Latest news with #YesInMyBackYard
Telegraph
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Penny Mordaunt leads ‘Yimby' demands to build more homes
Penny Mordaunt is leading 'Yimby' demands for the Conservative Party to commit to building more homes. In her first major intervention since losing her seat at last year's general election, Ms Mordaunt urged Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, to 'get policy right' to solve the housing crisis. The former Commons leader will speak next month at the launch of the Conservative Yimby Initiative – a new pressure group set up by Sir Simon Clarke, a former housing secretary. The Yimby (Yes In My Back Yard) movement first originated in California and calls for more house-building while opposing density limits. Sir Keir Starmer has declared that Labour 'is a Yimby party'. Mrs Badenoch has called for more homes to be built, but insisted this must happen 'in the right places', and said supply cannot keep up with current levels of immigration. Speaking to The Telegraph, Mrs Mordaunt said: 'How do you finance the regeneration of the dilapidated eyesore that is holding your high street back when the owner can't afford to and no developer wants to? 'What is the point of great, affordable, shared accommodation for young working people if they are charged five times what they should be in council tax? What can be done to make a desirable development happen when it doesn't deliver a viable return for the developer?' 'Beautiful, ambitious vision' Mrs Mordaunt said there was 'more than one thing that stifles development', adding: 'It is wider than just planning, and it is different in different places. 'Get policy right and not only will you resolve the shortage of good homes but you'll also regenerate high streets, increase disposable income, preserve family housing stock and enable great design. Above all, this is about people having a shared, beautiful, ambitious vision for their community.' Sir Simon, the director of Onward, a the centre-Right think tank, founded the Conservative Yimby Initiative after a collapse in the Tory vote among younger people at the last election. The age at which voters are more likely to become a Tory instead of voting Labour is now 63, while the average age of a first-time buyer hit 36 last year. This is four years higher than at the turn of the century, with one in five buyers now aged 40 or over. Risk of political extinction In a warning to Mrs Badenoch, Sir Simon said the Conservatives risked political extinction unless they committed to a more liberalised housing policy. 'Britain's failure to build the homes we need is punishing young people, and leaving even young professionals living in substandard accommodation which costs the Earth,' he said. 'This is not merely an exercise in policymaking for the Conservatives but a battle for survival and relevance. Almost nobody under 40 voted for us in 2024, and our party will die unless we take a clear lead on home-building again. 'For all Conservatives, it should be utterly unacceptable that the key determinant of whether you can ever hope to own a home in large parts of the UK – especially London and the South East – is whether you have access to the Bank of Mum and Dad. 'That is the opposite of a society based around merit, opportunity and hard work that is the best reason to vote for us.' Last year, Mrs Badenoch predicted that Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary, would miss her target of building 1.5 million homes in the current Parliament. She said the Government had introduced too much red tape to fulfil Ms Rayner's objective and accused Labour of 'punishing' areas where it believed it did not have support by imposing higher housing targets.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda
I don't claim to have perfect knowledge about why the electorate chose Donald Trump in the 2024 election, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because the masses got priced out of Shaker Heights. The first wave of liberal what-went-wrong books is crashing ashore, and its message, surprisingly enough, is largely about the evils of local zoning. I agree that affluent (and often liberal) communities often use rococo land restrictions to jack up land values and exclude the Wrong Element. Some reforms are in order. But the New YIMBY Order (YIMBY being an acronym for Yes In My Back Yard, in response to the more familiar NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard) places the same naïve faith in market solutions that led government policy astray starting in the late 1970s. And to whatever extent judicious easing of regulations is necessary, it will not set the proletariat free, because it sidesteps some important questions that deserve some attention. The books in question are Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman, a former congressional staffer; Stuck: How The Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, by Yoni Appelbaum, an academic historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic; and Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers, respectively, at The New York Times and The Atlantic. Dunkelman's book, the best of the lot, argues persuasively that Jeffersonian local-control liberalism can get in the way of Hamiltonian big-central-government liberalism—but Dunkelman makes too much of that problem. Appelbaum's book supplies rich narrative detail on the dishonorable history of zoning (it began with the ghettoizing of Jews) but he's weak on economic analysis. Klein and Thompson are better on economics but less persuasively tethered to the real world, replete with sentences such as 'Our era features too little utopian thinking' that lend their book the antiseptic tone of a TED Talk. Collectively, these books advocate what might be called supply-side liberalism. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the hell with demand, let's just create more stuff. