Reading comments about the housing affordability crisis is cool, but what's even cooler is joining an organization that does something about it. Join YIMBY Action, the nation's largest and most effective pro-housing advocacy group, at this link: new.yimbyaction.org/join/ Also...rates for new Nebula subscribers go up September 1. Use my link to get the best deal you're ever going to get: go.nebula.tv/citynerd
Why would it be weird that a conservative would support urbanism my father's politics is basically something between reganite and ron paul libertarian and he basically thinks city zoning councils are the scum of the earth cause they restrict property rights in ways he finds to be unconstitutional and supports higher density and public transit to the extent that it would be cheaper to support than sprawl.
@@jerredhamann5646I think Strong Towns has a fair amount of support from conservatives (at least the older style of such where there wasn’t so much Cold War militarism)
I'm fine with political action. I'm NOT fine with allying with a blog like Market Urbanism, who made his career shilling for the real estate lobby and trying to get rid of the only thing that has ever kept NYC affordable for its working class, which is rent stabilization -not his ilk in the slumlord class who would torch their own buildings tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it.
We have to accept that making housing affordable means that home values will need to stop growing. We cannot simultaneously demand that the value of homes keep appreciating as a retirement and investment vehicle and also be affordable. We NEED to get over homes as an investment. Yes, it will be painful and difficult. Yes, we will need to support people that poured most of their net worth into a house with the expectation that it will appreciate. But it must be done. We need to rip off that band aid so that we can move on as a society.
Going to be a hard sell to the voters, considering that makes up a vast portion of a person's wealth but you're right it should be like a TV, TV's depreciate in value every year until eventually they become free. Housing should be set up exactly the same way it should be depreciating every year you live in it....
@@pavelow235 it will be incredibly difficult which is why it probably won't be possible to just say "no more subsidies for holding on to your home, no more policies to protect home values" in one fell swoop. There will have to be some sort of compensation or transition plan to ease people into the paradigm shift.
I totally agree that homes should depreciate. It has always boggled my mind that we accept as the normal course of things that people should pay more for something as it gets older and its condition deteriorates. We at least need to separate land value from the value of the buildings on it.
I live in New Zealand and this is exactly what needs to happen. We have been wedded to the idea of housing as an investment and the entitlement of capital growth for so long. NIMBYism has been a major barrier to accepting higher density. On the one hand people with property want never ending capital gain and those without are desperate for values to become more affordable. Housing costs (buying and renting) are the number one cause of wealth inequality in our country. NZ has some of the worst housing affordability statistics in the world. We urgently need to change our mindset.
@user-wz8gj4mc4q I imagine it had a lot to do with the design and your neighbors. They can actually be good, but mostly they are cheap, neighbors are less invested and you get hassled by management. I did find an exception before going to a townhouse though.
@@GaryMiller-z6t yeah i moved out of my last place because a god damn family of 6 moved upstairs and i kept hearing banging and stomping at all hours, and they let their toys and stuff in the hallway on my floor blocking my door.
I think it's important to empahsize that unmet demand isn't just expressed as people becoming unhoused. Overcrowding, having roommates, living with parents, and having long commutes in addition to moving to cheaper cities are all other products of a housing shortage.
Fully agree. When I first moved into my building statistics would say that the vacancy rate 10 years ago was about the same as it is now but back then 1 person would live in each apartment, maybe a couple would live together in one of the larger ones. Now couples or roommates will split the small apartments and the bigger apartments have up to 4 people in them. The stats would say things haven't changed even though there are double the amount of people in the same square footage. Everyone is housed but the quality of the housing has certainly changed for the worse for a lot of people. And also agreed at my work 10 years ago 90% of people lived in the same city or within easy biking distance. Now it seems like close to 50% of people live in more affordable neighboring cities an hour drive away.
On a fundamental level, YIMBYism would benefit the average homeowner. The place you live needs to bring in more taxpayers to fund maintenance of the roads, parks, utility systems, and police & fire services your home depends on. These will all crumble to dust if we force the city to grow through urban sprawl rather than density.
People who live in "affordable" (meaning subsidized, usually) housing DO NOT support the property tax base. The property tax base is built on people who own homes they bought in the free market with money they earned/saved and by people who take the financial risk to build structures designed to become "affordable housing. In other words, the tax base is supported by capitalism.
I live in an African country where urbanisation isn't even a concept. I like to watch your channel to feel like we all have issues lol. I loved this video because you actually went beyond "let's be outraged" to "here are some concrete things happening and how you can get involved." That's very courageous for a UA-cam channel. The only reason you won't have a comment section on fire is that the NIMBYs unsubscribed after the pickup truck videos and the project 2025 one 😊.
Funny thing, every time I make a video where "a bunch of people unsubscribe," it's also the type of video where I get a bunch of new subscribers who agree with what I'm saying, so I always net out ahead
Broad strokes, yeah it all makes sense and I agree. Unfortunately in my area the yimby endorsed candidate used to work for a racist organization. I applaud the movement for laser focusing on housing, but they won’t get my support ignoring things like that
Call me "PIMBY," meaning possibly in my back yard. Every project should be evaluated on multiple levels, and the people who own property that will be effected should have a strong voice in the decisions.
I like to think there was a time when YIMBY was the default, but that would just be billionaires plastering their names on that streetcar/elevated line everyone uses. You go through some older cities and find stately mansions on the grand boulevards; those people can’t have all walked or used horse carriage to go to their grocery store.
On your point of bringing progressives and libertarians together, it really caught my eye that a primary sponsor of some of the YIMBY legislation is Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana. One of the most conservative members of the Senate, and he's one of the ones pushing for housing reform. If they can turn this kind of broad appeal into legislative momentum, they could do lot of work helping dampen the affordability crisis.
Exactly instead of waiting for every 4 years for the fake promises we could leverage both parties desire for power to increase our housing supply. Should be a requirement for both parties
@@tann_manThe problem is that there's only two parties. The Democrats still cling to the values of old, but progressives have no choice because the only other party is the fascist theocratic one.
Not sure why this is surprising to some people! Some of the biggest NIMBY's are liberals / Democrats, look at LA for example. Builders and developers and those who actually want to build are oftentimes Republicans.
I agree with the sentiment, but how about we let America do whatever it wants, no need to make America anything. Hopefully one day this phrase dies out along with the fascism that brought it to us.
@@pavelow235 Genuinely, good for you. But you're effectively saying people should "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" and that fallacy has long since been debunked. Some people can and should do better with what they have, but ignoring that the vast majority cannot is important to recognize.
@@jtsholtod.79 "fallacy has long since been debunked." By whom.....plenty of undocumented immigrants are literally buying homes in this country.....how much more outside or from the bottom can you get, Hard Work and Thriftyness just isn't practiced anymore in this society.
I'm a college student with a lot of flexibility for deciding where to work after college, affordability and value is top of mind in that decision. Affordability is key for for younger voters, and successfully communicating how yimbyism contributes to more housing and lower housing costs could be a massive boost for the movement
I will have to check out the Yimbys. I live in a neighbohood where people say they want walkable, bikeable neighborhoods and backyard ADUs etc but when something is done by the City to allow those things, they wail and gnash teeth and complain. For example, in my neighborhood there is a realtor that uses a drawing of herself riding a bicycle as her business logo and even parks a bike outside her business but she is very anti bike lane and constantly complains about the few parking spaces that were removed to install new protected bike lanes. She claims no one ever uses the bike lanes. I have had conversations with a number of neighbors about the supposedly unused bike lanes. I start pointing out every cyclist that passes us. They never noticed the cyclists before because they don't ride bikes and don't pay attention to bikes. I politely point out that is a them issue.
We are short 4 to 20 million houses. One party opens negotiations by proposing building 3 million more houses over 4 or more years. The other proposes doing nothing and is sure to block this initiative. Wow. This summarizes my feelings about our current parties on literally dozens of policy issues.
the problem is that because of federalism and our fetish for local control, the federal government really can't do much. they're forbidden from going to states and cities and overriding local zoning.
@@mikeydude750exactly, so the 3 million number is largely symbolic. I don't know enough, but i suppose the federal government can allocate funding based on states' compliance. Edit: he actually says it in the end.
@@CityNerd most of the stated policy goals of Project 2025 are things that prominent Republican voices have advocated in favor of for one to four decades now. Parts of the current housing crisis can be traced to Reagan cutting funding for public housing in favor of the LIHTC.
You are naive to believe anything any of them say, and you are extremely naive if you think the party whose main agenda is doing nothing is going to do something.
I think of this will have to be carried out at the state level. Cities are trapped in a classic prisoner's dilemma situation. Everyone realizes we need more housing somewhere, but accepting new neighbors is never easy. If just one city in an area opens up their zoning, they end up having to absorb all of the new housing in an area. Ideally we would liberalize zoning everywhere all at once, and the impact to all existing neighborhoods would be minimized. Instead of one city being completely swamped with new construction, all the cities in an area share a modest amount of new construction.
I have no doubt that voting when homeless is more difficult (harder to register, probably more likely to get purged by certain state administrations, etc.) it is in fact 100% possible to vote when homeless and no state requires a fixed address to vote.
To your point, people who move around a lot because of housing costs are less likely to be registered too for the same reasons (registration is needlessly difficult in too many places). But certainly it's allowed
@@qjtvaddict yup, people who are desperate are less likely to complain about the scraps thrown to them, even if they really should be getting a hell of a lot more than scraps.
Video idea: how to build density that works for larger families (3+ kids). Current options are either pay a fortune or live in the burbs. I don't need luxury flat, just 4 bedrooms. Happy to have 0-1 cars and no yard.
The solution would be the "missing middle" of modern city planning. Townhouses, duplexes, etc. built along public transit corridors. Funnily enough, some of the densest neighborhoods in the world are filled with 2-3 story townhouses rather than high-rise developments. Alternately - European/Asian-style suburbs where single-family houses are still dominant, but are placed closer together, and planned around a common local center (like a marketplace or a train station).
I think the urbanism movement in general needs to work on convincing people are aren't young, single, enjoy night life/bars, etc. Families, introverts, people who want a simple life of living above the business they own, etc. would be good groups to expand upon.
@@blores95as a borderline hermit I've never seen an issue with urbanism on that front tbh, especially since housing is so expensive right now you basically *need* to share space with someone else. It's usually easy to keep to yourself outdoors, and if I really don't want to see people I just stay home.
THANK YOU! That's all I could see. I thought maybe he had a strolling teleprompter switch under there... Either way, it was its own second show! Great video nonetheless!
Strong Towns did a video showing most high density stuff covers their own taxes and then some, while low density detached homes cost more in maintainance for water/power/roads than they can support themselves. If you just start taxing people the proper amount to cover the taxes for their own street, apartments will become a lot more popular.
Yes, I agree, in principle. The problem, though, is that the transition to people actually paying their own way will be so terribly disruptive that I can't imagine people having the guts to do it.
Apartments will become more popular for the median person who has no business living in a mansion, but we will continue to have huge enclaves of wealthier households who have no problem paying for the full costs of suburbs once the subsidies are pulled. Though realistically this upper middle class is also the most powerful voting bloc so they will be difficult to defeat politically.
@@FullLengthInterstatesI don’t really see the issue with that. Wealthier people don’t want to live with poor people problems of bad neighbors, worse education, crime, junkies etc so allowing them to self segregate is fine as long as they pay their way.
One Thing I rarely hear discussed on housing forums is Noise! I grew up in a triple decker in Prov. R.I. in the era before air conditioning. I was part of the problem, a kid running up and down the stairs. Playing wiffleball, or basketball in the yard. Our parents would call out the window for us when it was dinner time. I believe that if apartments were built with better quality sound reduction construction methods, ( such as concrete floors and steel/concrete stairwells and block firewalls as opposed to stick built with drywall), People would have a more positive attitude for apartment living. It is also a problem in the Burbs. Trash trucks running thru the neighborhood teens with loud cars, Trucks using Jake brakes and noise from freeways.
Even Montana was able to pass zoning reform before California because they saw the writing on the wall about housing prices going up as more people moved in. It’s one of those issues that’s simultaneously difficult to achieve and very easy to achieve. All it actually takes is changing some paperwork, you don’t need to secure funds or build some complex project. The issue is finding politicians who will actually support it and ignore the NIMBY people showing up at meetings.
The big problem is nimbys vote and younger people don't. Big cities like Houston and Chicago have single digit turn out rates for 18-30 voting. Also doesn't help to completely dismiss nimbys opinions
It is really wild, considering Montana harbors some of the most nativistic nimby attitudes in the country. One of the most popular TV shows of the last decade is all about stopping the "transplants" from coming in and ruining the place!
Yeah, we don’t want politicians ignoring people who show up. Check your fanaticism before we get a dictatorship. 😂🤣 You might want to go and listen to how those NIMBY’s often bring very rational and fair sounding arguments while the YIMBY’s bring platitudes and slogans. Screaming that it’s unfair that some people own more than one house while you are living in a rented home doesn’t make you sound sane. I’ve yet to have a real conversation with someone about adding smart density where it wouldn’t be a much easier and better plan than blanket re zoning rules which will likely create serious winners and losers where, as usual, the rich and powerful benefit while most people lose. Also, if you think any law change will make a big difference in less than five years short of enslaving laborers and forced land redistribution done Soviet style, you are kidding yourself. The most important things we can do are to try to eliminate the actual policy causes and let the market work. Let’s not do what was done 100 years ago and make things worse as we did with the Great Depression.
@@morewi it's not even that: it's that NIMBY's tend to be richer and have more time to spare to show up at city and county council meetings and raise a stink in the name of making life worse for everyone else. The kind of people who really benefit from walkable cities and need affordable housing are too busy trying to afford the non-affordable housing to do so.
Thank you for acknowledging that people from both sides of the political spectrum can be convinced to get behind zoning reform. The talking point that zoning restricts property rights and a land owner’s freedom to build what they want on their own property does appeal to many conservatives.
I’m definitely not a nimby, but I can’t quite get fully on board with Yimbys either. I think part of the reason is that I, like many people my age, don’t own any property(I’m a “Where Is My Back Yard) and the entire yes/no argument revolves around people who already own property. Yimbyism is great for property owners, but the real winners are developers, who of course are going to prioritize building units that will maximize profits. I’m not saying the movemeant is wrong, just that simply increasing supply doesn’t solve all the issues. There should still be efforts to secure regulations around ensuring affordable housing or even social housing. (See: Vienna) I’m sure some of you in the comments will disagree, but the fact that seemingly disparate political ideologies are coming together on this is a cause to look very closely at what we are trying to accomplish, and who we are trying to help. Simply removing zoning regulations to let land developers do whatever they want seems like there could be downsides. It’s a large discussion, no simple answer is gonna be the best one in all situations, and the YIMBY movement is far from perfect.
