ensure roads are re-configured when it’s time to replace them. So over time, the city has become better.

These long-term policies are deeply important. We didn’t get into the current situation because someone woke up and decided housing scarcity would be cool. It happened after decades of planning and building under policies which seemed like the future 60 years ago, but have become unsustainable. Parking minimums don’t instantly turn your town into a parking lot — it takes decades as buildings are replaced and more and more land is carved out for parking.

So yes, YIMBY doesn’t instantly solve the crisis, and we need to do more. But over time, as houses and lots sell, people remodel and build, the financial incentive to make more housing units available is very strong —- so over many years, things will definitely densify.

what are ADUs?

> There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.

Yes, there's no chance I'm going to rent an ADU under these incredibly tenant-biased regulations as in California. I have to be able to evict people at the end of their lease for any reason if they are going to be in an ADU on my property.

It's not really surprising that places with the most onerous "tenants rights" regimes have the biggest problems with housing inventory. I wish the people enacting these laws understood that for every squatter or rent deadbeat you prevent a landlord from evicting, there's a hundred potential landlords that just say no thanks I'll just leave my property empty.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-...

I live in Portland and own my house. I'd love to put in an ADU and rent to some of my friends but it's pretty expensive and I can't afford it.

As someone who owns a second house on a farm that has two rental units in it, I’m skeptical of attempts to expand ‘tenant rights’ in New York.

I had a tenant who decided that he did not have to pay the rent, it took months of trying to reason with him, we hired a lawyer and went through the process which took several months, in the end the tenant stayed on a few months past what would have been the eviction date but at least he was paying rent. Between that and another tenant losing her shit we lost at least a years rent plus still have a unit vacant even though we have been using the time to catch up on maintainance.

I’ve seen other small landlords in the same situation where they were psychologically devastated by the process of dealing with a bad tenant and evicting them. Right now my wife is helping a friend who inherited two homes from their parents who recently passed away which might have been a takeaway and not a gift because she has yet to clean up the mess left behind and struggles to with precarity (doesn’t have a working car, can’t find the title abstract and will have to cough up a few $1000 to be able to sell, …) renting the place out for a few years made some money but probably resulted in lost value in selling it.

The juiciest gossip in our small town us that the owner of an equipment rental company (probably able to afford to do it right) attempted an illegal ‘self-help” eviction by crashing into the building with a backhoe which is not only an own goal in terms of property damage but could probably cost $10,000 or more in court. (A friend of our who has struggled with homelessness got a settlement of that much for being illegally evicted by the homeless shelter when it closed but then struggled to cash the check because he had no bank account an no id to create a bank account…)

I actually think it's kind of a good sign that the policy was able to be passed without significant immediate disruptions.

I have some pretty radical views about the benefits of land value taxes, but I don't think it's a good idea to immediately change all taxes by a large amount because disruptions are very painful. If you can enact positive incentives slowly with gradual changes then you can avoid disruptions while moving towards a better future.

the extremely unpopular but logical next step in managing change would be to induce development by increasing property taxes. Basically compel people to move and sell their land to developers who build up the land.

People don't put 10k of their money towards the bakery opening up next block either. They put it in the bank, which will loan it out. No one needs a million negligent single-rental landlords to create housing. But it does mean you are not entitled to having the same style McMansion built on the close empty lot in eternity, it might just be something with some more space efficiency. It means you can't continue paying a tax rate set 30 years ago for land that has appreciated many magnitudes in value.

It's amusing to me that anyone would think a random smattering of ADUs would do anything at all to push the needle when it comes to housing. This is like fixing linter warnings (but not even doing that!) instead of building an entirely new section of an app. We need the latter.

As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect.

True YIMBY policy would be zoning for six-story apartments by-right citywide, with density going up to 20 stories near rapid transit.

But even policies that sound great on paper are often sabotaged by cities with unworkable affordability requirements that prevent anything from being built.

> we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things.

I've been watching something similar happen in LA with Measure HLA, a "safe streets" bill that was supposed to require the city to include safety improvements for pedestrians and cyclists during regular road maintenance. The bill passed with broad support but none of the people in charge of the agencies seem to want to do any of that stuff, so they either drag their feet or simply don't comply, leading to lawsuits and delays. (Just today, Metro voted unanimously to not include a now-legally mandated bike lane along a major new busway, claiming it's not their problem. Which might be true — and that's a separate issue — but playing hot potato with safety & mobility improvements feels like a leadership problem, not a legal problem.)

I like designing good incentives but in this case just passing laws is not working. You also need the actors to want the change. (I personally would be focusing on installing new leadership.)

I also live in Portland. Look into our local taxes for the answer. We have the highest local tax rate in the nation for families earning more than 200K a year, higher than Manhattan. It simply doesn't pencil to build an ADU and rent it out long term, so you’re incentivized to a short term rental like Airbnb, which does little to nothing to help the housing situation.

It’s the same for new apartment buildings. Next time you drive over the Fremont Bridge look at the skyline. 5 years ago there were 13 visible cranes mostly constructing high density apartment buildings. Today there are none. It’s the same reason, Portland has made it simply unprofitable to develop new high density housing.

