The *beautiful loner* fantasy is never borne out in human experience, our evolutionary advantage is expressed in our innate sociability. Thus, people like living in communities and these always have rules so neighbors know where they stand. So the argument is always about how we reform the rules when they cease to work for too many. This is the principle of the Abundance Project.
You are picturing dense housing being built. My more salient concern would be a slaughterhouse or granite mine being built next door. I am fine with both of these being in my exurban community, but there is a reason they are generally located away from other land use.
The CCP in China is kinda like this...Finishing my doctorate in Hangzhou in 2014, the 22-story building my hotel housed, also had luxury and bare-bones economy residential apartments, various offices, a bit of light industry--and practically zero parking, that was cornered by the ultra-rich because they could afford it. Every day was pandemonium in/around that building.
So overly centralized state control can get messy.
you could manage this without zoning. granite mines or slaughterhouses are undesirable because of the negative externalities they produce: noise, odor, dust, etc. if affected landowners have a right to collect fair compensation for those externalities, then the cost of setting up a slaughterhouse in a residential neighborhood would be prohibitive
People are not very free to form Homeowners associations . Post development homeowner associations are very hard to form. In California they require almost unanimous consent from the residents in a given area.
Perhaps you think they should be decided by a majority vote? But what is that but another form of government control ?
There's a difference between broad rules that promote health and safety -- separating industrial activity from residential / commercial areas, where random people live and congregate -- and fiddly regulations on exactly what kind of residential building you can build. There's no legitimate public purpose for the latter.
We developed things like public sanitation, basic safety standards, funding for parks, and so on, all without fine-grained zoning that told you how tall your house could be. The current regime of extremely-restrictive zoning -- blocking the natural, gradual change that human settlements experienced for thousands of years -- is a modern experiment since the 1940s, and it's a complete failure.
No, zoning was invented in Berkeley after the Euclid decision made it illegal to explicitly ban certain races from living in certain areas, to try to keep Those People from coming into Our Nice Neighborhoods.
_Most_ of our methods of financing and regulating real estate were developed over the first half of the twentieth century, with conscious intent to support segregation.
I'm a District Councillor in the south of England. I've also only recently (4 years ago) been able to afford a house, having lived with my parents throughout my thirties. So I think I've seen both sides of the NIMBY / YIMBY debate and am convinced that both sides get some of it right, and some of it wrong.
But I also have a very frustrating experience relating to local plan making. I don't know if you're familiar with Neighbourhood Plans in the UK? Essentially, when they were introduced the idea was that the government would set an (ambitious) housing target and if local communities positively planned to meet that need, they'd have more control over where and how it was delivered. The idea was introduced by the Coalition Government 2010-2015. Unfortunately since then the government has stopped bothering to support the process, so now Neighbourhood Plans are too difficult to make / too easily challenged by developers and we're back to unplanned development even where you have communities willing to accept new housing in return for more control over how it comes forward.
To give you one very good example of the stupidity of the situation: I was heavily involved with the creation of the village of Southbourne, West Sussex's first, second and third Neighbourhood Plans. The first planned for (and delivered) 350 new homes. The second planned for an additional 1250 new homes (which would have doubled the size of the village). The Planning Inspectorate threw the Plan out because it proposed too much housing. (The target had been agreed by the District council but the District Council had been unable to complete it's own Local Plan meaning the target wasn't considered valid.) By the time the District's Local Plan was completed three years later, close to two thirds of the target (which was eventually confirmed) has been permitted on appeal - but without the the area-wide planning and infrastructure delivery that would have been achieved had the community's Neighbourhood Plan been allowed to be adopted. That includes planning approval for 9 houses in a site which blocks road access to a field that the community intended to allocate for the delivery of hundreds of houses. Most of the permitted housing is not actually being built because of market conditions.
So the community has the worst of all worlds: insufficient new housing being built to help bring down prices, piecemeal rather than masterplanned delivery of new housing, many years' work on a positive planning document down the drain, an even more antagonistic relationship with developers and even less trust in local government to oversee development that will bring benefits to the community.
