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How NIMBYism Broke the American City | Nolan Gray
175 Plays8 months ago
We’re exploring how zoning, regulations, and NIMBYism have impacted America’s cities in this episode featuring M. Nolan Gray, Senior Director at California YIMBY and author of Arbitrary Lines. Topics covered include:
- Why are housing costs skyrocketing across the country?
- How have zoning laws broken American cities, and what reforms could fix them?
- How should the YIMBY movement engage with communities resistant to new development?
- What are the best policy solutions for addressing the housing affordability crisis?
- How has YIMBYism gained traction within the Democratic Party?
Join Project Liberal founder Joshua Eakle and steering committee member Shawn Huckabay as they engage in a timely conversation with Nolan Gray on the future of housing policy.
Follow Nolan at https://x.com/mnolangray
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the latest episode of the Project Liberal podcast. I'm your host, Josh Echol, the president and chairman of the board here at Project Liberal. I am joined today by my co-host, Sean, from our steering committee, Sean. Happy Sunday. Thank you for taking the time. Now you're welcome. Absolutely.
00:00:19
Speaker
And today we've got an awesome guest to talk to us about a very pressing issue, something that's actually top of mind among the Democratic Party's coalition. There's a lot of shifting lines around this issue. I'm very incredibly excited to have this conversation. We are joined today by
The YIMBY Movement and Housing Crisis
00:00:32
Speaker
Nolan Gray. Nolan Gray is the senior director of California YIMBY. He's the author of a book called ah ah Arbitrary Lines, which is how zoning broke the American city and how to fix it. Nolan, thank you for joining us this morning, early on a Sunday. We appreciate you taking the time.
00:00:48
Speaker
Thanks so much, Joshua. It's a pleasure to be here. but's do it Yeah, no, absolutely. So um I did TSM. Before we get into the actual meat of the conversation, I know just for the sake of our audience, you are one of the probably more eloquent and passionate and public speakers around the issue of yimbyism and this idea of using supply side solutions to fix the housing crisis. This is obviously, as I mentioned, top of mind within the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is embracing more of a yimby agenda by the day. I want to get into a lot of that. I want to talk about the housing crisis, I want to talk about the solutions that you championed to fix it, talk about the political landscape. But before I did that, I wanted to talk more about this kind of um this broad movement around liberalism. And I know that you you've been a self-described liberal. So I'm curious as to maybe whether you could give us some background on your philosophy, what liberalism means to you, like what thinkers you draw from, and just kind of kick us off with a broad definition as you understand it.
Liberalism and Political Influence
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. um You know, I spent so much of my time as a sort of single issue policy person now. And the more I feel like the more you learn about one issue area, the more reluctant you become to opine on general politics. I have people that I trust for that, right? I ah division of labor on on my policy and political views.
00:02:05
Speaker
um But, you know, I would think a few things. One is that i I take a default presumption of allowing people to live their lives as they see fit and allowing for a diversity of modes of living. And I think that's very core to the liberal project, you know, as most eloquently put by folks like John Stuart Mill of experiments in living. You know, I also draw a lot from ah you know but from a very different part of the liberal tradition of Nozick's idea of a utopia of utopia, of letting a lot of different people run different experiments on how they live their lives and realize different visions of the good life. And and certainly when I look at
00:02:46
Speaker
cities where we've done so much to put our cities into a straitjacket and to impose one mode of living. ah you know i think i I get inspiration from those core liberal ideas of just empowering folks to try new things and and all of the growth and innovation and change and dynamism that comes out of that. um Especially now where you know There have been many moments where it feels like the folks at the top don't necessarily share this commitment on issues like free trade or or or open immigration ah open and fair immigration or you know allowing for innovation in the market, allowing for protecting ah certain individual ah liberties on on on very sensitive social issues. um so you know i think it's and one In some ways, it feels like we're varying we're we're living in a uniquely illiberal moment, but I think
00:03:38
Speaker
The fact that this other sort of counter liberal insurgency has emerged but in the form of your podcast and so many other great institutions suggests that there actually is something there that is incredibly salient and and and powerful with people. so ah Yeah, I like to say that liberalism was effectively the background noise of American politics for a very long time. And when liberalism comes under threat, it's almost like, it feels to me like over the last couple decades, people have kind of forgotten how to argue in favor of liberalism. And it's really only when there's a threat like what we're seeing right now that people are kind of coming together and reminding themselves and having these conversations to fight back against it. so
00:04:16
Speaker
i I wanted to talk a little bit about that briefly before we go into the meat of your actual specialty, the thing that you spend all your time talking about, which is this distinction between liberalism and the left. So I had Jeremiah Johnson on the show, I think that was the last episode that we did, and one of the things that we talked about was we see kind of this potential coming civil war after this election between kind of these the the more progressive economic populist agenda and what we might call a liberal economic agenda.
00:04:46
Speaker
So I'm curious, how do you kind of see that divide happening within the
Political Dynamics in Housing
00:04:51
Speaker
democratic coalition? It feels to me like right now there's this unity around defeating this a liberal threat of MAGA populism, but it seems like there is some tension within the DNC within just a broader like kind of center left around what one of those ideologies is going to fit out. So I'm curious as to like... Great question. Yeah, where you might fit into that whole thing.
00:05:10
Speaker
uh well certainly closer to the center left of the democratic party uh and i think that that's generally where where yimby falls i mean i you know it's in within the little housing space that we're in right i think you actually feel this divide where i think all there are a lot of yimbies who say we need to build a lot more housing we need to fully fund programs like section eight we need to line up more public resources for uh you know potentially non-profit deed restricted affordable housing uh there are parts of the yimby coalition that even support new approaches to social housing and i think that it's a There's lots of room for that. But then I think on you know there are other contingencies within the constituencies within the Democratic Party who would say, well, let's just impose rent control. ah Any sort of use of market mechanisms to solve this problem is just further entrenching evil capitalism. And never mind that that system has basically made us pretty wealthy and prosperous. um And so you definitely feel this tension within my specific issue.