I think you have a point that completely removing all rules isn’t going to help. But in very few instances is that even close to the reality in the US. Basically every society has developed some sort of ruleset for land use. There are a few things that just mix. Building polluting factories in residential neighborhoods isn’t a good idea. And yes, building a 12-story highrise among an area of 2-story homes is probably not great idea either. But the US went incredibly overboard with this. The American R1 (residential detached single family houses) zone is basically unmatched anywhere else in the world in it’s strictness. Not only does it not allow for duplexes/ townhouses or just having like two or three separate apartments in a detached house. All of which are houses, hardly distinguishable from a single family home. They also often mandate absolutely giant lots with a lot of wasted space in the front. And it also excludes cafes, bakeries, doctors and other small businesses completely normal in most other countries residential areas. You can limit developers without outright banning them from building anything but single family homes. If you’re actually worried about the „character“ of a neighborhood you can easily put some rules in place over how high a building can be and how close it can be to other buildings. But you don’t need to regulate the usage of the home.
@@eechauch5522 I’m definitely not worried about the “character” of any neighborhoods. And I understand that there are still plenty of regulations and zoning around land development. I’m totally in favor of “up-zoning.” But changing zoning is not the same as actually building housing. Building housing also depends on interest rates, materials costs, labor costs, labor supply, etc. So just changing zoning is no guarantee of new housing. And even when dense housing does actually get built, it is, unless specifically mandated to be otherwise, “market rate,” housing, which means that it is decidedly not “affordable,” or “below market rate” housing. YIMBYism is rife with marketeers who will tell you that all that matters is supply, and if we just increase supply, it’ll all work itself out. They call it “filtering,” like the wealthy people will buy the new housing and leave their old housing. But it’s just some trickle down economics again, and just like trickle down economics, pretty frequently it just doesn’t work for a bunch of reasons that become obvious with even a bit of reflection; like new people moving to the area (housing demand is not fixed like some Econ 101 textbook problem). Again, I’m much more YIMBY than NIMBY, but I find the YIMBY “movement” to be insufficient for actually addressing the issue of making sure that people can get affordable housing.
Worked for a housing affordability coalition over the summer thanks to influence from this channel, it's such a major issue that almost every single person cares about "housing is too damn expensive now!" but not enough people realize why
So I am one of those younger folk you exposed in the beginning lol. The truth is this issue really is important for me because I love my country, I want to be proud of the place I live and the spaces we inhabit. And videos like that, especially ones which show contrasts to places outside of the USA, are really eye opening to what it could be like since I have never left here. I have lived in car centric places with pretty low density my whole life and I have been getting politically active and been starting to see the mess with my own eyes as I engage and learn more. Recently, a local representative came to a university political club which I attended and revealed an incredible statistic for the housing issue. At these development meetings for the city of Tempe in the Phoenix metro area, the 21-45 age bracket, which comprise 65% of the voting base and are the primary consumers of housing, are less than 30% of the people who show up to them. And so the decision makers have a lopsided idea of what will be popular decisions and so generally anti density measures get passed because they view not doing so as potentially risky. It is like that for other cities here in the metro area as well. He said that just the 21-45 demographic showing up really helps them have more confidence making more YIMBY actions. I have actually started to attend some and people really can bring up the most ridiculous things sometimes that make me boil and want to say something during my own presentation opportunity, but since they can be recorded, I get quite nervous potentially doing that. I am definitely interested in this YIMBY action group and hopefully they might be able to give some tips. Thanks for the information CityNerd. GO YIMBY!
yo we're probably a similar age (i just graduated uni) but i admire you for getting out there and learning more on your own. i had no idea about urbanism at all until i happened to move to a city in asia as an exchange student five years ago. when i moved back to my rural hometown i was like "tf is this shit?" lmao my tip for being able to speak without getting too flustered by nimby nonsense is to prepare a statement. write it, print it, or even just read off your phone, but you're right in that it's both really difficult and really important to speak up in front of a crowd you know disagrees with you. also, you can word it in a way that pledges support to the policies you like more than against the ones you dont- it feels a bit less combative, and if the nimbys make a big deal over it that's on them. keep up the good fight!
Detached single families are for people who love pointless chores. Waste half a day moving stupid grass? Yessir. Wait for a century for water to turn hot? Absolutely. Running a marathon to get the car keys you left upstairs? Totally!
@@pavelow235 I've lived in a friend's single family detached and had the pleasure of renting one for half a year. I really really really hated doing that shit
As a disabled person I literally could not live in this type of house if I was the one in charge of all that stuff. I currently live with my parents and their house is not very big at all and it's still difficult for me to get around when I'm not feeling well. On bad days I truly do miss my studio apartment. It was so much easier to maintain and get around. My dream is not to have a giant mansion but a modest apartment with a craft room and a nice kitchen lol
Really stoked on this video. I'm often left wondering what the heck I can do to help after watching a CityNerd video, and it was really validating to see that people beyond the subscribers to this channel care about these issues.
And put together proposals for the improvements you want to see to the local public works. You can also get together with like minded neighbors to do activism aimed at showing the potential of these changes to public spaces.
Others have noted political action at the local level but you can also definitely help by volunteering for dems up and down the ballot this year. They’re going full YIMBY and parties will notice if that is rewarded.
First step would be to run for county council and approve some of those multi-family homes.... And stop going on a power trip about how the zoning variance can't be approved
Another angle we need to change are Fannie and Freddie mortgage guidelines which strongly discourage condos and infill while subsidizing and encouraging sprawly vinyl villages. Its a dystopian outcome of only funding houses that are good comps to appraise rather than housing that is effective for living.
*affordable* is the tough part of housing. Unless government builds housing, private industry will seek the most profitable and fastest return on investment, and that means condos. If you are a deveopper, it is a lot easier to pre-sell very expensive condos, then you go to the bank to get a SHORT TERM loan to build the 50 storey appartment building, and conclude condo sales as soon as possible to repay the loan and make a hefty profit. You'll never get a loan if you want to build affordable rental housing where you need a 20 year mortgage paid vy rental revenues every month with lots of interest and governmemnt rules on how fast you can hike rent etc. The government could buy those artificially expensive condos units from builders and then rent units at affordable prices. The government could built rental appartments and assume their debt while renting units at affordable prices. Or the government could use the tax code and other instruments to make it more profitable for builders to build rental affordable housing than to build expensive condos that have quick return on investment.
The perfect irony of America is how my friend and I were bored and wanted to find a place to hangout while in another city. I looked up a placed literally called a “third place” and when we got there, there were apartments in walking distance from restraint and Game Centers. A park and outdoor dining. A bar and walkable sidewalks. The parking was in a parking garage with free for 2 hours. My friend and I would go to that place all the time if we had an area like that. And we had a pretty great time until we had to go. Then we leave the area and you’re stuck in city traffic. Typical American sprawl. We drove back to our suburban city later (I don’t need to tell you what it looks like; you know how it is).
Look deeper Americans, I live in Spain where more than 60% of the population live in apartments, and yes, the housing crisis is also striking here, and hard. If you think private investors and liberalizing soil is going to take you out of the housing crisis, I'm sorry to tell you that you are deeply wrong. All of this said, building densely is of course a good approach urbanistically and environmentally, but prices are not going to go down if the private sector is the only one building and are building without any restrictions.
The US' slightly weaker housing crisis is on top of our huge problems with transportation, healthcare and safety. Other developed nations may also have unaffordable housing but you have overall better quality of life stats. For example comparing the US to the UK, even though the UK is weaker economically and London is also famous for unaffordable homes, median wealth is higher in the UK than the US because their transportation, healthcare and housing allows normal people to save.
I am part of the problem as a single family home owning dad in his fifties. My daughters will be living at our family home until they can afford to leave, which will likely be in another 5-10 years, when they're well into their 20s. It IS my problem, because it's my daughters' problem. I am trying to advocate for affordable urban living in my city, as should every parent with a clue. Edit: no i don't want to turf them out, they're welcome to live here as long as they need to. But they have no other feasible choice right now. That sucks for them.
This is a fairly new issue in the neighborhood I just moved to. An old small strip mall lot is up for redevelopment and a bunch of old boomers are fighting the project because they think it would destroy the “park-like nature” of the neighborhood and turn it into the big city, but it’s barely enough units to add much capacity to the overall road system honestly. It would also bring some much needed mixed use spaces to the area and would be built over existing under utilized development, so I’m all for it!
For the Oregon example, it was urban progressives and rural Republicans who were able to pass the missing middle zoning measure HB2001 in 2019 over the objection of suburban representatives of both parties.
The suburbs are a tax on everyone, fiscally, politically, infrastructurally, and more. Toronto is a great example where the suburbs and the city combined governments and now the city is largely beholden to suburban interests. However, I'm not sure the neighborhood in-fighting in Philly is any better.
He's all business today and I'm here for it. Also I am working on creating a UA-cam channel of my own because I was inspired by you that's best in the rust belt. So if you ever make a trip to Cleveland, let me know. I can give you the best places to check out and the most urbanists places
I feel that we should also invest in communities that have historically been underinvested in, such as rust belt cities that have seen population declines, as a way to relieve pressure from other in demand areas.
A big issue with home values outpacing income increases is derived from housing as an investment, at the very least housing has to outpace inflation and the illiquidity premium to be a viable investment- we all know it does much better than that, meaning for us to reach a place of more long term sustainable housing affordability, housing as an investment needs to become less of a thing
As a progressive and a CityNerd fan, I've been following the yimby trend and some recent conversations online have really left a sour taste. I'm finding that overwhelmingly the solution is simply 'state subsidies for private developers to increase supply.' I know we're nowhere near this discussion in this country, but why are we pushing so hard for state subsidies for private developers, who are entirely incentivized to make money, instead of pushing for public housing? Private developers who have *very recently* openly colluded on price-fixing?
Ray, curious what you think of the Strong Towns criticism of YIMBYs. As I understand it, the criticism is that YIMBYs tend to prioritize corporate capital funding large multifamily projects vs grass roots smaller scale densification through ADUs and smaller projects that would be funded by local capital that’s more likely to stay in the community.
I don't know if we're thinking about the same videos from Chuck, but my recollection is that Chuck's argument wasn't so much anti-YIMBY as anti-corporate, which, as you point out, can drain resources from a community.
Strongtowns is anti-scale and loves advocating for the worst kinds of protectionism. If a deal regarding local land is made that happens to involve external funding, it is because that external funding would represent the biggest net benefit to the local party. It is the right of the local party to seek investment from the best bidder, after all, isn't YIMBYism all about people being able to do what they want with their land? If your city produces valuable exports, then the city would not fear a small leg of outflows, and its internal investors should already be well capitalized and have a natural advantage when bidding for projects. If your city does not produce valuable exports, then it should do its best to cooperate with the national economy that it feeds off, which includes gracefully sundowning.
i've had the thought for several years that a multifamily dwelling in that size range would do well to have a car share arrangement as part of the features of the space. whether that's in the form of an on-site loaner car or a contract with a rental company, it would help encourage tenants to ditch car ownership, with ready access to a car if needed.
There's an apartment building opening in my city that will have shared cars for tenants. I'd love to live there, but I suspect it will be way out of my price range.
@@AubreyBarnard we have two big controlled rent complexes in my town. the rent is just a little bit over my mortgage payments. makes me glad I bought when I did.
My city has declared that a large portion of its downtown that has not been developed will be reserved as green space. This was announced at the same time that money was approved to build a 100 unit multi-family 'affordable' development, which I assume means the price of homes will be below the median home price. You mentioned in one video that the in the Bay Area, neighborhoods in an urban center were blocking zoning for multi-family development, presumably to keep home prices up. I suspect that my city is doing the same, and only building an affordable development to get federal grant money or something. I am guessing that the affordable development will house families in need, or on government assistance, which means guaranteed income for the developers. I am also suspicious that declaring undeveloped land 'green space' is less about preserving the environment than it is about keeping home prices high and keeping out the riff-raff. Am I wrong to be suspicious? Doesn't this harm the middle and working classes?
Oh shit, I didn't know there was a volunteer form on the Yimby action website, I haven't filled out a form that fast in a long time haha. I'm so excited to catch the livestream later!
Still wish I saw real outcries let alone advocacy for social housing, and other methods for lowering rents that doesnt rely on the benevolence of the free market
@@andreaallais4942 This is true, I was among them, but generally speaking this support tends to be reactive to things already being done rather than proactive. I am not saying you or our movement is in lockstep with this, but concerningly I've seen quite a few yimby people snub the idea of social housing as a valid part of their coalition, instead lionizing a market centered approach as the only method that is "politically possible"
It's not the "benevolence of the free market." The government is the core of the housing issue. Now they need to revert many of the zoning laws that hurt us, then allow the free market to do its thing. Even if social housing was built it would be extremely expensive. It's not just about building more houses, because no matter what they will continue to be expensive. If we can see changes in zoning laws to allow for mixed use developments, aka the "missing middle," they will be built, and housing prices will plummet. This will allow for many other benefits as Citynerd pointed out in this video. TL;DR: we need to reform zoning laws
I like cars, I really do. I enjoy cool/old/fast cars. I also think that most people shouldn't have to rely on cars to get around. Cars should be for those who want them or need them for a certain purpose, not just to go from A to B
Good stuff. Would be nice though if you included the challenges of Nimbyism. In the case of ADUs for instance, it’s easy to forget there often a strain on water, gas electric needs for a neighborhood, parking issues, and often mature landscape is removed in favor of concrete etc, furthering the development of hot spots, etc. There are many, many problems that come with density if not done in a smart and thoughtful way. Keep up the great work!
Same. I'm one of those people you would expect to be a NIMBY, but I'm not. I have a single family home on over 1/3 of an acre within 3 miles of the center of Charlotte, NC, but I'm completely down with changing zoning and doing a lot more with density along with more rail. We really need both here.
Love your content. I'd love to see a video of suburban communities focusing on increasing urbanism/density. I'm from the Seattle area, and live in Redmond, the last 10 years have seen the expansion of light rail, and massive building of tall housing units downtown. It's nice to see these changes happening, and I'd love to only where else is focusing on these needed improvements. Love the channel.
