The Weird Politics of Housing Abundance

And why we should reject attempts to suck YIMBYism into the Omnicause

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Over the past few months, I’ve seen a handful of attempts to make the cause of housing abundance a partisan one. These efforts have largely come from housing advocates themselves, who have at various times attempted to either reject Republican electeds from the movement or force pro-housing activists and officials to embrace a pro-Palestinian stance.

This is misguided on several fronts. For one, housing advocacy groups taking a position on a divisive foreign conflict would not help Palestinians, but it might destroy the housing movement. Two, the pro-housing movement nationally is not even a Democratic (party) movement, let alone a leftist one. Some of the biggest housing wins of the past year—comprehensive zoning reforms in Montana and Florida, for instance—have come from Republican state governments in red states.

This is a good thing. Pro-housing policies are having success not because they’re right- or left-coded, but because they’re the right thing to do at a time when Americans of all political orientations are grappling with high rents and eye-watering mortgage payments. As a nonpartisan cause, housing abundance has succeeded by drawing support from both sides of the aisle.

Today’s letter will explore the pro-housing movement from a political lens, exploring the current battle lines, housing’s political coding across the spectrum, and how polarization threatens to upend the pro-housing movement’s momentum.

Coding the Housing Movement

Pro-housing policies defy easy classification into traditional left- or right-leaning buckets. On one hand, land use reform is fundamentally deregulatory. Local governments’ over-regulation of land use has led to housing shortages, and that problem is solved—at least in part—by putting fewer restrictions on what can be built where. This kind of deregulatory framing resonates more on the right, and property rights advocates—generally a right-leaning group—played a big role in passing Montana’s 2023 zoning reform package.

Source: Mercatus Center

But pro-housing advocacy also appeals to many on the left. Historically, high rents driven by housing shortages have hit urban residents in left-leaning coastal cities the hardest; therefore, many of the earliest housing advocates were left-leaning Democrats. And from an outcomes perspective, the practical result of land use reform—housing affordability—has historically been a left-of-center cause. Many leftists also see the end of restrictive, single-family-only zoning as an important racial justice issue, aligning them with property rights Republicans and free marketeers.

Housing’s muddled political coding has led to these odd alliances playing out in real time as housing reforms are proposed in state houses nationwide. From a March 2024 Bloomberg article (emphasis mine):

[Kentucky] State Representative Steven Doan introduced legislation in January that would legalize fourplexes, tiny homes and accessory dwelling units across the state. Other reforms in the omnibus bill would legalize home businesses, forbid prohibitions on renting and end mandatory minimum square footage requirements for homes. And it would add a shot clock to permitting approvals, allowing construction to proceed after 60 days.

As a real estate attorney and former president of an emergency shelter in northern Kentucky, Doan speaks knowledgeably about codes and regulations, hitting popular YIMBY talking points. Yet he also says that a housing abundance agenda fits within the free market populism of today’s GOP. “This [bill] allows a homeowner or a landowner to decide exactly what they do with their property and gets away from the central planning that is local planning and zoning.”

Doan represents a conservative district that includes several Cincinnati suburbs, and describes himself as a liberty-leaning Republican. “Thomas Massie is my congressman and a big supporter of mine,” he said, referring to the libertarian Republican who joined the House in the Tea Party era. In other words, Doan’s GOP bonafides are firm. But his housing omnibus has won the support of progressive Democrats from Louisville, he says, who are backing it for equity reasons.

Of course, each side also has its own reasons to oppose housing reform. For example, the most left-leaning politicians in the most left-leaning places—New York and San Francisco, for instance—tend to be hostile to market-based solutions to anything, including housing. But these places also have very weak state capacity, making them incapable of building meaningful amounts of government-sponsored housing, so many socialist elected officials are effectively part of the urban anti-housing coalition. PHIMBY only works if your city is capable of building public housing at scale, which none currently are.

