YIMBYs Convinced Democrats

Tcomplete and total victoryFor a niche technocratic movement that is hyper-obsessed with increasing the supply of housing, that’s what the last few weeks have been like in Democratic politics. In recent years, the work-from-home housing boom has pushed housing affordability higher on the national political agenda. And years of advocacy by “yes-in-my-backyard” activists, or YIMBYs, have familiarized politicians with the logic of housing shortages.

Vice President Kamala Harris knows that “if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we have to build more housing and repeal some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it harder to build homes for working people in this country,” as former President Barack Obama declared on the second night of the Democratic National Convention last month.

In her speech two nights later, Harris declared to thunderous applause, “We will end the housing shortage in America.” Her campaign has since focused even more on the issue, launching a “battlefield housing blitz,” complete with dedicated advertising.

That senior members of the Democratic Party believe that America’s housing shortage is driving the affordability crisis should come as no surprise. For the past two decades, the need for more homes has been the closest thing technocrats and pundits have come to a consensus. A range of ideological sources, academic studies, think tank reports, real estate industry analyses, and state legislatures have concluded that rising home prices and rents are the result of a shrinking supply of homes. What Is What is surprising is the willingness of national Democratic politicians to foreground an issue on which Democratic politicians at the state and local level are deeply divided.

Last week, housing advocates hosted a “YIMBYs for Harris” fundraising video conference that featured prominent public officials such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who spoke in favor of Harris focusing her attention on the housing crisis.

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But for a movement accustomed to operating in local town halls and forging bipartisan deals in statehouses, this newfound attention may be unsettling. Alexander Berger, CEO of Open Philanthropy, an early and current pro-housing funder, told me that he was generally encouraged by the convergence of national Democrats on the issue, but he raised one “warning”: the possibility that “the most high-profile Democrats who are raising this issue … will make it a more polarized issue.” In other words, if YIMBYism becomes associated with Harris and other elite Democrats, will state Republican lawmakers be more likely to oppose pro-housing legislation?

As I reported earlier this year, some prominent advocates were relieved when President Joe Biden didn’t take a strong stance on housing policy in his State of the Union address. Similarly, while many housing advocates celebrated on X and other social media platforms during the convention, others worried behind the scenes about the backlash.

Regulation of housing development is usually the responsibility of state and local governments. Although the U.S. government can help with financing, especially for affordable housing, and can use federal dollars to push states to adopt better policies, most experts believe that likely federal interventions to increase housing production are likely to have marginal effects; stronger measures seem politically impossible.

Those who fear that elite Democrats will polarize the issue are misinterpreting the political economy of the housing shortage. The housing affordability crisis is being driven by Democratic-led states and cities. If Democrats in the lower party lines up with Harris and Obama, then elected officials in charge of housing policy in highly restrictive California, New York, and Massachusetts will face enormous pressure to change course. This will have further benefits for the entire country. When people are pushed out of expensive cities like San Francisco and Boston, they move to more affordable markets, which puts upward pressure on prices in those places. But moving to second-choice housing has a major downside: When people are unable to live near the jobs that best suit them, it hurts the entire economy; productivity, GDP growth, and wages suffer.

I also doubt that the greater Republican polarization against housing reform will have any real-world impact. As president, Donald Trump tried to send the message that Democrats want to “destroy the suburbs” after Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey proposed providing subsidies to jurisdictions that updated their zoning to make it easier to build affordable housing. Yet one of the biggest pro-housing success stories was pro-Trump Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte’s list of reforms — the “Montana Miracle” — that passed into law last year.

Yes, some helpful bills could die in the short term, especially in statehouses run by Republicans. But the biggest recent defeat for the pro-housing movement came not at the hands of a Republican but of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who vetoed an ambitious bipartisan housing bill for early-career residents that drew opposition from progressives and conservatives alike. Republicans’ commitments to supporting business and economic growth could lead them down a pro-housing path. Even if Trump or Harris polarize national Republicans against equity-oriented zoning reform, it’s unlikely that rising red states like Texas and Florida will decisively turn away from development and growth, the twin pillars of their political success.

ANDTrump once suggested,People can get tired of winning too often. Movements accustomed to operating in the shadows often stumble when their moment comes. Strategies optimized for persuading legislators in meetings can falter under the pressure of a national election campaign. The most common problem is that winning the battle of ideas online or in the ivory tower doesn’t necessarily translate into progress in achieving results.

By and large, Democrats are comfortable in the world of demand-side politics—that is, providing subsidies so people can afford existing goods or services—but the housing crisis is fundamentally a supply-side problem. By linking housing unaffordability to a housing shortage, Harris undermines arguments that many Democrats on the lower ticket find compelling: that there is no shortage, that new construction is not the answer, that redistributing existing housing would be sufficient.

Harris isn’t turning her back on demand-side policies. One of her most highly touted housing policies is $25,000 in down payment assistance for all qualifying first-time homebuyers (the eligibility criteria have not yet been detailed). Programs like these are popular and seem promising at first glance, but a large expansion of demand-side programs in a supply-constrained market leads to higher prices. One study of low-income housing markets found that landlords were able to charge higher rents when housing vouchers were more generous. Another study found faster rent growth in areas with larger demand subsidies. To prevent landlords from absorbing down payment assistance through higher home prices, a demand subsidy would have to be implemented After a lot of new housing was built,” a senior campaign adviser, who asked not to be identified so he could freely discuss internal political discussions, told me, and the campaign understood that.

Regardless, the biggest obstacle facing the housing movement is that many of its legislative victories have not yet translated into significantly more homes being built. It can take a long time for housing markets to adjust to changes in the law; a number of important reforms have been passed in the past few years. But reorienting local governments toward building rather than slowing development will take more than time; it will also take sustained political effort. In 1982, California passed a law legalizing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — small secondary units, also known as casitas, mother-in-law suites or garage apartments, that homeowners build on their properties.

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But the law also allowed uncompromising local governments to set standards that made building ADUs exorbitantly expensive. As a report by the pro-housing organization California YIMBY explains, “In practice, most local jurisdictions adopted burdensome and impractical standards that resulted in permitting few ADUs over 34 years.” Some cities where 5,000-square-foot homes dominated allowed ADUs only on lots larger than 7,500 square feet, the researcher found.”

Lawmakers tried to pass more reforms, but to little avail. Finally, in 2016 and 2017, a package of new laws went much further to force cities to allow more ADUs. The state ultimately prevailed, and 68,000 new ADUs were built from 2017 to 2021. And by 2022, nearly one in five manufactured homes in California was an ADU.

This kind of fine-tuning is necessary to determine what the exact obstacles to construction are. But it would be even better if the cities themselves felt motivated to partner in producing more housing, not the obstacles. That’s what makes the new, broad tone of the national Democratic Party on housing policy so exciting. Trying to get housing advocates to play by the letter of the law through every local state government is time-consuming and expensive. Convincing them that their partisan and ideological commitments require figuring out how to build more housing would be much more effective.