FREE FOR ALL: How to lower the rent

Learning to love building, and solving the affordable housing crisis — and embracing abundance

The rent is too damn high. 

To put that in wonky terms, the shortage of affordable housing costs the U.S. some $2 trillion a year. In less wonky terms, this crisis limits freedom, keeping people from living where they like, taking jobs they might enjoy, and creating the lives they want. Housing hits people where they live — because it is entirely about where they live.

Like many lasting American problems, a toxic mix of racism, class bias, and policy inaction has gotten the country into this mess, but it’s been difficult to get the political momentum to find an actual solution, at least on a national scale. The Biden administration had made a significant investment in housing, but failed to message effectively on the idea. Kamala Harris had promised on the campaign trail to "end America’s housing shortage.” And Donald Trump hasn’t delivered for those on the right who had hoped for a new Republican administration to back residential construction with deregulatory measures. Instead, Trump has created chaos, alternately cutting funding for housing programs or proposing unworkable plans to build housing where it isn’t needed or wanted.

Whatever happens over the coming years, housing remains a critical issue. There isn’t enough of it, and people can’t afford it. Progressives and Democrats are, however, embracing the idea of building after years of struggling to balance the need for more units with the need to protect the environment and existing communities, especially at the state and local levels. And the idea is a key element of the discourse around “abundance” — and the conversations we’re going to be having around Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of that title in our Book Club, beginning this afternoon (details below)

Is "Abundance" the new scarcity?

To better understand how we got into a housing shortage in the U.S., how to detangle the ongoing policy and cultural arguments between NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) and YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) factions, and to find out more about how YIMBYism got onto the Democratic agenda and what might change now that it has, we invite you to revisit our conversation with Matthew Lewis, communications director at California YIMBY and a longtime advocate for affordable housing construction in a state that pioneered exclusionary zoning, has seen some of its worst ongoing effects, and has given rise to a coalition that might point a way out of the crisis — and toward abundance.

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A programming note: Book Club meeting today!

Join us this afternoon, Wednesday, May 7, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be hosting a Live meeting of The Ink Book Club with Leigh Haber. We’ll talk about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, go over some ideas, and talk about how the club will run. You’re still welcome if you haven’t done all the reading, and we hope to see you all there!

To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

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There’s real progressive energy behind the YIMBY movement now. But obviously California has a long history of NIMBYism and that’s why there’s been a YIMBY response more recently, the movement that you’ve been a part of. Can you talk about the roots of the idea?

So right now, I'm taking you for a walk with me in my neighborhood in Berkeley. The reason I mention this is that Berkeley pioneered the creation of different residential zone districts to achieve the objective of racial segregation. And that was in 1916. And it wasn't like they were subtle. They weren't ashamed of it. It was a very popular notion to have neighborhoods where only white Christian people could live.

The idea, though, that expands from that is the use of zoning as a tool for racial and class segregation. And I think it's important to ground it there because the reality of the history of the YIMBY movement is that you've had planners and affordable housing developers and early urbanists who for decades have been trying to undo these deliberate segregationist policies.

So those on the right have often associated NIMBYism with left causes; they’ve argued that rich urban Democrats are blocking gentrification, or poor people are arguing misguidedly against the end of rent stabilization. Left critics, on the other hand, have often accused YIMBYs of being in the pocket of developers who are only going to build for the wealthy anyway, or of being tools of the right.

It feels to me like this is a little bit of a battle for the soul of progressivism because I reject out of hand the notion that I am not progressive because I want there to be abundant housing in cities. And yet, if I stood up next to a lot of people who refer to themselves as progressives, they'd say, "Oh, you're a corporate shill. You just want more profits for developers." And I'm like, "Well, yes. I do want homebuilders to make money.

But homebuilders making money is a sign of there being a need for a lot of housing.

There’s a bipartisan appeal to the YIMBY movement you’re involved in that’s really interesting. Is this something that motivates the base? Or is it a matter of reaching across the aisle? Why do you think the Democrats have now been focusing on this?

We started to see data in polling a couple of years ago. I think we were ahead of the curve in California on a lot of this stuff. But it was right when people started talking about inflation, as the pandemic was coming to a close, and what we started to see early on was that a significant chunk of inflation was the housing shortage. 

But what can't get back to normal is housing, because we haven't changed the constraints on supply. We don't have housing factories we can just turn back on, because we made them illegal, so to speak.

