One of the more curious, not to mention consequential, aspects of modern liberalism is its reliance on assumptions that collapse under even rudimentary scrutiny. For example, the liberal “YIMBY” movement (for “yes in my back yard”) assumes that the sole cause of the housing affordability crisis plaguing liberal states like California is a lack of supply. There isn’t enough housing, ergo, housing is expensive. Build more of it, of any type, and prices will fall. It isn’t simple, it’s simplistic. A robust and growing body of research demonstrates that housing costs are far more complex, involving variables like income levels in different neighborhoods, costs of land, materials, and labor, and market preferences. More fundamentally, the YIMBY theory reduces supply and demand to a meaningless tautology.
Nevertheless, lawmakers in states including California, Washington, and New York have jumped on the YIMBY bandwagon. Over the last seven years, California alone has passed some 400 new laws intended to unleash a new flood of housing supply by limiting or eliminating local zoning, land use, and development rules as well as state environmental reviews. Other bills provide myriad perks to developers of market rate and luxury multifamily housing by eliminating things like setbacks, height limits, floor area ratios, and off street parking. Supply, supply, supply.
This is all coming from Democrats, particularly liberal Democrats, who until recently were champions of things like housing affordability and accessibility, and, in particular, environmental protections. In contrast these days, California Democrats have embraced trickle down economics to a degree that would leave Ronald Reagan himself aghast at their audacity. It’s not just housing. They’re using supply side policies to spur everything from mass transit to wind and solar energy. Everywhere you look it’s “build, baby, build.”
There’s just one little problem: None of it is working. The YIMBY theory of housing is producing housing that most people don’t want. According to the US Census Bureau, about 82% of Californians live in single family or small multi-family homes (duplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings). The vast majority of those homes are in low density urban neighborhoods, suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. This, of course, stands to reason. Most people want space of their own, private or shared front and back yards, gardens, lawns, and trees. These features aren’t “nice to haves,” enjoyed by the privileged few. They’re fundamental to quality of life.
This isn’t what a majority of people want, but it’s what California liberals are building by the thousands.
Yet YIMBYism is predicated on dense new urban neighborhoods consisting of apartments with no green space. In a very real sense, the movement seeks to turn back time. After a century in which Californians, and Americans in general, flooded out of cities for suburbs, YIMBYs want to claw them back. Which is where the movement rests on another easily disprovable assumption, that, with apologies to Dr. Seuss, a home is a home no matter the type. In other words, YIMBYism is premised on the assumption that housing is fungible.
This is economically illiterate. A fungible product is one that is identical, or nearly so, no matter the supplier. Commodities are generally close to perfectly fungible. So is currency. The $20 bill in your wallet is identical to the one in my pocket. On the retail side, gasoline is close to fungible. Think of the intersection in your city where there are gas stations on two, three, or all four corners, all offering the same price per gallon. Generally speaking, you don’t care whether you fill up at Shell, Chevron, or 76. You’re going to fill up at the station with the shortest line, or the one that happens to be on the side of the street you’re on.
Read the rest of this piece at The All Aspect Report.
Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.
Photo: An example of high density housing that is popular with planners, but isn’t what a majority of people want. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.
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