April 28, 2025
Professional-housing advocates supply an evaluation of sophistication relations that’s extra subtle and has extra explanatory energy than the one held by many critics of the “abundance agenda.”
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Building continues on a mixed-use condominium advanced that may maintain greater than 700 models of housing and 95,000 sq. toes of business house on August 20, 2024, in Los Angeles.
(Mario Tama / Getty Photos)
“Abundance” is a slippery time period. Of their latest e-book, appropriately titled Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe it as a “a easy thought: (that) to have the longer term we wish, we have to construct and invent extra of what we’d like,” together with housing, inexperienced power, public transportation, and so forth. However to critics on the left, abundance is, at greatest, an inventory of coverage concepts with no principle of energy—a dry, technocratic train with no political core.
To Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, as an illustration, abundance liberalism is a reboot of the Democratic Management Council, “a gaggle of centrist thinkers plotting a revival of liberalism by the use of pragmatism and coverage innovation.” In The Nation, Jeet Heer just lately wrote that abundance “quantities to a brand new iteration of neoliberalism selling deregulation and business-friendly insurance policies.” And in Rolling Stone, David Sirota and Aaron Regunberg argue that abundance liberalism “writes America’s central shortage drawback—company energy—out of the financial story.”
If these critiques sound vaguely acquainted, it’s as a result of almost an identical fees have been made towards the “sure in my yard” (YIMBY) motion for years. And “abundance” is one thing just like the YIMBY conceptual framework generalized to a variety of different coverage areas. (Glastris and Weisberg, bizarrely, credit score abundance wonks for uplifting the YIMBY motion, although it was very a lot the opposite manner round; the phrase “abundance agenda” was coined solely in 2022, whereas YIMBYism dates again to Obama’s second time period.)
Present Difficulty
Opponents on the left have lengthy accused YIMBYs of refusing to interact with questions of energy. YIMBYism has been, in line with one critic, “a promise that we didn’t must redistribute something (as a result of we) might simply make extra property.” In In Protection of Housing, an early entry within the left-anti-YIMBY style, David Madden and Peter Marcuse argue that “free market boosters” fail to know that the “steadiness of energy between tenants and landlords, or between actual property house owners and communities, can’t be decided in a impartial, apolitical manner.” Of upzoning and allowing reform, they write that “eradicating the laws that rein in property house owners shifts energy in the direction of capital and away from residents.”
It’s tough to judge the energy of those arguments when utilized to abundance liberalism writ massive, as a result of “abundance” means so many issues to so many individuals. Even YIMBYism is hardly a single factor: There are centrist Democratic YIMBYs, but in addition DSA YIMBYs, libertarian YIMBYs, center-right YIMBYs, and so forth. (There are even spineless, reformist social-democrat YIMBYs like me.)
However loads of YIMBYs do, in truth, assume deeply about problems with energy. Many left YIMBYs particularly have an understanding of sophistication and energy relations that’s superior—each in its sophistication and in its explanatory power—to the one provided by lots of their critics. Their pro-housing advocacy is just not an try to keep away from questions of energy however to confront them head-on.
To know the left-YIMBY evaluation, it’s useful to take a look at the place its critics fall brief. Above, Madden and Marcuse (who died in 2022) sketch out a bipolar class system, by which “actual property house owners” are pitted towards “communities.” It is a widespread gadget in anti-YIMBY writing, however it’s wildly out of step with the fact that almost all American households—almost two-thirds, to be slightly extra exact—are owners. Even in these comparatively dense cities the place the homeownership price falls under 50 %, loads of houses are nonetheless owner-occupied. In Manhattan, the homeownership price is 25 % and climbing. One-third of Brooklynites personal their dwelling. The homeownership charges in San Francisco, Cook dinner County (dwelling of Chicago), and Los Angeles County are, respectively, 44 %, 63 %, and 49 %.
Madden, Marcuse, and plenty of of their anti-YIMBY compatriots are working in a self-consciously Marxian body of reference. However satirically, their greatest mental failing in the case of the politics of housing is their incapacity to assume dialectically. “Capital” and “the group” emerge from their evaluation as homogeneous, inert blobs. They’d have come nearer to the mark if they’d as a substitute adopted the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson’s dictum to not “see class as a ‘construction,’ nor whilst a ‘class,’ however as one thing which in truth occurs (and may be proven to have occurred) in human relationships.” Thompson’s instance teaches us to derive our class evaluation from real-world, observable dynamics as a substitute of making an attempt to compress the proof to suit a set of prefabricated concepts.
