Thank you Charles for this thoughtful reply to Laura and Jeff, I’ve been looking forward to your perspective.
I’m hung up on a question of degree: When do you see state preemption as “lending assistance to cities that are struggling” versus “systematically weakening our cities for short-term expediency”? When I talk about state preemption, I’m typically thinking of exactly the types of reforms you describe, not all usurpation of local authority. Most YIMBY preemption laws in CA at least fit a similar mold. And I actively oppose some state preemption. CA’s Prop 13 capping local property tax rates has hobbled the ability of local govs and school districts to meet their needs
The way I’m increasingly thinking of the state preemption debate is a separation of powers discussion. Much as some things make sense at the level of federal vs state governments, some things make sense at the level of state vs city governments. Finding the right balance is an ongoing discovery process that will vary by issue. The gap between YIMBY and Strong Towns on the right balance for land use doesn’t seem very far. Am I missing some deep ideological difference?
No, I don't think so. If we think of preemption as a scalpel to help stuck cities get past some bad legacy practices, then I think we're working for the same thing. If we approach this as a bludgeon to strip cities of power and put them in their place, then I think we have the wrong framing. The trick is that both of these mindsets can, at times, support the same outcome. It's what we do next that really matters.
I like the separation of powers angle. What worries me about some of this discourse is an implicit assumption that the city government or the neighborhood unit is in some way sacred and that every possible decision should be made there. Sometimes the smallest and nearest collective entity brings the wisdom of direct knowledge, but other times it brings parochialism that will gladly sabotage a larger community for its own perceived interest. The most appropriate level of government at which to handle a given policy isn't always immediately obvious. It may also be worth considering that cities are delegated authority by state governments, and that (as is often mentioned in these circles) the most local context is the property owner, not the lowest level of government. I don't think it's healthy localism to demand that a property owner win a neighborhood consensus before building an ADU or a duplex or an apartment tower on their parcel, nor do I think it's a top-down imposition if the state comes to that property owner's rescue.
I'm mostly interested in whether a given policy is restrictive or permissive and whether it achieves its intended outcome, rather than which level of government it elevates.
Yes, you are describing the chicken problem that I wrote about in my first book. Who should decide whether you can have backyard chickens? Well, it only impacts you and your immediate neighbors, so the proper unit of decision making is you and your neighbors. It is improper for the city to legislate one standard for the entire city -- although this is really common -- and even worse for there to be some statewide law. Since this is not a city level decision, but they are the next highest level of government, their role is to provide assistance to the neighbors, setting up a process to be used, where needed, to help them reach this decision collaboratively.
Yes, I know that looks like a different kind of local government than the over-regulatory, process-minded, feeble ones we have today. We aspire to better.
So, what do we do with the regional light rail line? The impacts for such an investment are regional and so it is the regional government that should be empowered to make this decision. There should be consultation and listening, but no local veto.
FWIW, the idea that the lowest level of government, or the most local context, is the individual is something I flatly reject. That's not how communities work unless you live in the wilderness alone (and then you're likely to die soon).
Maybe the issue is that people disagree on what constitutes a legitimate chicken problem. Incumbent homeowners who don't want their neighborhoods to mature tend to see housing density and land use in their neighborhood as only impacting them, meaning they should have the most important if not the only say on the matter, and neighbors who want to build have an obligation to satisfy them. In reality I see it as being much closer to your regional light rail line example, because the impact of housing supply issues and development patterns is regional, and I think offering a local veto is a mistake.
To say that the lowest level of zoning policy is the individual parcel and its owner isn't to say that we don't live in a society and nobody has an obligation to accommodate the people around them. What I do take it to mean is that people should need to have a good reason, that can be articulated in narrow and concrete terms of community interest, if they want to stop others from doing something with their property. Living in a community to me means things like "you can't burn a pile of trash in your backyard," not "you can't build anything unless all of your neighbors like it."