On the other side, right-leaning opposition to housing abundance can take a few forms. Land use reform often begets change—new buildings and new people, specifically—and this can be a problem for some lower-case-c conservatives. For instance, many suburbs of major cities in blue states were built as a result of white flight as the midcentury middle class abandoned cities en masse. Any attempts to increase density or affordability are seen as a violation of those places’ raison d'etre and provoke tremendous opposition, as New York Governor Hochul discovered in 2023 after attempting to use state law to force NYC’s suburbs to build housing.

Generally, the right’s views on housing breaks on individualist vs communitarian lines. While individualists on the right tend to prioritize private property rights, right-leaning communitarians instead emphasize a community’s right to set collective guidelines—including defining an in-group and an out-group—even if the rights of individuals to use their property freely are impinged.

Interestingly, the right-communitarian’s blood-and-soil approach is mirrored on the left with different political coding and language but identically poor results for housing production. Understanding this requires moving past the traditional left-right spectrum.

Pro-Housing Alignment by Other Frameworks

Clearly, traditional left-right dynamics are woefully insufficient to describe the housing movement. Kentucky GOP Senator Steven Doan is pro-housing, as is my left-leaning Democratic NYC councilmember, Erik Bottcher. But they probably agree on little else. Similarly, Long Island Republican Lee Zeldin is strongly against zoning reform, as are many left-wing socialist politicians from San Francisco and New York like Dean Preston and Jabari Brisport. But it’s also not a “centrist” movement; moderate Democrats and Republicans from purple districts fall on both sides of the land use question and are rarely the ones pushing the issue forward.

The communitarian vs individualist framework presented earlier gets us closer to an answer—particularly in understanding right’s outlook on zoning and land use regulation—but it’s obviously incomplete. Many housing advocates on the left, for instance, push pro-housing policies to benefit their communities even if more housing construction in their neighborhood would not be a good thing for them personally. But others on the left oppose more housing from a communitarian standpoint due to concerns about displacement. And as noted earlier, many of these left-communitarian objections mirror right-communitarian objections that potential newcomers may be of a different racial or ethnic background from those already present in the area.

Source: ThoughtCo

Rather, a better indication of alignment on pro-housing policies comes down to three factors:

• Individualism

• Age

• Institutional trust

Pro-housing supporters tend to be younger, more individualist, and have higher institutional trust. Each of these factors contributes in its own way.

Younger people tend to be more impacted by housing costs. If not personally impacted, they certainly see the effect that high rents and home prices have had on their peer group—delaying marriage, children, and other milestones of life. Younger people also tend to be more adaptable to change and are less wedded to a neighborhood staying the way it has been since the 1970s.

At an event earlier this year, I asked a New York State lawmaker how the Legislature breaks down on housing issues. The main determinant of support vs opposition to pro-housing policies, he noted, was simply age rather than party affiliation, district, or background.

Institutional trust is another key factor. Comprehensive land use reform requires participants to put trust in a legislative process that could fundamentally alter their built environment. Support for individual re-zonings requires a degree of trust that a developer will do what they say they will and that local government will hold them to account if they don’t.

In addition to making reform difficult, a lack of institutional trust drives anti-housing conspiracy theories on both the left and the right. On the left, vacancy trutherism is rampant among left-leaning activists as well legislators. And the anti-housing populist right—and left—are increasingly eager to blame institutional investors for rising housing costs rather than a lack of supply. A young person with high institutional trust is likely to support policy solutions to the housing crisis. A young person with low institutional trust is likely to blame Blackstone.

Institutional trust is probably where the “horseshoe theory” is most applicable, as the same anti-housing arguments can be seen on both the left and the right. And anti-housing views that come from a low-trust place are often bundled with a variety of other fringe opinions; one of NYC’s left-wing anti-housing council members, for instance, was run out of town in part for endorsing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

The role of individualism, therefore, is best understood in the context of the other factors. An right-leaning individualist with high-to-moderate institutional trust will likely support housing reforms of the kind seen Montana and Kentucky, for instance. But a right-leaning individualist with low institutional trust with see an attempt to force people to eat the bugs and live in a pod.