> There's a general fear of being a landlord

Yes. And this is fixable, if there is political will. There is a long list of locales where I'd never want to be a landlord due to how little recourse you have in cases of tenant misbehavior/nonpayment. CA is near the top. Portland is too.

Until this is fixed, however, those locales will tend to lose independent landlords, as they cannot afford the rent losses as they are not diversified enough. Big faceless companies like Avalon will grow cause they can.

My small city in Washington is the template for the state's ADU law and multi-family density law. When the ADU law passed, we saw a lot of people convert garages into ADUs and anymore any custom builds almost always add an ADU. But to your point - it isn't clear how many have become rentals. What I observe is that many people saw it as good resale value, as multi-generational living, or simply a place to put guests when they came to visit. It was about the same time we put a moratorium on VRBOs, which had been another reason people saw these as beneficial without becoming a full-time landlord. Personally I have one and it has been beneficial income while also giving my tenants a good transition point (college students, people escaping bad marriages, people who need a place to land while they look for a place to buy, etc)

Third:

I have my own property because I don't want to share it with someone else. If I wanted to share, I'd rent a room or get a townhouse or some other form of housing where sharing space is common.

Fourth:

Building an ADU is actually very expensive and the payback time is quite long. You have to dig for sewage and water, pour a foundation, and so forth. If doing it at a high level, it's going to be as intensive as building a house... It's just smaller. Most people are not handy at all and therefore will need to hire out every bit of it... Which is very expensive.

Maybe landlord coops could be a solution. Band together to co-own with multiple small landlords and share the risk.

I live in an area in Los Angeles that passed a similar law a few years ago (actually I live in an ADU) I can say the exact opposite has been true here. SO many houses have added ADUs - some rented out - but the vast majority are turning their properties into multi-generational living. Can't say that rent has come down per-say, but I have managed to rent one at below market. Having individual landlords with the pressure of paying their HELOC means they are less likely to sit on an empty unit for 5 months waiting for the most high dollar tenant. I 100% feel like this policy has been a big net positive.

what I would really like to see now is allowing owners to sub-divide and sell the ADU. This could bring back the "starter-home" that no longer exists and has kept me out of the market

This is because ADU laws don’t go far enough. If you can sell your property to a developer for 3x the times the price you paid for it because all of a sudden it’s legal and financially viable to build a sixplex, many people will take that offer.

They did something similar in Vancouver, BC. To me it just seemed like everyone's been leaving the city and saying "We literally can not afford to own a place here" and politicians heard "You want us to manufacture more landlords and pull up the ladder even further!? Ok, we'll try".

Yes in my backyard shouldn't mean literally yes, you can live in my actual physical backyard, more than there shouldn't be undue restrictions on building more densely nearby

I don't understand why you brought up ADUs... nobody thinks ADUs are the solution to the decade+ long housing crisis. Blue states need massive state-wide zoning reform that overrides local control.

Just a bit north of you, in Seattle, it feels like every house in my neighborhood with enough land added an adu, a dadu, and condoized. My realtor says almost everyone looking for single family homes wants an existing dadu or somewhere they can build a dadu.

I don’t know that anyone has claimed allowing ADUs is all you need to do to solve our housing crisis. But in a lot of places it’s the only thing the NIMBYs will let you get away with. So if you can’t middle housing, at least allowing ADUs gets you something more.

If the demand to live in your city dramatically outstrips the any possible number of ADUs that can be built, then it won’t help on its own, the cup still runs over.

I think people would like money but being a landlord in addition to probably being a multi-income household is a lot. A lot can go wrong being a landlord even in a place with permissive laws.

One thing that I think would be interesting would be allowing the sale and transfer of unused development rights (AKA "air rights.") That lets somebody take advantage of the development capacity without the landowner having to make a gamble on what could be a very risky development. A lot of jurisdictions have something like this allowed already but generally limit it to certain districts, or only landmarked properties get to sell development rights like this, or something else.

Removing barriers is necessary, but not always sufficient

TL;RD: to make housing affordable you need to make everyone poor - not just the renters, but owners too.

What does it even mean to "light a fire under the butt" of a middle class home owner who is scared to rent because they'd be unable to evict a destructive junkie? What kind of fire do you have in mind, that would scare them even worse than that possible outcome?

Whatever it is, it will probably make you or any politician who advances it very unpopular.

ADU = Accessory Dwelling Units (for those of us not "in the know" or whatever)

> They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off.

This is a part of the problem which I think isn't discussed often enough. Because of the varying marginal utility of money, if the divide between rich and poor becomes big enough, owners will not want to rent out in their own homes, because nothing the tenant can pay will make any significant difference to their personal budget, and certainly not enough to make up for the stress/risk.

Maybe they can find someone non-threatening enough where the benefit of having someone living in the cellar apartment, to discourage break-ins when they're away etc. makes up for the risk. That is, I guess, how I managed to get a rental in one of the most expensive parts of Oslo ~20 years ago. But I really doubt I'd gotten that if I wasn't extremely non-threatening, let alone if I had been a minority of some sort.