Well said. California’s state preemption housing laws all give local governments the power to deny housing projects if they can demonstrate a concrete risk to health and safety. Even preemption needs to make sure there is a pathway for people to demonstrate a project should be denied!
But generally, housing decisions have regional, even statewide impacts. Millions of people have been forced to leave California because of local NIMBYism. Any argument about subsidiarity needs to recognize local governments are not well designed to account for the much broader impacts of local obstructionism to housing.
Which gets back to a point Charles made: Leveraging state solutions isn’t intrinsically a failure of housing advocates, it’s a recognition that local governments inherently won’t address the full scale of housing needs on their own. The local and state advocacy go hand in hand
I feel like we would be well served by going back to OG strong towns and reminding ourselves that we are in a predicament and predicaments don't have solutions, they have responses. We will not (probably cannot) get things so right that our responses don't cause problems for the next generation. The hope is that we're going to maybe reduce the oscillation of predicament and response. Though that's probably too optimistic and we should maybe just aim to increase flexibility for the future so that future people have an easier time adapting--or is even that too optimistic given human nature.
The idea of a predicament having a response is a solid one. The response is never to jump to another solution, however, even if you acknowledge there will be unanticipated consequences. In each book, I write about how a response is setting up systems so that feedback loops are tighter so the people who experience the harm also have the agency to address it. An easier time adapting another way to say it and, no, that's not too optimistic.
1. The Ontario government made municipalities allow duplexes and triplexes as-of-right across the province = Good
2. The Ontario government tried to rip up bike lanes in Toronto = Bad.
We need the checks and balances. Echoing what Jeremy said above, it's a calibration issue.
On the whole, I tend to agree with you Charles that city governments should be strengthened and cultivated regardless of any specific issue going on at the time. In the long term, this is what will benefit the residents.
To put it bluntly, I find that since state (and provincial) governments take into account the vast suburban sprawls and municipalities that usually surround North American cities, it's interests (beyond housing and planning) can often be at odds with cities and urban centers.
What worrys me about those who champion the top down approach is that they are overlooking all the other issues surrounding cities and governance besides housing.
The state-level initiatives you say you've supported are the ones I typically hear about. What are some examples of pro-housing state policy that you don't support?
I sometimes feel like this debate is more about semantics, aesthetics, and area of focus than about policy agendas.
There are two that immediately come to mind. The first is an abolition on height limits. WTF? The other is just an overall push to abolish zoning, in general.
I also think that a lot of stuff done in the name of TOD is really coarse and unhelpful. I'd prefer a different kind of approach, one that required neighborhood maturing but didn't legislate such large leaps (which really distort the local market and, IMO, stifles investment in housing).
Sometimes it's semantics, sure, but there is a (not small) contingent of the YIMBY conversation that has an ahistorical take on zoning and a rather aggressive hatred of city governments. I've had people I consider to be very smart and thoughtful advocate for abolishing all zoning, ending all of local government's regulation of land use, and allowing individuals the right -- regulated only by the state -- to do whatever they want on their property. These are extreme, rather nutty, concepts that do the entire conversation more harm than good when they are embraced / tolerated by more thoughtful housing proponents.
OK, now we're talking about something! I don't want to abolish land use regulation, but I see their purpose as a stopgap against uses that directly disturb the health, safety, and peace of neighboring residents, not as a frontline tool for neighborhoods to hammer out a uniform vision of what their character "should" be. For example, I think keeping someone from building heavy industry next to my house is a legitimate use case for regulation, but keeping someone from building a three story building next to me because I don't want anything more than two on my street, or forcing them to use the same architectural style as my house, or not paint it in a color I don't like, is not.
I'm very hostile to height limits, specifically. While I support the general idea of incremental housing as a desired outcome, I think we should let this happen naturally and not micromanage how fast a neighborhood is allowed to change. I'm skeptical of the fear that neighborhoods would change too quickly and in undesirable ways without these limits; to the contrary I don't think city zoning review processes using traditional height limit regimes can keep up with a thriving neighborhood's pace of development.