And it started to become more and more of an issue in local politics. You can track cities across the country where the YIMBY movement has since bubbled up, where people are realizing, "This city has not built anywhere near enough housing for the number of people who are moving there." It doesn't matter where you go, because the reality — what the data shows — is that Americans, in general, would rather live in a city, or at least in a metro area. Everybody's like, "Oh, they prefer suburbs." But that's not what the prices suggest. 

I think, like antitrust efforts, it seems like not only do you have most people wanting the same thing across the political spectrum, but you have a real bipartisan spirit, and potentially a way to bridge some of these unbridgeable gaps in modern political life. So talk about that a little bit because I'm very curious about that, like how you bridge the gap with you know YIMBYs who are not coming from a progressive perspective.

I think that the thing that holds the coalition together is the outcome orientation around, “Did it get built?” Because the reality is that within the coalition that agrees to that, you're going to have you know the farthest left socialist YIMBYs who are like, "Look, I tolerate market-rate housing, but only because I know the conditions that allow that will lead to more social housing, right, which is true.

In order to have social housing, not only do you need the zoning for market-rate housing, but you need the funds from the market-rate housing to pay for it. Something that gets lost in the discussion is that when you build market-rate housing, the people who live in it are paying full taxes, property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes. 

And below-market-rate subsidized housing doesn't pay those taxes. It uses that funding.

Yeah. It's an outflow. And so on our far left, we have people who fully understand that. And they will be the people who are like, "We have to do rent control. We have to do social housing. We have to do maximal subsidies." But not at the expense of building the largest number of homes possible.

And then from the right, we have people who think the government is the problem. They want to eliminate all the regulations, let property owners do what they want on their property, and aren’t fans of taxes in general at all. 

But you know, I tolerate them as a condition to allowing homes to be built, that single focus. Did it get built? We're not going to try to tell people they're right or wrong on issues that aren't related to homes getting built.

So protecting existing tenants, things that require taxation, also require good regulation, as we might put it. 

Well, to be really clear, and to be really clear, this is where you're completely correct about how much of a state issue this is.

Because in California we're governed by a supermajority of Democrats, anchored by a large progressive block of voters, we have no compunction about talking about the need to raise taxes to deal with housing. And we can do that. 

And we can do that. We can do that while holding the Republicans and the conservatives in our coalition within California because they're also Californians, and they understand that this state is dominated by Democrats. And so they hold their noses. Democrats control the place.

California is not the only place with a housing supply shortage. But aren’t some of the places — if not the cities, then the states they are in — that have housing shortages led by conservatives? 

I have deeply embarrassing news for you. The housing shortage is significantly worse in states and cities controlled by Democrats. The fastest-growing states in the United States are controlled by Republicans, and they also perfectly overlap with the states that have built the most: Florida, Texas, and Georgia. So we really do have an in-party problem. U.S. cities are controlled by Democrats. So, to the extent that most of the housing shortages are in our cities, it is a Democratic Party problem.

So the issue comes back to how the Democratic Party is going to clean up its own mess on housing and recognize that part of the problem. And the places that are building the most housing are also passing bans on women having human rights 

So why haven’t the Democrats been freaking out about that is my question. Blue states are bleeding members of Congress because we failed to build enough housing, and because your congressional allocation is based on your population. And the states that are growing the fastest are the reddest.

So the concern in red states might be, "Wait a second. Are they going to come and dilute our single-family suburbs into places with lots of brown and gay people?" But that's a different question than whether they are building enough. 

But there’s a big problem in some of those states. I think of Phoenix, Arizona, where developers have built these sprawling suburban developments that the city can’t supply with water or other services; meanwhile, it’s hotter there every year. What does that mean for the future of those places?

Well, there's another story here — and this has been one of my obsessions for a while — which is what's happening in the insurance markets. 

You’re talking about what’s happening in Florida, right? Despite stuff getting built, climate change is driving insurers out of the state? 

Well, in Houston, it’s a big issue. In Arizona, big issue. All these places where they're building the most housing happen to be the areas in the crosshairs of climate catastrophe. And so I think that the big challenge red states face on housing is the reckoning they're going to face when FEMA cuts off the bank account on rebuilding in flood zones and hurricane zones, because what the regulators in those states want to do is pretend it's not happening. Now, California is no better. We are also pretending like it's not happening.

But at least the red states are building something.