I would love a video on urban water policy! Water and its conservation or waste is a super important part of housing development. I know that vegas is weirdly really well positioned for the future population growth but theres not too much popular media available on it. I thought you might have a unique ability to comment on this as well considering you last two cities of residence. Best, Dogman
The housing affordability crisis is an offshoot of the wealth disparity crisis and the fact that economic activity is dominated by a wealthy minority who concentrate production and commerce for maximum efficiency and their own profitability instead of working individuals building smaller communities around meeting local needs. As you've pointed out, the cost of living tends to skyrocket in dense urban areas where job availability is high and economic self-sufficiency is low. Years ago, life for many entailed being legally tied to the land owned by the noble classes, today, modern serfdom entails being legally bound to employment and a race-to-the-bottom exploitative consumerism dictated by the wants of the neo-nobility. While affordable, high-density housing in urban areas isn't something that should be opposed, it needs to go hand-in-hand with a society-wide redistribution of wealth and economic interests otherwise you're just putting a bandaid on a severed artery.
You are completely free to buy a plot of land and take out the loans necessary to make your own apartment block. And you can rent those units for 20 a month if you think it is so cheap to build and the rents are just "greed".
@@PeteMoss-zf6tx Thanks for your insightful "Just go build an apartment bro" comment. The point is we CANT build what we want on most land that we could purchase in cities thanks to SFZ, even if we could gather the money/loans needed to build an apartment block. All of this red tape with permitting and possible rezoning only adds more to the cost of building any type of housing too. This isn't even getting into the landlords or corporations trying to maximize profits on every rental they own
@GirtonOramsay again, that is just a load of cope. Most people here are not going to be stimied by some assumed zoning restrictions. Most of you won't so it CLEARLY because the costs (IOW reality) will knock some sense into you that it isn't cheap and rents aren't set by "greed" but by economic reality. So it is easier to play radical activist online while whining that you can't build yourself because of some "conspiracy".
I think that housing is the most pressing issue in the US currently. The amount of unhoused people in the richest country in the world is actually insane. Not having stable housing breeds other societal problems as well. We need to band together and demand this. Keep showing up, people. Please don't vote against your best interests.
As much as I love medium-high density housing and urban spaces, there is the social issue of "bad neighbors". I know nightmare neighbors exist everywhere, but I've been cussed out and kept awake all night by parties and loud music far more often while living in apartments than in single-family suburbs. In order for higher density housing to work (which I think we should strive for, right alongside better public transit), there needs to be a social change, too. It needs to be the social norm, and there needs to be social consequences, for people to be decent neighbors as a part of higher density housing to be functional for the long-term and not just a cool, trendy idea.
Neighborly consideration make a huge difference, but there are still crying babies, running toddlers, etc. When it comes time for me to sell my single family home for and apartment and less maintenance, noise level will be top of mind
That is a serious problem. I have always lived in apartments because I don't want to be responsible for a building and a surrounding yard. This is one of the trade-offs. For a long time, I've been in middle income suburban apartment complexes. Unfortunately, one bad neighbor can ruin the place for everyone nearby. Some apartment complexes are well managed and have lease contracts designed to account for noise, and a call to the office can take care of the problem. Some, unfortunately, are poorly managed, and the employees make no effort to keep this problem under control. This situation can lead to the police being called for noise complaints, which can escalate with tragic results. (For me, calling the police over noise is a last resort, but I've been desperate enough to do it on a few occasions.) I don't know what the solution is. Some people are stubbornly inconsiderate and lack empathy, and nothing short of draconian punishment will change their behavior. I think it would be helpful if noise ordinances were updated to adequately cover common modern day noise nuisances (i.e. incessantly barking dogs and music with loud, penetrating bass) and if there were serious consequences for repeated violations. Maybe a couple nights in jail with constant annoying noise piped into the cell would teach people to change their ways.
There are higher density areas with single family houses. For example non detached single family homes. I live in one in Germany. They’re beautiful and quiet. Look up Altbremer Haus :)
@@heatherharrison264there are for sure people who just don't care about their noise. I've had neighbors I've called the police on many times, and it still didn't stop them. Usually the police just tell them to turn it down and leave. But there needs to be real consequences for repeat offenders.
Frankly, landlords are a huge part of the problem, and nobody seems to want to talk about it. Housing shouldn't be a financial investment. Nobody - no person, no company, no organization - should be able to own mass housing.
My problem with YIMBY is that it tends to focus on leaving decisions up to the market, which inevitably means developers, which inevitably results in cheaply built 'luxury' apartments with some nasty ground level features in areas with poor transit links that don't really address the housing problem for the most vulnerable. This wouldn't be a problem if YIMBYs would also help get transit, bike lanes, and affordable housing put in, but YIMBY organisations and a lot of individuals are often strangely against those policies.
Most of these shortages are in areas with restrictive regulations on building developers. The answer is to ease regulatory restrictions on new housing construction, not more government involvement.
I can imagine that. There must be la lot of empty houses in places that are dying. If people were willing to commute a thousand miles a day, the housing crisis could be solved. I'm a little disturbed by the idea of "market rate AND affordable housing". Why are they separate things? Who decided that the market rate should be unaffordable? There are a number of countries that have adopted tiered zoning, similar to Japan, and they've done very well. Japan has eliminated their housing shortage, and even as Tokyo has grown larger the cost of housing per square meter is half what it is in London or New York.
A lot of communities also do not permit trailer parks within the town limits. These facilities allow a lot of housing units to be located adjacent to each other in a much denser formation that single family homes. The trailer park right down the road here is small with just about 20 mobile homes, but takes up the same space as like 2 single family homes. Manufacturing this kind of housing is a lot easier to do on the mass level to get millions of units built quickly.
Exactly! That's why they call them manufactured homes - way faster, more efficient, and greener to produce, plus much faster to get through permitting (no engineering reviews). The laws banning them and hiding them away behind mandatory walls are backward and prejudiced and must be done away with!
No we dont have a housing shortage. We have a 'job centralization' problem. We got plenty of houses all over the country, but nobody wants to live in them. Because people want to live close to where the jobs are.
Job centralization is a problem for cities that have maxed out in terms of capacity (Manhattan, Toronto, Tokyo) etc. Most US cities, including the surrounding suburbs of the aforementioned maxed out cities, are very much underdeveloped and could easily expand vertically if legal. Optimal economies of scale occurs at around 10 stories, where the cost per square foot is the lowest in terms of construction and upkeep.
@@FullLengthInterstates True. All those big city suburbs could be densified. They are actually doing that a tiny tiny bit in Atlanta recently. Trying to anyway. I didn't know that 10 stories was the most cost-efficient height. I don't know if that's the most attractive height though. I think six stories is more attractive. But maybe like in office places would be okay.
@@saratemp790 I think 5 over 1s are currently the most viable build-anywhere US apartment given the established scale with US builders in terms of skill and materials. But globally 10 stories is a more common apartment height that can be found in both city centers and fairly rural areas.
@@FullLengthInterstates 10 stories is okay, if you have extra room between the two sides of the street. Like put a one block park in the middle of the street. The taller the buildings, the more room you need in between them, to get sunlight. Yes 5 over one would be the best here.
I think we mostly see eye to eye, but forgive my rant: I think the YIMBY movement is needed, but I think 1) funding public housing that isn't means-tested (i.e. repeal the Faircloth amendment, expand HUD funding, and more) and 2) pushing for more aggressive (regional) housing development in metro areas where single-family homes predominate. These both depend on a strong regional vision driven by the public sector. Right now, YIMBYism is way too easily co-opted by private developers and moderates that want deregulation + tax cuts to be prioritized over residents + building affordable housing. In San Francisco, we are constantly fighting about what processes to expedite and what taxes to cut --- not about where to actually deliver housing. Going back to my first note -- San Francisco's population dropped by 10% -- but rental and housing prices didn't even take a dent. We are instead focusing on cutting taxes for businesses and private developers and pulling the rug out from social services to prop up more money for local enforcement -- hoping for a pre 2020 boom to return. City first vs. region first: -------------------------------------------------------- Just like with the zoning map you shared, there are region wide disparities. San Francisco can be denser; it has lagging private developments that were approved years ago. Yet San Francisco is only 49 square miles, and San Mateo county has 10% fewer people while being 10 times as large --- 455 square miles. Even San Jose is a little over 4 times the size of San Francisco while only having a 10-20% larger population --- and the same disparity repeats within Santa Clara. San Jose is close to half the county's population but only 10% its size. Are we not approving enough? -------------------------------------------------------- If we look at regional approvals, we see that Bay Area cities are very good at approving new properties well above the median income --- they are all bad at making housing for people at or below the median income. Is this because of approvals or because private developers are trying to maximize dollars? Is paying 5-10% a property's values in fees or taxes enough to justify this disparity? An aside on some types of YIMBY legislation: -------------------------------------------------------- California passed legislation expediting and eliminating reviews for affordable developments on property owned by religious institutions and universities --- but what's that going to do exactly? Regular private developments still need millions of dollars to be built and permits or delays from approvals are a fraction of that. Similarly, at the federal level, legislators are reviewing providing 50 million in challenge grants for agencies that support religious institutions in this process. If religious institutions have land and want to make housing --- why not just develop it? Why bank on the taxpayer transferring funds to their balance sheet or making affordable housing pipelines that won't pump out any housing? As you mentioned at 6:30, proposed developments in San Francisco are predominantly "transit-oriented" buildings that keep dense housing along busy car streets like Geary, 19th Ave, Potrero, Van Ness, Irving, and Mission. [Edit: this lines up with what you mention in 12:30 -- but doesn't this just highlight the contradictions in what we say? Isn't it sad that multifamily housing is near transit corridors --- but also lets support the legislation that prioritizes this? Even moderate mayors like Matt Mahan in San Jose --- who did local fear mongering about how housing development would cause traffic and put stress on local infrastructure --- said it was "common sense" policy to keep housing development near existing transit routes. When Mahan was San Jose City Council Member for District 10, he tried to ensure the light rail still extended into his largely suburban, high income constituency and that the VTA maintained its scant bus service (mattmahansj.medium.com/vta-dont-strand-almaden-s-seniors-students-bcb495701d3e?) --- since that time it seems like he has embraced "public transit is for poor people" common sense policy. What's more, he's gone from "housing for all" (mattmahansj.medium.com/our-housing-shortage-deepens-racial-inequity-5bf752d604b8?) and embraced "smart growth" common sense policy (mattmahansj.medium.com/smart-growth-is-san-joses-best-future-bb4af75812a7?). For cities that are "built-up" the choices are: suburban sprawl or demolishing properties to make way for better ones. In San Francisco, we only demolish existing public housing or less-than-desirable SROs to make room for new developments. An aside on ADUs and deregulation: -------------------------------------------------------- Support for ADUs have been strong in California -- but do they really bring down rents? They probably drive up housing costs because they are assets tied to an existing single family home or multiunit property. That being said, I don't think it's surprising at all that right-libertarians have embraced deregulating housing, and I also don't think these policy change is a silver bullet without making *landlording* less profitable. Right-libertarians and conservatives will gladly support housing and zoning reform because what it really means is deregulation and tax cuts; eliminate greenbelts and get out of the way of private developers -- to make what exactly? A bunch of apartment buildings or a bunch of single-family homes that are cheaper to make and potentially net way more -- in addition to receiving considerable subsidies from the government.
Love this comment, especially as a fellow SF resident. I find it surprising how often people who position themselves as progressives also feel that the "invisible hand of the free market" is the path to salvation.
Yes, until housing exceeds demand, there is a need for intervention regarding affordable housing. The disparity between income levels is so great that market rate housing will never be affordable to a big segment of the population.
@@northamericanvanlines and also cut implicit and explicit subsidies for suburbia and drivers. There is really no libertarian defense for free parking or drivers not paying the cost of their road use. I wrote an article exploring how roads may work in an anarcho-capitalist society and I concluded that it would be far more urbanist than the status quo. Not saying that we should go there, but it just illustrates how screwed up the current situation is.
3:20 bringing in the national candidates into the debate is nonsense because these are issues decided at the municipality level....ZONING and land use.....hence that is why housing increases is stabilizing in Austin TX..... Because the free market allowed towering residential buildings and now the market is starting to stabilize...... Contrast that to Washington DC which still has increases in prices....constrained building , zoning is hurting
This all sounds great, and sounded great 5, 10 years ago too. But for that whole time I've lived in either Santa Clara or Santa Cruz counties in CA, and the population in both of those places has gone *down* slightly from 2019-2024. The truly astronomical rise in both rents and housing prices during precisely that period doesn't seem like it can be explained primarily as supply problem. It seems instead that (as with e.g. the stock market), it may have more to do with the huge increase in the money supply during that period. That doesn't mean YIMBYism, zoning reform, etc. aren't important, but it does highlight how so long as housing is allowed to be treated as an investment, even a stable demand/supply environment cannot guard against insane price increases.
I cannot explain how happy I am to hear "YIMBY" and then you pan to a cut of Phoenix Arizona and Central avenue. I don't think people realize that downtown phoenix was dead by 2006 and there were only the diehard locals hanging out here. Now, in 2024, we have a robust transit center with lightrail and bus station directly connected that replaced our non-functional bus station. Downtown Phoenix has come a long long way from being a place no one wanted to be to being a hub of the valley.
I was thrilled to see it too. I hope with those buildings being built that the rent prices start to go down in the area. Right now it is stupidly expensive to live in those "luxury" apartments.
@@JorgeGarcia-gp5cfAnd yet this video is pushing for more of that shit. I shouldn't have to suffer because I want privacy and a yard. The real issue that CityNerd is afraid to address is hedge funds buying up property.
Ngl. I want walkable living places because I want to maximize my chances to meet cool people, a new friend, find love, or stumble upon a cool new hobby. People keep telling me to “put myself out there” and it just feels like such a monumental effort is required to do this. I would love to put myself out there by simply existing, and going about my day. Life can just feel so isolating with long commutes in cars.
Part of the resistance to many neighborhoods increasing density is that many are homogeneous, similar in ethnicity, income level, educational attainment and they don't want that to change.
To some extent, we have the same issue of housing costs rising faster than income in many European countries. But here, in many of the bigger and more expensive cities, transit has improved in step with this. As you point out in the video, paying a higher percentage of your household income on housing. Is a lot more viable if you can comfortably "get by" with owning one car less...
I've lived in Seattle since 1999. I've watched downtown grow, with plenty of very expensive units that normal people can't afford. Sure, many of those places have openings but there's no obvious way to get homeless or poor people into them. Meanwhile, we taxed grandma out of her home in Green Lake so that she had to sell. I've only seen a little development right on the edges of busy, loud, ugly main roads while one block in is a million dollar house. I used to bus to work, then they slashed the number of buses on the route and it was taking 90min each way while driving was 25min even in bad traffic. It's been a disaster and while I can currently afford a nice apartment... How long will that last without intervention?
My only concern is... why does it have to look like that? Why do these 15 minute city/etc projects all have to look like modernist nightmares? Just white/grey box after white/grey box, looking like a prison. I don't get it. I feel like if these projects actually looked nice people wouldn't be so opposed to them, genuinely.