The issue I'm seeing is that right now, you won't even be cashflow positive unless you can put 40-50% down on the construction costs.

That's a HUGE ask for someone to build an ADU! If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you just become a developer? The answer is obvious: capital. But that applies at every scale, and thus to a whole lot of those homeowners you're showing disdain for too.

People complain the rents in my area are too high. But the costs of the underlying real estate, maintenance, construction, and repairs are so high right now that it barely pencils out if at all. Most houses in the area were constructed in the 70's or the 90's and have not been well-maintained. So there's added costs of trying to bring old structures back up to snuff. New construction, even medium/high density stuff doesn't make sense unless you have 40-50% down or access to some ridiculously low interest loan.

Something has to give. Either prices need to come down on land, labor and construction materials, or rents need to go even higher.

There are often a lot of redundant parts of the legal & zoning code intended to limit development. You can legalize ADUs de jure, but you probably still have setbacks that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have parking or curb or utility requirements that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have HOAs that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have "impact fees" and utility billing issues and all sorts of recently-added building codes that de facto prohibit ADUs. On top of that, the ADUs are usually extremely limited in character - "less than 1200sqft, less than 30% of the floor area of the house, no more than two residents", etc, etc. On top of that, you're paying for a financing category that the banks don't know how to deal with, without the subsidies that homeowners enjoy on mortgage payments, you're suddenly getting a property tax bill that's higher, and you're facing the possibility of squatting tenants under a regime that's designed to be inherently hostile to landlords.

You still have all sorts of laws against doing the thing you just supposedly legalized.

We already have highly inflationary monetary policy that makes capital accumulation for middle class people impossible outside of high risk vehicles like stock or property. We also already have a complicated network of grants, tax breaks, statutes, and pressure organizations to incentivize or ramrod through housing as long as the expected inhabitants are any demographic that is reliably expected to vote for “our democracy”. I just really don’t know what more you want here. Confiscate everyone’s bank anccount and liquidate it to build housing projects?

The United States has plenty of vacant housing. It just doesn’t have plenty of free or nearly free vacant housing in the downtown sections of our dozen largest cities. Maybe the issue is that we don’t want every single person on earth living in San Francisco or New York. Encouraging remote work was probably a step in the right direction on relieving that demand, but I think maybe there is some structural problem about hyper concentration of capital in a few extremely large cities that we are trying to fix with zoning ordinances, or, I guess stealing from the perfidious Kulacks to give to the noble proletariat.

> radical new zoning laws

> ADUs on their property

If this is "radical" then it just shows how far we've fallen.

Another factor for me is there is risk to hiring contractors. If i could just pay money and have confidence things on my house would be fixed I would do it in a heartbeat. But you have to become a lawyer and project manager to make sure they do it.

> There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights

Yes, these laws also increase the cost of housing.

>They don't need the money

Yeah. At a certain affluence, I'd rather have extra space and privacy than extra money. I can't think of a reasonable amount of money that would incentivize me to rent out an ADU in my backyard. $10k a month? idk my kids play in that yard...

I am a big fan of YIMBY-ism but I think your points here are fair. This is a controversial take among YIMBYs but I think the benefits of ADUs are oversold. Of course I am all for allowing them if that is all we can do but the idea of the ADU only exists because it is supposed to allow building more housing while preserving the overall "character" of single family neighborhoods. Subdividing a lot and building a new home is better in every way for both the homeowner and the resident of the eventual structure. ADUs seem like they could provide a lot of housing because it is a huge increase in what is theoretically allowed but it is not a huge increase in what people will realistically build in the United States in 2025 in single family neighborhoods. This is true for the reasons you state and also many other reasons because it is the opposite of economies of scale that typically brings costs down.

We have an answer to building more housing at a lower cost and it's apartment buildings. We need more apartment buildings. We don't need them everywhere, there will still be plenty of places with predominantly single family homes, but we need them in more places than they are today. They don't have to be big high rises but there needs to be a enough number of units in a single building to make projects pencil.

ADUs are particularly ineffective, because each one requires the owner to work as a part-time landlord with the tenant being almost their housemate. All the headache without much increase in income.

I happen to have chatted with the head of a large commercial contractor in Portland a few months ago. He told me Portland's unattractive to developers because, compared to other cities, rents are low and the cost to build is high, so the flow of real estate investment dollars into Portland is slow.

Since the problem we're trying to solve is making rent cheaper, conditional on the current state of the economy, the solution here is making it cheaper to build dense residential in Portland in the urban core and improve transit options.

It takes a pretty specific type of property to accommodate an ADU and it has to be in a specific location to make the ADU worthwhile. If you're in the suburbs you also have HOA rules to contend with. The only place we could put an ADU in our suburban house is to build out our 4-car garage -- it's large enough (and we onyl need 1 car), but we'd have to build a bathroom and a kitchenette. But even if we could afford the initial substantial outlay, I don't think we'd have a lot of takers as people who are likely to rent an ADU typically need to live closer to the city.

