[[{“value”:”At the Democratic National Convention former President Obama came out strongly in favor of housing deregulation saying “we need to build more homes and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it harder to build homes”. Robert Kwasny asks on X, “What are the intellectual roots of present-day YIMBYism?” Looking at
The post The Intellectual Roots of YIMBYism appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]]
At the Democratic National Convention former President Obama came out strongly in favor of housing deregulation saying “we need to build more homes and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it harder to build homes”. Robert Kwasny asks on X, “What are the intellectual roots of present-day YIMBYism?”
Looking at MR I think the first truly YIMBY post was a 2005 guest post by Tim Harford, Red tape and housing prices, pointing to a Slate article by Steven Landsburg. Here’s Landsburg:
Instead of the traditional formula “housing price equals land price + construction costs + reasonable profit,” we seem to be seeing something more like “housing price equals land price + constructions costs + reasonable profit + mystery component.” And, most interestingly, the mystery component varies a lot from city to city.
Even in cities like San Francisco, where there’s little room to build and land is consequently dear (on the order of $85,000 per quarter acre, compared with $2,200 for Dallas), you can’t use land prices to explain away housing prices. The mystery component in San Francisco housing—that is, the amount left over when you subtract land prices and construction costs from house prices—is the highest in the country.
Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joe Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania have computed these mystery components for about two dozen American cities. They speculate that the mystery component is essentially a “zoning tax.” That is, zoning and other restrictions put a brake on competitive forces and keep housing prices up. (Read one of their papers here.)
Zoning’s Steep Price, the Glaeser and Gyourko paper is actually from 2002 (a popular version of their NBER piece presented that same year at the NYFed) so you can see back in the old days it took years for ideas to circulate even among the bloggers! Nevertheless, 22 years from NBER paper to Presidential campaign is a great accomplishment. I see Glaeser and Gyourko as the YIMBY fountainhead. All hail Glaeser and Gyourko!
MR continued to promote housing deregulation on and off for years but I think it picked up around 2017 which is when the first YIMBY reference I can find on MR appeared in an assorted link. Here’s Tyler in 2017 pointing to a job market paper on how regulation increases housing prices and here is me in early 2018 on Why Housing in California is Unaffordable. The increase in research on this topic gave us something to talk about which is an interesting model of how ideas are transmitted.
Kwasny also wonders why Democrats seem to have picked up YIMBY more than Republicans, especially given that deregulation, anti-zoning, pro-growth, pro-developers would seem more compatible with Republican rhetoric and political support. Indeed, Zoning’s Steep Price was published in Cato’s Regulation and the assorted link which introduced YIMBY to MR was to an article blaming YIMBY on libertarians, Peter Theil and tech bros! (Congratulations Jeremy Stoppelman for an extremely effective EA donation!)
While it might have started out as being coded libertarian, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias are to be credited with pushing YIMBY and housing growth among Democratic elites. (Jon Favreau, an Obama speech writer, says Obama sounds like Ezra Klein!) But it’s not too late for Republicans to come home. Can’t we all agree on building more? Read Bryan Caplan in the NYTimes!
Addendum: Tyler traces the intellectual roots of YIMBY back much further to Nicolas Barbon’s An Apology for the Builder which is also recommended by Marc Andreessen. For Britain, Sam Bowman points Mark Pennington’s excellent 2002 monograph Liberating the Land: The Case for Private Land-Use Planning (pdf).
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Economics, Education, History, Law
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