I really like the Activist CityNerd! I was heartened to hear VP Harris mention that she wanted to tackle the problem of hedge funds buying up housing stock and converting it to rental and jacking up rents. In Atlanta this is a huge problem that affects many starter home communities and minority communities. They use hundreds of shell companies to get out from under basic obligations to maintain their properties and make them safe to occupy. Residents of these properties almost never are able to actually contact anyone who owns these places. It's great to see Harris wants to fix this!
The government regulation is causing this issue so now we should add more??? Shut down exclusionary zoning and they won’t be able to manipulate the market.
This is an illusory solution. The only reason these techniques work is due to the housing shortage. Building more housing is the only way to signal to these corporate interests that they should look elsewhere for easy high profits.
Yeah so a plan that actually builds no new housing and "forces" landlords to make properties nicer. So basically it will just make renting more exspensive.
Solid Yimby. I also wish there were more ways to convert apartments to condos. Many people live in the same apartments for years and even decades, and everyone would benefit from giving these people a stake in keeping their complexes well maintained and connected to the surrounding neighborhoods.
The way to convert apartments to condos is by building more housing to increase vacancy rates. This will help downgrade real estate from guaranteed profit with dirt cheap interest rates, into a more normal high risk business. Then investors with lower risk tolerance would choose to sell.
@@neutral_narr it does for the people who already live in apartments, though. without it, their rents get tripled or quadrupled instantly. and most of those people couldn't absorb that increase and would end up homeless.
@@neutral_narr It takes time to build affordable housing. And all of the YIMBY people say that no one will build housing unless we get rid of rent control and "let the market decide". So what happens when you "let the market decide"? You end up with a massive spike of homelessness and unaffordability in the future hopes that maybe, possibly, if we're lucky, rents might get a bit cheaper
Rent control harms more low income people than it helps (decreasing supply by dis-insentivising development of low income housing). YIMBYism is the only solution to housing affordability. Rent control is something that sounds nice, but is one of the worst policies for housing affordability out there.
The difference between Harris / progressive style YIMBYism and libertarian YIMBYism is in the use of conditional grants vs a purely deregulatory framework. If you look at the Harris proposals they’re full of ways for the government to spend money with strings attached. 25k tax credit for first time homebuyers. Tax credit for firms that construct affordable rental units. 40 billion dollar fund for affordable housing. There’s probably more. The main thrust is that all of these proposals spend money and try to promote housing development bottom up. In my opinion, this is bad for three reasons. 1. It’s a bandaid. If houses aren’t being built for systemic reasons, which seems true, then paying money to overcome that systemic hurdle isn’t sustainable. You’ll just have to spend the money every year in perpetuity since houses have a finite lifespan. It’s also expensive; although I doubt anyone cares anymore. 2. Affordable housing is not the place to start. Building luxury apartments is often cast as gentrification, but it’s a natural fix. For every luxury apartment you build you suck up some of the rich people that are competing for mid tier housing with the middle class, which allows some of the middle class to stop competing with the lower class for low end housing. You also have the greatest incentive to build, since profit margins are at their largest. This means you require less subsidy, if any. By contrast, if you build “affordable housing” you have no way to stop a rich person from competing for that housing other than methods like income limits and rent control. But that’s going to limit the profit incentive for building, which means you further rely on the government subsidies to overcome the gap. With a shortfall of 4 million houses, how are you going to subsidize your way out of it? A 40 billion proposal only adds 10k per new unit, which is often not going to overcome the gap from the required rent controls. 3. The 25k for first time buyers in specific is demand side, which does nothing. There’s already huge demand, it’s just stupidly hard to build. All this will accomplish is help some first time buyers get into a home in exchange for the prices rising for everyone else. Not ideal. In my opinion subsidies can have a role to play, but the focus needs to be on increasing supply through deregulation.
The NYTimes has a great video about “Liberal hypocrisy is fueling income inequality.” What you listed at 2:30 is basically saying the worst housing problems are in cities Democrats have an absolute monopoly in.
I've been a long time Patreon and never have I been more disappointed than in your video today. To completely blow off the untapped potential of existing empty housing across this country, the FACT that Wall Street venture capitalists have destroyed the ability of anyone attempting to build or buy a starter home, greedy developers raising 3/1 or 5/1 condos and branding them as "luxury" to dupe gullible buyers, and the obscene quantity of empty office spaces all along decent transit corridors (at least Chicago is doing something about converting them into housing on LaSalle) is mind-boggling. If Harris wins in November, count the 3 million sf homes in a long list of broken promises. Remember the fight for a $15 minimum wage? The promise of student loan debt reduction? Cutting down on fracking leases? There are real solutions to this problem. Looking to the national election will not solve anything. BTW don't count me as a fan of Cheeto Mussolini. I'm not. I'm just a city planner with a lot of ideas to solve this problem through deconstruction to reclaim decent materials, renovate and reactivate what can be saved, and make the bad vulture capitalist property owners accountable like they have in San Antonio and Winston-Salem.
7:49 real libertarians are actually in favor of increased economic liberties broadly. I suspect that a lot of Republicans who claim that as an identity are in fact a lot more concerned with protecting particular liberties such as the freedom of rich ppl to increase their own wealth at the expense of the poor and middle class. Any sort of YIMBY thinking was personally introduced to me by self described libertarians in school and it’s very unfortunate that many well meaning liberals seem to have fallen for a lot on NIMBY rhetoric. That or they just don’t like the idea of their house loosing value
Increased economic liberties for people who have exponentially more than they need often means in the real world, fewer economic liberties for those those just trying to survive. The big issue with the libertarian perspective is they see what they produce as their noble right, and their waste byproduct an opportunity for someone else to clean up.
As a home owner l can assure you. Nobody wants to see their home loose value. And property values increasing or decreasing do not automatically means your property taxes are going to go up or down. It all depends on the mil rate applied.
@@mpetersen6 It is natural that no one wants to see their home lose value. I don’t fault anyone who is concerned about the value of the biggest investment they will likely make. I think it’s unfortunate that we live in a country where, housing, which is necessary for everyone to thrive, is an asset class and not something closer to a traditional commodity.
"There is a housing shortage of 3 million... or 20 million..." No. It doesn't all add up. You can't express it as some kind of simple number of people "unhoused" or living more densely. There's tons of cheap housing in places with no economy; But people should not be forced to live a bleak existence there. Housing should be plentiful enough to support the continuing urbanization and social integration of the US population. Agriculture and extractive industries have been largely automated and no longer support a massive standing labor army, and the housing built there for that purpose needs to be replaced with housing in places that still have a functional role for the population. The number is much higher than this when you account for the fact that many, many people have a pent-up desire to live somewhere else which is not reciprocated by someone who wants to occupy their home. The number of people overall who want to change their housing situation but can't afford to because of prices ("because of the shortage") is very, very high. 20%? 50%? 80%?
Hi fellow former city planner here. I have always been adverse to YIMBYism because it's presented as a free market silver bullet for housing affordability. It won't work unless it's combined with rent control, social housing, and as others have mentioned here, shifting housing from being an investment to a social good. And planners love to point to "filtering" as the answer and I think that's a pretty pesimistic response for the millions of people who need affordable housing now- "just wait 30 years and this new luxury apartment building will lower the cost of other housing." Also with landlords actively price fixing and collectively charging higher and higher rents with apps like RealPage, counting on increased private housing development alone to increase housing affordability isn't going to work. Maybe Ray agrees with some of these points and didn't get into it in this video?
I agree that YIMBY can be somewhat distasteful in its purely market approach to solving the problem, but they are allies right now and that's important since we do need housing construction to pick up regardless of any other consideration on top of that. A good thing Harris' campaign has called out is "fighting corporate landlord rent hikes" and "price gouging"; hopefully that is a good sign.
Chicagoans!!! Join Urban Environmentalists Illinois, we're the local YIMBY Action chapter and not only do we advocate for housing, but we're a good time too!
Portland, Oregon. We have a housing affordability problem! Also Portland, Oregon. We have a downtown vacancy rate of 9%. We have options but many people don't want to utilize them. Also affordability doesn't mean the cost of producing something is lessened. It means the end user pays a lower price. Affordability is costing someone somewhere along the line a market cost. Ultimately I'm a yimby but we have a few hurdles besides policy, mostly the notion that single ppl demand they should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment in a city's most desirable location with parking and other of amenities, , and it must be "affordable". America could stand to check its expectations.
I purchased a house at the bottom of the market in Riverside, California in 2009. So, not even prime real estate. Maybe prime-adjacent. Now, only 15 years later, it is worth literally four times what I paid for it. FOUR TIMES. If that's not a sign of an extreme housing shortage and general market failure I don't know what is.
What wasn’t mentioned was the cost of housing is also been influenced by the investor market and by corporations buying housing for profit. If you were only allowed to own one house the cost of houses would quickly fall.
@@pavelow235 it’s an example that it’s not supply only that influences cost of housing. In Sweden you are heavily taxed so it’s largely unprofitable to buy more than two residential properties
Good luck with that. The problem is the owners of rental properties fall in wide range of types. When l was younger landlords could sometimes be real assholes. And sometimes they were decent people who only became owners of rental properties because of an older family member passing away and they inherited the house. And a lot of those were two flat. And then you have the manager types who act like little tin gods. Another factor in the housing market is the flippers. Buying up housing of substandard quality and doing the minimum they can get away with to make the property livable. If it's a multi unit then they are likely looking at rentals. If it is a single family. Then they are looking at profit. To be honest if somebody is flipping houses l do not expect them to lose money on the deal. But raking the buyer over the coals is just plain greed. I once told my wife if we ever hit the lottery one thing l would like to do is build modestly sized starter homes with modest sized lots.
@@mpetersen6 you’re missing the point. Less people are owning more and more housing. To wealthy people it’s simply an investment that is paying good dividends.
And the cost of renting would go up a lot. I mean there is a little validity because its cheaper to rent in some markets but its not like the cost of owning is really high and the cost of rent is really cheap. There just isn't enough housing and evil corporate profits are an easier target than building housing and pissing off the urban democrat NYMBY voter.
In the Atlanta suburb of Peachtree City, teens and older people alike rely on little electric vehicles (golf carts) to get around. Is this a potential model for a more sustainable suburbia (opines Bloomberg)? Surely not?!
Honestly I'm not sure if PHIMBY is a movement yet. There are tenant and YIMBY orgs that support public housing but I don't really see organizations dedicated to expansion of public housing as their primary issue.
I know you're not asking me but. I am for the PHIMBY movement in concept, my only hesitancy is that I've seen a few people have a "Public Housing or Bust" attitude to new development, which isn't helpful. We need all sorts of housing for all sorts of people. Delaying new home construction because the housing doesn't match a certain ideal (in a housing crisis, mind you) is just Nimbyism rebranded. However, I'm not ready to throw in the towel on PHIMBY/YIMBY allyship. It's a movement in its infancy, we will continue to hold conversation and see how this thing pans out. Yes to public housing, yes to more housing!
Reading comments about the housing affordability crisis is cool, but what's even cooler is joining an organization that does something about it. Join YIMBY Action, the nation's largest and most effective pro-housing advocacy group, at this link: new.yimbyaction.org/join/
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Why would it be weird that a conservative would support urbanism my father's politics is basically something between reganite and ron paul libertarian and he basically thinks city zoning councils are the scum of the earth cause they restrict property rights in ways he finds to be unconstitutional and supports higher density and public transit to the extent that it would be cheaper to support than sprawl.
@@jerredhamann5646I think Strong Towns has a fair amount of support from conservatives (at least the older style of such where there wasn’t so much Cold War militarism)
Yep Thank you
CityNerd are you galvanizing me to political action?
I'm fine with political action. I'm NOT fine with allying with a blog like Market Urbanism, who made his career shilling for the real estate lobby and trying to get rid of the only thing that has ever kept NYC affordable for its working class, which is rent stabilization -not his ilk in the slumlord class who would torch their own buildings tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it.
We have to accept that making housing affordable means that home values will need to stop growing. We cannot simultaneously demand that the value of homes keep appreciating as a retirement and investment vehicle and also be affordable.
We NEED to get over homes as an investment. Yes, it will be painful and difficult. Yes, we will need to support people that poured most of their net worth into a house with the expectation that it will appreciate. But it must be done. We need to rip off that band aid so that we can move on as a society.
Going to be a hard sell to the voters, considering that makes up a vast portion of a person's wealth but you're right it should be like a TV, TV's depreciate in value every year until eventually they become free. Housing should be set up exactly the same way it should be depreciating every year you live in it....
@@pavelow235 it will be incredibly difficult which is why it probably won't be possible to just say "no more subsidies for holding on to your home, no more policies to protect home values" in one fell swoop. There will have to be some sort of compensation or transition plan to ease people into the paradigm shift.
I totally agree that homes should depreciate. It has always boggled my mind that we accept as the normal course of things that people should pay more for something as it gets older and its condition deteriorates. We at least need to separate land value from the value of the buildings on it.
Pro-tip: do not vote for the candidate who is a property magnate.
I live in New Zealand and this is exactly what needs to happen. We have been wedded to the idea of housing as an investment and the entitlement of capital growth for so long. NIMBYism has been a major barrier to accepting higher density. On the one hand people with property want never ending capital gain and those without are desperate for values to become more affordable. Housing costs (buying and renting) are the number one cause of wealth inequality in our country. NZ has some of the worst housing affordability statistics in the world. We urgently need to change our mindset.
HOLY S**** I designed the "Apartments are good Actually" sticker on your laptop!! first time seeing it in the wild 😂
LEGEND! It's in the wild so many places!!! You are an icon for that one.
I LOVE this sticker! Amazing design
"Apartments are for losers" would be a better one. Most miserable time of my life was spent living in an apartment.
@user-wz8gj4mc4q
I imagine it had a lot to do with the design and your neighbors. They can actually be good, but mostly they are cheap, neighbors are less invested and you get hassled by management. I did find an exception before going to a townhouse though.
@@GaryMiller-z6t yeah i moved out of my last place because a god damn family of 6 moved upstairs and i kept hearing banging and stomping at all hours, and they let their toys and stuff in the hallway on my floor blocking my door.
I think it's important to empahsize that unmet demand isn't just expressed as people becoming unhoused. Overcrowding, having roommates, living with parents, and having long commutes in addition to moving to cheaper cities are all other products of a housing shortage.
Fully agree. When I first moved into my building statistics would say that the vacancy rate 10 years ago was about the same as it is now but back then 1 person would live in each apartment, maybe a couple would live together in one of the larger ones. Now couples or roommates will split the small apartments and the bigger apartments have up to 4 people in them. The stats would say things haven't changed even though there are double the amount of people in the same square footage. Everyone is housed but the quality of the housing has certainly changed for the worse for a lot of people. And also agreed at my work 10 years ago 90% of people lived in the same city or within easy biking distance. Now it seems like close to 50% of people live in more affordable neighboring cities an hour drive away.