00:06:07
Speaker
um you know i think I think you're exactly right that the Democratic Party right now sees an existential threat in the form of Trump. And so there's some sort of willingness of the coalition to work together. um But, you know, i I don't know what happens, you know, in a, in a Trump victory scenario, right? I worry that you would see more radical elements say, look, see, we, we told you so. You had a moderate candidate like Biden, then you had a moderate candidate like Harris and
00:06:38
Speaker
and never mind Biden's victories on all these things we, you know, folks on the left might care about, and never mind that that Harris ran a pretty close campaign and ah in a tough year for ah the incumbent party. That's one possibility, right? ah Another possibility is Harris wins, right? There's this feeling of, okay, look, see, actually, a lot of Americans do kind of want this return to normalcy in a certain sense of just basic a good government liberalism compared to, I think, some of the radical stuff that we're seeing on the right. You know, it's funny, I've been talking to a lot of folks when I travel and they say, you know, when Trump got elected, right, all up and down the ticket at the local and state level, we had very radical candidates.
00:07:19
Speaker
um you know running in democratic primaries. And that doesn't necessarily have to be intention with EMB. But in many cases, those candidates were sort of on this, oh yeah, let's just do rent control. Don't ever don't ever build any market rate housing ever. um And also, by the way, don't ever build new affordable.
00:07:35
Speaker
housing ever if it's not, you know, owned and operated by the government. um And so there was this, you know, that was what we knew happened in the Trump period. And I think there is some real risk of that happening again, whereas when Biden got elected, a lot of the these the temperature cooled down a lot in the state and local elections, and you actually had much more normal, workable, I think, professional candidates ah running. So You know, I spend very little time thinking about it. and This is my sort of ah perspective on it from from this unique housing perspective. um But yeah, it's, you know, both this has been an issue on both parties, right? I mean, we' we're talking about the Democrats, but on the Republican end of the ledger too, ah you have a lot of Republicans who I think would still broadly identify with the liberal tradition. In fact, i think I think most actually, even though Trump is flooding the airwaves, yeah ah you have folks on the on the right who would say, yeah, let's
00:08:28
Speaker
Let's use markets with some smart interventions to solve this problem of housing affordability. There are a lot of Republican Yambis, but then on the other hand, you have this this sort of more Trumpy and keep your government hands off my R1 zoning mode of of populist politics of, oh, the problem is Wall Street. The problem is foreign buyers. The problem is like immigrants coming in and buying the homes. That's just so unhealthy. So, you know, I would say it's a it's a It's an ongoing conversation, I think, within both parties. you know This is the the joys and drawbacks of having you know two major big tent parties. Yeah. One thing I would want to add that um just as a side note kind of related to this that I've noticed is that among some of the more progressive or further left people within sort of the democratic coalition, you often find this thread of like misanthropy.
00:09:19
Speaker
um in the sense that like like the reason they would object to a solution that involves building more housing is they have ah there's a fundamental value of like human beings are bad, and their influence on the world is bad, and anything that expands that influence is bad. right like That's like a value that I think underlines a lot of, not center left, but far left,
00:09:42
Speaker
And that butts up against the more center-left mentality of what I'm starting to see people call the abundance agenda of like, no, humanity's great. The purpose is for humanity to flourish. And that's what we're trying to do. And I think you see like a value struggle between those two groups. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, if to if you're on the sort of more radical end of either sort of party or ideology,
00:10:06
Speaker
Right. You kind of have to, on some level, believe like, oh, the status quo is just fundamentally broken or something wrong. I think you're totally right. I mean, I call them, you know, the but first the revolution caucus. Right. You have a lot of folks who are like, well, no, let's like, why bother building any more housing? Why don't we just why don't we just further amiserate the working class until we get the revolution? Right.
00:10:24
Speaker
Or, oh no, like don't don't ever allow anything that's not like my particular vision of social housing to be built, because that's entrenching like markets and housing, and I don't like that. You definitely get that on the on the right as well. I mean i think this is, you know again, I'm not um' not a like political sort of election season knower, but everyone's gotta have a take, right? We're on a podcast. um yeah I think this is part of what's helping Harris, is that she's actually got a sort of general optimistic perspective. You listen to like You listen to Trump for 12 years of of this country's going to hell, all of these problems, all of these existential threats. And I think it can get a little exhausting to people. I think actually there's something really attractive about, hey, you know we've got problems, but this is a great country.
00:11:12
Speaker
um yeah These problems are solvable. Let's work together. And it's weird because it's you know it's like the party that seizes that ground seems to pretty consistently be the party that can can win and actually effectuate positive change. And um so i think I think this is a ah feature, too, shared with Yimbyism and exactly, Sean, you mentioned the abundance agenda. It's this basic idea of a better world is possible. I mean, I'm always kind of baffled by people who are in policy advocacy who seem to be operating on an implicit
00:11:43
Speaker
notion of, yeah, things are bad and they're going to get worse. like why do you So go move to a cabin, or like just like start entertaining your apolitical hobbies. right like Why are you here? Whereas the yimbies that I work with, or the folks in the abundance agenda on so many other issues,
00:12:00
Speaker
There's this feeling of, yeah, there's a problem, but be pretty fixable. We actually know the playbook. Let's go out and do it and let's explain how a better world is possible. And again, I think that's just so much more compelling. I was thinking about this when um you know i was I helped teach at UCLA and I taught a class at Pepperdine recently. and You know, when working with students, right? It's like all of this evidence of students respond better to, Hey, you're doing good work and you can get better. They respond much better to that than, Hey, this is bad. You need to improve. You're going to fail. Right. It's like, I think that there's like this ah universal sort of.
00:12:37
Speaker
potential motivator here of, like, if you explain to people, hey, yeah, things are things are not going so well right now, but we know what we got to do and it's going to get better. That's just so much more compelling than than the alternatives. And that's the I don't think the right or the left necessarily has to have a monopoly on that.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, no, I like that. I like that a lot. I think you're completely correct. um So then why don't we take why don't we like zoom in
Zoning Laws and Reform Needs
00:12:58
Speaker
on that for a minute? Because housing the housing crisis is probably one of the most important issues among voters. It goes directly back to this cost of living crisis. It's it's something, especially and in states like California, it's like one of these major pressing issues in the election.
00:13:12
Speaker
This is something you've spent your your time many much of your time talking about, researching, and fighting for. it I'm curious as to whether like you could start us off by talking about maybe what brought us to this point? like what What policy decisions or actions kind of created this situation where housing is so expensive? And then maybe we could talk a little bit about what are some of the solutions to break us out of it.