On the Omnicause

I write all of this to demonstrate that the pro-housing movement is not a simple left-right issue. While plenty of leftists are in support of land use reform, it doesn’t have the same obvious partisan coding as something like abortion or climate change or Black Lives Matter.

This is important, because all those causes have been subsumed over the past few years into the Progressive Omnicause. While women’s rights and racial justice were formerly distinct causes with unique agendas and goals, they’ve since merged into a semi-unified intersectional progressive movement, the Omnicause. In the words of Jonathan Chait:

The progressive movement emerged over the past two decades out of a series of component groups representing causes like civil rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, and labor. Over the past two decades, these groups, sometimes called “The Groups,” have evolved from a patchwork of atomized single-issue organizations into a relatively unified movement. Each component part now habitually supports the projects of the others: Abortion-rights groups endorse defunding the police, civil-rights groups demand student-debt relief, and so on.

While one can debate whether or not that was a good thing for those causes, it is clear to me that the pro-housing movement should steer well clear of it.

For one, the housing advocacy movement has seen more success over the past five years than all those other progressive causes combined. Zoning reforms have been enacted in blue and red states alike, tackling a variety of issues from ADU and apartment legalization to building code reform to permit review shot clocks. Much more work is to be done—and progress is uneven, with some places like New York lagging—but the housing movement is succeeding in a way that few political movements in recent years have.

And it’s succeeding in part because it promises real, tangible benefits rather than slogans, catchphrases, and groupthink. People—particularly young people—see the pain caused by increasing rents and spiraling home prices. And research has repeatedly shown that building more housing brings housing costs down. The movement’s ability to draw support from across the political spectrum is a feature, not a bug. Housing advocates may disagree with other advocates on a litany of issues, but they’re able to put those aside to support buildings more housing.

Given this big tent nature of the movement, it’s not possible to neatly fit other causes into it as much as some advocates may want to. The attempt to push YIMBY organizations to take a pro-Palestinian stance, for instance, misunderstands what “big tent” means:

The “tent” is big because it welcomes many different supporters, not many different causes. Big tent movements, in fact, struggle to support more than one clear objective due to the political diversity of their bases. It’s a single-issue movement, and that’s completely fine.

Given the diversity of the pro-housing movement I’ve described here, putting a litmus test in the form of a complicated Middle Eastern conflict on the housing movement would surely fracture it. The original article arguing for YIMBY groups to take a stand for Palestine, for instance, was clearly aimed at California Senator Scott Weiner. Weiner is a major housing advocate and one-time darling of the pro-housing left. But he’s also a Jew with a nuanced opinion on the current conflict, which is problematic for many on the left, and he’s been a repeated target of pro-Hamas activists in recent months. By attempting to pressure YIMBY groups to take a stand against Weiner, activists risk fracturing the big tent housing coalition. (As a state senator, Weiner plays no role in US foreign policy.)

Of course, it’s unclear how much all this really matters. One could argue that Doug Burgum and Steven Doan are going to propose and support housing reforms regardless of what San Francisco leftists have to say about them.

But I think that’s an overly optimistic view given the state of polarization. If housing becomes a partisan issue—publicly associated with the Progressive Omnicause and all it represents—it becomes vastly harder for politicians in red and purple states to support housing. Those states are suffering from their own housing crisis, and people everywhere deserve an affordable place to live.

And it’s not like the progressive movement is particularly good at enacting its policies in even the bluest cities and states. Building housing without the private sector—which many on the left would prefer—requires tremendous state capacity. When New York City can’t even expand its transit system at a reasonable cost, it’s hard to imagine how it would build half a million units of new housing over the next eight years. Hanging our hat on that is a recipe for more homelessness and pain.

Policies and their advocates should be judged by the real-world impact they have. Sacrificing affordable homes for millions for a performative statement is a bad trade.

—Brad Hargreaves