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the government should get out of the way. But their preferred method to achieve this is not tax cuts but deregulation, typically at the local rather than federal level. 'Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked,' write Klein and Thompson, 'is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.' Well, sure. But ignoring demand is also a convenient way to dodge potentially divisive questions about distribution. 'The world we want requires more than redistribution,' Klein and Thompson state grandly. 'We aspire to more than parceling out the present.' That doesn't offer much sustenance to the rest of us drudges condemned to inhabit 2025. Rather than speculate about the future, let's consider the supply-side liberals' revisionist history. To varying degrees, all three books portray Robert Moses, who bulldozed thriving neighborhoods throughout New York City to build his expressways and thruways and parkways, as a force for good. The only reason we don't recognize this, they argue, is that Robert Caro portrayed Moses as a destructive force in his 1974 biography The Power Broker. Moses's most formidable opponent was Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Moses wanted to build an elevated highway through SoHo and Little Italy that would bisect Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where Jacobs lived. Jacobs stopped him. Bizarrely, Caro left Jacobs out of The Power Broker because the book was too long to include her. (The missing chapter probably resides in one of the 100 boxes of papers Caro recently donated to the New York Historical Society; some enterprising magazine editor should find it and persuade Caro to let him publish it. But I digress.) The delicate ecology of the neighborhoods Moses blasted through didn't interest Moses, but it did interest Jacobs. She wrote about how a mix of retail and residential structures enriched a neighborhood, and how pedestrian flow and smaller-scale construction kept neighborhoods safe by allowing 'eyes on the street.' At the time, urban renewal policies favored building the exact opposite: tall Brutalist high-rises surrounded by inhospitable concrete plazas. In lower-income neighborhoods, housing projects of this type became the perfect breeding ground for violent crime. Appelbaum sees Jacobs as a villain. Her chief sin was that her neighborhood preservation scheme jacked up property values. Jacobs bought her West Village house in 1947 for $7000, sold it in 1971 for $45,000, and today the city assesses it at $6.4 million. Well, yes, making a neighborhood flourish carries some risk that people will want to live in it. The solution is not to crap up that neighborhood but to help other neighborhoods flourish in similar fashion so that livable neighborhoods become the norm and remain affordable to all. Government regulation can help this process by reserving certain housing in livable neighborhoods for low-income families and/or providing subsidies that allow them to live there. At times Appelbaum is so eager to attack Jacobs that he misreads her willfully. 'The key link in a perpetual slum,' Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 'is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.' To Appelbaum, that demonstrates that Jacobs wanted displace her neighborhood's immigrant renters with 'a stable, gentrified population of homeowners.' This is nonsense. As Appelbaum argues elsewhere in his book, the urban gentry are more mobile than lower-income residents, and therefore less likely to create the stability that makes a neighborhood thrive. Appelbaum is so determined to defend high-density housing that he even celebrates the old tenements of New York's Lower East Side, which in 1910 housed 619 residents per acre, the greatest number of them Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Appelbaum notes cheerily that one old tenement was refashioned into a museum, 'a shrine to America's first rung on the ladder of opportunity.' Has Appelbaum been to the Tenement Museum? On display are cramped sweatshop apartments where families slept at night and sewed garments during the day because management was too cheap to give them a workplace. These places were breeding grounds for smallpox, typhus, and other diseases. Jacob Riis wrote a whole book about this. 'An epidemic,' Riis explained in How The Other Half Lives (1890), 'which the well-to-do can afford to make light of as a thing to be got over or avoided by reasonable care' is 'excessively fatal among the children of the poor, by reason of the practical impossibility of isolating the patient in a tenement.' Appelbaum will have none of this. 'They were just apartment buildings,' he writes. 'Today, the very same units reformers claimed would ruin the health and morals of their inhabitants rent for princely sums.' Eventually Appelbaum acknowledges grudgingly that conditions in tenements 'were frequently horrifying,' as documented by Riis and others. But 'it was also true that reformers hunted for the most appalling conditions they could document, to dramatize their cause.' Oh, please. All three books cite Paul Sabin's 2021 book Public Citizens to argue that Ralph Nader choked off housing supply by encouraging public-interest lawsuits against local governments to prevent developers from despoiling the environment. (I reviewed Sabin's book, which I mostly admired, in The New York Times.) Dunkelman rather intemperately writes that Nader (along with Rachel Carson and a few others) exhibited a Nixonian 'cynicism' about government. In fact, all Nader wanted was for the government to be accountable to local communities that had a legitimate interest in preserving clean water and protecting green spaces. Granted, the avenues Nader created were used later for less laudable ends—ends that Nader himself disparages. But I don't believe these excesses, which warrant correction, have much to do with what truly ails this country. And I don't think supply-side liberalism shows much promise as an appeal to a working class that's abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. I'll continue this discussion in a forthcoming follow-up.