00:13:33
Speaker
Totally. Well, why don't we start with where we are right now, which is for a large and growing number of Americans, home prices have increased beyond what they could conceivably afford. Many Americans are increasingly locked out of home ownership in a way that was not true maybe of their parents and their grandparents.
00:13:50
Speaker
ah Many Americans are stuck renting and a large and growing share of Americans spend over a third to half of their income on rent. um So, you know, you're not even able to maybe even save the down payment to become a homeowner at some point. But even if you do want to remain a renter, so much of your income is going into rents.
00:14:07
Speaker
um A lot of Americans have responded to this by moving further and further out of cities, so undertaking larger, much more grueling commutes, or maybe turning down jobs or educational opportunities that would have helped them to maximize their well-being. And then for in the most extreme cases, you have many hundreds of thousands of Americans who are homeless. And on ah ah nearly all of these trends, we we've really hit rock bottom over the last few years. there's some shoots of hope that we can talk about. But in places like California, right home prices continue to be many, many multiples of the median household income. Generally three to five is considered healthy in many California jurisdictions, it's about 15. We continue to have some of the highest rents and some of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, meaning there's just not a lot of apartments and you have you know a small pool
00:14:55
Speaker
of renters competing for the same number of units. Ideally, you want the opposite to be happening. You want landlords competing for renters. ah We have the opposite. And then, of course, we have record-setting homelessness crisis. It's immediately visible when you land in San Francisco, l LA, San Diego. And it's just totally unacceptable. I think people with normal ethical reactions are baffled that this persists.
00:15:16
Speaker
So it's a problem also to I think part of the national sort of spread of this issue is that these problems have taken root increasingly across the country. And the reason is um because you know ah for so long we were used to thinking of this as a California or a Northeast problem, but this was a problem that grew out of policies that exist all across the country. um And so in my book, I really, there's a lot going on here. There are a lot of aspects of this issue that that need to be discussed. But for my part, I focus on what I think is the most obvious and easily fixable aspect of this ah crisis, which is the zoning rules we have on the books that essentially lock us into a housing crisis. So you have zoning rules that make housing altogether illegal to build. For example, in your typical US city, about 75 to 90% of residential areas, the only legal form of housing that you can build is a detached single family home. You can't build townhouses, duplexes, small apartment buildings, totally illegal. Many US cities, you can't build residential and many commercial areas.
00:16:15
Speaker
So that's a whole bunch of housing that we just all together take off the table. Where we do allow housing, the zoning rules often mandate that the housing be much more expensive. So high parking requirements that say we're but you can't build housing unless you have two or three parking spaces per unit. High minimum lot sizes that say you're not allowed to have a home unless you can afford 10,000 square feet of land. And in many cases, those like land prices is the most expensive driving aspect of the price. right And then finally, even where we allow housing and even where these mandates pencil ah we subject housing to long discretionary highly political reviews so you might it might take six months a year two years to just get and entitled and get permits you might have to undertake an environmental review and get sued by nimbies you might have to do multiple public hearings it might come up to a city council vote where if the wrong people show up at the at the tuesday 10 a.m meeting to yell at the council members your project might get altogether killed
00:17:11
Speaker
So we've we've we've we've placed all these barriers to not only building a housing, but building exactly the type of housing that we know we need, these infill housing that's inherently more affordable. And then we look around and we say, well, wow what why do we have a housing crisis? um And so you know this is essentially 100 years or so of deliberately making it illegal to build affordable housing has but pretty put us in a situation where it's illegal to build affordable housing.
00:17:37
Speaker
Understandable. So I gather, and you know one of the things that um then when we start talking about solutions, I gather that ah the the Obama-Kamala narrative that we've heard out of the DNC of tearing down a lot of these restrictive rules and regulations and zoning requirements sit at the center of this. But if we're looking forward to yeah policy changes specifically that can kind of dig us out of the environment that we're in, um I'm assuming first of all that a lot of these have to happen at the local level.
00:18:04
Speaker
But I also am just curious as to whether there are any novel approaches specifically that you've seen work, you know, to to ah ramp up the supply and address some of the challenges you just outlined. Totally, yeah. So a unique feature of zoning in the U.S. is that it's almost entirely local. ah So in almost every other developed country, the state or the province or the national government play a much larger role in this setting this policy. But a unique feature of the U.S. is the state basically sets up a neighboring legislation and then local governments are free to run, right, with almost basically no oversight, except for in ah maybe about a half dozen states.
00:18:40
Speaker
um So the the easiest way to reform here is to have local governments liberalize these rules, right? To say, okay, look, let's let's remove these arbitrary barriers to new housing production. Let's remove these arbitrary mandates that are making housing more expensive. Let's streamline our permitting and entitlement process. And you're seeing a lot of really exciting process ah progress being made here. um So, of course, ah Minneapolis made history in 2019 by being the first city to legalize ah apartment buildings, ah small apartment buildings citywide. So they said, okay, we're not going to hold 75 to 80% of our city off limits to the most affordable forms of housing.
00:19:18
Speaker
We're going to allow for low rise residential that doesn't necessarily change the character of the neighborhood ah to be built anywhere. um You've seen this happen across ah the country and other forms of allowing ah residential in commercial zones. So allowing for those tiled tired old strip malls and office parks to be turned into mixed use communities, right? Allowing for but you know parking lots to be turned into the type of infill housing ah that we need. So there's a lot of exciting examples there, and the list just continues to grow and grow and grow. um Now, that said, there's often not a local politics around reform in many local governments. So a unique feature of American local government governance, again, is that it's heavily, heavily
State and Federal Roles in Housing Solutions
00:20:05
Speaker
fragmented. So your typical metro area is actually, in many cases, a dozen or more different cities. In Los Angeles County, there's 88 different cities.
00:20:14
Speaker
So local reform is good, but expecting local reform to happen in all 88 cities in LA County is not a viable path to near term reform. And so this is where a lot of YIMBY advocates look to the state.
00:20:29
Speaker
ah to say, look, let's the state government, this is a state delegated power to local governments. It's a matter of many cases of regional issues. You know, housing markets don't stop and start at these jurisdictional boundaries. There's spillover effects. So let's have some state guardrails to ensure that every city is doing its fair share.