Arlington resident here. You should read up on what happened when the board moved to end single family zoning county wide.
It was largely consistent with your hypothesis: ferocious opposition by a minority, who, in addition to opposing the change itself, felt that the implicit bargain about density had been betrayed.
There’s been a long battle in the courts that’s expected to continue.
"Land readjustment illustrates a general rule of political economy: it is possible to build legitimacy for massive changes, including demolishing many people’s homes and dramatically changing the character of an area, IF THE BENEFITS OF DOING SO ARE SHARED, and if those most affected are seen to have opted for the change."
That's the problem with much of the YIMBY movement: residents affected might only share the down sides, with the profit going to developers and a few larger landowners that depart. It doesn't have to be monetary downsides: it could be character of the neighborhood changes.
I benefitted from a rezoning in Arlington, MA that allowed two houses to be built on each existing lot. We were close to the last on the street to take advantage of this, and when we sold after 27 years, we made a solid profit. The contractor bought our house simply for the land, knocked down our 115 year old house and built two new ones in its place.
As someone who lives in Houston, it's not a great example. We make it very easy to build and always have, which is a big part of our culture. Very few places are like that. In California and most other places local governments respond to NIMBYs because and have practices that favor them, i.e., member deference. Many cities with a history of growth in the early 20th century have big bureaucracies and have been putting up red tape for decades. Local governments aren't going to unwind that. State governments have to be the ones leading. I wish other cities would look to Houston, but it's a big outlier even in Texas.
“Maybe we should just let them.” This is one of the problems with left-leaning thinking: “let them”? Who is “we” and what right do “we” have to let “them” do something? This is why I’m so suspicious of the Democratic Party. It decided that it would “let me” do things instead of trying to persuade me to join them, as if they owned me or I was a child that needed to be told what to do. All the charts in the world can’t obscure the underlying condescension of telling people what you’re going to allow them to do.
It might be worthwhile to ask why there would be a housing shortage in Arlington when there were enough homes there to house more people five years ago. Also while NoVa population overall is down, not up. It seems like a really strange example.
Noah discussed Arlington rather than Fairfax, but the same principle applies. If your population is shrinking, and you have 10k more people moving out than moving in, which is the case for Fairfax, presumably those people are leaving vacancies behind.
This suggests issues other than simple lack of housing stock are in play.
Noah, I am gifting you Jonah Goldberg’s latest G-File. I am positive you’ll identify with it.
As to the above, if you were to build more housing in any city, the ones you’d want to renovate would be run-down downtowns where everyone has fled for whatever reason. At the same time, you’d have to build the restaurants and affiliated businesses that support humans. in other words, not just an apartment building, but everything else.
Perhaps YIMBY proponents could sway more people if they stressed the environmental benefits. Conservatives and moderates make it all about empowering developers. No wonder some liberals are suspicious.
You ...But government doesn't need to have anything at all to do with that People are free to form homeowners associations on their own
Ie private agreements with other homeowners.
Me... People are not very free to form Homeowners associations . Post development homeowner associations are very hard to form. In California they require almost unanimous consent from the residents in a given area.
Perhaps you think they should be decided by a majority vote? But what is that but another form of government control ?
I would add that in addition that this solution works because:
1) it is relatively easy for people to move with metro areas, so one neighborhood that allows significantly greater will quickly attract relocators who want to live in that type of neighborhood ( and vice versa), so it becomes a self-sustaining process.
2) rapid expansion in housing in one neighborhood will help keep housing and rental prices lower across the entire metro (assuming that the scale of building is large enough).