(author here; ED of YIMBY Action)

I'm super curious about why you think YIMBY-ism is passive. I feel like the main criticism we've often gotten is that we're too in-your-face with our advocacy.

Say more.

Maybe it's not the bulk of the cost but site development fees for a new ADU in Portland are like $40k, to say nothing of the cost of actually getting approval checked off.

It always comes back to social issues because some people have a problem with policies that support all kinds of economic activities.

I'm pretty sure the political group that can guarantee a quality National Health Service in the US will win

See, people, NIMBIES in particular, take issue with housing and infrastructure, people with stock in pharma and insurance corps take issue with government supporting others.

In this very forum, some asinine person supported Trump administration axing the free tax submission programme of the IRS on the basis of them owning shares in the tax software companies.

That's pretty much where liberal politicians end up targeting most of their policymaking and even a sizable portion of their campaign platform (as demonstrated in the Harris platform).

Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

“Delivering better lives for people” is already an inherently social issue, though. There are many people who don’t WANT to improve certain people’s lives, and if your proposed policies help them, they will be against it even if it makes everyone’s life better; they are willing to forgo improving their own life to make sure the people they hate won’t see any improvement.

Unless your policies go out of their way to exclude the groups they hate, you aren’t going to get their support.

> Instead of getting tangled up in social issues

It's not that they're getting 'tangled up', it's that reactionary activists (whose ultimate goal is repealing the Civil Rights Act entirely) use strawman social issues as a wedge and the press is led around by the nose parroting these controversies that are brazenly ginned up.

Liberal politicians don't really have a great strategy for this because the majority of media (and I'm talking about the real media: influencers with more following than all legacy media combined) is right-wing these days.

Progressives end up barely treading water while reactionaries run circles around them, and then are blamed when reactionaries make everything worse.

Home owners are by far the majority, so battling home owners is an easy ticket to defeat.

How are housing and government services not social issues?

Only one presidential candidate had "DEI" and trans people as a major part of their campaign (and now have made those things a major part of the first two months of their presidency) and it wasn't the Democrats. It's kinda shocking to me that people think the Democrats have been running on social issues while Republicans haven't. I'm curious the sorta of media people watch that make them believe this.

Democrats are largely controlled opposition. If you ask where democratic power comes from, it comes from campaign donations by America's richest and most powerful people. Bloomberg ran for president under their banner, think about that. At minimum it communicates that the democratic platform is compatible with oligarchs.

How are they supposed to wrangle corporate power, when that is exactly where their power comes from?

"Social issues" are a godsend for oligarchs because they allow for effort to be spent on issues that don't challenge corporate power. They provide a sink for democratic efforts that ultimately don't move the needle for most of their voters. It gives a pathway for "positive" change that doesn't threaten corporate power. It insidiously disempowers the people who would be most likely to wrestle with corporate power. Most of all it provides the illusion of opposition and therefore the illusion that I have representation because I have someone who has the appearance of representing my values (like empathy), but none of the substance of it.

Democrats have a choice. (1) don't threaten corporate power and focus on ultimately pro-corporate social issues that are ultimately dis-empowering (2) threaten corporate power/land owner power/Israel power and immediately have their campaign financing removed and their challengers funded.

Even if you believe that democrats are focusing on issues that meaningfully change people's lives, like build back better or CHIPS, they are doing it without challenging corporate power. Which is why no matter which regime is in power, it feels like democracy is in decline.

Then you get sad, because you realize there is no way to get actual representation for the issues you care about other than to run yourself, but if you ran explicitly to challenge those in power, those in power would fund your opposition. So then you realize that it's hard to get into power without expressing loyalty to those who grant power, and then you have a cogent explanation for why things are the way they are.

I agree.

But as other commenters are pointing out, many liberals are already trying this, but conservatives misrepresent them as being focused on social issues (and misrepresent their opinions on such issues) anyways.

IMO, here are the problems liberals face and solutions to regain popularity:

- Liberal politicians may say the correct things, but what matters is what they do, and specifically how it's perceived. As vice-president, Harris did practically nothing, and the overall perception of the economy under Biden is negative. Meanwhile, Trump is doing almost exactly what he said, even small things like pardoning Ross Ulbricht. Fortunately, you don't need to be the party in power, or even elected, to have well-perceived actions; I believe community-building is the best and easiest way for liberals to regain appeal.

- Liberal politicians may say the correct things, but they don't open themselves up to criticism enough. Liberals (and conservatives, and corporations) have learned to say almost nothing for fear of misspeaking, but this is backfiring; they get attacked for policies they don't state because they don't explicitly denounce those policies, and the policies they do state get misrepresented because they don't clarify or broadcast the clarifications enough. Harris should've went on Joe Rogan's podcast and should've agreed to a debate in Fox News; she would've been judged for her responses, but by not going, she was judged for imagined responses*. Meanwhile, Trump agreed to the debates on CNN and ABC, and he posts and speaks much more often and unscripted (so it's him posting and speaking).

