YIMBYs' Premature Victory Dance at the DNC
Kamala Harris' promise to end the housing shortage and adopt rent control shows that YIMBY ideas are just one of several competing housing policy agendas within the Democratic Party.
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
This week's newsletter takes a look at some of the pro-housing supply lines that made it into the programming at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and whether this is proof of a much-hyped YIMBY takeover of the party.
YIMBYs Triumphant at the DNC?
During his remarks on the third night of the DNC, former President Barack Obama said Vice President Kamala Harris knows "if we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority."
During her own acceptance speech, Harris sandwiched a brief promise to "end America's housing shortage" in between calls to provide capital to small businesses and protect entitlement programs.
You are reading Rent Free from Christian Britschgi and Reason. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
The response from YIMBY activists and fellow traveling wonks, academics, and journalists—who all favor liberalizing zoning and land use regulations as a way of increasing housing supply and bringing down housing costs—has been ecstatic.
At Bloomberg, Matthew Yglesias called YIMBY the "breakout star" of the convention. Business Insider said Obama had pushed Democrats into their "YIMBY era." Mother Jones and Politico likewise ran articles on YIMBYs' increasing sway over Democrats' agenda and priorities.
Harris' solitary mention of "ending America's housing shortage" made her the "most pro-housing candidate" said the Center for New Liberalism, a think tank, on X.
Certainly, getting a former president's explicit endorsement of your policy agenda, and having a presidential candidate wink at it during their high-profile convention speeches, is a significant win for Democratic YIMBYs.
It's evidence that the YIMBY worldview is swaying Democratic elites. Obama's remarks in particular are evidence that some Democratic elites think YIMBY policies aren't just correct, but also worth running on.
That's all a far cry from former president Donald Trump's explicit NIMBYism and Sen. J.D. Vance's (R–Ohio) plan to lower housing costs through mass deportations of immigrants.
Settling Down
With all that said, the DNC offered a lot less evidence of a YIMBY takeover of the Democratic party than many commenters are claiming. It's also far from clear that a Harris-Walz administration will actually advance YIMBY priorities and improve housing affordability.
While the need to build more homes got more attention at this DNC than at past conventions, it was hardly the center of the agenda.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, perhaps the most outspoken and active YIMBY Democratic governor, didn't mention housing in his DNC remarks.
Former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge, in her convention remarks, only recited Harris' goal of building 3 million new homes, plus her policies of limiting rent increases and subsidizing down payments. She did not mention liberalizing zoning, eliminating parking minimums, streamlining permitting, or other YIMBY reforms that could deliver those 3 million units.
Harris' rhetorical commitment to "end America's housing shortage" is also less impressive when one considers that ending America's housing can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
When a politician says they support legalizing marijuana or abolishing the death penalty, they're committing themselves to a pretty straightforward policy position. Their rhetoric creates a clear measure of accountability.
But when a politician says they want to end the housing shortage, that can mean a commitment to dozens of different policies, some good, some benign, and some very bad.
Policy-Focused
And Harris' specific policy commitments on housing are generally pretty bad.
She has endorsed President Joe Biden's call for federal rent control, a disastrous policy with a long track record of reducing rental housing supply and quality. She's called for $25,000 down payment subsidies for first-time homebuyers, something that could increase supply somewhat but will also certainly increase home prices.
Harris has also been quick to scapegoat "corporate landlords" for buying up homes that could have gone to individuals, and for using rent recommendation software to set "artificially high" rents—two very debatable claims.
On policy specifics, this all makes Harris arguably worse than past Democratic candidates and administrations.
The Obama administration criticized land use regulations for driving up prices and floated an early "YIMBY grant" proposal to incentivize local governments to liberalize their zoning code.
As a candidate, Biden's housing platform called for stripping federal transportation funds from localities that didn't liberalize their zoning codes. (In office, his administration settled for creating a small, poorly targeted YIMBY grant program.)
Not Victory, but Conflict
Harris' main claim to YIMBY fame then isn't her policy proposals are better than past Democratic candidates. Rather, it's that she's talking about the need to build more housing more than past Democratic candidates.
That's good. The takeaway shouldn't be that she's a zealous YIMBY convert, however. Rather, the takeaway is that housing affordability is a more salient issue now than during past campaigns, and so Harris has to talk about it more.
When talking about housing, Harris is drawing off of a mishmash of ideas about housing that have broad acceptance on the left. That's how she's ended up criticizing local supply restrictions alongside calls for rent control and crackdowns on corporate landlords.
"If housing is at the white-hot center of the political universe, that raises the risk of bad ideas gaining traction" as well as good ideas, writes Yglesias in his Slow Boring newsletter today. He interprets Obama's criticism of state and local supply restrictions as an attempt to focus Democrats on productive zoning reforms, and not policies that would make the housing shortage worse.
I think that's a correct reading. The implication, however, isn't that YIMBYs are setting Democratic housing policy, but rather that their agenda is just one of several in contention.
Harris is trying to fly above this contention by endorsing nearly every liberal and left-wing housing policy on offer.
That's worrisome, even if some YIMBY ideas end up becoming policy during a Harris administration. At the end of the day, the federal government can only do so much to encourage more home construction. Meanwhile, it could do a lot to reduce it.
Quick Links
- A lawsuit challenging Alexandria, Virginia's elimination of single-family-only zoning is headed to trial, reports The Washington Post.
- Meanwhile, Berkeley, California, the first community to adopt single-family-only zoning in the U.S., is finalizing broad upzoning of the city, says Planetizen.
- Economist Tyler Cowen argues we should focus more on speeding up transportation than on increasing density when trying to fix our cities and boost economic growth.
- Ilya Somin responds that true mobility (the ability to move where you want) requires the price-depressing effects of lots of dense new housing.
- Alex Tabarrok traces the intellectual roots of YIMBYism.
- Utah argues some federal land ownership is unconstitutional in a new lawsuit.