Japan and France are not relevant to the discussion because they have homogenous populations (In France until recently) without the American phobias of race, income and crime. Houston and Arlington are growing communities. What you are suggesting to win approval of the homeowners leads to a more economically segregated community but granted maybe less so than if no housing was being built. I don't know but would guess that the homeowners in these cities welcome the new ratables to the tax base if the new housing is being built "over there". In cities with less or no growth there is a strong tendency to want to protect what they have. The economics of building housing in these cities requires the housing to be built in market attractive locations that are not "over there" but are next door (exception being instances where former industrial sites have been turned into new housing communities). As a footnote I would point to a time in NYC when the Board of Estimate controlled land use rather than the city council (changed in 1989 after a supreme court ruling of one person one vote). MUCH MUCH easier to gain approval of developments that benefited the city as a whole. The three city wide electeds had six votes with one vote for each of the five borough presidents. A borough president could vote no and win politically but the development would move ahead with the votes of the citywide officials in favor. Oh, if we still had that today.
I like the idea of 'sharing the proceeds of the redevelopment evenly'. A technical question about Japan: How does that work, exactly? A political question about the US: How does that work, exactly?
What if we built more housing where currently nobody lives? Imagine areas of your grid with no dots. Why is this, the most obvious idea, always last on the list?
Tax areas that want local control to pay for transit/roads to the new areas.
We don't build houses where no one wants to live, because no one wants to live there.
The problem that we are trying to solve is people want to live in cities, but the locals prevent new housing. This benefits the few (current owners) at the expense of the many (would be owners).
But most people don’t actually live in cities, and, given the option to work remote, most don’t want to. About 50% suburban, 30% urban, 20% rural, IIRC.
Population in dense areas is still down from pre-pandemic.
My point is, that is not true. Many, many small cities, towns, exurbs, and rural areas are very welcoming to new people. That’s why they have been having an influx.
“In 2023, many people continued to move out of Northern Virginia, a trend seen in other big metro areas across the country. Many of these people stayed in Virginia, moving to smaller cities and counties nearby. Migration from Northern Virginia helped the Winchester Metro Area become Virginia’s fastest growing metro area, with its population increasing at nearly five times the rate of Virginia as a whole. It also contributed to Richmond Metro Area’s greatest influx of new residents in its history. The four fastest growing counties in Virginia so far this decade—New Kent, Goochland, Louisa, and Caroline—were all in or adjacent to the Richmond Metro Area.”
FYI, all four counties mentioned are rural exurban counties.
A whole lot do, particularly the kind of white collar jobs prevalent in high cost cities.
And as we’ve seen in Goochland, New Kent, Louisa, and Caroline, the presence of remote workers tends to create many new local jobs in the communities where those remote workers settle.
can you explain what policy lever you have in mind? if places are already welcoming to new people then what do we need to do to make it easier to live there?
How about we divide your grid up even further, so each square has one dot in it?
The localest possible control is to let people do what they want with their own land.
Haha I meant to put in that analogy, and forgot.
The *beautiful loner* fantasy is never borne out in human experience, our evolutionary advantage is expressed in our innate sociability. Thus, people like living in communities and these always have rules so neighbors know where they stand. So the argument is always about how we reform the rules when they cease to work for too many. This is the principle of the Abundance Project.
But government doesn't need to have anything at all to do with that
People are free to form homeowners associations on their own
Ie private agreements with other homeowners
Generally speaking, some zoning is a good thing.
You are picturing dense housing being built. My more salient concern would be a slaughterhouse or granite mine being built next door. I am fine with both of these being in my exurban community, but there is a reason they are generally located away from other land use.
The CCP in China is kinda like this...Finishing my doctorate in Hangzhou in 2014, the 22-story building my hotel housed, also had luxury and bare-bones economy residential apartments, various offices, a bit of light industry--and practically zero parking, that was cornered by the ultra-rich because they could afford it. Every day was pandemonium in/around that building.
So overly centralized state control can get messy.
That's not zoning, that's health and safety code.
In Virginia, which includes the DC suburbs such as Arlington that Noah mentioned, it’s determined by local zoning.
you could manage this without zoning. granite mines or slaughterhouses are undesirable because of the negative externalities they produce: noise, odor, dust, etc. if affected landowners have a right to collect fair compensation for those externalities, then the cost of setting up a slaughterhouse in a residential neighborhood would be prohibitive
HOAs are imposed by the original developer. And they ARE a level of government.
Mattew, that's a distinction without a difference, no?
The point is that the rules are set communally.
