Everybody's Here
Notes from a housing initiative's launch event in D.C.
I wrote about some conversations I had during a couple of housing events in D.C. the other week. The first event was the launch for the Metropolitan Abundance Project, a mostly but not exclusively housing-focused initiative from the folks at California YIMBY. That’s the original YIMBY organization, and they’ve been pretty influential in pushing pro-housing laws in California. The Metropolitan Abundance Project was, obviously, launched in D.C., and is an attempt to do legislative advocacy in more places.
As I noted in that earlier piece, it was really cool to see much of this vague network of pro-housing people all together in one room. Most of us probably knew who most of the others were, but definitely some of that is just social media mutual following. So getting those folks in a room is worth something in and of itself.
As part of the launch, there was also a panel discussion, and here I want to relay some of the interesting points that were made.
One, which I’ve touched on before, is the framing of what we usually think of as “nice” or “desirable” or “expensive” or “exclusive” places as fundamentally not any of those things. Fundamentally, such places are productive. This is an important distinction. It defines the housing shortage in these places as a hoarding or walling off of opportunity, rather than as a protection of a fundamental character. In other words, the thing being excluded isn’t “desirability,” which impliedly should be afforded or earned, but opportunity, which is everybody’s right.
I noticed that the introduction to the panel, by Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, had a careful mix of words and implied arguments and audiences. He nodded towards making cities desirable and safe for families, promoting carbon-free transportation, fostering racial and economic fairness and opportunity. In other words, you’re covering people who come at housing advocacy and urbanism more generally from a pro-family perspective, an environmentalist perspective, a social justice perspective, and a libertarian-ish economic opportunity perspective. (Not that these are mutually exclusive.)
The point that MAP is underscoring is that we are facing a fundamentally artificial, self-imposed scarcity. Hanlon said that anti-growth sentiment, or NIMBYism, arose as a political force in coastal cities and college towns, but now threatens all metro areas. That’s even a little bit of an anti-elitist point.
So I found the political messaging element here interesting, from these framings to the notion of the housing crisis as being about scarcity versus abundance. Maybe this message can really break through political polarization. There was even a mention of popular discontent. It was almost like the premise was that this election was a protest against the status quo, which is also the opposite of what we housing folks want.
The panel had a former state legislator from Arizona, whose name unfortunately I didn’t catch. He talked about his time in the statehouse, where he tried to go big on a housing and zoning reform bill. He called himself a conservative, but said a lot of conservatives have no real answer to the housing crisis.
What was interesting about his remarks was the view inside the legislative process. The League of Arizona Cities and Towns, he said, didn’t like his housing bill—those organizations being un-aligned with the pro-housing movement is ironic—and they sent an alert out to all the mayors. This ended up scaring some legislators who had been for the bill, and the bill didn’t end up having the votes (short story).
He then explained that later on, a number of core elements from that bill passed as individual bills. But the big “omnibus” bill he sponsored originally caught a lot of attention and catalyzed a movement. For a new concept, he said, “it may be better to have a sacrificial year or two” in the form of a big bill that won’t pass, to build knowledge and momentum so that elements of it can pass later. This is stuff I never would think about, not being involved in politics directly.
The next panelist was Katie Cristol, a former Arlington County Board member. She was on the board during the time the county’s Missing Middle zoning reform was passed unanimously. That passage followed eight years of development. By the final outreaches and hearings, she said, the YIMBY advocates actually outnumbered the NIMBYs. Arlington, she noted, is majority under 40 and majority renter, but you’d never know that from being on the council.
She talked about race and environmentalism, and how getting the NAACP and the Sierra Club on board with the zoning reform was key to getting it passed. She also noted that missing middle is a fundamentally conservative reform: it permits multifamily units in single-family zones, but only if they can fit within the basic form of a detached house.
This issue of coalition-building, trying to get this group on board and that group on board and hoping your outreach to one doesn’t make the other suspicious, etc. etc.—that whole process, I guess, can look kind of cynical from the outside. But that’s what policymaking is. That’s what democracy is. I think, as the Arizona politician said, conservatives often lack answers to these difficult problems because on some level they’re skeptical of the whole process of making public policy.
Unfortunately, despite the caution with which Arlington went about the Missing Middle reform, a judge struck it down—the same judge overseeing almost the same case in Alexandria, which passed a similar reform. Cristol noted that Charlottesville passed a similar ordinance, and theirs also got held up in litigation. What happened to basically letting localities exercise land-use powers? It’s so odd to me that localities can put pretty much any restrictions they want in the code, but any attempt to reform these old codes suddenly raises questions about the extent of their powers. Cristol said she thought, with multiple cities’ similar reforms tied up in the courts, that the Virginia Supreme Court would need to rule somehow on this question.