My city updates its Master Plan roughly once per decade, with an eye toward the next twenty years of development, and doing this is a massive staff undertaking in light of its limited resources. If we really need housing now, and we want to see it in a way that breathes life into cities instead of producing more car-dependent sprawl, I don't think accepting that neighborhood density may iterate about once per generation is good enough. My neighborhood has no hard height limits but requires "major review" for projects over 45 feet, and I'm trying to get City officials to consider with me whether this has anything to do with how rare it is to see new construction over three stories. The responses I get are receptive, but tinged with a sense of resignation that we're in between cycles, staff time is limited, and even starting the process of changing this now would take a long time. Far from seeing my city government as an adversary, I think they're fundamentally sympathetic but overburdened and cross-pressured. Saying a given policy may be best handled at the state level isn't a dig against them, coming from me.
If someone said OK, we won't remove height regulations, but we'll do an incremental-development regime that lets neighborhoods grow up without requiring a manual update of the zoning districts, I'd gladly take that, but my actual personal position is that this stuff is unnecessary and building height isn't reasonably definable as a threat to surrounding residents' health, safety, or peace.
I hear many public comments insisting on the importance of uniform building height in neighborhoods and decrying things like three or four story buildings next to two story buildings, sometimes using photos taken in my neighborhood as alleged evidence that these situations constitute an "incompatible use," and I just haven't seen any credible argument that this is an actual problem. Some people just really want uniformity, or they're attacking any visible manifestation of growth, but I don't see it as their right to try to impose that on other people with different preferences through the zoning code.
I'd be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on misguided TOD efforts, particularly what you mean when you say legislating large leaps. If some particular kind of development that the local market can't support is being forced somehow (constructed by the government with public funds?), that's one thing, but if the policy is a deregulation effort, I'll reiterate my stance that merely removing a ban on building something doesn't force it to happen, and "neighborhoods maturing too fast" is the opposite of the problem that we actually have.
I think it would be nice to let housing development happen naturally, but the things that are distorting housing prices are (in order or impact): 1. Financialization of housing, 2. Financialization of housing, 3. Financialization of housing...... 100. Height limits.
Back in 2016, I wrote an article about how large leaps in zoning merely spike land prices. This is a rather obvious conclusion, albeit an unpopular one in many YIMBY circles (and I know this because I really heard from them).
The most critical aspect of establishing housing markets that respond to local supply and demand dynamics is having a solid relationship between the value of what is built on the land (Improvements) and what the land use worth (Land). The Improvement/Land ratio drives all affordability issues, but only a few people (and they are shunned) actually discuss it. Most everyone just takes high land values as a given in the equation and then searches for a way to respond to them.
Cities need to dramatically simplify what they do, and limit the notion of what they can control or impact. Creating dynamic and responsive systems will mean creating a window of maturing for every neighborhood, one that is high enough to foster thickening up but not so high that we spike land values and artificially stagnate the neighborhood. In a city like mine (small, slow growth) that should be easy and require little administration. In a larger city, it will become slightly more complex, but way less than the systems we operate with today.
If you look at the cover of my book on housing, it visually represents the incoherence of large leaps in development pattern. It's kind of a Rorschach test - many housing advocates see more housing (yeah!!!) but someone who has read the book and bought into a Strong Towns approach will see an incoherent relationship between land and improvement values and will understand why that is limiting housing production, causing prices to speak, and fostering a broad lack of affordability.