"cheaper cities" sound so elitist....do you deserve to live on Park Ave, Manhattan?
@@pavelow235Funny you say that when it's unaffordable to live in the entire city of New York 😂
@@F4URGranted So the humans that do live in NYC...they don't exist in this dimension??? And Staten Island is plenty affordable....
@bopete3204 Not to mention the inability to start a family because you can only afford a studio apartment.
On a fundamental level, YIMBYism would benefit the average homeowner. The place you live needs to bring in more taxpayers to fund maintenance of the roads, parks, utility systems, and police & fire services your home depends on. These will all crumble to dust if we force the city to grow through urban sprawl rather than density.
But my property value
@@Master_Roach Exactly
People who live in "affordable" (meaning subsidized, usually) housing DO NOT support the property tax base. The property tax base is built on people who own homes they bought in the free market with money they earned/saved and by people who take the financial risk to build structures designed to become "affordable housing. In other words, the tax base is supported by capitalism.
they are physically incapable on conceiving long term benefits. all they care about is right now. short-termism will be our downfall
@@Master_RoachI know it’s simplistic to just say “people are selfish” in this case, but sometimes it sure feels like it.
I live in an African country where urbanisation isn't even a concept. I like to watch your channel to feel like we all have issues lol. I loved this video because you actually went beyond "let's be outraged" to "here are some concrete things happening and how you can get involved." That's very courageous for a UA-cam channel. The only reason you won't have a comment section on fire is that the NIMBYs unsubscribed after the pickup truck videos and the project 2025 one 😊.
Funny thing, every time I make a video where "a bunch of people unsubscribe," it's also the type of video where I get a bunch of new subscribers who agree with what I'm saying, so I always net out ahead
I'm a YIMBY and didn't know it.
Broad strokes, yeah it all makes sense and I agree. Unfortunately in my area the yimby endorsed candidate used to work for a racist organization. I applaud the movement for laser focusing on housing, but they won’t get my support ignoring things like that
Call me "PIMBY," meaning possibly in my back yard. Every project should be evaluated on multiple levels, and the people who own property that will be effected should have a strong voice in the decisions.
I like to think there was a time when YIMBY was the default, but that would just be billionaires plastering their names on that streetcar/elevated line everyone uses.
You go through some older cities and find stately mansions on the grand boulevards; those people can’t have all walked or used horse carriage to go to their grocery store.
It's the ideology we didn't know we were practicing.
You sound pretty damn NIMBY to me
On your point of bringing progressives and libertarians together, it really caught my eye that a primary sponsor of some of the YIMBY legislation is Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana. One of the most conservative members of the Senate, and he's one of the ones pushing for housing reform. If they can turn this kind of broad appeal into legislative momentum, they could do lot of work helping dampen the affordability crisis.
You'll find the most NIMBY out there are staunch democrats
Exactly instead of waiting for every 4 years for the fake promises we could leverage both parties desire for power to increase our housing supply.
Should be a requirement for both parties
Don't worry the right wing is rapidly turning walkable cities into a conspiracy theory culture war issue.
@@tann_manThe problem is that there's only two parties. The Democrats still cling to the values of old, but progressives have no choice because the only other party is the fascist theocratic one.
Not sure why this is surprising to some people! Some of the biggest NIMBY's are liberals / Democrats, look at LA for example. Builders and developers and those who actually want to build are oftentimes Republicans.
M.A.W.A.
Make America Walkable Again
I agree with the sentiment, but how about we let America do whatever it wants, no need to make America anything. Hopefully one day this phrase dies out along with the fascism that brought it to us.
And make america great again
@@kibble-netwhen someone's "freedom" actively harms other people and takes away other people's freedom, there's gotta be another way.
@@LiamMeehan-rq7kzThis unironically, but without that fascist racist Republican nonsense
Ma waiiiiife (sry 😅)
Yes I have noticed we have a housing affordability crisis
Nobody helped me. I started from the bottom.
@@pavelow235Federal grants is what makes national leaders important. So, not nonsense.
@@pavelow235 Genuinely, good for you. But you're effectively saying people should "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" and that fallacy has long since been debunked. Some people can and should do better with what they have, but ignoring that the vast majority cannot is important to recognize.
@@jtsholtod.79 "fallacy has long since been debunked."
By whom.....plenty of undocumented immigrants are literally buying homes in this country.....how much more outside or from the bottom can you get, Hard Work and Thriftyness just isn't practiced anymore in this society.
@@pavelow235 Highly doubtful. Everyone had help, and I mean everyone
I'm a college student with a lot of flexibility for deciding where to work after college, affordability and value is top of mind in that decision. Affordability is key for for younger voters, and successfully communicating how yimbyism contributes to more housing and lower housing costs could be a massive boost for the movement
I will have to check out the Yimbys.
I live in a neighbohood where people say they want walkable, bikeable neighborhoods and backyard ADUs etc but when something is done by the City to allow those things, they wail and gnash teeth and complain.
For example, in my neighborhood there is a realtor that uses a drawing of herself riding a bicycle as her business logo and even parks a bike outside her business but she is very anti bike lane and constantly complains about the few parking spaces that were removed to install new protected bike lanes. She claims no one ever uses the bike lanes.
I have had conversations with a number of neighbors about the supposedly unused bike lanes. I start pointing out every cyclist that passes us. They never noticed the cyclists before because they don't ride bikes and don't pay attention to bikes. I politely point out that is a them issue.
We are short 4 to 20 million houses.
One party opens negotiations by proposing building 3 million more houses over 4 or more years. The other proposes doing nothing and is sure to block this initiative.
Wow. This summarizes my feelings about our current parties on literally dozens of policy issues.
the problem is that because of federalism and our fetish for local control, the federal government really can't do much. they're forbidden from going to states and cities and overriding local zoning.
@@mikeydude750exactly, so the 3 million number is largely symbolic. I don't know enough, but i suppose the federal government can allocate funding based on states' compliance.
Edit: he actually says it in the end.
If you think Project 2025 is their playbook (it is), they put "protecting single family zoning" as the most important goal of HUD
@@CityNerd most of the stated policy goals of Project 2025 are things that prominent Republican voices have advocated in favor of for one to four decades now.
Parts of the current housing crisis can be traced to Reagan cutting funding for public housing in favor of the LIHTC.
You are naive to believe anything any of them say, and you are extremely naive if you think the party whose main agenda is doing nothing is going to do something.
I think of this will have to be carried out at the state level. Cities are trapped in a classic prisoner's dilemma situation. Everyone realizes we need more housing somewhere, but accepting new neighbors is never easy. If just one city in an area opens up their zoning, they end up having to absorb all of the new housing in an area. Ideally we would liberalize zoning everywhere all at once, and the impact to all existing neighborhoods would be minimized. Instead of one city being completely swamped with new construction, all the cities in an area share a modest amount of new construction.
You can't vote if you have no fixed address. Housing shortage and homelessness is a covert form of gerrymandering
Have u heard lost a pen joke and how it caused someone to become a homeless person?
I have no doubt that voting when homeless is more difficult (harder to register, probably more likely to get purged by certain state administrations, etc.) it is in fact 100% possible to vote when homeless and no state requires a fixed address to vote.
To your point, people who move around a lot because of housing costs are less likely to be registered too for the same reasons (registration is needlessly difficult in too many places). But certainly it's allowed
They want homelessness
@@qjtvaddict yup, people who are desperate are less likely to complain about the scraps thrown to them, even if they really should be getting a hell of a lot more than scraps.
Video idea: how to build density that works for larger families (3+ kids).
Current options are either pay a fortune or live in the burbs. I don't need luxury flat, just 4 bedrooms. Happy to have 0-1 cars and no yard.
I must admit 4 bedroom condos are a needle in a haystack. Maybe buy two adjacent condos and knock the wall down😊
The solution would be the "missing middle" of modern city planning. Townhouses, duplexes, etc. built along public transit corridors. Funnily enough, some of the densest neighborhoods in the world are filled with 2-3 story townhouses rather than high-rise developments. Alternately - European/Asian-style suburbs where single-family houses are still dominant, but are placed closer together, and planned around a common local center (like a marketplace or a train station).
I think the urbanism movement in general needs to work on convincing people are aren't young, single, enjoy night life/bars, etc. Families, introverts, people who want a simple life of living above the business they own, etc. would be good groups to expand upon.
@@blores95as a borderline hermit I've never seen an issue with urbanism on that front tbh, especially since housing is so expensive right now you basically *need* to share space with someone else. It's usually easy to keep to yourself outdoors, and if I really don't want to see people I just stay home.
Agreed, I’d like to see this too. Not because it’s relevant to me but because it’s interesting!
Nothing beats getting home from work, grabbing a piece of cheese cake from the fridge, and turning on the newest CityNerd video
Not me being unable to take my eyes off Ray's thumb twiddling.
I've often wondered who his spouse is.
Now I can't unsee it
This isn't even my favorite subject but his deadpan delivery makes this the most easy zone out videos on UA-cam
THANK YOU! That's all I could see. I thought maybe he had a strolling teleprompter switch under there... Either way, it was its own second show! Great video nonetheless!
In time with each word :D
Strong Towns did a video showing most high density stuff covers their own taxes and then some, while low density detached homes cost more in maintainance for water/power/roads than they can support themselves. If you just start taxing people the proper amount to cover the taxes for their own street, apartments will become a lot more popular.
Yes, I agree, in principle. The problem, though, is that the transition to people actually paying their own way will be so terribly disruptive that I can't imagine people having the guts to do it.
Apartments will become more popular for the median person who has no business living in a mansion, but we will continue to have huge enclaves of wealthier households who have no problem paying for the full costs of suburbs once the subsidies are pulled. Though realistically this upper middle class is also the most powerful voting bloc so they will be difficult to defeat politically.
@@FullLengthInterstates I wouldn’t mind that, it would still be an improvement over the status quo
@@FullLengthInterstatesI don’t really see the issue with that. Wealthier people don’t want to live with poor people problems of bad neighbors, worse education, crime, junkies etc so allowing them to self segregate is fine as long as they pay their way.
@@FullLengthInterstates Have you ever lived near section 8 housing? The well-off do not want to live near those areas for a reason.
One Thing I rarely hear discussed on housing forums is Noise! I grew up in a triple decker in Prov. R.I. in the era before air conditioning. I was part of the problem, a kid running up and down the stairs. Playing wiffleball, or basketball in the yard. Our parents would call out the window for us when it was dinner time. I believe that if apartments were built with better quality sound reduction construction methods, ( such as concrete floors and steel/concrete stairwells and block firewalls as opposed to stick built with drywall), People would have a more positive attitude for apartment living. It is also a problem in the Burbs. Trash trucks running thru the neighborhood teens with loud cars, Trucks using Jake brakes and noise from freeways.
That last sentence reads like Bob Dylan lyrics, I can hear him singing it
Even Montana was able to pass zoning reform before California because they saw the writing on the wall about housing prices going up as more people moved in.
It’s one of those issues that’s simultaneously difficult to achieve and very easy to achieve. All it actually takes is changing some paperwork, you don’t need to secure funds or build some complex project. The issue is finding politicians who will actually support it and ignore the NIMBY people showing up at meetings.
The big problem is nimbys vote and younger people don't. Big cities like Houston and Chicago have single digit turn out rates for 18-30 voting. Also doesn't help to completely dismiss nimbys opinions
It is really wild, considering Montana harbors some of the most nativistic nimby attitudes in the country. One of the most popular TV shows of the last decade is all about stopping the "transplants" from coming in and ruining the place!
Yeah, we don’t want politicians ignoring people who show up. Check your fanaticism before we get a dictatorship. 😂🤣
You might want to go and listen to how those NIMBY’s often bring very rational and fair sounding arguments while the YIMBY’s bring platitudes and slogans. Screaming that it’s unfair that some people own more than one house while you are living in a rented home doesn’t make you sound sane.
I’ve yet to have a real conversation with someone about adding smart density where it wouldn’t be a much easier and better plan than blanket re zoning rules which will likely create serious winners and losers where, as usual, the rich and powerful benefit while most people lose.
Also, if you think any law change will make a big difference in less than five years short of enslaving laborers and forced land redistribution done Soviet style, you are kidding yourself. The most important things we can do are to try to eliminate the actual policy causes and let the market work. Let’s not do what was done 100 years ago and make things worse as we did with the Great Depression.
@@morewi it's not even that: it's that NIMBY's tend to be richer and have more time to spare to show up at city and county council meetings and raise a stink in the name of making life worse for everyone else. The kind of people who really benefit from walkable cities and need affordable housing are too busy trying to afford the non-affordable housing to do so.
prop 13 moment
I miss the stadium comparison in your videos. With over 300k subscribers, maybe you could compare it to city size or airports/train stations???
A Wyoming comparison works for this milestone.
300k is close to the estimated size of the Roman army at the Empire's peak.
He'd rather try to gaslight people into think Republican's are the problems for things liberals caused.
Throughput of train stations _would_ be an interesting comparison!
metro ridership
Thank you for acknowledging that people from both sides of the political spectrum can be convinced to get behind zoning reform. The talking point that zoning restricts property rights and a land owner’s freedom to build what they want on their own property does appeal to many conservatives.
I’m definitely not a nimby, but I can’t quite get fully on board with Yimbys either.
I think part of the reason is that I, like many people my age, don’t own any property(I’m a “Where Is My Back Yard) and the entire yes/no argument revolves around people who already own property.
Yimbyism is great for property owners, but the real winners are developers, who of course are going to prioritize building units that will maximize profits.
I’m not saying the movemeant is wrong, just that simply increasing supply doesn’t solve all the issues. There should still be efforts to secure regulations around ensuring affordable housing or even social housing. (See: Vienna)
I’m sure some of you in the comments will disagree, but the fact that seemingly disparate political ideologies are coming together on this is a cause to look very closely at what we are trying to accomplish, and who we are trying to help. Simply removing zoning regulations to let land developers do whatever they want seems like there could be downsides.
It’s a large discussion, no simple answer is gonna be the best one in all situations, and the YIMBY movement is far from perfect.
I think you have a point that completely removing all rules isn’t going to help. But in very few instances is that even close to the reality in the US.
Basically every society has developed some sort of ruleset for land use. There are a few things that just mix. Building polluting factories in residential neighborhoods isn’t a good idea. And yes, building a 12-story highrise among an area of 2-story homes is probably not great idea either.