Yes, but one uses the police power of the state
Any durable set of communal rules, by necessity, has a code of enforcement.
Zoning is people using the police power of the state to prevent other people from doing what they want with their own property
This is very different from a homeowner's.Association where people get together and decide as a group not to do something
People are not very free to form Homeowners associations . Post development homeowner associations are very hard to form. In California they require almost unanimous consent from the residents in a given area.
Perhaps you think they should be decided by a majority vote? But what is that but another form of government control ?
There's a difference between broad rules that promote health and safety -- separating industrial activity from residential / commercial areas, where random people live and congregate -- and fiddly regulations on exactly what kind of residential building you can build. There's no legitimate public purpose for the latter.
We developed things like public sanitation, basic safety standards, funding for parks, and so on, all without fine-grained zoning that told you how tall your house could be. The current regime of extremely-restrictive zoning -- blocking the natural, gradual change that human settlements experienced for thousands of years -- is a modern experiment since the 1940s, and it's a complete failure.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
The broad rules are also set by zoning. Extremely restrictive zoning is a local phenomenon, not a universal constant.
This is precisely how the need for zoning came about!
No, zoning was invented in Berkeley after the Euclid decision made it illegal to explicitly ban certain races from living in certain areas, to try to keep Those People from coming into Our Nice Neighborhoods.
https://pacificlegal.org/real-estate-issues-americas-sordid-history-of-exclusionary-zoning/
https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines
_Most_ of our methods of financing and regulating real estate were developed over the first half of the twentieth century, with conscious intent to support segregation.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/
See also how Boston Brahmins talked about triple deckers, which are now considered charming and historic.
https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/rise-fall-rebirth-new-england-triple-decker/
Finely-grained zoning has _always_ been about excluding undesirables.
Zoning was invented in Germany in the 1800s around land use, not the US for city development.
Our crisis level lack of affordable housing at the same time we actively pursue foreign immigration is an issue that feeds nativist populism.
And so there is a fundamental principle of social cohesion and stability at stake
We desperately need to promote innovative YIMBYism.
I'm encouraged Noah and other abundance thinkers are on the case.
I'm a District Councillor in the south of England. I've also only recently (4 years ago) been able to afford a house, having lived with my parents throughout my thirties. So I think I've seen both sides of the NIMBY / YIMBY debate and am convinced that both sides get some of it right, and some of it wrong.
But I also have a very frustrating experience relating to local plan making. I don't know if you're familiar with Neighbourhood Plans in the UK? Essentially, when they were introduced the idea was that the government would set an (ambitious) housing target and if local communities positively planned to meet that need, they'd have more control over where and how it was delivered. The idea was introduced by the Coalition Government 2010-2015. Unfortunately since then the government has stopped bothering to support the process, so now Neighbourhood Plans are too difficult to make / too easily challenged by developers and we're back to unplanned development even where you have communities willing to accept new housing in return for more control over how it comes forward.
To give you one very good example of the stupidity of the situation: I was heavily involved with the creation of the village of Southbourne, West Sussex's first, second and third Neighbourhood Plans. The first planned for (and delivered) 350 new homes. The second planned for an additional 1250 new homes (which would have doubled the size of the village). The Planning Inspectorate threw the Plan out because it proposed too much housing. (The target had been agreed by the District council but the District Council had been unable to complete it's own Local Plan meaning the target wasn't considered valid.) By the time the District's Local Plan was completed three years later, close to two thirds of the target (which was eventually confirmed) has been permitted on appeal - but without the the area-wide planning and infrastructure delivery that would have been achieved had the community's Neighbourhood Plan been allowed to be adopted. That includes planning approval for 9 houses in a site which blocks road access to a field that the community intended to allocate for the delivery of hundreds of houses. Most of the permitted housing is not actually being built because of market conditions.
So the community has the worst of all worlds: insufficient new housing being built to help bring down prices, piecemeal rather than masterplanned delivery of new housing, many years' work on a positive planning document down the drain, an even more antagonistic relationship with developers and even less trust in local government to oversee development that will bring benefits to the community.