00:20:47
Speaker
um And so, for example, here in California, we've created a framework where, statewide, anybody can build an accessory dwelling unit in their backyard or their garage, subject to the same standards and subject to a long list of protections. And that's been really, really, really powerful. That's been about 100,000, nearly 100,000 new units permitted since 2017.
00:21:07
Speaker
Um, you know, in other states, they've established frameworks to allow faith groups to build affordable housing on their land. So this is the yes and God's backyard idea of make it easier for churches that many cases have a mission of providing for the poor and the needy ah to build affordable housing on their land. ah So.
00:21:26
Speaker
it's it's kind of it's it's ah it's an kind of It's an incredible space in the sense of it used to be like, oh, let's find the one or two Yembe victories and then say nice things about them. So now it's like, well, every single city and every single state is having this conversation on some level. And I think we've had some pretty like outstanding you know successes. You look at a place like Austin, for example. Austin had an extreme run up in prices as a lot of people were moving there over the course of the pandemic and incomes were increasing.
00:21:53
Speaker
ah But because the city had this much more liberal land use planning framework now, of course it within taxes, right? It's a lot more restrictive, but compared to California, it's a lot more liberal. The market was able to respond with a lot more new supply. And what we're already saying is vacancy rates going up, rents coming down, home prices coming down. That's very good, right? if They're not they're sort of getting off the California train and saying, we're going to build the housing that our community needs to remain affordable. And you're seeing a lot more of that, I think, in some of the more ah you know thoughtful jurisdictions to say, we can build a lot more and get this crisis under control.
00:22:29
Speaker
ah Do you think there's anything the federal government can do from an incentives perspective to address this? I mean, that was one of the things that that Jeremiah talked about. I know this is necessarily outside of the scope of maybe some of these local reforms. But is there any action that the federal government could take? Or are you aware of any incentives or solutions that they could provide on that front?
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. So what we've done so far, but so so a couple of things. Should the federal government be involved at all? Within our constitutional framework, I think it's a pretty strong case to be made that the federal government has, and probably always should have, a very limited role on Lainey's planning. Now, Lainey's planning for complex legal reasons grows out of powers that live with the states. And I think that's that's fine, right?
00:23:14
Speaker
um ah Now, a couple things. The federal government has already done a few things. One, yeah we passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. So the federal government has said, okay, when a religious land use is at issue, um the presumption needs to be in favor of allowing this group to actually build the building that it needs to build up to function. ah So, the federal government has sort of come in and said, okay, where constitutional liberties are at issue, right, ah we're going to stop clear protections. And that's called Right Lupo.
00:23:47
Speaker
um The federal government has also ah said ah that federal agencies need to be affirmatively furthering fair housing. So pursuant to the ah Fair Housing Act of 1968, that banned a bunch of explicitly discretionary practices, but it also said that every sort of operation in government needs to be advancing the cause of allowing for a range of housing at all income levels, even in high opportunity neighborhoods. So that's that's the second piece. The third piece, and this is where we actually started putting our money where our mouth is, was um in the Biden spending bill, we got a significant pot of money to actually pay local jurisdictions ah to reform their zoning. That was called the, folks were calling that the baby MB grant. That's essentially the pro-housing grant.
00:24:37
Speaker
um So this is good. ah Taking steps in the right direction. What can the federal government doing go doing forward? The federal government gives out a lot of money. um And the federal government can basically say, hey, if you're not liberalizing your zoning rules, if you're not actually building housing, if you're not achieving affordability outcomes, ah you're not eligible for the Community Development Block Grant. You're not eligible for transit funding if you're not actually going to make a plan to ah legalize housing around the new transit stations that we're going to fund.
00:25:05
Speaker
Yeah, um I think that stuff is all positive. I think also more funding for jurisdictions that are doing the right thing would be positive. One thing I would quibble though, is, you know, a lot of the ideas right now are around okay let's, let's. um Let's condition money on zoning reform or let's condition money on like putting together a plan. um And this is this is kind of the framework that California has been in since 1969 of mandating local plans and mandating like actual zoning reforms. The problem is that it's so easy for a local government to say, okay, sure, yeah, we'll we'll lower our minimum lot sizes.
00:25:44
Speaker
ah But we'll not change all of these other rules that technically make it infeasible to actually build a small lot home. And so one thing I would suggest to federal policymakers is to like.
00:25:55
Speaker
index these rules or condition these rules on ah the actual outcomes that we care about, right? So just say, okay, if home prices are over 5x median household incomes in your metro area, or if you're not building if you're not issuing an average of five permits per thousand residents over the last five years, you're just not eligible for this giant pot of federal money.
00:26:21
Speaker
right just like that Those are the outcomes we care about. We care about affordability and we care about permitting that we think would get us to affordability. And I would say rather than playing this weird game with local jurisdictions where we say, okay, please send us a ah laundry list of all the nice zoning reforms you've done. The federal government should say, are you achieving affordability outcomes or are you taking measures to achieve them in ah in a real and sort of measurable way?
00:26:44
Speaker
Um, one idea I've been putting out there, you know, I don't love the mortgage interest deduction or salt, uh, state and local tax credit program. Uh, but there's always this push to bring it back. I mean, I say, bring it back, but say, okay, it's conditioned if you're a homeowner and you want to be eligible for these.
00:27:01
Speaker
generous, regressive tax benefits, ah you have to actually be either building housing or you have to have ah widespread housing affordability in your community. ah you know But then you start to really change the politics of this issue and you put local policymakers who have the power to change these rules in a position where if they don't like effect to it if they don't effectuate effective zoning reform, then homeowners in their jurisdiction are potentially paying a much higher federal ah tax bill. That's the way I would prefer that policy makers think about it. Not to say that there's anything wrong with like, let's reform zoning. I'm the um the let's reform zoning guy. But like, what do we want to actually achieve? And what are the incentives that get us there?
00:27:43
Speaker
Sounds like there's a lot of similarities between some of the proposals that I'm hearing from the Canadian government at the time regarding tying up incentive federal incentives to some of these reforms and putting the pressure on local jurisdictions. It sounds like a ah viable model. um yeah i do yeah sorry I do have a question for you because I'm kind of curious.