Obama was already talking about this towards the end of his second term. But where are we going now? How have things shifted? Is there a way to do YIMBYism that's divorced from these ideas around deregulation or other kinds of conservative trends that give us sprawl we can’t support in places that maybe we shouldn’t be building in? 

Well, the easiest way to defang that charge is to point out that prison reform is also “deregulation.” Does that make it bad? Criminal justice reform is “deregulation.” Give me a break. Marijuana legalization is “deregulation.” 

People might see those cases of deregulation as calls for better regulation, no?

I understand what you're saying. But the thing is, we don't need marijuana regulation. “Deregulation” is a convenient epithet used by our opponents to the far left to suggest that YIMBYism is somehow Reaganism.

Are they suggesting that all regulations are good? That's absurd on its face. That's just absurd on its face. It used to be legal to regulate bathrooms so that only white people could use them. So I think that there are bad regulations, and the zoning regulations are among the worst of them. Regulations can be wielded by the powerful to harm the powerless.

And in fact, in most societies — and I don't care what kind of economic system you talk about — that's kind of the definition of power. So I think that there needs to be a much more nuanced conversation, particularly on the left, about this question of good regulation versus bad regulation.

The thing that YIMBYs are really holding on to — and I think this is why we've built such a big tent — is that it's all about the outcome. Did the homes get built? Yes or no. And I know that's reductive, but it's a really critical metric because we have a ton of folks on the left who will argue there is no housing shortage. There’s this notion on the left that for some reason, greedy capitalists who build houses are sitting on them vacant to allow them to appreciate and value so they can sell them later.

Another argument that you hear sometimes, and let me ask you about this one, is if you free developers to build, they're going to build stuff for rich people. But yes, of course, the developers are going to build taking advantage of the market that’s there, and they're not going to build stuff that's directly affordable. In fact, it is illegal to build it, and so it doesn't get built. Developers are building what the market allows them to build, period.

What people see on the ground is, "Oh, they're not building housing for me. Therefore, this is a problem with the system where they only allow builders to build for rich people." And what YIMBYs say is, "Well, you're half right. We have designed a system where you're only allowed to build for rich people." But that's because we so severely restricted how many homes can be built that of course builders are going to gravitate towards the top of the market. 

To my understanding, the role of the federal government here is not that clear; housing spending decisions largely fall to the states and municipalities, right? 

It’s true, the federal role is pretty de minimis. But there are some big things that the feds can and should do, and they mostly relate to finance and carrots and sticks. The federal government dishes out giant checks for transportation projects. It could condition those. 

States have been taking a lot of that money and just widening highways, which is not going to that's not going to help. That's not going to help at all. That's going to make it worse. Highways add long-term liability.

The carrot would be that cities and jurisdictions that demonstrate on the books a commitment to affirmatively further fair housing under the Obama housing rule they get full funding, or they would get bonus funding. And in states that are demonstrating exclusionary zoning and defending it, they get no funding or diminished funding. And you just say, "Look, you want to have an exclusive city?" Great. You can exclusively pay for it. 

So the federal government can prioritize infrastructure spending in jurisdictions that are also addressing housing as a part of more efficient and effective use of infrastructure.

I believe that housing should be a core progressive cause, but I make that subsidiary to the fact that I want to see more homes get built. And so whoever signs up with my organization to help that happen is on the team. And so what we get from the far right is, "You're hanging out with socialists." And what we get from the far left is, "You're hanging out with Trumpists." And what I say is, "They're getting me votes. I don't fucking care." 

I've heard a similar argument from people who are involved in antitrust, in the effort against corporate consolidation — that there is a consensus here that's broader than either party, that's not ideological in the same way as many other issues, so you can get this kind of collaboration. 

I think it's because so many Americans have had such a horrible experience with the way housing works. If you're a homeowner and you want to add an ADU — nope, it's illegal. If you're a renter looking for an affordable apartment in D.C., — nope, there aren't enough of them.

We’ve screwed up land use everywhere in this country. So everybody comes back to the same place, asking, "Why are our cities so low-slung? Why is it mostly single-family? Why do I have to drive everywhere? What the hell? How did this happen?" 

It's almost post-partisan. But what's amazing is that in a country where 65% of people own the homes they live in, you still end up with this large movement of people who want to legalize having more homes in our cities. What that shows is that people don't look at home ownership only out of greed. It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum they're on. It's really fascinating because it's sort of like they are getting something about housing that they don’t seem to be getting in other realms.

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Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images; Matthew Lewis photo courtesy California YIMBY