Los Angeles Times
14-02-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Nonprofits allege Los Angeles plan to boost housing development is too weak, illegal
Two housing advocacy organizations sued the city of Los Angeles on Thursday, alleging its recent plan to boost home building is inadequate and fails to comply with state law. In their lawsuit, the groups, Yes In My Back Yard and Californians for Homeownership, allege that the city has not demonstrated its plan can accommodate an additional 255,000 homes as required, in part because the city failed to change the underlying zoning in many neighborhoods. In a news release, Yes In My Back Yard, or YIMBY, said the need for more housing is even more pressing after January's fires wiped away thousands of homes in Los Angeles. 'Angelinos are expecting their government to deliver the housing and infrastructure they need to thrive,' Sonja Trauss, YIMBY executive director, said in a statement. 'We need to rebuild quickly and efficiently.' Economists generally blame a lack of home building as the main driver of California's high prices and rents. The lawsuit filed Thursday covers a complicated process cities go through to try to ensure enough housing can be built. Under the state-mandated process, known as the Housing Element, the city of Los Angeles needed to find land where an additional 255,000 could realistically be built over an eight-year period. To hit that goal, the city changed the underlying zoning in a few communities, including downtown, but relied mostly on a series of new incentive building programs known collectively as the CHIP ordinance, which it approved last week. Under CHIP, while underlying zoning rules stay the same, developers can exceed those limits on size, height and unit count if they include a certain percentage of affordable units. In general, the incentives can only be used in commercial and existing multifamily zones, not areas reserved for single-family houses. In the lawsuit brought by YIMBY and Californians for Homeownership, which is funded by the California Assn. of Realtors, the groups allege the city previously committed to changing the underlying zoning of more neighborhoods, and in failing to do so, violated state law. Matthew Gelfand, counsel for Californians for Homeownership, said Los Angeles initially indicated it needed those additional rezonings to meet its numbers and that by relying on voluntary incentive programs Los Angeles makes it less likely it will produce the large volume of units it needs. Nora Frost, a spokeswoman with the Los Angeles City Planning Department, said the city's plan complies with housing element law and that it is a 'transformative program, driven by extensive, multilingual community engagement, which will significantly increase housing production throughout the city.' Alicia Murillo, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees the implementation of the state housing law, said the agency is evaluating Los Angeles' plan and 'will reach out to the city if there are any questions or concerns.' YIMBY and Californians for Homeownership have a history of suing cities to enforce state housing law. In November, an L.A. County Superior Court judge found the city of Los Angeles illegally denied 78 affordable homes in Sun Valley in a lawsuit brought by YIMBY.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - The YIMBY Caucus should start at home by repealing the Height Act
The new bipartisan Yes In My Back Yard or YIMBY Caucus in Congress is a promising sign that the housing affordability crisis gripping American cities might finally get the national attention it deserves. Almost no major U.S. city allows housing development sufficient to keep rents and prices from spiraling ever higher. State and local reformers have pocketed some key victories over the last few years — particularly California — but hardly enough to end housing shortfalls. Yet existing federal tools have few clear ways to break down local barriers to denser housing development. Restrictive single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes and off-street parking requirements are all under the purview of local authorities. In other words, new YIMBY Caucus members have their work cut out for them. Federal interference has to strike a balance, careful not to alienate locals while also pushing cities to actually change course. One easy place for the YIMBY Caucus to start? Its own backyard, Washington D.C., where the antiquated Height of Buildings Act is stunting new development and needs to be repealed. Passed by Congress in 1910 in response to outrage over the new Cairo Hotel, the Height Act has capped development across the city at 130 feet, or about a dozen floors. Even after D.C. was granted home rule in 1973, the city retains authority to regulate land use only up to the Height Act's limit. In downtown D.C., developers have built right up to the limit on virtually every available parcel. And with no more room to build up, they are instead building out. Research from Brookings last year suggests that on the edges of downtown D.C., the Height Act stifles new housing construction necessary to prevent displacement of existing residents. But the costs of the Height Act to city residents go further. The pandemic and the growth of remote work hit downtown D.C. very hard. Office vacancy rates are at record highs, depressing foot traffic and depriving local businesses of weekday customers. Much of the District's empty office space is prime for conversion to residential apartments or other uses, but such conversions are expensive and rarely pencil out without sky-high rents. One such project opened last year with monthly rent for studio apartments starting at $2,900. Allowing builders to add additional floors would let them spread the fixed costs of converting older office buildings across many more units, enabling lower rents. Without Height Act changes, these projects will continue to be infrequent, slow and expensive. Members of the YIMBY Caucus or its allies might find common cause with President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with reducing the federal government's headcount and possibly sending some federal agencies out of the city entirely. If DOGE is successful, it could free up older office buildings throughout the city that are prime