Economic Impacts of Housing Policies
00:28:01
Speaker
um One thought that's occurred to me as a non-expert on this issue is that you know people tend to think of homes when they buy them as an investment. ah That's not my perspective. I tend to think that, at least if you plan to live in the home, you should think of it as a so a consumable good rather than an investment. You're buying it because you want to live in it. But a lot of people do think of their home as, you know this is I'm putting a lot of money towards this, I'm investing towards this.
00:28:25
Speaker
That seems like it creates an inherent conflict of interest between people who currently own homes who see it as an investment and want the value of their home to go up as high as possible and people who want to either buy a home or pay rent who obviously want the exact opposite, right? They want homes to be as cheap as possible. um How do you kind of square that circle and how would you persuade somebody concerned about losing money on what they see as an investment to be more open to policies that would allow expansion of housing?
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really great question. Well, so a few things. um One is I think in a normal healthy housing market, so populations growing, new housing is getting built, home prices are, ah you know, remaining fairly steady.
00:29:09
Speaker
um A home is a good investment to the extent that it's a store of value. ah you know A home, even in a place like Texas or Florida, you know notwithstanding any sort of environmental issues, will generally hold its value in real terms. That doesn't account for the fact that in many cases, you're going to have to put tens of thousands of dollars right so into the structure. But in any case, it will be a store of value. It'll hold its value in real terms. And then when you want to sell it, you know you'll have this this asset.
00:29:40
Speaker
that's That's just as true in in more housing abundant context as it is in in housing scarce context. The difference is right folks in California are used to seeing their homes you know increased by many multiples over the course of decades, whereas you know a normal home in a healthy housing market is going to hold its value. And that's OK. A lot of the value of a home is actually tied up in the land.
00:30:04
Speaker
um And that can only increase as you have more intensive development and more demand. So, you know, if you're in in a normal healthy housing market, if you're a homeowner who really actually does want to see some sort of return off of this home that you've bought, you should actually be pushing to allow for much more intensive development.
00:30:23
Speaker
On your property, because that's going to increase the land value and and and leave you with this asset that's actually incredibly valuable at the end of your. Working career, assuming that you're in ah and a healthy, growing city.
00:30:35
Speaker
um you know I would say, too, this is partly why, for example, there's all this evidence that when an apartment building is built next to a single-family home, ah ah not only does the value of that home not go down, it actually seems to increase because that's signaling to the market that that land is actually more valuable, that there are much more intensive uses that could be deployed on that land.
00:30:56
Speaker
um So that's a couple things. One last thing I'll say too is um part of the reason why California's totally dysfunctional framework works is because we have Prop 13. So if you're a homeowner and you bought your home for $70,000, $80,000 in the 70s, and now it's worth like 2 million, you're actually not seeing your property tax bill increase at all.
00:31:21
Speaker
Whereas in a typical US state with a normal property tax system, your property tax bill is going to go up quite a lot. And so on the one hand, you might feel like, cool, this is awesome. Like I want this valuable asset. On the other hand, you're feeling the tax pressure of, okay, I have to pay a much higher annual property tax bill because my home is a lot more valuable. There's at least some cross pressure there.
00:31:43
Speaker
to get prices under control. ah right And I think that's basically good. right that gets That gives everybody some buy-in for allowing for a reasonable number of homes. I guess, actually, the the the real last thing I'll say is, right not like on the one hand, like it would be awesome the idea of, OK, I bought this home for $100,000, and now it's worth $5 million. dollars But like the the scale of the destruction of the community that's associated with that happening is just so devastating that I think when you come to California and you actually see what this looks like in practice of like, oh, okay, now my young adult children can't afford to live anywhere near me. Now there's people living in cars and tents all around me. like there's no There's no actual diversity in any meaningful sense around me. ah like Schools are closing because like young families can't afford to live here.
00:32:31
Speaker
like I think that's actually part of what's shifted in a place like California is like normal, well-adjusted people are like, okay, cool. My home's gotten a lot more valuable, but oh my God, I look around me and like my community is wrecked. And it's like, I think the normal intuition that a lot of people have, maybe not the people who show up at public hearings and have a meltdown, but I think most normal people would say, okay, yeah, we do actually need to get this under control. Like I'm glad my home values increased, but like this is totally beyond what is is acceptable.
00:32:58
Speaker
yeah That's a good segue into like a sort of a second part to my question, which isn't related so much to home
Community Dynamics and Housing Policy
00:33:03
Speaker
values. But it is related to who we know are the people that tend to populate those meetings, right like the local city council meetings and stuff. It's very often um you know the elderly or retirees, people like that who, um you know as you said, they might have bought their house in the 70s or something. They've lived there their whole life. Or you know even if they didn't buy it in the 70s, they bought it 10, 20, 30 years ago.
00:33:27
Speaker
um whose primary concern isn't necessarily their investment, right? Like maybe they're not that worried about, you know, losing money because they're just planning on living in that house till they die anyway. um But they have a kind of mentality of like, you know, I don't want things to change. I'm too old to learn new things. I don't want to deal with the neighborhood around me being different.
00:33:46
Speaker
I kind of just want to coast out you know the last you know decade of my life, just relaxing, knowing that things are fairly static around me. And those people often, because they're retired, like they they have more time to show up to a city council meeting at 10 a.m., whereas you know someone that's still in their working years would be at work and wouldn't necessarily you know be able to attend to a meeting like that. So I guess how would you persuade Someone in that demographic that like, look, you don't want to do this. um You know, you should be more concerned about whether your neighbors can afford to buy homes, whether there's housing available to people other than yourself. ah What would be the way you would ah kind of attack that problem?
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, just maybe to like address the global sort of issue behind the question, we can, one, I think we just need to have far fewer of these housing projects go through this typical public hearing forum, because you're exactly right. you have we We know this from social science, empirical social science. You have this Tuesday, 10 a.m. public hearing, and it's a very, very, very select and unrepresentative group of people showing up. It's people who are tending to be wealthier, people who are far more likely to already be homeowners,
00:34:57
Speaker
people who are are are more much more likely to be older, people who are much more likely to be whiter. So there are all these sort of distorting aspects of this this public hearing format. So to the extent we need to still do public hearings, we actually should be doing things like focus groups, intercept surveys, actually getting a cross-section of the community out. And when we do that, pretty invariably, we find that people support liberalizing a lot of these these these these mandates.