I'll need to digest more of your viewpoint on this to respond appropriately, but my starting point is that I'm very skeptical of claims that too-permissive zoning is a major cause of inflated land prices or failure to develop more broadly. Land speculation is certainly a problem, but when I look around, I see mostly the same problems in neighborhoods with height limits as in the ones without, and projects that fail tend to run up against things like financing issues, high construction costs, and unpredictable permitting processes loaded with veto points. Maybe this is true in some areas, but from my vantage point, the idea that our real problem is things growing too fast or too unevenly is pretty alien. I'm going to need a lot of evidence to believe that height limits can actually ease land prices in my area and serve a pro-housing purpose, but I intend to at least consider it.
That being said, the big-picture story remains that zoning and permitting in American cities is too restrictive, that the regime is designed to please people who don't want their neighborhoods to mature. In that context, I'm confused as to why people wanting to do away with height limits elicits a "WTF?" from you. You may want us to consider a different approach like floating height limits, but the height limits we know in the real world are fixed and arbitrary. That removing them would make things worse is not sufficiently self-evident, to me, to merit balking at people who want to do so.
You asked for an example of where I think state preemption is inappropriate. Abolishing height limits is one. There is no state -- even California -- where one standard policy across the state makes sense.
My position at present is that height limits in and of themselves aren't justifiable at all, outside of some niche circumstances, because I've only ever seen them used as tools to keep neighborhoods in stasis. From that vantage point, it's not so much that there should be a uniform policy as that I think the whole premise of prescribing it through policy is wrong.
What would you think about a state policy that height limits can exist, but need to allow incremental development? Should neighborhoods have the prerogative of saying no thanks, we don't want to change, this neighborhood of two story houses must remain at a maximum of two stories forevermore? I think that's as much of a cause of housing market distortion as anything, or in other words, things like permissible building heights are absolutely not a chicken problem.
Based on this article you mis-understand the solution to incentive problems.
You seem to understand and agree that there is an incentive problem to the housing crisis. The problem being, homeowners are incentivized to limit new housing to make their housing more valuable. Your solution seems to be to: increase housing at the margins where the incentives aren't so perverse and try to moralize it or at least have people focus on non-monetary things such as, "this may not make us richer but it will strengthen our town".
It is impossible for a system to be resilient when it requires its participants to act against their incentives. A town will never be strong if it requires its citizens to be selfless. You have to figure out a way to allow people to act in their own self-interest while still ending up with a strong town.
Your example of the grandparent and the grandchild is a classic prisoners dilemma. If every town voted to increase housing supply then the grandchild would have affordable housing. But... if every town ...except the grandparents... voted to increase housing supply, the grandchild would still have affordable housing, plus the grandparent could leave money to the grandchild from the sale of their appreciated house. That is why this needs to be at the state level.
Finally, your claim about state zoning reform being a top-down approach is wrong. Setting permissive-zoning at the state level is a bottom-up approach. Setting restrictive-zoning at the local level is the top-down approach. When permissive-zoning exists the individual land owners decide what gets built (can't be more bottom up than that). When restrictive-zoning exists the government decides what gets built. If you value a bottom-up approach you should be for permissive state zoning.
This is a super interesting discussion, I totally understand Yimby’s side of things where, more housing is needed now and the only way to make that happen is through the state level as a lot of the negative externalities are felt outside of the local level. On the other hand I also agree with Marohn here that local backlash is going to happen and could cause hostility to the movement as a whole, but also I don’t see this bottom up approach working in places like CA. After all local governments do everything in their power to stop housing from being built.
I wonder if the solution here is to incentivize people at the local level to benefit from development in general. If you can align incentives at every level it could become much easier to build.
Two places I’ve seen these ideas discussed have been:
I think there may be a larger issue that overrides Local vs State control. Not just with housing, but with all public policies and projects, Big Business interests are calling the shots. The captains of industry and commerce control the professions, and the well-paid, higher-educated class of Professionals are not abandoning the captains’ ship.
