Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability. California has recently passed legislation to reform environmental regulations that have hindered home-building. The power of the so-called Yimby (“Yes in my backyard”) movement seems only to have been reinforced. Yet the great irony is that where the Yimby agenda has advanced furthest – notably my home state of California – housing affordability has remained consistently the worst.
Yimbys have got something right – the central problem behind the housing affordability crisis is the failure to build enough homes. Homebuilders built hundreds of thousands fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate has put the US housing market short by approximately 4.5 million homes.
But if Yimbys have correctly diagnosed the problem, their solutions – oriented towards building more high density urban apartments – have tended to make matters worse. High density development, often seen as the alternative to “sprawl”, does not necessarily lower prices, as is sometimes suggested, because of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees. In fact, US data suggests a positive correlation between greater density and higher housing costs.
Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. Mainstream Yimbys, so obligingly financed by tech oligarchs and urban real estate interests, see the solution not in socialist housing but for the private sector to construct their dreamscape of high density homes and apartment buildings. They are not interested so much in people buying their own properties, and seem to care little that investors already own one in four single family homes.
Yimbys repeatedly blame poor housing affordability on so-called Nimbys (“Not in my backyard”) groups, including those who want to preserve the lower density neighbourhoods, filled with detached family homes, that they bought into. Getting rid of zoning that prevents the construction of taller buildings is a critical Yimby priority, which they have pushed not only in California but in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.
Yet the positive impact on home-building via these policies has been negligible, with the mixed exception of strong growth in so-called Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) – self-contained units that often remain part of a primary property, most of which are kept for relatives, or used as a spare guest house, an office, or as a high-end rental.
Overall, even with ADUs, California housing construction is at among the lowest rates in America. Only one California metropolitan area was among the top 20 for housing growth last year; Texas had four areas on that list, Florida three. In Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, just 1,325 new homes were approved citywide in the first quarter of 2025.
The Yimbys believe that the only real solution is to roll back regulations further and introduce new housing laws designed to increase urban density. Much of this is based on often exaggerated climate concerns about “sprawl”. Remarkably they have gained the support of the libertarian Right. One might think such people would embrace the notion of promoting a class of small property owners, but it seems that juicing the profits of large corporations is a higher priority. The problem here, for Yimbys on the Right and Left, lies in the small matter of market preferences: most people don’t want to live in the inner-city high rise apartments beloved by planners and Yimbys, but in a house with a garden of their own.
Indeed, generally high-end dense housing has a relatively small market. Condos and apartments may thrill Yimby imaginations – the public, not so much. Surveys, such as one in 2019 by political scientist Jessica Trounstine, have found that the preference for lower-density, safe areas with good schools is “ubiquitous”. Three out of four Californians, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, opposed legislation that banned zoning which only permitted single family homes.
This mismatch between what is being built and what most people want can be seen in the huge oversupply of apartments, not just in the US but in Canada’s big cities too, causing prices for such properties to drop over the past two years. Yet despite all the evidence, Yimbys show little or no interest in the predominant dreams of their own citizens.
Worse, their ideas are helping to inform the agenda of the so-called “Abundance Democrats”, a fashionable new movement which seeks to make peace between the Left, prosperity and growth, inspired by a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Even the Yimbys’ more moderate ideas as laid out in the book – also called Abundance – largely ignore the suburbs and exurbs, where most Americans live, and stay clear of ownership.
As attorney Jennifer Hernandez suggests, there is an “ugly elitist underbelly” to Abundance, reflecting the values of hipster professionals while eschewing “even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centres, who want to be able to buy a detached, single family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odours with their neighbours…”
The obvious and likely failure of Yimby policies might well empower far more radical approaches to housing, which seem more interested in turning cities into a souped up version of greater Moscow. The Mamdani approach of public housing and rent control may come to be seen by progressives as the best alternative – however disastrous public housing has been in cities across the United States.
Given the utter failure of mainstream Yimbyism, the progressive embrace of a more socialist approach seems inevitable. Well-heeled Yimbys, and their corporate backers, are unlikely to enjoy the results.
This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Brett VA via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.
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