Don’t buy Brad Lander’s YIMBY junk, by Brett Yates

Every couple weeks, City Councilmember Brad Lander experiences a spasm of guilt over what Gowanus is going to look like in 10 years, and in order to relieve this sensation, he tweets a link to an article about the importance of increasing the housing supply as a means to combat rising rents in America’s cities.

It may be Farhad Manjoo’s May opinion piece in the New York Times: “America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.” Manjoo partly attributes the crisis in San Francisco, where the median one-bedroom rent has soared to $3,700, to Democratic lawmakers’ obeisance to rich homeowners who, for all their social progressivism, don’t want new high-rises blocking their Painted Ladies’ views of the Golden Gate. This led the California State Legislature to reject Senate Bill 827, which would have eased local zoning restrictions and allowed developers to build midrise apartments in lower-density neighborhoods.

I lived in San Francisco when State Senator Scott Wiener introduced SB 827. The landed gentry of St. Francis Wood opposed it, but so did the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The bill would have created new housing; it also would have completed the ethnic cleansing of the Mission District, creating an irresistible financial incentive for landlords to push their remaining Latino tenants out of the neighborhood’s smaller, older buildings, which developers would then have razed in order to build shiny new condos for tech workers.

A month later, Lander’s rationalization of choice may be “Americans Need More Neighbors” by the New York Times Editorial Board: “The United States is suffering from an acute shortage of affordable places to live, particularly in the urban areas where economic opportunity increasingly is concentrated. And perhaps the most important reason is that local governments are preventing construction.”

The purpose of the article is to praise the city of Minneapolis for abolishing single-family zoning. “People should be free to live in a prairie-style house on a quarter-acre lot in the middle of Minneapolis, so long as they can afford the land and taxes. But zoning subsidizes that extravagance by prohibiting better, more concentrated use of the land. It allows people to own homes they could not afford if the same land could be used for an apartment building. It is a huge entitlement program for the benefit of the most entitled residents,” the board explains.

I don’t know the first thing about Minneapolis or have a strong opinion on the policy in question. But I think I can spot the flaw in the logic above, which insists that ending single-family zoning will somehow give the boot to the city’s “most entitled residents.” In reality, high-income households will absorb the cost of the adjusted property taxes on their newly valuable land and stay put, as the first sentence in the quoted paragraph acknowledges.

Other communities, where working-class and middle-class families bought modest detached homes when prices were low and managed to hold onto them despite their smaller incomes, seem likelier, in the absence of other municipal controls, to disappear. These are the homeowners whom the New York Times deems undeserving. Personally, I believe in density and might accept the argument that, in the age of climate change, no one deserves to occupy a whole quarter-acre lot in the center of a major city, irrespective of his or her wealth, but this argument would have no merit within the logic of the market economy. The wealthy must always get their way.

In any case, Minneapolis is just a pretext here. In both pieces, the larger message is clear: city governments must stand back and allow the eager free market to solve the problem of unaffordable rents. It’s time to bring the supply-side economics of neoliberal deregulationists to the housing crisis. The builders want to build; we just need to let them do their thing.

This is the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) attitude, which locates a politics of antiracism, desegregation, anti-homelessness, and equality of opportunity within an opposition to municipal zoning ordinances that protect the light-filled lawns and uncrowded sidewalks of the NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard). The YIMBY’s nemesis is the homeowner who cares more about “preserving the existing character of the neighborhood” (a frivolous concern) than about the plight of the poor.

The conservatism of the NIMBY allows the YIMBY to feel like a radical even as his policy prescriptions match those of any big-time real estate developer. Progressives like Lander distinguish themselves from libertarians because they support rent control and Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), which, together, they believe can guide private development to serve the needs of the public.

In general, some suspicion may be warranted when the proposed solution to a major social problem stands to produce an enormous profit for some private entity. Empirically, the YIMBY position is flatly wrong. On a regional level, significantly increasing the supply of market-rate housing will, in the long run, decrease rents overall – though it won’t ever end homelessness – but it’s not so simple on a neighborhood level.

Empowering developers to build stacks of vacant luxury condos in coveted, up-and-coming areas of Brooklyn won’t create affordability there – just look how affordable Williamsburg became after its rezoning. Instead, it’ll trigger a speculative frenzy, and longtime tenants will lose their homes as developers rebuild the neighborhood in the image of the new arrivals. MIH units won’t come close to making up the difference.

The true YIMBY knows, however, that the gains of increased production will ultimately trickle down even to the victims of displacement – perhaps somewhere in New Jersey, a few years from now. That’s good enough for him. For most others, the failure of the de Blasio administration’s rezonings is clear. A few months ago, Jumaane Williams won the Public Advocate election partly on a promise to call for a moratorium on neighborhood rezonings, although I haven’t heard him mention his pal Lander’s plan for Gowanus since taking office.

The Gowanus rezoning will be the biggest of the de Blasio era thus far, and it’ll take place under an elected official who regards himself as one of the city’s most progressive councilmen. Afterward, Lander will tell himself that a democratic procedure birthed the new Gowanus – a process of outreach and input from equal voices, arriving at compromises for the benefit of all.

In truth, his Bridging Gowanus was a charade. The decision to rezone came from the top, and it never mattered what anyone else thought. Very few voices count in New York City – although, in 2015, brownstone owners in the Cobble Hill Historic District forced Lander to reject a ULURP proposal by Fortis Property Group for the former LICH site, which would have generated 1.2 million square feet of housing in accordance with a plan that Lander himself reportedly had helped conceive alongside the developer. YIMBYism eventually figures out whom it can pick on, and ultimately, it isn’t the “wealthy liberals” of Manjoo’s imagination. Unfortunately, Gowanus doesn’t have a Cobble Hill Association of powerful donors.

We all know how it’ll look a decade from now. Gowanus will be expensive and ugly, a place largely without industry, art, or people of color. Oblivious yuppies – their brains vaguely poisoned by the toxic soil beneath their new hardwood floors – will occasionally stumble headfirst into the canal, where flesh-eating bacteria will consume them whole. Their neighbors won’t look up from their streaming HBO shows long enough to notice.

Who wants this? If we actually hope to prevent cities from turning into dystopian playgrounds for the wealthy, where service workers arrive by the truckload from distant shantytowns on the periphery, market-based mechanisms aren’t the answer. The solution is obvious: municipalities should start building their own housing.

In Europe, it’s called “social housing,” and it attracts renters from all walks of life. For instance, in Vienna, 60 percent of residents live in the city’s social housing. Critics would demand to know how New York City would pay for such a program if anyone proposed it, but in fact social housing doesn’t necessarily need to lose a great deal of money. In many cases, it basically breaks even, with wealthier renters subsidizing the poorer ones in economically diverse buildings. But because it doesn’t need to turn a profit, it can address the actual needs of the housing market at every level, instead of reflexively adding to a glut of luxury condos.

When it comes to housing, we’re stuck in 2009 logic. Surveying a broken healthcare system at the start of the Obama presidency, progressives told themselves that they could find a way to make the capitalist market fix the problem. Instead of fighting for the right solution (single-payer), which now seems so obvious, they picked a wrong solution that seemed possible. At least they got to feel like they were doing something. Brad Lander feels like he’s doing something about the housing crisis.

On the most basic level, I agree with Lander: we need to build more housing. So let’s build more housing. Some of it can be in Gowanus! But let’s leave the developers out of it.