While Chuck Marohn may be a rare exception, most of these well-paid, educated and licensed professionals are not inclined to question the status quo, especially if doing so results in loss of employment, perhaps permanently. (SEE In the Matter of the Professional Engineer License of Charles Marohn. Filed April 10, 2023 Affirmed Wheelock, Judge Minnesota Board of Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design File No. 2020-004)
The gangsters calling the shots aren’t City Council members or State legislators, they’re business interests - the same AECOM, United Health Care, Wells Fargo, you name it big business lawyers, architects, engineers, “strategic communicators” and other credentialed employees that pass back and forth between private corporations and public agencies. This Professional class of employees works at all levels of government, from the local Library Board to the State DOT to the Federal Housing Authority.
For example, an SRF consultant becomes a City Public Works Director, then leaves the high-paid city job to become a presumably higher-paid salesman for some “intelligent” roadway business, and then, presumably after finding the sales gig more difficult and less lucrative than expected, goes back to another Public Works gig with another city. No need to name names, but this person, and I’m sure many just like him, exists. These high-paid Professionals, passing back and forth between high-paid gigs in public employment and private industry sales/consulting, are not the guys and girls likely to question the status quo. The SRF consultant-Public Works Director- “intelligent” roadway pitchman is the embodiment of the status quo. Just another schmuck with an engineering degree, or law degree, or an architecture degree, or a business degree, or heaven help us a Humphrey Institute degree, keeping the Corporate Welfare ball rolling.
Hm, maybe a good way to think about this (yet again acknowledging the ideological similarity between strong towns and YIMBY) is that In a specific situation where a ‘movement’ decides whether to push for state preemption on a particular issue (we can use parking reform as an example),,,,,,
it can be framed as a tradeoff. Do we decide to risk local power building and legitimacy, and agency for a bold solution ? OR, Do we take the harder path, the (arguably) more permanent, locally relevant, but slower one.
This is a question of responses. Seth Zeren had mentioned the original strong towns logic: ‘What is our response to this predicament?’
Well, it depends on what your movement wants. This problem cannot be solved online through Substack. It will extend to the actual practice of reform. And only then will we see who is right
Thank you Charles for this thoughtful reply to Laura and Jeff, I’ve been looking forward to your perspective.
I’m hung up on a question of degree: When do you see state preemption as “lending assistance to cities that are struggling” versus “systematically weakening our cities for short-term expediency”? When I talk about state preemption, I’m typically thinking of exactly the types of reforms you describe, not all usurpation of local authority. Most YIMBY preemption laws in CA at least fit a similar mold. And I actively oppose some state preemption. CA’s Prop 13 capping local property tax rates has hobbled the ability of local govs and school districts to meet their needs
The way I’m increasingly thinking of the state preemption debate is a separation of powers discussion. Much as some things make sense at the level of federal vs state governments, some things make sense at the level of state vs city governments. Finding the right balance is an ongoing discovery process that will vary by issue. The gap between YIMBY and Strong Towns on the right balance for land use doesn’t seem very far. Am I missing some deep ideological difference?
No, I don't think so. If we think of preemption as a scalpel to help stuck cities get past some bad legacy practices, then I think we're working for the same thing. If we approach this as a bludgeon to strip cities of power and put them in their place, then I think we have the wrong framing. The trick is that both of these mindsets can, at times, support the same outcome. It's what we do next that really matters.
I like the separation of powers angle. What worries me about some of this discourse is an implicit assumption that the city government or the neighborhood unit is in some way sacred and that every possible decision should be made there. Sometimes the smallest and nearest collective entity brings the wisdom of direct knowledge, but other times it brings parochialism that will gladly sabotage a larger community for its own perceived interest. The most appropriate level of government at which to handle a given policy isn't always immediately obvious. It may also be worth considering that cities are delegated authority by state governments, and that (as is often mentioned in these circles) the most local context is the property owner, not the lowest level of government. I don't think it's healthy localism to demand that a property owner win a neighborhood consensus before building an ADU or a duplex or an apartment tower on their parcel, nor do I think it's a top-down imposition if the state comes to that property owner's rescue.