But the US went incredibly overboard with this. The American R1 (residential detached single family houses) zone is basically unmatched anywhere else in the world in it’s strictness. Not only does it not allow for duplexes/ townhouses or just having like two or three separate apartments in a detached house. All of which are houses, hardly distinguishable from a single family home. They also often mandate absolutely giant lots with a lot of wasted space in the front. And it also excludes cafes, bakeries, doctors and other small businesses completely normal in most other countries residential areas.
You can limit developers without outright banning them from building anything but single family homes. If you’re actually worried about the „character“ of a neighborhood you can easily put some rules in place over how high a building can be and how close it can be to other buildings. But you don’t need to regulate the usage of the home.
@@eechauch5522 I’m definitely not worried about the “character” of any neighborhoods.
And I understand that there are still plenty of regulations and zoning around land development.
I’m totally in favor of “up-zoning.” But changing zoning is not the same as actually building housing. Building housing also depends on interest rates, materials costs, labor costs, labor supply, etc. So just changing zoning is no guarantee of new housing.
And even when dense housing does actually get built, it is, unless specifically mandated to be otherwise, “market rate,” housing, which means that it is decidedly not “affordable,” or “below market rate” housing.
YIMBYism is rife with marketeers who will tell you that all that matters is supply, and if we just increase supply, it’ll all work itself out. They call it “filtering,” like the wealthy people will buy the new housing and leave their old housing. But it’s just some trickle down economics again, and just like trickle down economics, pretty frequently it just doesn’t work for a bunch of reasons that become obvious with even a bit of reflection; like new people moving to the area (housing demand is not fixed like some Econ 101 textbook problem).
Again, I’m much more YIMBY than NIMBY, but I find the YIMBY “movement” to be insufficient for actually addressing the issue of making sure that people can get affordable housing.
Worked for a housing affordability coalition over the summer thanks to influence from this channel, it's such a major issue that almost every single person cares about "housing is too damn expensive now!" but not enough people realize why
So I am one of those younger folk you exposed in the beginning lol. The truth is this issue really is important for me because I love my country, I want to be proud of the place I live and the spaces we inhabit. And videos like that, especially ones which show contrasts to places outside of the USA, are really eye opening to what it could be like since I have never left here. I have lived in car centric places with pretty low density my whole life and I have been getting politically active and been starting to see the mess with my own eyes as I engage and learn more. Recently, a local representative came to a university political club which I attended and revealed an incredible statistic for the housing issue. At these development meetings for the city of Tempe in the Phoenix metro area, the 21-45 age bracket, which comprise 65% of the voting base and are the primary consumers of housing, are less than 30% of the people who show up to them. And so the decision makers have a lopsided idea of what will be popular decisions and so generally anti density measures get passed because they view not doing so as potentially risky. It is like that for other cities here in the metro area as well. He said that just the 21-45 demographic showing up really helps them have more confidence making more YIMBY actions. I have actually started to attend some and people really can bring up the most ridiculous things sometimes that make me boil and want to say something during my own presentation opportunity, but since they can be recorded, I get quite nervous potentially doing that. I am definitely interested in this YIMBY action group and hopefully they might be able to give some tips. Thanks for the information CityNerd. GO YIMBY!
yo we're probably a similar age (i just graduated uni) but i admire you for getting out there and learning more on your own. i had no idea about urbanism at all until i happened to move to a city in asia as an exchange student five years ago. when i moved back to my rural hometown i was like "tf is this shit?" lmao my tip for being able to speak without getting too flustered by nimby nonsense is to prepare a statement. write it, print it, or even just read off your phone, but you're right in that it's both really difficult and really important to speak up in front of a crowd you know disagrees with you. also, you can word it in a way that pledges support to the policies you like more than against the ones you dont- it feels a bit less combative, and if the nimbys make a big deal over it that's on them. keep up the good fight!
@@cheef825Y'all are giving me faith in the next generation.
Detached single families are for people who love pointless chores. Waste half a day moving stupid grass? Yessir. Wait for a century for water to turn hot? Absolutely. Running a marathon to get the car keys you left upstairs? Totally!
And then they evolved to awful McMansions...
@@GirtonOramsay
And cheaply built ones at that.
I don't know this reads as envy to me.
@@pavelow235 I've lived in a friend's single family detached and had the pleasure of renting one for half a year. I really really really hated doing that shit
As a disabled person I literally could not live in this type of house if I was the one in charge of all that stuff. I currently live with my parents and their house is not very big at all and it's still difficult for me to get around when I'm not feeling well. On bad days I truly do miss my studio apartment. It was so much easier to maintain and get around. My dream is not to have a giant mansion but a modest apartment with a craft room and a nice kitchen lol
You just got me to make my first-ever political donation. I am now a certified dues-paying YIMBY!
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Really stoked on this video. I'm often left wondering what the heck I can do to help after watching a CityNerd video, and it was really validating to see that people beyond the subscribers to this channel care about these issues.
Write/call local elected officials, show up to meetings to voice your opinion, voice your opinion in casual conversations, etc.
And put together proposals for the improvements you want to see to the local public works. You can also get together with like minded neighbors to do activism aimed at showing the potential of these changes to public spaces.
Others have noted political action at the local level but you can also definitely help by volunteering for dems up and down the ballot this year. They’re going full YIMBY and parties will notice if that is rewarded.
First step would be to run for county council and approve some of those multi-family homes.... And stop going on a power trip about how the zoning variance can't be approved
@@SailingROX4321there isn't a shred of evidence that either political party gives a damn about the pricing of homes😂
Another angle we need to change are Fannie and Freddie mortgage guidelines which strongly discourage condos and infill while subsidizing and encouraging sprawly vinyl villages.
Its a dystopian outcome of only funding houses that are good comps to appraise rather than housing that is effective for living.
*affordable* is the tough part of housing. Unless government builds housing, private industry will seek the most profitable and fastest return on investment, and that means condos.
If you are a deveopper, it is a lot easier to pre-sell very expensive condos, then you go to the bank to get a SHORT TERM loan to build the 50 storey appartment building, and conclude condo sales as soon as possible to repay the loan and make a hefty profit. You'll never get a loan if you want to build affordable rental housing where you need a 20 year mortgage paid vy rental revenues every month with lots of interest and governmemnt rules on how fast you can hike rent etc.
The government could buy those artificially expensive condos units from builders and then rent units at affordable prices.
The government could built rental appartments and assume their debt while renting units at affordable prices.
Or the government could use the tax code and other instruments to make it more profitable for builders to build rental affordable housing than to build expensive condos that have quick return on investment.
The perfect irony of America is how my friend and I were bored and wanted to find a place to hangout while in another city. I looked up a placed literally called a “third place” and when we got there, there were apartments in walking distance from restraint and Game Centers. A park and outdoor dining. A bar and walkable sidewalks. The parking was in a parking garage with free for 2 hours. My friend and I would go to that place all the time if we had an area like that.
And we had a pretty great time until we had to go. Then we leave the area and you’re stuck in city traffic. Typical American sprawl. We drove back to our suburban city later (I don’t need to tell you what it looks like; you know how it is).
Look deeper Americans, I live in Spain where more than 60% of the population live in apartments, and yes, the housing crisis is also striking here, and hard. If you think private investors and liberalizing soil is going to take you out of the housing crisis, I'm sorry to tell you that you are deeply wrong. All of this said, building densely is of course a good approach urbanistically and environmentally, but prices are not going to go down if the private sector is the only one building and are building without any restrictions.
The US' slightly weaker housing crisis is on top of our huge problems with transportation, healthcare and safety. Other developed nations may also have unaffordable housing but you have overall better quality of life stats. For example comparing the US to the UK, even though the UK is weaker economically and London is also famous for unaffordable homes, median wealth is higher in the UK than the US because their transportation, healthcare and housing allows normal people to save.
I am part of the problem as a single family home owning dad in his fifties. My daughters will be living at our family home until they can afford to leave, which will likely be in another 5-10 years, when they're well into their 20s. It IS my problem, because it's my daughters' problem. I am trying to advocate for affordable urban living in my city, as should every parent with a clue.
Edit: no i don't want to turf them out, they're welcome to live here as long as they need to. But they have no other feasible choice right now. That sucks for them.
This is a fairly new issue in the neighborhood I just moved to. An old small strip mall lot is up for redevelopment and a bunch of old boomers are fighting the project because they think it would destroy the “park-like nature” of the neighborhood and turn it into the big city, but it’s barely enough units to add much capacity to the overall road system honestly. It would also bring some much needed mixed use spaces to the area and would be built over existing under utilized development, so I’m all for it!
For the Oregon example, it was urban progressives and rural Republicans who were able to pass the missing middle zoning measure HB2001 in 2019 over the objection of suburban representatives of both parties.
The suburbs are a tax on everyone, fiscally, politically, infrastructurally, and more. Toronto is a great example where the suburbs and the city combined governments and now the city is largely beholden to suburban interests. However, I'm not sure the neighborhood in-fighting in Philly is any better.
Hi from a YIMBY who lives in Santa Cruz, CA a city which is consistently ranked one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
Yep. I'm from there, and no longer live there because it's so unaffordable. But I go back and visit every few years.
He's all business today and I'm here for it. Also I am working on creating a UA-cam channel of my own because I was inspired by you that's best in the rust belt. So if you ever make a trip to Cleveland, let me know. I can give you the best places to check out and the most urbanists places
I feel that we should also invest in communities that have historically been underinvested in, such as rust belt cities that have seen population declines, as a way to relieve pressure from other in demand areas.
A big issue with home values outpacing income increases is derived from housing as an investment, at the very least housing has to outpace inflation and the illiquidity premium to be a viable investment- we all know it does much better than that, meaning for us to reach a place of more long term sustainable housing affordability, housing as an investment needs to become less of a thing
As a progressive and a CityNerd fan, I've been following the yimby trend and some recent conversations online have really left a sour taste. I'm finding that overwhelmingly the solution is simply 'state subsidies for private developers to increase supply.'
I know we're nowhere near this discussion in this country, but why are we pushing so hard for state subsidies for private developers, who are entirely incentivized to make money, instead of pushing for public housing? Private developers who have *very recently* openly colluded on price-fixing?
Ray, curious what you think of the Strong Towns criticism of YIMBYs. As I understand it, the criticism is that YIMBYs tend to prioritize corporate capital funding large multifamily projects vs grass roots smaller scale densification through ADUs and smaller projects that would be funded by local capital that’s more likely to stay in the community.
I don't know if we're thinking about the same videos from Chuck, but my recollection is that Chuck's argument wasn't so much anti-YIMBY as anti-corporate, which, as you point out, can drain resources from a community.
Strongtowns is anti-scale and loves advocating for the worst kinds of protectionism.
If a deal regarding local land is made that happens to involve external funding, it is because that external funding would represent the biggest net benefit to the local party. It is the right of the local party to seek investment from the best bidder, after all, isn't YIMBYism all about people being able to do what they want with their land?
If your city produces valuable exports, then the city would not fear a small leg of outflows, and its internal investors should already be well capitalized and have a natural advantage when bidding for projects.
If your city does not produce valuable exports, then it should do its best to cooperate with the national economy that it feeds off, which includes gracefully sundowning.
i've had the thought for several years that a multifamily dwelling in that size range would do well to have a car share arrangement as part of the features of the space. whether that's in the form of an on-site loaner car or a contract with a rental company, it would help encourage tenants to ditch car ownership, with ready access to a car if needed.
There's an apartment building opening in my city that will have shared cars for tenants. I'd love to live there, but I suspect it will be way out of my price range.
@@AubreyBarnard we have two big controlled rent complexes in my town. the rent is just a little bit over my mortgage payments. makes me glad I bought when I did.
My city has declared that a large portion of its downtown that has not been developed will be reserved as green space. This was announced at the same time that money was approved to build a 100 unit multi-family 'affordable' development, which I assume means the price of homes will be below the median home price. You mentioned in one video that the in the Bay Area, neighborhoods in an urban center were blocking zoning for multi-family development, presumably to keep home prices up. I suspect that my city is doing the same, and only building an affordable development to get federal grant money or something. I am guessing that the affordable development will house families in need, or on government assistance, which means guaranteed income for the developers. I am also suspicious that declaring undeveloped land 'green space' is less about preserving the environment than it is about keeping home prices high and keeping out the riff-raff. Am I wrong to be suspicious? Doesn't this harm the middle and working classes?
Oh shit, I didn't know there was a volunteer form on the Yimby action website, I haven't filled out a form that fast in a long time haha. I'm so excited to catch the livestream later!
Still wish I saw real outcries let alone advocacy for social housing, and other methods for lowering rents that doesnt rely on the benevolence of the free market
In 2022 YIMBY action supported California AB 2053, the Social Housing Act although it ended up not passing
@@andreaallais4942 This is true, I was among them, but generally speaking this support tends to be reactive to things already being done rather than proactive. I am not saying you or our movement is in lockstep with this, but concerningly I've seen quite a few yimby people snub the idea of social housing as a valid part of their coalition, instead lionizing a market centered approach as the only method that is "politically possible"
It's not the "benevolence of the free market." The government is the core of the housing issue. Now they need to revert many of the zoning laws that hurt us, then allow the free market to do its thing. Even if social housing was built it would be extremely expensive. It's not just about building more houses, because no matter what they will continue to be expensive. If we can see changes in zoning laws to allow for mixed use developments, aka the "missing middle," they will be built, and housing prices will plummet. This will allow for many other benefits as Citynerd pointed out in this video.
TL;DR: we need to reform zoning laws
@@pinnacull brother im with you on the zoning stuff, but thats the basic beginning, not the end
I like cars, I really do. I enjoy cool/old/fast cars. I also think that most people shouldn't have to rely on cars to get around. Cars should be for those who want them or need them for a certain purpose, not just to go from A to B
Good stuff. Would be nice though if you included the challenges of Nimbyism. In the case of ADUs for instance, it’s easy to forget there often a strain on water, gas electric needs for a neighborhood, parking issues, and often mature landscape is removed in favor of concrete etc, furthering the development of hot spots, etc. There are many, many problems that come with density if not done in a smart and thoughtful way. Keep up the great work!
I have owned my house for twenty years, but I am worried about my kids and their friends finding housing.
Same. I'm one of those people you would expect to be a NIMBY, but I'm not. I have a single family home on over 1/3 of an acre within 3 miles of the center of Charlotte, NC, but I'm completely down with changing zoning and doing a lot more with density along with more rail. We really need both here.
@@andrewdiamond2697when are you going to build the 20 storey skyscraper on your single-family lot?
Love your content. I'd love to see a video of suburban communities focusing on increasing urbanism/density. I'm from the Seattle area, and live in Redmond, the last 10 years have seen the expansion of light rail, and massive building of tall housing units downtown. It's nice to see these changes happening, and I'd love to only where else is focusing on these needed improvements. Love the channel.