A lot of the category battle in housing politics takes place not between Large Actual Property and native communities however inside communities: Prosperous owners, significantly when they’re organized into neighborhood associations, type highly effective anti-housing blocs. Political science analysis has discovered that the folks most definitely to talk out towards housing improvement throughout public hearings are usually older, whiter, wealthier owners. Their opposition to new building helps make sure the persistence of regional housing shortages, which drives up rents and locks first-time homebuyers out of the housing market.
A few of this opposition stems from an comprehensible resistance to vary: Many householders like their neighborhoods the best way they’re and wish to hold them that manner. However many prosperous owners produce other extra concrete causes for wanting to maintain new houses out of their backyards.
NIMBYs will usually cite property values as a purpose for opposing multifamily improvement: The presence of condominium buildings, they argue, blights single-family neighborhoods and makes their houses much less helpful. The precise results of upzoning and multifamily building on dwelling values are a bit extra nuanced—in some instances, constructing reasonably priced housing has been discovered to reinforce the worth of close by single-family houses—however regardless of. Because the economist William Fischel argued in The Homevoter Speculation, any type of change to a neighborhood’s constructed surroundings introduces a certain quantity of economic danger for owners: “NIMBYism makes completely good sense if you consider the variance in anticipated outcomes, and the truth that there is no such thing as a method to insure towards neighborhood or community-wide decline.” Restrictive zoning, and the creation of native owners’ cartels like neighborhood associations to implement an efficient ban on building, function advert hoc insurance coverage insurance policies.
On this effort, they usually have the help of the left’s anti-YIMBY faction. Notably in California and different blue states with well-funded progressive nonprofit sectors, some advocacy teams will combat pro-housing reforms as a result of, they argue, the manufacturing of dense, market-rate housing spurs gentrification and displacement. They continue to be dedicated to this place regardless of the massive and rising physique of proof that multifamily building truly reduces rents within the surrounding space. (There additionally appears to be little self-reflection amongst these teams over the truth that they usually discover themselves in coalition with lobbying teams just like the realtors and rich owners in unique neighborhoods.)
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NIMBYism can be understood as a type of conspiracy to hoard public facilities. In Segregation by Design: Native Politics and Inequality in American Cities, the political scientist Jessica Trounstine presents proof that cities with larger property tax revenues and public spending (significantly larger charges of public college funding) had been extra more likely to undertake zoning within the early twentieth century. Because the title of Trounstine’s e-book suggests, zoning helped keep segregated areas the place white, rich residents might monopolize well-funded public infrastructure. In actual fact, restrictive zoning has confirmed to be an efficient software for useful resource hoarding even after the tip of authorized Jim Crow: Whereas it has develop into harder to implement racial segregation inside college districts, zoning and different land-use restrictions assist protect segregation between districts.
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Simply as “the group” is just not a coherent unit of sophistication evaluation, we will’t make any sense of housing politics until we break the real-estate trade down into its constituent parts. Broadly talking, it’s helpful right here to differentiate between productive companies and rentier companies. Right here I exploit “productive” in a value-neutral sense to explain companies that generate income via the manufacturing o0f materials items, on this case models of housing. “Rentier companies” is an umbrella time period that encompasses all the pieces from small, so-called mom-and-pop landlords to massive real-estate funding trusts (REITs) like Blackstone.
On the highest stage of abstraction, there’s a clear divergence in pursuits between productive capital and rentier capital. Builders earn a living after they construct housing; landlords, then again, acquire extra revenue in instances the place housing is comparatively scarce. Most of the largest REITs are frank about this when talking to traders: They brazenly have a good time housing shortages that give them the leverage to lift rents.
It could, at first look, seem to be productive companies would, in distinction to rentier capital, uniformly help land-use deregulation so they might have extra alternatives to construct. However many builders are both detached to pro-housing reforms or actively against them. (One latest instance: the president of San Francisco’s Residential Builders Affiliation saying, in defiance of all proof on the contrary, “San Francisco doesn’t have a zoning drawback.”) That’s as a result of builders are likely to specialize: Land-use reforms that encourage the creation of extra infill condominium buildings do little to assist the builders of sprawling single-family subdivisions, and will in truth harm their backside line by making a launch valve for pent-up housing demand.
Additional, many builders profit from restrictive land-use guidelines in the cities the place they function. The advanced allowing guidelines in a metropolis like San Francisco or Los Angeles penalize small builders, however reward these massive companies with the expertise, authorized and technical assets, and political affect wanted to navigate the system. In impact, these guidelines lock out opponents and defend regional developer cartels. Opaque allowing techniques that run extra on political affect than clear, goal requirements additionally are usually breeding grounds for corruption.
