Dissent - Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate
Chief economist Brian Callci and senior legal analyst Sandeep Vaheesan debate how the YIMBY (short for "Yes In My Backyard") movement, which calls for zoning reforms, falls short of in addressing the nation’s housing affordability crisis, arguing for the federal government to take a more active role in providing housing
After decades of relative stagnation, American housing policy is now several years into a period of radical change and experimentation. In California, where I am policy director for the state-level organization California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard), city planners will often gripe (with, I have to admit, some justification) that state housing law is changing too quickly for them to keep up. Several other states—including Washington, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and Rhode Island—have enacted their own ambitious housing reforms, with more following each year. Cities like Minneapolis, Sacramento, Austin, and Spokane have redrawn their zoning maps and removed non-zoning barriers to housing production such as minimum parking requirements; meanwhile, New York City is moving ahead with its pro-housing “City of Yes” plan, though its ultimate fate remains uncertain.
At the same time, researchers have been steadily adding to our understanding of the relationship between land use rules, housing supply, and housing costs. Evan Mast’s pathbreaking “chain of moves” research shows how new housing production can set off a cascade effect throughout the market, lowering rents for everyone. Xiaodi Li has isolated the effect of new housing on prices within a block radius. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern have explored the relationship between homelessness, housing costs, and proxies for housing supply such as vacancy rates. And a number of contemporary scholars—including but not limited to Jessica Trounstine, Jacob Anbinder, Sheryll Cashin, and Richard Rothstein—have illuminated the forces that shaped America’s housing crisis in the first place.
The balance of this research firmly supports the YIMBY analysis that legalizing more housing development in supply-constrained cities will ease the housing crisis. But despite the growing evidence and the shifting politics of housing, intra-left debates over the crisis remain oddly stuck in place. To supply skeptics, YIMBYs are still “market fundamentalists” pursuing a right-wing, deregulatory agenda. Their technocratic, market-based plans cannot possibly end the housing crisis; the only solution is massive public investment and decommodification.
The empirical case for the supply-skeptic argument is thin and getting thinner every year; mostly, supply skeptics on the left are forced to rely on a small handful of already debunked studies with deeply flawed methodologies. But that’s OK, because the core of their argument is philosophical, not conceptual: deregulated markets exist to enrich capitalists, and so any policy that relies on market instruments will inevitably tend to benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else. As Dave Madden and Peter Marcuse wrote in In Defense of Housing, a foundational text for supply skeptics of the left, “Removing the regulations that rein in property owners shifts power towards capital and away from residents—while also, not coincidentally, making land more valuable and more amenable to speculation.”
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