Arlington resident here. You should read up on what happened when the board moved to end single family zoning county wide.
It was largely consistent with your hypothesis: ferocious opposition by a minority, who, in addition to opposing the change itself, felt that the implicit bargain about density had been betrayed.
There’s been a long battle in the courts that’s expected to continue.
"Land readjustment illustrates a general rule of political economy: it is possible to build legitimacy for massive changes, including demolishing many people’s homes and dramatically changing the character of an area, IF THE BENEFITS OF DOING SO ARE SHARED, and if those most affected are seen to have opted for the change."
That's the problem with much of the YIMBY movement: residents affected might only share the down sides, with the profit going to developers and a few larger landowners that depart. It doesn't have to be monetary downsides: it could be character of the neighborhood changes.
I benefitted from a rezoning in Arlington, MA that allowed two houses to be built on each existing lot. We were close to the last on the street to take advantage of this, and when we sold after 27 years, we made a solid profit. The contractor bought our house simply for the land, knocked down our 115 year old house and built two new ones in its place.
As someone who lives in Houston, it's not a great example. We make it very easy to build and always have, which is a big part of our culture. Very few places are like that. In California and most other places local governments respond to NIMBYs because and have practices that favor them, i.e., member deference. Many cities with a history of growth in the early 20th century have big bureaucracies and have been putting up red tape for decades. Local governments aren't going to unwind that. State governments have to be the ones leading. I wish other cities would look to Houston, but it's a big outlier even in Texas.
“Maybe we should just let them.” This is one of the problems with left-leaning thinking: “let them”? Who is “we” and what right do “we” have to let “them” do something? This is why I’m so suspicious of the Democratic Party. It decided that it would “let me” do things instead of trying to persuade me to join them, as if they owned me or I was a child that needed to be told what to do. All the charts in the world can’t obscure the underlying condescension of telling people what you’re going to allow them to do.
Those people shouldn't have needed to ask permission in the first place
Arlington’s current population is lower than it was in 2020. Like most of Northern Virginia, it experienced a big drop in population following the widespread availability of remote work during the pandemic, with many people moving to rural and exurban parts of the state. It has rebounded somewhat but is not back to 2020 levels. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/amid-slow-population-growth-virginias-demographic-landscape-being-transformed
The drop in NoVa population is big enough that the state has been investigating the potential impact on tax revenues. See https://cardinalnews.org/2024/09/04/northern-virginia-is-losing-population-why-thats-a-problem-for-the-whole-state/
It might be worthwhile to ask why there would be a housing shortage in Arlington when there were enough homes there to house more people five years ago. Also while NoVa population overall is down, not up. It seems like a really strange example.
The population decline in Fairfax county cited in your source is <1%, so not likely to have a meaningful impact on the housing market.
Noah discussed Arlington rather than Fairfax, but the same principle applies. If your population is shrinking, and you have 10k more people moving out than moving in, which is the case for Fairfax, presumably those people are leaving vacancies behind.
This suggests issues other than simple lack of housing stock are in play.
Noah, I am gifting you Jonah Goldberg’s latest G-File. I am positive you’ll identify with it.
As to the above, if you were to build more housing in any city, the ones you’d want to renovate would be run-down downtowns where everyone has fled for whatever reason. At the same time, you’d have to build the restaurants and affiliated businesses that support humans. in other words, not just an apartment building, but everything else.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/writing-donald-trump-politics-repetition/
Perhaps YIMBY proponents could sway more people if they stressed the environmental benefits. Conservatives and moderates make it all about empowering developers. No wonder some liberals are suspicious.
No it's about empowering people to do what they want with their own property
No. It empowers some people to force me to do what they want me to do with my property.
How so?
Who is forcing you to turn your house into apartments?
you don’t seem to know what a homeowners association does.
They can force me not to turn my house into apartments. That's how so.
I think you do understand but are just playing rhetorical games.
Except you voluntarily joined.
you moved the goal posts to get here...