I'm mostly interested in whether a given policy is restrictive or permissive and whether it achieves its intended outcome, rather than which level of government it elevates.
Yes, you are describing the chicken problem that I wrote about in my first book. Who should decide whether you can have backyard chickens? Well, it only impacts you and your immediate neighbors, so the proper unit of decision making is you and your neighbors. It is improper for the city to legislate one standard for the entire city -- although this is really common -- and even worse for there to be some statewide law. Since this is not a city level decision, but they are the next highest level of government, their role is to provide assistance to the neighbors, setting up a process to be used, where needed, to help them reach this decision collaboratively.
Yes, I know that looks like a different kind of local government than the over-regulatory, process-minded, feeble ones we have today. We aspire to better.
So, what do we do with the regional light rail line? The impacts for such an investment are regional and so it is the regional government that should be empowered to make this decision. There should be consultation and listening, but no local veto.
This is my favorite video explaining this concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX_GrSEaPt0
FWIW, the idea that the lowest level of government, or the most local context, is the individual is something I flatly reject. That's not how communities work unless you live in the wilderness alone (and then you're likely to die soon).
Maybe the issue is that people disagree on what constitutes a legitimate chicken problem. Incumbent homeowners who don't want their neighborhoods to mature tend to see housing density and land use in their neighborhood as only impacting them, meaning they should have the most important if not the only say on the matter, and neighbors who want to build have an obligation to satisfy them. In reality I see it as being much closer to your regional light rail line example, because the impact of housing supply issues and development patterns is regional, and I think offering a local veto is a mistake.
To say that the lowest level of zoning policy is the individual parcel and its owner isn't to say that we don't live in a society and nobody has an obligation to accommodate the people around them. What I do take it to mean is that people should need to have a good reason, that can be articulated in narrow and concrete terms of community interest, if they want to stop others from doing something with their property. Living in a community to me means things like "you can't burn a pile of trash in your backyard," not "you can't build anything unless all of your neighbors like it."
Well said. California’s state preemption housing laws all give local governments the power to deny housing projects if they can demonstrate a concrete risk to health and safety. Even preemption needs to make sure there is a pathway for people to demonstrate a project should be denied!
But generally, housing decisions have regional, even statewide impacts. Millions of people have been forced to leave California because of local NIMBYism. Any argument about subsidiarity needs to recognize local governments are not well designed to account for the much broader impacts of local obstructionism to housing.
Which gets back to a point Charles made: Leveraging state solutions isn’t intrinsically a failure of housing advocates, it’s a recognition that local governments inherently won’t address the full scale of housing needs on their own. The local and state advocacy go hand in hand
I feel like we would be well served by going back to OG strong towns and reminding ourselves that we are in a predicament and predicaments don't have solutions, they have responses. We will not (probably cannot) get things so right that our responses don't cause problems for the next generation. The hope is that we're going to maybe reduce the oscillation of predicament and response. Though that's probably too optimistic and we should maybe just aim to increase flexibility for the future so that future people have an easier time adapting--or is even that too optimistic given human nature.
The idea of a predicament having a response is a solid one. The response is never to jump to another solution, however, even if you acknowledge there will be unanticipated consequences. In each book, I write about how a response is setting up systems so that feedback loops are tighter so the people who experience the harm also have the agency to address it. An easier time adapting another way to say it and, no, that's not too optimistic.
What are you unsure of?
Well said Chuck.
Case in point:
1. The Ontario government made municipalities allow duplexes and triplexes as-of-right across the province = Good
2. The Ontario government tried to rip up bike lanes in Toronto = Bad.
We need the checks and balances. Echoing what Jeremy said above, it's a calibration issue.
On the whole, I tend to agree with you Charles that city governments should be strengthened and cultivated regardless of any specific issue going on at the time. In the long term, this is what will benefit the residents.
