A must-read for builders, investors, developers, planners, and other housing stakeholders, this New York Times opinion piece by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti lays bare the cost and consequence of what essentially has been a sustained attack on housing.
The cost for the country of too-stringent housing regulations in high-wage, high-productivity cities in forgone gross domestic product is $1.4 trillion. That is the equivalent of losing New York State’s gross domestic product.
Hsieh and Moretti further zero in on the local, regional, and national culprit–land-use restrictions that can be contorted every which way by any number of self-interested opponents to any kind of development–in what amounts to a massive economic heist that for all intents and purposes robs nearly $7,000 in annual pay from every average-Joe worker in America.
These stifling laws–the social and municipal equivalent of applying a tourniquet to the throat–by effectively shutting down development of affordable housing in America’s most vibrant economic geographical markets. Hsieh and Morettie write:
Today, this locomotive of prosperity has broken down. Finance and high-tech companies in cities like New York, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco find it difficult to hire because of the high cost of housing. When an unemployed worker in Detroit today finds a well-paying job in San Francisco, she often cannot afford the cost of housing there.
New housing construction in America’s most dynamic cities faces growing regulatory costs, delays and enormous opposition from neighboring homeowners. Since the 1970s, a property-rights revolution — what critics call Nimbyism, from “not in my back yard” — has significantly reduced the development of new housing stock, especially in cities where the economy is strongest.
Thing is, Nimbyism is emblematic of how self-defeating and self-destructive social and economic polarization is in America today.
For, much of the Nimby agenda is not only well-intentioned, it’s downright healthy and practical and sound. Isn’t it true that many of our municipalities
- Have too much traffic already?
- Overburden other infrastructures and city services like police and waste disposal, water, highway and street maintenance, etc.?
- Have too little green or undeveloped public space?
- Put disproportionate tax burden on present landowners to support newcomers and transitory households?
- Have growing crime rates?
- Have countless other challenges to the quality of local life?
The Nimby agenda’s problem is its close-mindedness to realistic and sustainable solutions. It cuts off its nose to spite its face because, at its essence, a town, or city, or county that can and does not plan to replenish its vital human resources eventually loses out and loses all. Everything Nimby activists work for and clamor about will go away if their strangle-hold on new affordable housing options prevails.
As citizens, it’s a tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot, and this is a classic case.
The problem with the Yimby agenda too is its close-mindedness to the value of Nimby needs, and the use of brute tactics to overcome Nimby resistance. Sound planning that looks at code, land-use strategy, mindful self-sustaining long-term investment, measured development, and overall local, cultural and social values and character as positives is a win for all.
Hsieh and Moretti turn back to Washington in their search for gains against this subtle, insidious attack on affordable housing, which as they illustrate is not only a barrier to social and economic mobility but also mutes broader economic and financial gains for all. They conclude:
There is a lot of debate in Washington about the costs of regulations for economic growth. Exclusionary land-use regulations in our most dynamic labor markets impose demonstrable high costs on our nation’s economic well-being.
Reforming these regulations through smart growth policies is a policy that should appeal to both Democrats and Republicans. The primary beneficiaries would be America’s middle-class workers.
While there may be a role for advocacy and change at the federal level, we also believe our localities are the place to focus on political and social skill-sets that sharply, and perhaps, unnecessarily divide Nimbys from Yimbys on a town by town basis. Yes, Us against Them is a simpler, less strenuous framework to view the challenges residential developers and builders face in the municipalities they develop for housing.
Imagine, instead, a new breed of land-use strategists and planners, with a full-portfolio of data and evidence-based assumptions, collaborating to tackle one of America’s most wicked problems right now, the lack of affordable housing in the nation’s most economically vibrant cities. It’s not so hard to imagine, right? And it’s exactly what’s happening here and there already.
Possibly, however, there’s more common ground between a Nimby and a Yimby than it’s currently popular to imagine.