- Wrt. social issues (trans, woke. etc.): "live and let live", and ask for clarification, particularly examples. This area is where people imagine and misrepresent others' opinions the most; so when a liberal politician is asked their opinion on XYZ, they should answer unambiguously, even if it makes them look bad, then debate and clarify. I really think the overarching policy should be "live and let live", and finding ways to accomplish that with minimal federal intervention; because I believe (and hope) it's something most people would agree on**, and because "getting X done" is strictly easier than "getting Y to do X".

One thing that must be said, because the above problems and solutions have been discussed before, but this has been discussed less: these also apply to "the far left", perhaps the same or more than they apply to conservatives. Many people get attacked by the far left who are completely on their side (recent example: ProtonVPN); many others get attacked who I believe are on their side, but must clarify their policies.

In summary: people choose the worst interpretations of their political opponents' speech; if they oppose you, they'll choose the worst interpretation of your speech. However, if you don't speak, your opposers will choose an even worse interpretation of your silence. The ways to remove bad interpretations are: clarify, and far more significantly, act in a way that disproves them. Also, if your general actions benefit people, they'll gradually stop opposing you, so they'll start choosing better interpretations; the same speech is more or less controversial when it's spoken from different people,

* If someone asks you a question and you don't respond, they're not going to forget the whole scenario, they're going to imagine your response based on their existing perception of you. Even if truthfully answering the question lowers their perception of you, if lying or not answering lowers it more, it's the correct choice.

** At minimum, I believe most people would allow any group happiness, if it didn't affect them, said group wasn't hurting another group, and doing so meant they themselves were better off. If most people believe liberal politicians will help their quality-of-life more than conservatives, I don't think they care about social issues; but vice versa is also true, most people won't protect victim's rights if they believe they must non-negligibly sacrifice QOL to do so.

Indeed, it seems the real work of politics is convincing someone that what they want is different from what they currently want.

I don't see how that contradicts what the author is saying?

More abundant housing would be better for society in general, in the long term. But it's definitely true that less abundant housing can be financially superior for existing landowners right now, I don't think anybody really disputes that.

>Politicians are beholden to the members of their district

In a perfect world with informed voters this would be the case. It is not. In America, you can get away with literally killing your constituents as long as you have the right party affiliation next to your name.

> real estate prices aren't rental rates

Sure, but they are heavily correlated. Price changes in real estate are reflected in rental rates (not 1 to 1, but still reflected)

Also, many of those renters in each politician’s district would like to purchase a home in the same district if the prices came down enough, so the politicians should (in theory) be beholden to their interests, too.

Of course, in reality, real estate owners are a much more powerful (per capita) political force than renters are, so politicians are not automatically catering to the larger majority of their constituents that are not real estate owners.

So the simple answer here seems to be removing our focus from satisfying property owners, no? It's okay to abandon a system when it no longer works for the community. Constituents having to move to capture the improvement in pricing is not the ideal outcome, the ideal outcome is protecting constituents and meeting them where they are. In the worst case scenario, constituents might end up homeless rather than stable in another district where prices are lower, whereas land owners might see the line on a chart go down if the value of their real estate drops. I am much more inclined to help the constituents...

> Since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as perceived by voters)

Wrong!!

Please get this right, because telling people they need to loose wealth to fix society is a horrible place to be in.

They own the land and the land will appreciate in value (unless your house as a shit location, but then you area poor-ass republican anyways, statistically speaking).

This is the great positive some outcome:

- Housing unit costs go down

- Land values go up

So long as it is economical to density by a greater ratio than the ratio land prices grow by, this works out.

We live in a nation where grown-up children systematically are, in a way, turned into economic refugees fleeing the high-cost areas where they were born and their parents live. There are lots of people that care deeply about promoting housing abundance, more than enough to be a political force.

The real problem is-- this is a problem of a diffuse absence. There is, generally, no simple focused location to complain about, and the problem does not lend itself to a roll-up-our-sleeves-and-spend-some-money solution. Those are called "housing projects" and they are a tool of last resort.

In addition, this is a failed policy built on the shoulders of a failed transportation policy. Government is stuck on the developmental cul-de-sac of rubber tires and individual vehicles, and the housing crisis is intrinsically linked to this. The modern generation has demonstrated no profoundly increased enthusiasm for investment in mass transit, and instead prefer unproven technology fixes always just beyond the horizon.

Given that I'm not trying to sell my house, its market value is meaningless to me. Meanwhile, that house is in the midst of an growing group of increasingly desperate people. Desperation has very real consequences for the people living nearby.

The effect you're describing is not nothing, but I think you're overstating it. I'd rather see the homeless housed than see my property value go up by another 10k. It would be worth more in that case, market evaluation be damned.

The problem is the "pulling up the ladder" phenomena which seems to plague the US. My ancestors were allowed to come here and that was good but it would be better for me today if we stopped letting people come to the US. My house was affordable for me but it would be better for my wealth if housing in my neighborhood became unaffordable. In California Prop 13 limits taxes of long time property holders and businesses at the expense of new entrants.