Cristol had some other interesting thoughts on all of this.
She said back when the work on Missing Middle started, there was a prevailing notion of “protecting the neighborhoods”—which more or less assumed people and multifamily residences were a nuisance. That people living in multifamily buildings don’t count as members of neighborhoods. This, she said, was an idea from the ‘70s, with debates over the Metro corridor running through part of Arlington.
The fact that this idea from half a century ago still prevailed showed how much we just haven’t touched these issues in ages. That, the judge, an older man, striking down a modest reform in a majority-young, majority-renter county, the general attitude that nothing should ever change—Cristol called it “intergenerational despondency.” We’re “trying to bend the curve” on housing costs, where maybe today’s kids can buy a home in these communities in their 20s and 30s like so many of today’s NIMBYs did in their youth.
The next panelist, Emily Hamilton, an economist who focuses on housing, spoke a bit about inclusionary zoning, a policy that requires developers to include a certain percentage of “affordable,” i.e. income-restricted, units in new buildings, and often gives them a “density bonus,” where they can build more market-rate units if they go above the required percentage of affordable units.
Hamilton noted two problems with this. One is that it likely reduced the total amount of housing production, though she said this depended on the locality. And two, IZ relies on “an underlying base of exclusionary zoning.” In other words, a “density bonus” has no value unless the status quo is that you can’t build. Interesting. This sort of technocratic, situation deregulation to engineer some specific desired purpose is not really letting the market work, and it isn’t the “abundance” approach.
I bet this point would get some disagreement, and perhaps you could argue IZ is the least-bad option among what’s possible right now. But I found Hamilton’s critique interesting.
She also made another interesting point: zoning reforms often just reveal other code or finance issues. One way around this is the increasingly popular reforms to permit ADUs: “accessory dwelling units” or what many people know as an in-law suite. These are small projects that a homeowner themselves can do. They’re not disruptive, and so easy to permit and regulate. And they don’t raise issues with financing the way larger projects can.
But there are ways localities can actually incentivize them rather than just permit them on paper. For example, not requiring a public hearing; not requiring off-street parking; not requiring owner occupancy. A line in the code is the difference between one of these projects feeling achievable to an average homeowner or not. Altogether, Hamilton said, ADU advocacy blunts NIMBYism because homeowners can see themselves wanting the right to build an accessory unit and basically monetize their land (without selling or taking out a home equity loan).
The last panelist, Anika Singh Lemar, spoke mostly after I had gotten up, and I didn’t get to take as many notes. But in response to Katie Cristol talking about getting the NAACP on board, Lemar noted that the earliest organized to open up zoning were tied to fair housing and civil rights concerns. In her own state of Connecticut, the NAACP protested downzonings in, I believe, the 1970s. The Mount Laurel decision in New Jersey in 1975, which requires municipalities to provide affordable housing, is from the same era. In other words, the politics of this stuff has changed, and there was a moment when more muscular reforms were enacted or considered than today. Interesting.
It’s all interesting. Thanks for following along!
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"She said back when the work on Missing Middle started, there was a prevailing notion of “protecting the neighborhoods”—which more or less assumed people and multifamily residences were a nuisance. That people living in multifamily buildings don’t count as members of neighborhoods."
I feel like that's the real problem here. Sometimes it feels like we're a country that just hates people and feels like they are just a threat and a burden. That it's a high ideal to spread out and avoid other people as much as possible, and that the more people that are around, the worse things get.
I think a lot of this comes from failed public policy and urban planning after the 30s that lead to very disfunction cities here in the US. Now we're coming up on the limit of sprawl and coming to terms with all the problems it creates. But it's so hard to unwind the entrenched anti-urban mentality because folks are worried about losing what little they have (itself a result of our land use policies basically mandating that folks live beyond their means). It's a wicked problem that I fear will only lead to unavoidable catastrophy similar to the Great Depression that spawned it.
The problem with the YIMBY movement is that it's fundamentally about cramming as much housing as possible into a given area - often citing many politically-charged progressive/leftist reasons for doing so. It thus ends up being viewed, not without justification, as an unholy alliance between progressive activists advancing a culture-war agenda and huge corporate developers who only want to cover the land in five-over-ones.
Zoning ultimately has to be about aesthetics and the "lived experience", if you will, of residing in a given community. I prefer human-scale, mixed-use urbanism not because it advances abstract political goals, but because (generally speaking) such places are more pleasant, enriching, and convenient to live in. But building such a community is a totally different proposition from simply "upzoning" an existing car suburb. And then, everyone (and maybe the same person, at different times in their life) has a different idea about what type of urbanism is the ideal.