To put it bluntly, I find that since state (and provincial) governments take into account the vast suburban sprawls and municipalities that usually surround North American cities, it's interests (beyond housing and planning) can often be at odds with cities and urban centers.
What worrys me about those who champion the top down approach is that they are overlooking all the other issues surrounding cities and governance besides housing.
The state-level initiatives you say you've supported are the ones I typically hear about. What are some examples of pro-housing state policy that you don't support?
I sometimes feel like this debate is more about semantics, aesthetics, and area of focus than about policy agendas.
There are two that immediately come to mind. The first is an abolition on height limits. WTF? The other is just an overall push to abolish zoning, in general.
I also think that a lot of stuff done in the name of TOD is really coarse and unhelpful. I'd prefer a different kind of approach, one that required neighborhood maturing but didn't legislate such large leaps (which really distort the local market and, IMO, stifles investment in housing).
Sometimes it's semantics, sure, but there is a (not small) contingent of the YIMBY conversation that has an ahistorical take on zoning and a rather aggressive hatred of city governments. I've had people I consider to be very smart and thoughtful advocate for abolishing all zoning, ending all of local government's regulation of land use, and allowing individuals the right -- regulated only by the state -- to do whatever they want on their property. These are extreme, rather nutty, concepts that do the entire conversation more harm than good when they are embraced / tolerated by more thoughtful housing proponents.
OK, now we're talking about something! I don't want to abolish land use regulation, but I see their purpose as a stopgap against uses that directly disturb the health, safety, and peace of neighboring residents, not as a frontline tool for neighborhoods to hammer out a uniform vision of what their character "should" be. For example, I think keeping someone from building heavy industry next to my house is a legitimate use case for regulation, but keeping someone from building a three story building next to me because I don't want anything more than two on my street, or forcing them to use the same architectural style as my house, or not paint it in a color I don't like, is not.
I'm very hostile to height limits, specifically. While I support the general idea of incremental housing as a desired outcome, I think we should let this happen naturally and not micromanage how fast a neighborhood is allowed to change. I'm skeptical of the fear that neighborhoods would change too quickly and in undesirable ways without these limits; to the contrary I don't think city zoning review processes using traditional height limit regimes can keep up with a thriving neighborhood's pace of development.
My city updates its Master Plan roughly once per decade, with an eye toward the next twenty years of development, and doing this is a massive staff undertaking in light of its limited resources. If we really need housing now, and we want to see it in a way that breathes life into cities instead of producing more car-dependent sprawl, I don't think accepting that neighborhood density may iterate about once per generation is good enough. My neighborhood has no hard height limits but requires "major review" for projects over 45 feet, and I'm trying to get City officials to consider with me whether this has anything to do with how rare it is to see new construction over three stories. The responses I get are receptive, but tinged with a sense of resignation that we're in between cycles, staff time is limited, and even starting the process of changing this now would take a long time. Far from seeing my city government as an adversary, I think they're fundamentally sympathetic but overburdened and cross-pressured. Saying a given policy may be best handled at the state level isn't a dig against them, coming from me.
If someone said OK, we won't remove height regulations, but we'll do an incremental-development regime that lets neighborhoods grow up without requiring a manual update of the zoning districts, I'd gladly take that, but my actual personal position is that this stuff is unnecessary and building height isn't reasonably definable as a threat to surrounding residents' health, safety, or peace.
I hear many public comments insisting on the importance of uniform building height in neighborhoods and decrying things like three or four story buildings next to two story buildings, sometimes using photos taken in my neighborhood as alleged evidence that these situations constitute an "incompatible use," and I just haven't seen any credible argument that this is an actual problem. Some people just really want uniformity, or they're attacking any visible manifestation of growth, but I don't see it as their right to try to impose that on other people with different preferences through the zoning code.