I'm excited to come out and check out the eastside line AND the Lynnwood extension! The growth in both Redmond and Lynnwood is interesting to watch
I would love a video on urban water policy! Water and its conservation or waste is a super important part of housing development.
I know that vegas is weirdly really well positioned for the future population growth but theres not too much popular media available on it. I thought you might have a unique ability to comment on this as well considering you last two cities of residence.
Best,
Dogman
The housing affordability crisis is an offshoot of the wealth disparity crisis and the fact that economic activity is dominated by a wealthy minority who concentrate production and commerce for maximum efficiency and their own profitability instead of working individuals building smaller communities around meeting local needs. As you've pointed out, the cost of living tends to skyrocket in dense urban areas where job availability is high and economic self-sufficiency is low. Years ago, life for many entailed being legally tied to the land owned by the noble classes, today, modern serfdom entails being legally bound to employment and a race-to-the-bottom exploitative consumerism dictated by the wants of the neo-nobility. While affordable, high-density housing in urban areas isn't something that should be opposed, it needs to go hand-in-hand with a society-wide redistribution of wealth and economic interests otherwise you're just putting a bandaid on a severed artery.
You are completely free to buy a plot of land and take out the loans necessary to make your own apartment block. And you can rent those units for 20 a month if you think it is so cheap to build and the rents are just "greed".
@@PeteMoss-zf6tx Thanks for your insightful "Just go build an apartment bro" comment. The point is we CANT build what we want on most land that we could purchase in cities thanks to SFZ, even if we could gather the money/loans needed to build an apartment block. All of this red tape with permitting and possible rezoning only adds more to the cost of building any type of housing too. This isn't even getting into the landlords or corporations trying to maximize profits on every rental they own
As an anarcho-capitalist I agree with your assessment.
@GirtonOramsay again, that is just a load of cope.
Most people here are not going to be stimied by some assumed zoning restrictions. Most of you won't so it CLEARLY because the costs (IOW reality) will knock some sense into you that it isn't cheap and rents aren't set by "greed" but by economic reality.
So it is easier to play radical activist online while whining that you can't build yourself because of some "conspiracy".
Damn you said a whole lot of nothing
I think that housing is the most pressing issue in the US currently. The amount of unhoused people in the richest country in the world is actually insane. Not having stable housing breeds other societal problems as well. We need to band together and demand this. Keep showing up, people. Please don't vote against your best interests.
As much as I love medium-high density housing and urban spaces, there is the social issue of "bad neighbors". I know nightmare neighbors exist everywhere, but I've been cussed out and kept awake all night by parties and loud music far more often while living in apartments than in single-family suburbs. In order for higher density housing to work (which I think we should strive for, right alongside better public transit), there needs to be a social change, too. It needs to be the social norm, and there needs to be social consequences, for people to be decent neighbors as a part of higher density housing to be functional for the long-term and not just a cool, trendy idea.
It greatly depends what kind of neighbors you have. Yes, I'm explicitly acknowledging race plays a factor..
Neighborly consideration make a huge difference, but there are still crying babies, running toddlers, etc. When it comes time for me to sell my single family home for and apartment and less maintenance, noise level will be top of mind
That is a serious problem. I have always lived in apartments because I don't want to be responsible for a building and a surrounding yard. This is one of the trade-offs. For a long time, I've been in middle income suburban apartment complexes. Unfortunately, one bad neighbor can ruin the place for everyone nearby. Some apartment complexes are well managed and have lease contracts designed to account for noise, and a call to the office can take care of the problem. Some, unfortunately, are poorly managed, and the employees make no effort to keep this problem under control. This situation can lead to the police being called for noise complaints, which can escalate with tragic results. (For me, calling the police over noise is a last resort, but I've been desperate enough to do it on a few occasions.) I don't know what the solution is. Some people are stubbornly inconsiderate and lack empathy, and nothing short of draconian punishment will change their behavior. I think it would be helpful if noise ordinances were updated to adequately cover common modern day noise nuisances (i.e. incessantly barking dogs and music with loud, penetrating bass) and if there were serious consequences for repeated violations. Maybe a couple nights in jail with constant annoying noise piped into the cell would teach people to change their ways.
There are higher density areas with single family houses. For example non detached single family homes. I live in one in Germany. They’re beautiful and quiet. Look up Altbremer Haus :)
@@heatherharrison264there are for sure people who just don't care about their noise. I've had neighbors I've called the police on many times, and it still didn't stop them. Usually the police just tell them to turn it down and leave. But there needs to be real consequences for repeat offenders.
Frankly, landlords are a huge part of the problem, and nobody seems to want to talk about it. Housing shouldn't be a financial investment. Nobody - no person, no company, no organization - should be able to own mass housing.
Love it! I’m a lead for one of YIMBY Actions local chapters and it really is fun and gratifying doing this work locally
My problem with YIMBY is that it tends to focus on leaving decisions up to the market, which inevitably means developers, which inevitably results in cheaply built 'luxury' apartments with some nasty ground level features in areas with poor transit links that don't really address the housing problem for the most vulnerable. This wouldn't be a problem if YIMBYs would also help get transit, bike lanes, and affordable housing put in, but YIMBY organisations and a lot of individuals are often strangely against those policies.
32 unadulterated seconds of an apathetic black cat is what I subscribe for.
Most of these shortages are in areas with restrictive regulations on building developers. The answer is to ease regulatory restrictions on new housing construction, not more government involvement.
I can imagine that. There must be la lot of empty houses in places that are dying. If people were willing to commute a thousand miles a day, the housing crisis could be solved.
I'm a little disturbed by the idea of "market rate AND affordable housing". Why are they separate things? Who decided that the market rate should be unaffordable?
There are a number of countries that have adopted tiered zoning, similar to Japan, and they've done very well. Japan has eliminated their housing shortage, and even as Tokyo has grown larger the cost of housing per square meter is half what it is in London or New York.
A lot of communities also do not permit trailer parks within the town limits. These facilities allow a lot of housing units to be located adjacent to each other in a much denser formation that single family homes. The trailer park right down the road here is small with just about 20 mobile homes, but takes up the same space as like 2 single family homes. Manufacturing this kind of housing is a lot easier to do on the mass level to get millions of units built quickly.
Exactly! That's why they call them manufactured homes - way faster, more efficient, and greener to produce, plus much faster to get through permitting (no engineering reviews). The laws banning them and hiding them away behind mandatory walls are backward and prejudiced and must be done away with!
“In the year of our Lord 2024”. 😂Your mix of knowledge, wit, and sarcasm are unmatched sir
This isn't anything new.
No we dont have a housing shortage. We have a 'job centralization' problem. We got plenty of houses all over the country, but nobody wants to live in them. Because people want to live close to where the jobs are.
Job centralization is a problem for cities that have maxed out in terms of capacity (Manhattan, Toronto, Tokyo) etc. Most US cities, including the surrounding suburbs of the aforementioned maxed out cities, are very much underdeveloped and could easily expand vertically if legal. Optimal economies of scale occurs at around 10 stories, where the cost per square foot is the lowest in terms of construction and upkeep.
@@FullLengthInterstates True. All those big city suburbs could be densified. They are actually doing that a tiny tiny bit in Atlanta recently. Trying to anyway. I didn't know that 10 stories was the most cost-efficient height. I don't know if that's the most attractive height though. I think six stories is more attractive. But maybe like in office places would be okay.
@@saratemp790 I think 5 over 1s are currently the most viable build-anywhere US apartment given the established scale with US builders in terms of skill and materials. But globally 10 stories is a more common apartment height that can be found in both city centers and fairly rural areas.
@@FullLengthInterstates 10 stories is okay, if you have extra room between the two sides of the street. Like put a one block park in the middle of the street. The taller the buildings, the more room you need in between them, to get sunlight. Yes 5 over one would be the best here.
I think we mostly see eye to eye, but forgive my rant:
I think the YIMBY movement is needed, but I think 1) funding public housing that isn't means-tested (i.e. repeal the Faircloth amendment, expand HUD funding, and more) and 2) pushing for more aggressive (regional) housing development in metro areas where single-family homes predominate. These both depend on a strong regional vision driven by the public sector. Right now, YIMBYism is way too easily co-opted by private developers and moderates that want deregulation + tax cuts to be prioritized over residents + building affordable housing.
In San Francisco, we are constantly fighting about what processes to expedite and what taxes to cut --- not about where to actually deliver housing. Going back to my first note -- San Francisco's population dropped by 10% -- but rental and housing prices didn't even take a dent.
We are instead focusing on cutting taxes for businesses and private developers and pulling the rug out from social services to prop up more money for local enforcement -- hoping for a pre 2020 boom to return.
City first vs. region first:
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Just like with the zoning map you shared, there are region wide disparities. San Francisco can be denser; it has lagging private developments that were approved years ago.
Yet San Francisco is only 49 square miles, and San Mateo county has 10% fewer people while being 10 times as large --- 455 square miles. Even San Jose is a little over 4 times the size of San Francisco while only having a 10-20% larger population --- and the same disparity repeats within Santa Clara. San Jose is close to half the county's population but only 10% its size.
Are we not approving enough?
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If we look at regional approvals, we see that Bay Area cities are very good at approving new properties well above the median income --- they are all bad at making housing for people at or below the median income. Is this because of approvals or because private developers are trying to maximize dollars? Is paying 5-10% a property's values in fees or taxes enough to justify this disparity?
An aside on some types of YIMBY legislation:
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California passed legislation expediting and eliminating reviews for affordable developments on property owned by religious institutions and universities --- but what's that going to do exactly? Regular private developments still need millions of dollars to be built and permits or delays from approvals are a fraction of that. Similarly, at the federal level, legislators are reviewing providing 50 million in challenge grants for agencies that support religious institutions in this process.
If religious institutions have land and want to make housing --- why not just develop it? Why bank on the taxpayer transferring funds to their balance sheet or making affordable housing pipelines that won't pump out any housing?
As you mentioned at 6:30, proposed developments in San Francisco are predominantly "transit-oriented" buildings that keep dense housing along busy car streets like Geary, 19th Ave, Potrero, Van Ness, Irving, and Mission. [Edit: this lines up with what you mention in 12:30 -- but doesn't this just highlight the contradictions in what we say? Isn't it sad that multifamily housing is near transit corridors --- but also lets support the legislation that prioritizes this? Even moderate mayors like Matt Mahan in San Jose --- who did local fear mongering about how housing development would cause traffic and put stress on local infrastructure --- said it was "common sense" policy to keep housing development near existing transit routes. When Mahan was San Jose City Council Member for District 10, he tried to ensure the light rail still extended into his largely suburban, high income constituency and that the VTA maintained its scant bus service (mattmahansj.medium.com/vta-dont-strand-almaden-s-seniors-students-bcb495701d3e?) --- since that time it seems like he has embraced "public transit is for poor people" common sense policy.
What's more, he's gone from "housing for all" (mattmahansj.medium.com/our-housing-shortage-deepens-racial-inequity-5bf752d604b8?) and embraced "smart growth" common sense policy (mattmahansj.medium.com/smart-growth-is-san-joses-best-future-bb4af75812a7?).
For cities that are "built-up" the choices are: suburban sprawl or demolishing properties to make way for better ones. In San Francisco, we only demolish existing public housing or less-than-desirable SROs to make room for new developments.
An aside on ADUs and deregulation:
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Support for ADUs have been strong in California -- but do they really bring down rents? They probably drive up housing costs because they are assets tied to an existing single family home or multiunit property.
That being said, I don't think it's surprising at all that right-libertarians have embraced deregulating housing, and I also don't think these policy change is a silver bullet without making *landlording* less profitable. Right-libertarians and conservatives will gladly support housing and zoning reform because what it really means is deregulation and tax cuts; eliminate greenbelts and get out of the way of private developers -- to make what exactly? A bunch of apartment buildings or a bunch of single-family homes that are cheaper to make and potentially net way more -- in addition to receiving considerable subsidies from the government.
Love this comment, especially as a fellow SF resident. I find it surprising how often people who position themselves as progressives also feel that the "invisible hand of the free market" is the path to salvation.
Yes, until housing exceeds demand, there is a need for intervention regarding affordable housing. The disparity between income levels is so great that market rate housing will never be affordable to a big segment of the population.
good regulation > no regulation > bad regulation
Who wants a place to live?
"I do i do. We all do. "
Who wants to build houses?
"I don't dream of labor"
It’s nice to see you recognizing that there is a space for libertarians in the urbanist movement.
when "deregulate everything" intersects with regulations that really are objectively bad...
@@northamericanvanlines and also cut implicit and explicit subsidies for suburbia and drivers. There is really no libertarian defense for free parking or drivers not paying the cost of their road use. I wrote an article exploring how roads may work in an anarcho-capitalist society and I concluded that it would be far more urbanist than the status quo. Not saying that we should go there, but it just illustrates how screwed up the current situation is.
No, we don't need you trying to feel up all the high school girls.
3:20 bringing in the national candidates into the debate is nonsense because these are issues decided at the municipality level....ZONING and land use.....hence that is why housing increases is stabilizing in Austin TX..... Because the free market allowed towering residential buildings and now the market is starting to stabilize...... Contrast that to Washington DC which still has increases in prices....constrained building , zoning is hurting
This all sounds great, and sounded great 5, 10 years ago too. But for that whole time I've lived in either Santa Clara or Santa Cruz counties in CA, and the population in both of those places has gone *down* slightly from 2019-2024. The truly astronomical rise in both rents and housing prices during precisely that period doesn't seem like it can be explained primarily as supply problem. It seems instead that (as with e.g. the stock market), it may have more to do with the huge increase in the money supply during that period. That doesn't mean YIMBYism, zoning reform, etc. aren't important, but it does highlight how so long as housing is allowed to be treated as an investment, even a stable demand/supply environment cannot guard against insane price increases.
I cannot explain how happy I am to hear "YIMBY" and then you pan to a cut of Phoenix Arizona and Central avenue.
I don't think people realize that downtown phoenix was dead by 2006 and there were only the diehard locals hanging out here.
Now, in 2024, we have a robust transit center with lightrail and bus station directly connected that replaced our non-functional bus station.
Downtown Phoenix has come a long long way from being a place no one wanted to be to being a hub of the valley.
Not being familiar with Phoenix, I can't even figure out where the downtown is just having a look on Google Earth.
@@cacogenicist 7th Avenue to 7th Street.
From Roosevelt to Jefferson.
I was thrilled to see it too. I hope with those buildings being built that the rent prices start to go down in the area. Right now it is stupidly expensive to live in those "luxury" apartments.