It is a very tough sketch of the housing energy map: I’ve omitted key actors reminiscent of nonprofit reasonably priced housing builders, institutional lenders, constructing commerce unions, and realtors. I’ve additionally elided the numerous regional variation in housing politics: The political financial system of the San Francisco Bay Space, for instance, seems very completely different from the political financial system of the Dallas metropolitan space. But when I’ve supplied a caricature, it at the very least bears a better resemblance to actuality than the “actual property versus communities” dynamic imagined by some anti-YIMBYs. So with this schema fastened in our minds, it’s now time to think about the place YIMBYs match into all of this.
The important thing perception of the unique YIMBYs is that whereas anti-housing forces are extremely organized, the individuals who would profit from pro-housing reforms haven’t, traditionally, been organized in any respect. Struggling renters have much less time and fewer assets than rich owners, rentiers, and developer cartels. Lots of them could not perceive the hyperlink between the finer factors of native allowing legislation and the lease hike they obtained after they renewed their lease. Plus, lots of those that would profit from a brand new multifamily challenge in an unique neighborhood are individuals who don’t reside there but, and subsequently haven’t any affect over native energy brokers.
However the housing scarcity successfully created a brand new class of perma-renter: extremely educated however downwardly cell members of the skilled managerial class who, as city rents skyrocketed and homeownership fell out of attain, discovered themselves going through financial pressures that beforehand solely hit low-income and working-class households. It’s these individuals who fashioned the unique core of the YIMBY motion, although its membership has since broadened to incorporate many individuals each additional up and additional down the category ladder.
Anti-YIMBYs generally cost that the motion is solely targeted on the pursuits of this class: that it’s preoccupied with constructing “luxurious condos” that shall be occupied completely by younger, childless, white professionals. However in truth, easing anti-housing land-use restrictions advantages renters and first-time homebuyers throughout the earnings spectrum. As I’ve beforehand identified in The Nation, constructing extra residences—even residences close to the excessive finish of the market—has been discovered to drive down rents for the bottom tier of models. This, in truth, is why REITs and different landlords rightly perceive extra homebuilding to be towards their pursuits.
And it isn’t simply the company energy of REITs that’s threatened by YIMBY reforms: Fairer, extra clear, and extra versatile land-use guidelines undermine developer oligopolies by cracking open markets to a spread of smaller, scrappier homebuilders. That’s as a result of builders are likely to specialize—a single-family sprawl developer can not seamlessly pivot to constructing mid-rise condominium buildings. When it turns into authorized to construct new typologies, new companies surge into the market—one thing we noticed firsthand in California after the state made it considerably simpler to construct Accent Dwelling Items. (I’m frequently mystified that so lots of YIMBYism’s critics determine with the anti-monopolist left—regardless that opposing YIMBY reforms means preserving the market energy of incumbent landlords and developer cartels.)
And the potential penalties of YIMBY reform go even deeper than that. Maybe a comparability between housing and labor can be illuminating. Economists usually agree that full employment results in wage progress, as a result of employers want to lift compensation so as to compete for a comparatively scarce provide of obtainable employees. Because the economist Michael Kalecki noticed in his 1943 essay “The Political Points of Full Employment,” the implications of this dynamic are extra radical than they first seem.
Underneath full employment, “the social place of the boss can be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would develop,” Kalecki wrote. “Strikes for wage will increase and enhancements in circumstances of labor would create political stress.” A persistently tight labor market can flip an entrenched social order the other way up.
What’s true for the labor market holds true within the housing market. The place housing is scarce and costly, landlords, home-owner associations, and developer cartels maintain the ability, and tenants and homebuyers are forged into the position of supplicants, pressured to simply accept subpar lodging at no matter value and in no matter neighborhood is dictated to them. However the place housing is plentiful, the roles are reversed: Landlords, sellers, and incumbent builders must compete on each value and high quality. Tenant harassment turns into exceptionally unhealthy for enterprise, as a result of tenants have loads of different housing choices to select from. Rich owners are now not capable of keep financial moats round their communities and monopolize the advantages of homeownership. The dignity, freedom, and stability that include housing safety develop into accessible to everybody. That is the longer term that YIMBYs need.
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Ned Resnikoff
Ned Resnikoff is an city coverage guide and fellow on the Roosevelt Institute. He’s engaged on a e-book about cities for Island Press with an anticipated publication date of fall 2026.
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