That thinking works if you don't feel any obligation to the future or society, which has been the direction of US consumer / libertarian culture for decades. The impacts are obvious. The public school I went to now has to bus students in from different neighborhoods because the housing is so expensive few young families can afford to live their. It's become for wealthy people aging in place and people all over the US and the world investing in real estate.

It's also a culture of fear, for the young and the old. People are scared and they worry, but they are blind to how much they really have. For the young they worry about not being able to afford a car and a house in their thirties. This was never really possible for everyone, and when it was the houses and the cars were so much less than we would consider normal today. It's a feeling that the present that you know well isn't as good as a rose colored past.

Tie minimum wage to the cost of housing on a per city or per zip code basis. When the middle class and wealthy are negatively impacted by their restaurants, grocery stores, etc becoming expensive (or shutting down) due to labor costs then they will relent. "I hate more housing, but I love to eat affordably." Connect labor prices to the cost of assets in some meaningful way.

I personally think people should not work for a wage less than they need to buy the crappiest home in their town which would negate this need, but the lower-classes haven't developed enough self-esteem or entitlement for that.

I think there's approximately 0 voters that are NIMBY because they want to prop up their housing values by restricting supply. They are NIMBY because they like the way things are where they live and want them to stay the same.

This is basically what owners and politicians think and act on, but ignores the fact that in many cases renters are already the people that make up their district, because the gulf between owning and renting is so vast, and nearly every owner subsidizes their mortgage or property taxes by renting their basement or something.

In my neighborhood, I'm quite sure that the overwhelming majority of the population are either renters and owner's kids. The minority have control over their shelter, many of those aren't even shy about asking for cash to dodge taxes while collecting pensions and old age security, and it's disgusting. Renters make up a significant enough voting segment, but no matter what we're voting for people who actively try to screw us in order to create more wealth for the wealthy.

It's more common than not in my social circle that anyone under the age of 40 is renting from an individual who owns a house on the comically, needlessly large plots that make up the neighborhood.

Change won't come from inside a district that's already comfortable... It has to come from broader coalitions that push past local veto points.

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I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, the polling says that members of every district are substantially more pro-housing than politicians believe they are. That's one of the points that I'm trying to make in this article: people in your district will reward pro-housing work and economic growth more than incubants believe they will.

On the other hand, 80% of the work we do at YIMBY Action is organizing visible constituencies in districts to incentivize politicians taking pro-housing positions. The phrase I always say is "politicians get to the heads of parades; we are building a parade."

And on a third hand, I do think we can build an ever-bigger parade by getting people who think they benefit from the status quo to realize they don't actually. Small businesses benefit from housing. Suburbanites complain that teachers can't afford to live in the school district and they're loosing people. etc etc etc. I think those arguments are permeating and softening a lot of housing-resistant districts.

I think you're right. There's another thing, too, where the opposition is unable to provide a coherence that speaks to the pervasive sense of 'wrong' and provide stability in identity that you mention.

Indeed, their idea of being coherent is not only maintaining the status quo that enables those two things, but doubling down. When challenged, they nest in the politics that the Republicans once espoused and have left behind, than realizing that there's a reason those messages and values have shifted by the maga right's successes. It should come as no wonder then that they lose ground year after year from desperate people looking for comfort from the political class.

(author)

Personally, I believe that the pervasive sense that things have gone wrong is an effect of feeling economically stunted. I think it feels spiritual, but it's got a specific and direct economic cause: When the next generation is doing worse economically than the previous one, people have all kinds of dark psychological and political responses. Responses that are self-defeating and irrational.

What I'm worried about is that we won't have time (or political will) to fix the economic problem before the resulting irrational reaction blows shit up.

Unfortunately, we have one party that wants the government to get some stuff done but doesn't really care about how much it costs, and another party that cares about costs but doesn't really want the government to get stuff done. So we end up either getting things done for an exorbitant price, or not getting anything done.

It seems that the author is arguing for specific government policies they consider smarter than current government policies.

> It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad".

With respect, perhaps you are trying to fit the article into a pre-existing worldview that divides political positions into pro-big-government and anti-big-government? At least, I have heard people espouse this perspective before and it always struck me as odd -- do you think there is a correlation between the size of a government and its quality?

There exist well-run countries with higher levels of government spending (e.g. Scandinavian countries) and lower levels of government spending (e.g. Switzerland, Singapore).

And there exist poorly-run countries with higher government spending (Greece, Brazil) and lower government spending (Hati, Somalia).

Similarly, some large companies are run well and others poorly, and some small companies are run well and others poorly. Scale confers advantages and disadvantages but doesn't seem inherently bad.

The basic thesis is that big government is bad when the gears are gummed by excessive participation/procedure, but good when it provides fast grants to pressing issues.

Well said.

With that said, a substantial part of that is that every major city in the US has spent decades underbuilding housing, so the smaller homes that urban seniors might otherwise want to downsize to are in very short supply in the first place.

I'm not sure if democracy has the tools to adequately deal with this tbh, at-least in the short-to-medium term.

I really hope we can find a way to make voters actually believe an abundant future is possible, and that it'll benefit them and their families.