00:35:24
Speaker
Now, to your actual question, I think the way we need to frame it is this, and I think you're exactly right, by the way. I think a lot of YIMBYs talk about this ah so much in terms of, oh yeah, NIMBYism is motivated by home values. And that's certainly lurking, I think, and um and and and reinforcing other motivations for NIMBYism. But I think you're exactly right, Sean. A lot of people just reflexively are like, I don't want my community to change, right? Like, I think people see their neighborhood as their extended home, and they're like, why are you coming into my home and rearranging my furniture?
00:35:51
Speaker
you know I like it the way it is. I bought it the way it was. right The way I think we we have to explain this is if you're in a high demand neighborhood, the options are not change or no change. The options are change in the built environment or change in the actual character and demographic composition of the community.
00:36:12
Speaker
right So your typical American R1 single-family zoning district in l LA or San Francisco is not in any meaningful sense shape staying the same. right Those homes, they might look identical to the homes that were built in the 60s and 70s, but they're now multi-million dollar homes ah that the only people who can afford are extremely ah wealthy ah ah You know, tech executives or folks who inherited money, right? The type of person who could afford those homes when they were first built or for the first 20 or 30 years they existed can no longer afford those homes. So you get these communities where, ah yeah, the built environment hasn't changed at all, but they're becoming far, far, far wealthier.
00:36:54
Speaker
There are no young families. There's no children. There's no diversity of ages or backgrounds. And then the folks who actually serve the community, you know, folks who work in the hospital or work in the schools or work in the supermarkets can no longer afford to live there. So in a much more meaningful sense, right? Yeah, the built environment hasn't changed at all. But the actual community has changed dramatically. And I think that when you when you start to talk in those terms to folks, they they immediately get it. Even then, though, I would say you walk around a lot of these um are one neighborhoods and there's been great work by the housing team over at AI on this. What you get is if you have rules that say it's illegal to build to take that incredibly expensive single family home on a 7,500 square foot lot and turn that into three or four townhouses or a small apartment building.
00:37:41
Speaker
what you What you do when you have those rules is, in many cases, the single family home and doesn't remain the same. It gets turned into a McMansion. It gets torn down and rebuilt as a much more expensive home. and So even if you are just like, yeah, I just i don't care like get all the i don't care if any like middle class people can ever afford to live here, just keep all the buildings the same. Even if that's what you want, the rules that we have on the books don't necessarily get that. you know I'm here in l LA.
00:38:05
Speaker
right next to a little pocket of R1 zoning that, of course, is you know right next to a transit line and in one of the most like expensive and productive places on Earth. That's okay, though. Totally cool. Good planning, right? um That neighborhood is not staying the same. but you know that name on On every single block, there are like two or three homes that have already been turned into giant blocky McMansions, and there's two or three more that are actively undergoing that conversion.
00:38:29
Speaker
So in all the meaningful senses that we care about, if we don't want our communities to radically change, we actually have to allow for a lot more flexibility and much more liberal rules that allow communities to grow and change and adapt over time. And that's that's I think that's maybe the core issue here is like that is what a healthy community looks like. you know when In almost every American city, there's a pre-zoning neighborhood that reflects this, right? It's a mixture of single family homes,
00:38:57
Speaker
and maybe some townhouses and maybe a small apartment building, and then, I don't know, God forbid, a corner grocery store. That was a neighborhood that that was built, but then changed a lot maybe over the course of 50 to 100 years before we put it into the zoning straitjacket, right? And to the extent that those neighborhoods still exist, we love them. We subject them to preservation districts, right? We don't let you change anything on them. But then we look at our current neighborhoods and we say, well, no, we you can never allow it to become that. You can never allow it to like grow and change and adapt.
00:39:25
Speaker
and learn based on current needs over time.
Success Stories and Broader Impacts
00:39:29
Speaker
And so you know I think that that's maybe the deeper issue is some degree of change is good and healthy and our in our neighborhoods. And i think that I think that mature people, empathetic people can can understand that.
00:39:41
Speaker
Very interesting. So one of the things that excites me about this is obviously the India agenda is working. As you mentioned, you point to cities like Austin where the actually embracing the supply side fixes are and the zoning reforms are actually producing real results.
00:39:56
Speaker
um you know We spoke to Jeremiah about this as well a little bit, but one of the things that excites me about this is it seems to me like yimbyism could serve as a gateway to ah recognition of like the the value of a broader abundance agenda. Because if you take this concept and you scale it out to other challenges that we face in society, obviously it's the same kind of concepts fix a lot of other issues.
00:40:18
Speaker
So I'm curious as to whether you see, I mean, I think we already established that you kind of see it as part part of this broader abundance agenda, but do you think yimbyism can serve as a good gateway for people to understanding the economic conditions and then apply that to other elements of society? Absolutely. Yeah. I've already seen that. ah Yeah. I think, I think what we've operated in housing for so long has been a scarcity mindset of, right. Okay. Well, um, to the extent we can build housing, it has to go way out on the periphery where it's far away.
00:40:46
Speaker
Maybe we could build some housing when we redevelop large industrial or commercial sites. ah But in general, nope, we're going to be operating in a context of there's just not enough housing. And the question is, how do you allocate it? Right. And it's like the.
00:40:56
Speaker
The politics of that are so toxic and dysfunctional. And I think that, you know, I think the a broader abundance agenda has actually been recognizing that this is kind of the mindset that we're in on a whole range of policy issues, right? On energy, on on transit and and transportation infrastructure, on water. and and And I think it's actually a revival, I think some of the better elements of of liberalism at its at its height.
00:41:21
Speaker
ah this confidence of hey actually you know we we can solve some of these problems and we can ah you know the change our policies and then achieve a level of abundance on some of these core needs ah to where we don't actually have to have these you know knock down drag out fights over how we're going to allocate It scares resources. um So I've definitely seen that happening and I hope it'll happen much more. You know, I think it remains to be seen if a broader abundance agenda can work for other issues, you know, I think. And and and even if it can, you know, it's like.
00:41:53
Speaker
I hear so many people say, oh, we just need to do yamby for like issue XYZ. Like I hear that so much and these abundance spaces and I get it because this is that we it's been a moderately successful movement. But understand what you're signing up for. You know, like the reason why yamby is successful is that for almost exactly a decade now, like folks have been.
