Why liberals are so conservative about housing

California is arguably the deepest blue state in America. Democrats rarely lose. On issues such as labor rights, the minimum wage and environmental policy, the state and its cities are bastions of progressivism.

But California’s housing shortage threatens to make a mockery of its other progressive accomplishments.

Our state remains deeply segregated by income and race. Its poverty rate, when living expenses are accounted for, is the nation’s highest. Soaring rents and home prices force many people to live far from where they work, contributing to long commutes and climate change. Most visibly and tragically, in a state that prides itself for offering opportunity, over 150,000 people are homeless. They live in cars, sidewalk tents, or rough encampments next to freeways and under bridges.

These problems stem, at least in part, from California’s longstanding hostility to development. It’s true that allowing more housing cannot by itself solve California’s crisis. But it’s also true that California’s crisis has no viable solution that doesn’t involve allowing more housing. And that’s a problem, because California’s version of liberalism doesn’t include liberal housing laws.

Our version of progressive politics

espouses limits on new housing development. But a progressivism that limits new housing is a progressivism that limits itself. The dream of a just and generous California will be elusive until we learn to love (or at least tolerate) new housing.

California isn’t entirely unique in this regard. Liberal people are often conservative when it comes to housing. Many liberals own homes, and an old idea in political science suggests that homeownership bends local politics to the right.

The reason for this influence is simple. Homeowners, though they probably don’t see themselves as such, are capitalists. Residential structures are America’s largest single source of physical capital, and the returns to that capital account for about 12% of U.S. gross domestic product. For homeowners, new development is competition. And no capitalist likes competition. It’s a threat to a vulnerable stock of wealth.

Homeownership, then, can put liberals in a tough position. Their abstract values, like affordability and opportunity, might clash with — and lose out to — the material value of their largest asset.

In practice, this tension manifests as the person who will vociferously favor gun bans or single-payer health care, but vehemently oppose new apartments down the street.

In recent years, social scientists have started to systematically document the connection between homeownership and attitudes toward development. My own research examined statewide public opinion data from Californians and found that homeowners, even liberal ones, were more likely to oppose housing of every kind. Tellingly, owning a home did not influence attitudes about national policies, like gun control or health care; it only shifted opinions about housing.

Not every liberal owns a home, of course, so self-interest can’t explain all liberal opposition to development. A second and perhaps larger issue is that allowing more development just doesn’t seem liberal.

Denser development requires deregulation — relaxing zoning and other rules — and deregulation is an ideologically charged concept often associated with conservatism. So even if development creates liberal outcomes (more affordability and less segregation), it might do so through what looks like an illiberal process.

And many liberals might not think new housing generates liberal outcomes. History, in the form of urban renewal and its excesses, plays a role here. Too much postwar development was reckless and destructive, needlessly gutting neighborhoods to make room for freeways or star-crossed megaprojects. Development earned some of its bad reputation, and many liberals internalized the idea that fairness required opposing it.

Finally, a lot of people, liberal and otherwise, believe more development makes housing more, not less, expensive. On one level, this perception is understandable. Market-rate development is, at least superficially, strange medicine for a housing crisis, in that it carries all the outward hallmarks of the disease it purports to cure. The housing it produces is often expensive, and the developers who build it aren’t trying to cure anything: They’re trying to make a profit. And because the new housing is expensive, the people who move in tend to be well-off.

Using market-rate development to alleviate a housing crisis involves rolling back regulations to let profit-minded entrepreneurs build expensive housing for affluent people. We shouldn’t be surprised if many people, especially liberals, don’t find that persuasive.

But the fact that something isn’t

persuasive doesn’t make it wrong. Counterintuitive or not, California needs a lot more housing, and the fastest, cheapest way to get housing is to let developers build it. Make no mistake: California must also invest heavily in public and subsidized housing. But those investments will be helped, not hindered, by plentiful market-rate housing.

This admittedly seems strange, because allowing market-rate development does mean producing expensive housing. But so does allowing development.

When we don’t build, the price of existing housing goes up. Instead of turning empty lots into expensive homes, we turn cheap homes into expensive homes. The consequences are less visible — it’s easier to notice a new building physically than an old building’s price rising — but also more damaging.

Blocking supply doesn’t blunt demand. As long our economy booms, high-income people will come to California. Our housing policy can divert these people into gleaming new buildings when they arrive or unleash them onto older buildings where our lower-income residents currently live.

The former option is clearly better. But embracing that option means coming to terms with some deregulation. And deregulation needn’t always be conservative. Many liberals already favor it in immigration and criminal justice, because they understand that regulations can be hijacked by powerful people to protect the status quo. Housing regulation is no different. It’s just harder to see, because many of us, even though it doesn’t feel like it, are powerful. We like our capital gains and quiet neighborhoods, and we like to think the housing crisis is caused by something or someone else.

It isn’t.

We have a housing crisis because we don’t build, and we don’t build because we have a fundamentally conflicted relationship with housing. Housing is both a store of wealth and a source of shelter. These goals don’t rest easily with each other. Housing grows in value when it is scarce, but when housing is scarce, shelter is insecure.

We cannot have rules that simultaneously restrict housing and make it broadly affordable. Too many of our rules today are regressive: They prioritize value and scarcity over shelter and abundance. As long as that’s true, California can’t be the liberal bastion of its aspirations.

The progressive thing to do with regressive rules is retire them.