candidates for conversions to other uses. Repealing the Height Act need not encroach on the District's ability to govern itself. Congress already interferes in the city's local affairs by imposing the limit in the first place — it has forced height limits on the city for five decades, irrespective of the wishes of its local government or market demand. Indeed, Mayor Muriel Bowser has come around on height limit reform post-pandemic and now supports raising it. The mayor's new 'Office to Anything' campaign underscores the local, cross-partisan demand for more private-sector development downtown. But repealing the Height Act alone would not unleash skyscrapers on our nation's capital overnight. City government would still have the power to set zoning policy city-wide. Without the Height Act's limit, the D.C. Zoning Commission would finally be allowed to zone for buildings taller than the existing 130-foot cap. To allay concerns that repealing the Height Act would encroach on historic sites, Congress should retain its limits immediately adjacent to the National Mall. Revitalizing D.C.'s local economy and preserving cherished landmarks are not incompatible. The YIMBY movement's success across the country was born from reformers building broad, cross-partisan coalitions to take on entrenched, anti-development interests. The District's height limit has long imposed higher rents on locals, federal employees and even congressional staff who want to live, work and play in our nation's capital. As the YIMBY Caucus ponders its first steps, there is no better place to start. Connor O'Brien is a research and policy analyst at the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan, D.C.-based think tank. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
07-02-2025
- Business
- The Hill
The YIMBY Caucus should start at home by repealing the Height Act
The new bipartisan Yes In My Back Yard or YIMBY Caucus in Congress is a promising sign that the housing affordability crisis gripping American cities might finally get the national attention it deserves. Almost no major U.S. city allows housing development sufficient to keep rents and prices from spiraling ever higher. State and local reformers have pocketed some key victories over the last few years — particularly California — but hardly enough to end housing shortfalls. Yet existing federal tools have few clear ways to break down local barriers to denser housing development. Restrictive single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes and off-street parking requirements are all under the purview of local authorities. In other words, new YIMBY Caucus members have their work cut out for them. Federal interference has to strike a balance, careful not to alienate locals while also pushing cities to actually change course. One easy place for the YIMBY Caucus to start? Its own backyard, Washington D.C., where the antiquated Height of Buildings Act is stunting new development and needs to be repealed. Passed by Congress in 1910 in response to outrage over the new Cairo Hotel, the Height Act has capped development across the city at 130 feet, or about a dozen floors. Even after D.C. was granted home rule in 1973, the city retains authority to regulate land use only up to the Height Act's limit. In downtown D.C., developers have built right up to the limit on virtually every available parcel. And with no more room to build up, they are instead building out. Research from Brookings last year suggests that on the edges of downtown D.C., the Height Act stifles new housing construction necessary to prevent displacement of existing residents. But the costs of the Height Act to city residents go further. The pandemic and the growth of remote work hit downtown D.C. very hard. Office vacancy rates are at record highs, depressing foot traffic and depriving local businesses of weekday customers. Much of the District's empty office space is prime for conversion to residential apartments or other uses, but such conversions are expensive and rarely pencil out without sky-high rents. One such project opened last year with monthly rent for studio apartments starting at $2,900. Allowing builders to add additional floors would let them spread the fixed costs of converting older office buildings across many more units, enabling lower rents. Without Height Act changes, these projects will continue to be infrequent, slow and expensive. Members of the YIMBY Caucus or its allies might find common cause with President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with reducing the federal government's headcount and possibly sending some federal agencies out of the city entirely. If DOGE is successful, it could free up older office buildings throughout the city that are prime candidates for conversions to other uses. Repealing the Height Act need not encroach on the District's ability to govern itself. Congress already interferes in the city's local affairs by imposing the limit in the first place — it has forced height limits on the city for five decades, irrespective of the wishes of its local government or market demand. Indeed, Mayor Muriel Bowser has come around on height limit reform post-pandemic and now supports raising it. The mayor's new 'Office to Anything' campaign underscores the local, cross-partisan demand for more private-sector development downtown. But repealing the Height Act alone would not unleash skyscrapers on our nation's capital overnight. City government would still have the power to set zoning policy city-wide. Without the Height Act's limit, the D.C. Zoning Commission would finally be allowed to zone for buildings taller than the existing 130-foot cap. To allay concerns that repealing the Height Act would encroach on historic sites, Congress should retain its limits immediately adjacent to the National Mall. Revitalizing D.C.'s local economy and preserving cherished landmarks are not incompatible. The YIMBY movement's success across the country was born from reformers building broad, cross-partisan coalitions to take on entrenched, anti-development interests. The District's height limit has long imposed higher rents on locals, federal employees and even congressional staff who want to live, work and play in our nation's capital. As the YIMBY Caucus ponders its first steps, there is no better place to start.