00:42:13
Speaker
you know advancing the ideas in this space. Folks have been trying out reforms and having them not work and trying out something different. you know Folks have been refining ideas. yeah know it's it's It's important to keep in mind that this is a movement and reform is a process and you're not gonna like yeah you know It's not going to be like ah Hello Fresh or Blue Apron, where it's like, okay, here's like the here's like the box of YIMBY for like nuclear power. Just like take out the ingredients and do that. yeah it's like You're going to have to refine and iterate and continue to ah you know build community. That's really, I think, a key aspect of what's happened with YIMBY.
00:42:48
Speaker
It's actually, it's a movement and and and the truest sense of that word of it's a lot of people who maybe were not political, who were not getting involved in policy discussions, who were not going to public hearings, coming out and getting involved. And I think that's going to be the trick for all of these other issue areas.
00:43:05
Speaker
how do you How do you get that sort of grassroots movement for maybe some some more more complex issues, like like scientific innovation? you know there's great There's great people doing a lot of this work, but I think it's ah it's a challenge and it'll require sort of different modes of thinking. and It's not just going to be yummy stamping out for all these other issue areas, even though we're more than happy to help folks think through that. I will say one thing I find kind of um amusing is that like um now it sounds like what you're saying is when they say we want yimbyism for x issue they mean they want to get a functioning grassroots movement going right but there's also an element of like um what yimbyism i'm going to use a word that like it's this is why i find it funny because this word is like
00:43:48
Speaker
verboten in like Democrat circles, even though this is exactly what yimbyism generally ends up being, which is it's a deregulation, right? it's It's we're scaling back government restriction on what you can do in order to allow the market to operate more freely and actually satisfy consumer demand. And there probably are a number of other issues where a solution along those lines is actually what's necessary. But it's just kind of interesting to me that like,
00:44:13
Speaker
There probably are people that are saying, we need a yimby for blah. And what they essentially mean is we need deregulation of blah. But that word has such a toxic sort of like right wing, screw the pores kind of like ah connotation to it that that they can't use that word. i I don't know if I have any further elaboration on that. I just find that kind of an interesting thing.
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think this is where, and I mean, yeah, absolutely. Like some of the project is deregulation. Like there are bad rules that harm people's quality of life and or create, etc. Yeah, we should get rid of them. You know, I mean, one of the great deregulators of the second half of the 20th century was Jimmy Carter, ah you know, breaking up these sort of Cartillistic sort of regulatory regimes um and that's okay. Like I think there's nothing necessarily wrong with progressive shouldn't have any issues with that agenda. um Now that said, when when it's framed as deregulation, then it starts to tickle like the ideology sort of bones, right? A little bit and people start to like retrench onto what does my side think of this general issue?
00:45:13
Speaker
And i would you know I would hope that we could just generally think of it in terms of like what are the outcomes that we want to achieve, right? like ah what What are the policies actually doing? um you know There's nothing inherently good about regulation or deregulation. um The way that you do it really, really, really matters. um On some issues, one policy framework might be appropriate. On some, the other might be appropriate. and I would hope that at a higher level, right, folks can like think through these issues in a mature way and not necessarily sort of automatically go to their, you know, what is my ideological camp? Think about this. I think that's partly what's so exciting about YIMBY is you go to these YIMBY groups and it's genuinely like libertarians and socialists and liberals and conservatives in the room together.
00:46:00
Speaker
able to work together able to say hey look we disagree on a thousand other things but we need to build housing there's not a lot of debate over like what it's going to take to build more housing and there might be healthy and interesting debates over okay how much of that's going to be social housing how much of that should be new greenfield development what if any rent control should there be right what what other sort of liberalizing changes do we need yimbies like if if you get You know, two yimmies in a room together, there will be like three different arguments happening. So, and that's good and healthy, right? But then when it's external facing, it's like, there's this clarity and shared mission of, yeah, we need to build a lot more housing period. Like there's 95% of what goes into that issue. There's no debate. Um, and so I think, yeah, I think you're, I think you're right in the sense of.
00:46:46
Speaker
Yimbyism is a little bit of a policy mode shift of, of okay, hey, these are issues that that don't really map neatly onto right or left. And whether you're talking about this issue in terms of property rights and deregulation or sustainability and equity, you can come around to the same ah cause. And and you know we get knocked for that, right? yeah on the On the right, people are like, oh, this is a far left conspiracy to get you know communist department blocks built in my neighborhood. And then on the far left, it's like, oh, these people were just all developer shills who just, you know, love landlords. Right. And it's like, he's just paying their real estate cronies or whatever to have them push this.
00:47:24
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Nevermind that BlackRock will say in its financial statements, we're buying housing because we think there's going to be a shortage. ah But I think i think it's OK. I think in this moment where there actually is some of this, again, as we were discussing at the top of the talk, there is some of this feeling of like, ah hey, actually this sort of liberal, broad liberal framework that we operate under is pretty good. And like, maybe we don't need these like radical sort of ah crazy you know ah experiments. Maybe we actually can sort of solve these problems and work together.
00:47:55
Speaker
Okay, well, with that said, I mean, maybe more of a looking forward to kind of close out the conversation.
Further Reading and Philosophical Insights
00:48:00
Speaker
um you know Obviously, i we'd recommend the audience pick up your book to start to cut to start learning more about it. I'm curious as to whether or not, whether there's any thinkers, you know policy leaders, or even politicians that you've interacted with that you just feel like get it, that you know maybe our audience should look into. Yeah, oh, that's a great question.
00:48:20
Speaker
um I would say once you've once you've bought two or three copies of my book, distributed them among your friends and family. Two or three or seven or 12. By 11 and you get to 12 free. um I would say a book that I think has really been inspirational for me is Order Without Design.
00:48:39
Speaker
by Alain Berto, B-E-R-T-A-U-D. ah Really, really fantastic book. He's a former principal urban planner at the World Bank. And I think he has a really amazing sort of theoretical framework for how we should think about cities. So that's really, really valuable. Elected officials, I hesitate to say elected because there's so many great people doing great work on this.
00:49:04
Speaker
That I, if I say one, then the rest of them will feel left out. I would say almost in every city in every state in the country. Now there's a great leader on this issue and I would encourage folks to seek them out and and help out figure out how you can help them.
