Party lines influence fixes to housing crisis
For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals: not enough bike lanes and transit, too many zoning laws.
The event began in 2016 in Boulder, Colorado, and has ever since revolved around a coalition of Democrats who want to make America’s neighborhoods less exclusive and its housing more dense. (YIMBY, a pro-housing movement that is increasingly an identity, stands for “Yes in my backyard.”)
But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different this year, in February, at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with pronouns, the conference included a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.
The first day featured a speech on changing zoning laws by Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana, a Republican who last year signed a housing package YIMBYs now refer to as “the Montana Miracle.”
Day 2 kicked off with a panel on solutions to Texas’ rising housing costs. One of the speakers was a Republican legislator in Texas who, while advocating loosened land-use regulations, has pushed for an abortion ban.
Anyone who missed those discussions might have gone to the panel on bipartisanship where Republican housing reformers talked with a Democratic state senator. Or noticed the list of sponsors that, in addition to foundations like Open Philanthropy, included conservative organizations like the Mercatus Centerand the Pacific Legal Foundation.
“There aren’t many ... diverse spaces in American civil life at the moment, and one of the pillars of the conference was the idea of a big tent,” said Liz McGehee, one of Yimbytown’s organizers. “The more we can find areas of agreement, the more we can adjust to each other ... and maybe that will help drive down the polarization.”
FRAMED TWO WAYS
As the lack of available housing has become one of America’s defining economic issues, it is increasingly a political problem. Politicians have found themselves inundated by constituents who have been priced out of ownership and embittered by rising rents and multiplying homeless encampments.
Legislators in states including California, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Oregon and Texas have reached for similar solutions. Invariably they revolve around loosening zoning and development laws to speed up construction and increasing funding for subsidized housing.
In plenty of places across the country there is serious and organized opposition to those policies. Especially at a local level, voters have blocked developments of all sizes. (In many places, the divide over what to do about housing comes down to homeowners versus renters, rather than breaking along more typical political lines.)
And not all of those housing measures would be considered bipartisan. Republican legislators tend to be leery of price caps like rent control. Democratic legislators often push for streamlining measures to be paired with new funds for subsidized housing, for instance.
But since the highestimpact policies revolve around increasing the pace of building to backfill the decades-old housing shortage that is the root of America’s housing woes, there is still plenty of overlap. So much so that two frequently opposing think tanks — the American Enterprise Institute and the Progressive Policy Institute — recently hosted a joint event in Washington on increasing housing supply.