Restricting housing construction does not just hurt developersit makes housing less affordable for everyone. But to overcome neighborhood resistance, you need to understand what drives it.

Birds sit on a telephone line near Skid Row Housing Trust's 102 pre-fabricated modular apartments under construction in Los Angeles.

Next week, Los Angeles will vote on Measure S, a ballot initiative that proposes a two-year moratorium on developments that required changes to land use.

The law could potentially limit both new developments and affordable housing. Even with an exception for affordable housing developments written into the law, critics say it could still further restrict affordability in the region.

For a growing chorus of urbanists, NIMBYism and land use restrictions are the culprit behind everything from growing income inequality to shrinking affordable housing, productivity, and innovation. A 2015 study estimated that land use restrictions costs the United States upwards of $1.5 trillion in lost productivity. The 2016 Economic Report of the President called for sweeping reform of zoning and land use restrictions to overcome these costly economic rents, build more housing, and stimulate the U.S. economy.

A recent white paper by Paavo Monkkonen sheds interesting new light on the connection between NIMBYism and housing affordability. It takes a deep dive into, on the one hand, neighborhood opposition and land use restrictions, as well as housing supply and housing costs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Californias other expensive housing markets. (The research was partially supported by an unrestricted grant from the Center for California Real Estate to the University of California Center Sacramento Center Housing, Land Use, and Development Public Leadership and White Paper Award.)

California offers an ideal case study in the effects of NIMBYism on housing prices. Its major metrosLos Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Diego, Santa Barbaraare some of the most expensive in the nation. They combine high levels of productivity and high levels of amenitytwo factors which create the high demand which puts pressure on housing prices, and have fallen victim to harsh land use restrictions.

San Francisco Is So Expensive Even Renters Can Be NIMBYs

My own research finds that knowledge and professional workers are able to pay Californias higher housing costs. The burden falls largely on less advantaged blue-collar and service workers who have very little money left over after paying for housing. San Francisco has the highest housing costs in the country, while L.A. has the highest share of rent-burdened households. Across the state as a whole, renters need to make almost four times the state minimum wage to afford an average rent.

The crux of the California problem, the Monkkonen paper argues, is not the states restrictions on uber-high density building in and around urban centers, but the broader dependence on lower-density zoning across the board. Los Angeles may be a relatively dense city and metro (indeed, according to some basic measures, it is the densest metro in the country), but three-quarters of its residential land is devoted to relatively low-density single-family housing that only shelters half the citys population.

But adding new supply in the form of high-rise towers in and around the core will do little to solve the overall housing affordability problem. For one, those towers are usually built for the wealthy, and luxury buildings often boost the price of housing in neighborhoods in and around where theyre built (prompting calls like this one for a luxury housing tax to fund affordable units). They can also displace people from their neighborhoods and change the character of those neighborhoodsthings residents very much care about and will understandably seek to block.

Understanding NIMBYs

To get beyond NIMBYism, we first must understand it. Neighborhood resistance isnt just triggered by residents trying to prop up their home values or protect their neighborhoods from things they dont likeits the product of policies that provide incentives toward homeownership and a regulatory system that encourages and prompts opposition.

Even if the economic arguments about the costs and negative consequences of NIMBYism reflect sound economic logic, they amount to little if they fail to address the very real concerns of neighborhood groups. Most regular citizens and neighborhood residents dont think like dispassionate economists. According to a 2016 Building Industry Association poll, some two-thirds of San Franciscans surveyed do not think increasing housing supply improves affordability. Rather, they believe that land use regulations help to protect their neighborhoods.

Monkkonen goes on to parse four different strains of NIMBYism and their underlying motivations:

To fend off the four flavors of NIMBYism, the paper suggests several strategies:

There are other ways to combat NIMBYism. Yale Law School professor David Schleicher suggests using local tax policy to essentially co-opt NIMBY opposition to new development. The basic idea, referred to as tax increment local transfers, is to allow the residents of neighborhoods to share in the tax revenues that come from new developmentfor example, by rebating and reducing their own property taxes over a period of time. Others suggest that shifting from the current property tax to a land-value tax, which taxes property owners on the underlying value of the land itself, will create better incentives for more intensive land use.

But regardless of the precise mechanism employed, finding better ways to understand and counteract NIMBYism and create more vibrant and affordable cities is one of the most pressing policy issues facing urban America. The need to build more housing without removing community input is, as Monkkonen puts it, "a challenge we can no longer ignore."

See the original post:
Anatomy of a NIMBY - CityLab