00:49:19
Speaker
you know i i i i continue to i think this movement actually to an underrated degree starts in the blogosphere you know it's like yimby starts as a bunch of weirdo bloggers in the early 2010s like cracking open zoning codes for the first time and saying guys what is all this crap um and you know i so i still i still think there's a highly decentralized quality to this you know i spend a lot of time on uh increasingly blue sky now but historically twitter uh just talking to other people in this community there's somebody one of the things that i think is so cool about this is that like yimby has sort of created like local wonks in every city and neighborhood and state in the country who are just tracking their local fights and like sharing insights about their local sort of issues and you get this almost like
00:50:08
Speaker
Decentralized emergent think tank that is yimby that like comes together to like share work and do peer review and like a really goofy and sometimes like argumentative way on like micro blogging platforms like, you know, twitter and blue sky and um That's that's why I think I spent a lot of time there. Maybe this is just ex post facto justification of me spending all day on Twitter for so many years. But I have to be staring at my phone all the time. I have to. It's important. I feel that it's work, mom. um Yeah. um But so that's you know, that this feels like a little bit of a lame answer. But I would say if you're just getting into this issue, too, a great book on this is Triumph of the City by Edward Glaser.
00:50:48
Speaker
Uh, you know, really just making the case for, this is why cities are so, so, so important. And this is cities as this fullest realization of, I think in many cases, liberal values, right? I mean, you visit a place like New York and you're like, yeah, this is like.
00:51:03
Speaker
This is kind of markets firing on all cylinders and producing this like amazing like environment that we all get a benefit from. This is like this hive of like entrepreneurial and creative energy of people trying out new things. This place where anybody can just show up.
00:51:19
Speaker
and like run sort of, you know, I know I keep saying this, but this is experiment and let me try out new ways of living, meet new people, you know, cities are that in their, in their physically manifested form. ah And so, you know, triumph of the city, I think really captures that as well.
00:51:34
Speaker
I think New York City in particular, um I think really sells that idea because it's so dense compared to most American cities that you really do get this impression while you're in New York City of like, wow, how much like insane amount of like planning and coordination must go into having this be a functioning city.
00:51:53
Speaker
when, you know, the number of people per square mile is as high as it is, right? Because, like, it's not trivial to manage, like, what are we doing about all the waste? How is everybody getting water? How's everybody getting electricity? What do we do if there's an animal in the road, right? Like, like that just the number of things that have to be managed every single day for that city to simply be a city that you can just walk around in and do city things is crazy. And it's just really impressive that they pull it off.
00:52:18
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah, and I think I think New York also too is cool because it it reflects some of these ideas that elaborate talks about which is like What we did with New York is we basically just mapped out a grid across Manhattan Island and We had a clear plan for the actual streets and sewer and then eventually we had a clear plan for parks But then what happened on any individual block we didn't sit down and say okay This is gonna be a residential area that's gonna be a commercial industrial. We didn't sit down and say okay This is gonna be this density. It's gonna be that density for the vast majority of ah of Manhattan's history, and what we get was this emergent order ah that sort of unfolds over time and is able to grow and adapt and change, and it's not always pretty, it's not always peaceful, but it produces this remarkable ah place, right? It gets to this idea, you know, a little bit controversial among some Yambis, but I think it captures some of the ideas of Jane Jacobs, for example, as discussed in Death and Life of the Great American City, this idea of cities as this emergent
00:53:17
Speaker
phenomenon that you you can't really aggressively sort of master plan and micromanage in the way that I think one sort of branch of liberalism tried to go in the 20th century. You got to kind of let these things unfold and you got to let individual yeah know cities emerge from the individual actions and experiments and and and dreams of all the individual people that make them up. And you know if you can come to peace with a little bit of the instability and chaos of that, then you can start to realize the beauty of that. and so yeah we're we're We're getting into the bigger picture stuff out of the out of the zoning reform weeds and into the bigger picture romance of cities, but I think that motivates a lot of people. um You know, so many Americans find themselves in sterile environments that, as a matter of law, cannot grow and adapt and change and get better over time. They can only get worse. And I think folks are waking up to a better possible reality on this.
00:54:09
Speaker
Yeah, and i it makes sense as to why it can be a scary concept because liberalism is that exact philosophy. We're not just talking about cities. It's this idea that individuals should be free to pursue their own interests and go out into the world. It's messy. It's chaotic, but it's one of the most beautiful and effective systems ever devised by humanity.
00:54:24
Speaker
So that's why we're passionate about it. And Nolan, I appreciate the work that you're doing to advocate for this. I hope in 20 years, California is going to be just as affordable as all these other states across the country. um We will build out of it. Is there anything that you want to plug, obviously, to the audience? Pick up arbitrary lines. ah You can follow Nolan at mnolangray on Twitter or X. I'm going to call it Twitter. Is there anything else you want to plug? um Yeah, I would say um I ah
00:54:55
Speaker
Yeah, sorry. I'd say get involved in your local YIMBY group. If this has been at all remotely interesting to you, there is very likely a group of people who are meeting and making real progress on this issue in your community. Even if it's a small group or even if it doesn't exist, I think you'll be blown away by how much progress you can make in a year on this. And if there isn't a group in your community, ah you could be the most important YIMBY. You could be the first one.
00:55:20
Speaker
you know, ah start following these issues, start start posting about them, ah convene a happy hour or a breakfast or a walking group, and get folks organized. You know, I talk to so many people, they say, oh, I really want to do yimbee advocacy, but there's no yimbees. There's no yimbee group in my community. I say, you are the most important yimbee. Go out and start it, get involved. You'll be blown away by how quickly you can achieve change.
00:55:45
Speaker
um And just to put a bow on it, ah you know, this is an area where the more work we put in right now, the more positive policy change we're going to get out and the more housing we're going to get built. um And so, you know, this is an area where the iron is really, really hot right now and we got to straight. So go out, put in the work, organize the MBs in your community and build better cities.
00:56:07
Speaker
Love it. Thank you, Nolan. And for the audience, if you're interested in Project Liberal, you can check out our website at projectliberal dot.org. We're building a cross-partisan coalition of individuals across the political spectrum that are passionate about advancing the cause of a free and open society. We need your support, need your help. You can sign up for our mailing list at projectliberal.org or become a member at projectliberal dot.org slash member. Nolan, thank you again for your time. Sean, thank you for your time. And to the audience, thank you guys for watching. Have a wonderful week.