It's the biggest difference I see in societies like China, there's this pervasive optimism about technology, progress and abundance (~700 million people have first hand experience). No idea if they can keep up the growth but we sure won't.

I think this is closer to hitting the truth.

I'll add... I think idealizing single family housing as the default, over generational family housing (mostly as a response to industrialization wanting worker movement, and the advent of automobiles) is going to eventually be seen as an unforgivable mistake.

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same

This is partly why we need to embrace a comprehensive land value tax without exception.

The sheer amount of regulations is an incredibly tangled mess. For housing, for example, typically every city has its own standards, so your talking thousands of different sets of standards. They usually won't be all that different from the next city over, but nevertheless they're functionally separate, you can't directly change the whole state or country at once.

You can get state laws that push cities to change, of course, and the feds can incentivize change through requirements for funding/grants, but overall there's just a lot of momentum behind the existing web of regulation.

I mean, no, not at all. BBB was a massive tax-and-spend proposal that included all kinds of cost-inflationary stuff; it was not focused on cutting red tape and increasing the supply of housing / energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan#Vision

It was exactly the kind of "everything bagel liberalism" that abundance/yimby types malign.

It's been something like a century since the US had unrestricted immigration.

long time = never gonna happen OR world war happens

Overturning Citizens United would do very little for housing in the US, because the housing crisis is the result of every major US city simultaneously but individually punching themselves in the face with zoning and regulations. The only way out of that is to motivate people to act at the local level.

100% agree. The only way to enact any meaningful change is to put the power back in the hands of the people, especially given the US's insane, borderline anti-democratic, 2 party political system. Both sides are effectively completely captured by the wealthy elites and entirely beholden to their corporate / wealthy donors, lobbyists and PACs.

Its why neither the Democrats nor Republicans really ever make any significant, meaningful changes that would materially improve the lives of working class people in big ways.

Neither party really represents the working class, and they'll never do anything to restrict the power or reduce the wealth of the rich folks they actually work for, so until corporate (Wealthy elite) money is purged from politics, it's just going to be more of the same for the foreseeable future.

I can't agree with this. I've also lived in SF for the last 30 years and by my lights a simpler, more effective policy would be to roll up the red carpet that was rolled out to tech companies. I don't consider the problem to be one of inadequate supply. I consider the problem to be one of excessive demand from one class of higher-compensation workers more-insulated from market forces (tech workers) out-competing another class of lower-compensation workers less-insulated from market forces (everyone else).

That’s a good idea to automatically upzone to double the sqft and units of neighbors (and height too). The previous BoS president, Aaron Peskin, had the opposite idea: he proposed an ordinance that apartments should be capped at the 1× the average sqft of the neighbors within 300 ft (https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3781286...). Fortunately, that ordinance did not pass, but it gives you an idea of the nonsense that he promoted: scarcity in the name of affordability.

Reminiscent of laws a couple decades ago which intended to make cars more fuel efficient; a loophole / exclusion for SUVs led to a paradigm shift (upwards) in vehicle size.

When examining any given political outcome, your first question should always be "how does this benefit people with large amounts of money", because that's why most of the things in our society actually happen -- particularly the persistent structural flaws.

It can be absolutely true that CEQA was passed by sincere environmentalists. But it can also be true that the beneficiaries are wealthy property owners. If this law produced really bad outcomes for those people, it would already be gone/reformed. But it makes most property more valuable, so that doesn't happen.

Anyway, I'm offering this because loads of people think this is some kind of left/right "process" dynamic that they can fix, when in fact if you fix the process dynamic those same people will find another way to fight you. And that's ok! It's possible to win! Just don't confuse yourself that this is some accidental screwup that you can easily fix, like a downed tree blocking the street.

Yeah, the entire result of NEPA/CEQA/SEPA legislation is mandated process rather than any specific environmental goals or regulation. They should be scrapped and replaced with specific goals and/or a government regulatory authority (like the EPA).

It's not a crazy theory but I wouldn't ascribe consciousness to it. It's probably more of an accident. It echoes the fact that 0% unemployment is also bad, because then no one would be available to take jobs, and all jobs would have to poach, massively increasing costs and crippling the economy. Of course no politician would ever run on a platform of, "make more people unemployed!" We are seeing some of the consequences of abundance now with the FIRE movement. Many people in the U.S. are able to retire early. That's great for them, but a society with too few people working quickly runs in to labour issues.

My pet theory on this revolves around the G. Michael Hopf quote: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times". When society is too comfortable and the average person experiences too few challenges, they become weak. Physically but particularly mentally. They lose touch with those truly in need. They even begin to secretly despise them. They adopt bourgeoise values and policies which are quite detrimental to society but feel good to declare. Toxic empathy is associated with this. People end up voting for bad policies which lead to worse times. Human societies appear to like to repeat this cycle.

>Just a theory,

As far as I'm concerned it's (almost) fact. Like the other person who respond to your post, there is also an accidental aspect to it.

> I have a theory that echoes the surprising premise of the well known HN-famous article "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" that states "The optimum amount of poverty, to governments, is not zero."