@@JorgeGarcia-gp5cfAnd yet this video is pushing for more of that shit. I shouldn't have to suffer because I want privacy and a yard.
The real issue that CityNerd is afraid to address is hedge funds buying up property.
Ngl. I want walkable living places because I want to maximize my chances to meet cool people, a new friend, find love, or stumble upon a cool new hobby. People keep telling me to “put myself out there” and it just feels like such a monumental effort is required to do this. I would love to put myself out there by simply existing, and going about my day.
Life can just feel so isolating with long commutes in cars.
Part of the resistance to many neighborhoods increasing density is that many are homogeneous, similar in ethnicity, income level, educational attainment and they don't want that to change.
To some extent, we have the same issue of housing costs rising faster than income in many European countries. But here, in many of the bigger and more expensive cities, transit has improved in step with this.
As you point out in the video, paying a higher percentage of your household income on housing. Is a lot more viable if you can comfortably "get by" with owning one car less...
NIMBY became a curse word for me when i started playing Sim City over 20 years ago.
NIMBY
I've lived in Seattle since 1999. I've watched downtown grow, with plenty of very expensive units that normal people can't afford. Sure, many of those places have openings but there's no obvious way to get homeless or poor people into them. Meanwhile, we taxed grandma out of her home in Green Lake so that she had to sell. I've only seen a little development right on the edges of busy, loud, ugly main roads while one block in is a million dollar house. I used to bus to work, then they slashed the number of buses on the route and it was taking 90min each way while driving was 25min even in bad traffic. It's been a disaster and while I can currently afford a nice apartment... How long will that last without intervention?
LOVE this! Will be at YIMBYs for Harris tonight! Thank you for the excellent video.
My only concern is... why does it have to look like that? Why do these 15 minute city/etc projects all have to look like modernist nightmares? Just white/grey box after white/grey box, looking like a prison. I don't get it. I feel like if these projects actually looked nice people wouldn't be so opposed to them, genuinely.
I really like the Activist CityNerd! I was heartened to hear VP Harris mention that she wanted to tackle the problem of hedge funds buying up housing stock and converting it to rental and jacking up rents. In Atlanta this is a huge problem that affects many starter home communities and minority communities. They use hundreds of shell companies to get out from under basic obligations to maintain their properties and make them safe to occupy. Residents of these properties almost never are able to actually contact anyone who owns these places. It's great to see Harris wants to fix this!
The government regulation is causing this issue so now we should add more??? Shut down exclusionary zoning and they won’t be able to manipulate the market.
@@josephkahn6830 What regulation? This is a problem of LACK of regulation when it comes to hedge funds. This has nothing to do with zoning
This is an illusory solution. The only reason these techniques work is due to the housing shortage. Building more housing is the only way to signal to these corporate interests that they should look elsewhere for easy high profits.
@@josephkahn6830no it isn’t
Yeah so a plan that actually builds no new housing and "forces" landlords to make properties nicer. So basically it will just make renting more exspensive.
Housing is so expensive in Seattle that the new CEO of Starbucks can't afford to live here. He's going to super comutte from Los Angeles!
Thanks for always speaking truth to power on this channel, even if it makes some people uncomfortable!
And ultimately, the goal is to make more people comfortable, by making it possible for them to find housing.
Solid Yimby. I also wish there were more ways to convert apartments to condos. Many people live in the same apartments for years and even decades, and everyone would benefit from giving these people a stake in keeping their complexes well maintained and connected to the surrounding neighborhoods.
The way to convert apartments to condos is by building more housing to increase vacancy rates. This will help downgrade real estate from guaranteed profit with dirt cheap interest rates, into a more normal high risk business. Then investors with lower risk tolerance would choose to sell.
The problem with YIMBYs is they want to get rid of rent control as well. Which would be an immediate affordability crisis for almost every renter.
Rent control doesn't do much though
@@neutral_narr it does for the people who already live in apartments, though. without it, their rents get tripled or quadrupled instantly. and most of those people couldn't absorb that increase and would end up homeless.
@mikeydude750 building affordable housing is what will fix this. Not saying rent control should be removed but it doesn't do the job.
@@neutral_narr It takes time to build affordable housing. And all of the YIMBY people say that no one will build housing unless we get rid of rent control and "let the market decide". So what happens when you "let the market decide"? You end up with a massive spike of homelessness and unaffordability in the future hopes that maybe, possibly, if we're lucky, rents might get a bit cheaper
Rent control harms more low income people than it helps (decreasing supply by dis-insentivising development of low income housing). YIMBYism is the only solution to housing affordability.
Rent control is something that sounds nice, but is one of the worst policies for housing affordability out there.
The difference between Harris / progressive style YIMBYism and libertarian YIMBYism is in the use of conditional grants vs a purely deregulatory framework.
If you look at the Harris proposals they’re full of ways for the government to spend money with strings attached. 25k tax credit for first time homebuyers. Tax credit for firms that construct affordable rental units. 40 billion dollar fund for affordable housing. There’s probably more.
The main thrust is that all of these proposals spend money and try to promote housing development bottom up. In my opinion, this is bad for three reasons.
1. It’s a bandaid. If houses aren’t being built for systemic reasons, which seems true, then paying money to overcome that systemic hurdle isn’t sustainable. You’ll just have to spend the money every year in perpetuity since houses have a finite lifespan. It’s also expensive; although I doubt anyone cares anymore.
2. Affordable housing is not the place to start. Building luxury apartments is often cast as gentrification, but it’s a natural fix. For every luxury apartment you build you suck up some of the rich people that are competing for mid tier housing with the middle class, which allows some of the middle class to stop competing with the lower class for low end housing.
You also have the greatest incentive to build, since profit margins are at their largest. This means you require less subsidy, if any.
By contrast, if you build “affordable housing” you have no way to stop a rich person from competing for that housing other than methods like income limits and rent control. But that’s going to limit the profit incentive for building, which means you further rely on the government subsidies to overcome the gap.
With a shortfall of 4 million houses, how are you going to subsidize your way out of it? A 40 billion proposal only adds 10k per new unit, which is often not going to overcome the gap from the required rent controls.
3. The 25k for first time buyers in specific is demand side, which does nothing. There’s already huge demand, it’s just stupidly hard to build. All this will accomplish is help some first time buyers get into a home in exchange for the prices rising for everyone else. Not ideal.
In my opinion subsidies can have a role to play, but the focus needs to be on increasing supply through deregulation.
Then you find out tons of predatory real estate behind the movement
Like what?
The NYTimes has a great video about “Liberal hypocrisy is fueling income inequality.” What you listed at 2:30 is basically saying the worst housing problems are in cities Democrats have an absolute monopoly in.
I'm apart of YIMBY Melbourne!
I've been a long time Patreon and never have I been more disappointed than in your video today. To completely blow off the untapped potential of existing empty housing across this country, the FACT that Wall Street venture capitalists have destroyed the ability of anyone attempting to build or buy a starter home, greedy developers raising 3/1 or 5/1 condos and branding them as "luxury" to dupe gullible buyers, and the obscene quantity of empty office spaces all along decent transit corridors (at least Chicago is doing something about converting them into housing on LaSalle) is mind-boggling. If Harris wins in November, count the 3 million sf homes in a long list of broken promises. Remember the fight for a $15 minimum wage? The promise of student loan debt reduction? Cutting down on fracking leases? There are real solutions to this problem. Looking to the national election will not solve anything. BTW don't count me as a fan of Cheeto Mussolini. I'm not. I'm just a city planner with a lot of ideas to solve this problem through deconstruction to reclaim decent materials, renovate and reactivate what can be saved, and make the bad vulture capitalist property owners accountable like they have in San Antonio and Winston-Salem.
7:49 real libertarians are actually in favor of increased economic liberties broadly. I suspect that a lot of Republicans who claim that as an identity are in fact a lot more concerned with protecting particular liberties such as the freedom of rich ppl to increase their own wealth at the expense of the poor and middle class. Any sort of YIMBY thinking was personally introduced to me by self described libertarians in school and it’s very unfortunate that many well meaning liberals seem to have fallen for a lot on NIMBY rhetoric. That or they just don’t like the idea of their house loosing value
Increased economic liberties for people who have exponentially more than they need often means in the real world, fewer economic liberties for those those just trying to survive. The big issue with the libertarian perspective is they see what they produce as their noble right, and their waste byproduct an opportunity for someone else to clean up.
As a home owner l can assure you. Nobody wants to see their home loose value. And property values increasing or decreasing do not automatically means your property taxes are going to go up or down. It all depends on the mil rate applied.
@@mpetersen6 It is natural that no one wants to see their home lose value. I don’t fault anyone who is concerned about the value of the biggest investment they will likely make. I think it’s unfortunate that we live in a country where, housing, which is necessary for everyone to thrive, is an asset class and not something closer to a traditional commodity.
"There is a housing shortage of 3 million... or 20 million..." No. It doesn't all add up. You can't express it as some kind of simple number of people "unhoused" or living more densely. There's tons of cheap housing in places with no economy; But people should not be forced to live a bleak existence there. Housing should be plentiful enough to support the continuing urbanization and social integration of the US population. Agriculture and extractive industries have been largely automated and no longer support a massive standing labor army, and the housing built there for that purpose needs to be replaced with housing in places that still have a functional role for the population. The number is much higher than this when you account for the fact that many, many people have a pent-up desire to live somewhere else which is not reciprocated by someone who wants to occupy their home. The number of people overall who want to change their housing situation but can't afford to because of prices ("because of the shortage") is very, very high. 20%? 50%? 80%?
The YIMBY crossover we’ve all been waiting for 🎉
YIMBY is an astroturf for the very real estate developers that created this housing crisis
Hi fellow former city planner here. I have always been adverse to YIMBYism because it's presented as a free market silver bullet for housing affordability.
It won't work unless it's combined with rent control, social housing, and as others have mentioned here, shifting housing from being an investment to a social good.
And planners love to point to "filtering" as the answer and I think that's a pretty pesimistic response for the millions of people who need affordable housing now- "just wait 30 years and this new luxury apartment building will lower the cost of other housing."
Also with landlords actively price fixing and collectively charging higher and higher rents with apps like RealPage, counting on increased private housing development alone to increase housing affordability isn't going to work.
Maybe Ray agrees with some of these points and didn't get into it in this video?
I agree that YIMBY can be somewhat distasteful in its purely market approach to solving the problem, but they are allies right now and that's important since we do need housing construction to pick up regardless of any other consideration on top of that.
A good thing Harris' campaign has called out is "fighting corporate landlord rent hikes" and "price gouging"; hopefully that is a good sign.
100% agree with you. I, too, would like to give CN the benefit of the doubt.
I'm all for more dense housing, but explicitly campaigning for more neighbors probably not gonna hit the mark.
Chicagoans!!! Join Urban Environmentalists Illinois, we're the local YIMBY Action chapter and not only do we advocate for housing, but we're a good time too!
Thanks for the tip!
Oh shit hell yes
Fellow Bend YIMBYs introduced me to your channel! Thank you for spreading the good word :)
City Nerd upload yeaaaa!
Portland, Oregon. We have a housing affordability problem!
Also Portland, Oregon. We have a downtown vacancy rate of 9%.
We have options but many people don't want to utilize them. Also affordability doesn't mean the cost of producing something is lessened. It means the end user pays a lower price. Affordability is costing someone somewhere along the line a market cost. Ultimately I'm a yimby but we have a few hurdles besides policy, mostly the notion that single ppl demand they should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment in a city's most desirable location with parking and other of amenities, , and it must be "affordable". America could stand to check its expectations.
Each time I see you release a new video, it starts my day off right
I purchased a house at the bottom of the market in Riverside, California in 2009. So, not even prime real estate. Maybe prime-adjacent.
Now, only 15 years later, it is worth literally four times what I paid for it. FOUR TIMES.
If that's not a sign of an extreme housing shortage and general market failure I don't know what is.
What wasn’t mentioned was the cost of housing is also been influenced by the investor market and by corporations buying housing for profit. If you were only allowed to own one house the cost of houses would quickly fall.
Interesting theory maybe that should extend everything we can only buy one pair of shoes one pair of pants, one egg at a time
@@pavelow235 it’s an example that it’s not supply only that influences cost of housing. In Sweden you are heavily taxed so it’s largely unprofitable to buy more than two residential properties
Good luck with that. The problem is the owners of rental properties fall in wide range of types. When l was younger landlords could sometimes be real assholes. And sometimes they were decent people who only became owners of rental properties because of an older family member passing away and they inherited the house. And a lot of those were two flat. And then you have the manager types who act like little tin gods.
Another factor in the housing market is the flippers. Buying up housing of substandard quality and doing the minimum they can get away with to make the property livable. If it's a multi unit then they are likely looking at rentals. If it is a single family. Then they are looking at profit. To be honest if somebody is flipping houses l do not expect them to lose money on the deal. But raking the buyer over the coals is just plain greed. I once told my wife if we ever hit the lottery one thing l would like to do is build modestly sized starter homes with modest sized lots.
@@mpetersen6 you’re missing the point. Less people are owning more and more housing. To wealthy people it’s simply an investment that is paying good dividends.
And the cost of renting would go up a lot. I mean there is a little validity because its cheaper to rent in some markets but its not like the cost of owning is really high and the cost of rent is really cheap. There just isn't enough housing and evil corporate profits are an easier target than building housing and pissing off the urban democrat NYMBY voter.
In the Atlanta suburb of Peachtree City, teens and older people alike rely on little electric vehicles (golf carts) to get around. Is this a potential model for a more sustainable suburbia (opines Bloomberg)? Surely not?!
You clearly haven't heard of The Villages in Florida
Thoughts on the PHIMBY movement? I’m all in favor of them being in alliance with the YIMBY movement, consider me red-pilled, in the Viennese sense
I think PHIMBY is a slightly smaller subset of Yimby... Yimbys want any housing delivered by anyone.
Honestly I'm not sure if PHIMBY is a movement yet. There are tenant and YIMBY orgs that support public housing but I don't really see organizations dedicated to expansion of public housing as their primary issue.
What about the YTMOA movement? (Yes To More Obscure Acronyms)
Why do people seem to think that YIMBYs aren’t for public housing too? Get in YIMBY circles and actually talk to people!
I know you're not asking me but. I am for the PHIMBY movement in concept, my only hesitancy is that I've seen a few people have a "Public Housing or Bust" attitude to new development, which isn't helpful. We need all sorts of housing for all sorts of people. Delaying new home construction because the housing doesn't match a certain ideal (in a housing crisis, mind you) is just Nimbyism rebranded. However, I'm not ready to throw in the towel on PHIMBY/YIMBY allyship. It's a movement in its infancy, we will continue to hold conversation and see how this thing pans out. Yes to public housing, yes to more housing!