You ...But government doesn't need to have anything at all to do with that People are free to form homeowners associations on their own
Ie private agreements with other homeowners.
Me... People are not very free to form Homeowners associations . Post development homeowner associations are very hard to form. In California they require almost unanimous consent from the residents in a given area.
Perhaps you think they should be decided by a majority vote? But what is that but another form of government control ?
Great article.
I would add that in addition that this solution works because:
1) it is relatively easy for people to move with metro areas, so one neighborhood that allows significantly greater will quickly attract relocators who want to live in that type of neighborhood ( and vice versa), so it becomes a self-sustaining process.
2) rapid expansion in housing in one neighborhood will help keep housing and rental prices lower across the entire metro (assuming that the scale of building is large enough).
Japan and France are not relevant to the discussion because they have homogenous populations (In France until recently) without the American phobias of race, income and crime. Houston and Arlington are growing communities. What you are suggesting to win approval of the homeowners leads to a more economically segregated community but granted maybe less so than if no housing was being built. I don't know but would guess that the homeowners in these cities welcome the new ratables to the tax base if the new housing is being built "over there". In cities with less or no growth there is a strong tendency to want to protect what they have. The economics of building housing in these cities requires the housing to be built in market attractive locations that are not "over there" but are next door (exception being instances where former industrial sites have been turned into new housing communities). As a footnote I would point to a time in NYC when the Board of Estimate controlled land use rather than the city council (changed in 1989 after a supreme court ruling of one person one vote). MUCH MUCH easier to gain approval of developments that benefited the city as a whole. The three city wide electeds had six votes with one vote for each of the five borough presidents. A borough president could vote no and win politically but the development would move ahead with the votes of the citywide officials in favor. Oh, if we still had that today.
I like the idea of 'sharing the proceeds of the redevelopment evenly'. A technical question about Japan: How does that work, exactly? A political question about the US: How does that work, exactly?
What if we built more housing where currently nobody lives? Imagine areas of your grid with no dots. Why is this, the most obvious idea, always last on the list?
Tax areas that want local control to pay for transit/roads to the new areas.
We don't build houses where no one wants to live, because no one wants to live there.
The problem that we are trying to solve is people want to live in cities, but the locals prevent new housing. This benefits the few (current owners) at the expense of the many (would be owners).
But most people don’t actually live in cities, and, given the option to work remote, most don’t want to. About 50% suburban, 30% urban, 20% rural, IIRC.
Population in dense areas is still down from pre-pandemic.
See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/young-adults-fuel-revival-small-towns-rural-areas
“City” isn’t the important part. It’s the same problem whatever word you use. People want to live somewhere but the locals don’t want more people.
My point is, that is not true. Many, many small cities, towns, exurbs, and rural areas are very welcoming to new people. That’s why they have been having an influx.
See for example https://www.coopercenter.org/research/amid-slow-population-growth-virginias-demographic-landscape-being-transformed
“In 2023, many people continued to move out of Northern Virginia, a trend seen in other big metro areas across the country. Many of these people stayed in Virginia, moving to smaller cities and counties nearby. Migration from Northern Virginia helped the Winchester Metro Area become Virginia’s fastest growing metro area, with its population increasing at nearly five times the rate of Virginia as a whole. It also contributed to Richmond Metro Area’s greatest influx of new residents in its history. The four fastest growing counties in Virginia so far this decade—New Kent, Goochland, Louisa, and Caroline—were all in or adjacent to the Richmond Metro Area.”
FYI, all four counties mentioned are rural exurban counties.
This article is about the places that are not welcoming to new people.
So why not make it easier for people to live in the many places that are?
Remote work lets people agglomerate virtually, and those remote workers result in new businesses and jobs in those areas.
A lot of jobs don't work for remote
A whole lot do, particularly the kind of white collar jobs prevalent in high cost cities.
And as we’ve seen in Goochland, New Kent, Louisa, and Caroline, the presence of remote workers tends to create many new local jobs in the communities where those remote workers settle.
can you explain what policy lever you have in mind? if places are already welcoming to new people then what do we need to do to make it easier to live there?