> It seems to me that if governments deliver too well for their citizens, if the citizens because too wealthy, if they are too well off, then they will begin to demand even more.

The more fundamental question is: what is poverty? 100 years ago the answer would be very different to today. The definition of poverty itself is what keeps poverty alive, as it continues to increase to keep up with new products and services that are available.

Wild that you're getting downvoted. I agree with you. Housing affordability is a wealth inequality problem.

I suspect fear of change is a big part of it, people choose where they want to live then want it to stay exactly like that forever.

Another big part is people not wanting the poors in their neighborhood. The more exclusive it is, the better.

> A popular view in the YIMBY community is that restrictive zoning and other policies that limit housing are pushed by homeowners who are benefitting from a housing shortage, in some kind of long-range Machiavellian conspiracy to alter macroeconomics in their favor. But this doesn't really hold up when you think about it.

> Restrictions on housing expansion are generally very local, with projects being blocked on the municipal level, or on the neighborhood level. But actually, more housing in a neighborhood would tend to benefit homeowners there.

I think that "restrictive zoning ... [is] pushed by homeowners" and "actually, more housing in a neighborhood would tend to benefit homeowners there" can both be true. Arguing that someone would be acting counter to their interests by supporting a policy doesn't mean that they don't support it!

I agree that the motivating issue at the very local level is probably less finances and more the impact of having more housing: aesthetics, parking impacts, noise, increased crowding for local resources (parks/schools/libraries/etc), not wanting lower income people in your neighborhood*, etc.

But it should be noted that while what you say about land is probably true, many landowners are also landlords, and it benefits them for the rent to be higher.

* Yes, this one is real. I've even seen people here fully admit to it, though it makes you look rather classist and unreasonable, so most people aren't gonna say it out loud.

> As the neighborhood becomes denser, rents might go down, but land values will go up, since a given piece of land can now be used to build a more profitable apartment building.

You're taking about the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, as they are, to be replaced with something else. The land value might go up, but the existing house value goes down, especially halfway through such a project. It's one thing if you're replacing low density multitenant buildings with higher-density ones, but it's a totally different story if you're replacing detached, single family homes. Usually the latter only happens after a decade or 3 of neglected, low value homes.

Higher density brings pluses and minuses.. more businesses, transit and other services, but also more traffic, crime, noise, etc.

It’s harder to do in a Western world. For example say that it’s cheaper to live in Indiana. The cost of moving from Texas, if you do it yourself, is about $4k. For many people that is considered too expensive. As a result they stay in place, which causes them to mentally collapse into anxiety or depression.

Another issue is the trend of return to office. There were people who moved to less expensive locations. They are now being required to come into the office. One guy with whom I work is spending about $1k a month on gas to do this. So now he is effectively losing $12k per year to keep his job. If he moves, he loses his lifestyle and his 3% mortgage. This puts him in a tight spot.

>People and businesses move to lower cost areas

Zoning/taxation/setting up business laws prevent an easy move.

Let’s do the exact same thing we just did when we lost. Surely that’s going to work.

Abundance is the new buzzword after the campaign of “brat” and “joy”.

I hope people will see through this crap and demand better. This website isn’t leaving a good impression with the credulity displayed in the comments. Luckily it’s far from the mainstream.

A heliocentric model isn't necessary for solar eclipse explanation.

"The moon and the sun revolve around the Earth, the moon is closer, and sometimes it is interposed between the sun and the Earth" is a story that works if the coordinate frame is Earth-centric or sun-centric.

(I know this wasn't the point of this comment, but identifying the problem while missing key details that end up mattering in the long run is, arguably, where Leninism falls down as effective political philosophy, so it seemed relevant. Lenin identified the problem of class consolidation, but attempts to reconcile it just moved the class barriers around instead of breaking them).

Nah, this is definitely still solvable. Specifically looking at housing for example, I believe Austin and Minneapolis have seen some good progress.

Your rhetoric sounds like the doomerism I constantly heard around 2009 during the great recession, ala "THIS time capitalism's done for good! No coming back from this one!" And then after a few years things largely went back to normal and the doomers pretended they'd never made any predictions, that would require them to actually introspect, you see.

Hmm yeah this article rubbed me weird, like why can't rich investors just snap up any amount of new housing? Article didn't mention "affordable housing" once.

You'll get at least one up-vote from me. Meanwhile, "time is a flat circle" and "all of this has happened before."

"Overly restrictive rules (zoning) and elaborate process (permitting and planning) create chronic shortages driving prices higher and creating an angry populace. That’s the TLDR thesis of a lot of the abundance books.

This is just the same concern-trolling anti-government neoliberalism that's been "eating state capacity" since at least the 1970s.

>I have a hard time wrapping my head around this statement ... Then why is it suddenly different when it comes to government.

Indeed. I think the media and Democrats are slowly figuring out that screaming about layoffs of federal employees as incipient fascism, tyranny, authoritarianism, etc. just doesn't outrage non-government workers who are quite familiar with the concept of you and everyone else in your office/department/division/company abruptly losing your job.