I'd be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on misguided TOD efforts, particularly what you mean when you say legislating large leaps. If some particular kind of development that the local market can't support is being forced somehow (constructed by the government with public funds?), that's one thing, but if the policy is a deregulation effort, I'll reiterate my stance that merely removing a ban on building something doesn't force it to happen, and "neighborhoods maturing too fast" is the opposite of the problem that we actually have.
I think it would be nice to let housing development happen naturally, but the things that are distorting housing prices are (in order or impact): 1. Financialization of housing, 2. Financialization of housing, 3. Financialization of housing...... 100. Height limits.
Back in 2016, I wrote an article about how large leaps in zoning merely spike land prices. This is a rather obvious conclusion, albeit an unpopular one in many YIMBY circles (and I know this because I really heard from them).
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-rising-tide
The most critical aspect of establishing housing markets that respond to local supply and demand dynamics is having a solid relationship between the value of what is built on the land (Improvements) and what the land use worth (Land). The Improvement/Land ratio drives all affordability issues, but only a few people (and they are shunned) actually discuss it. Most everyone just takes high land values as a given in the equation and then searches for a way to respond to them.
Cities need to dramatically simplify what they do, and limit the notion of what they can control or impact. Creating dynamic and responsive systems will mean creating a window of maturing for every neighborhood, one that is high enough to foster thickening up but not so high that we spike land values and artificially stagnate the neighborhood. In a city like mine (small, slow growth) that should be easy and require little administration. In a larger city, it will become slightly more complex, but way less than the systems we operate with today.
If you look at the cover of my book on housing, it visually represents the incoherence of large leaps in development pattern. It's kind of a Rorschach test - many housing advocates see more housing (yeah!!!) but someone who has read the book and bought into a Strong Towns approach will see an incoherent relationship between land and improvement values and will understand why that is limiting housing production, causing prices to speak, and fostering a broad lack of affordability.
https://www.housingtrap.org/
I'll need to digest more of your viewpoint on this to respond appropriately, but my starting point is that I'm very skeptical of claims that too-permissive zoning is a major cause of inflated land prices or failure to develop more broadly. Land speculation is certainly a problem, but when I look around, I see mostly the same problems in neighborhoods with height limits as in the ones without, and projects that fail tend to run up against things like financing issues, high construction costs, and unpredictable permitting processes loaded with veto points. Maybe this is true in some areas, but from my vantage point, the idea that our real problem is things growing too fast or too unevenly is pretty alien. I'm going to need a lot of evidence to believe that height limits can actually ease land prices in my area and serve a pro-housing purpose, but I intend to at least consider it.
That being said, the big-picture story remains that zoning and permitting in American cities is too restrictive, that the regime is designed to please people who don't want their neighborhoods to mature. In that context, I'm confused as to why people wanting to do away with height limits elicits a "WTF?" from you. You may want us to consider a different approach like floating height limits, but the height limits we know in the real world are fixed and arbitrary. That removing them would make things worse is not sufficiently self-evident, to me, to merit balking at people who want to do so.
You asked for an example of where I think state preemption is inappropriate. Abolishing height limits is one. There is no state -- even California -- where one standard policy across the state makes sense.
My position at present is that height limits in and of themselves aren't justifiable at all, outside of some niche circumstances, because I've only ever seen them used as tools to keep neighborhoods in stasis. From that vantage point, it's not so much that there should be a uniform policy as that I think the whole premise of prescribing it through policy is wrong.
What would you think about a state policy that height limits can exist, but need to allow incremental development? Should neighborhoods have the prerogative of saying no thanks, we don't want to change, this neighborhood of two story houses must remain at a maximum of two stories forevermore? I think that's as much of a cause of housing market distortion as anything, or in other words, things like permissible building heights are absolutely not a chicken problem.
Based on this article you mis-understand the solution to incentive problems.
You seem to understand and agree that there is an incentive problem to the housing crisis. The problem being, homeowners are incentivized to limit new housing to make their housing more valuable. Your solution seems to be to: increase housing at the margins where the incentives aren't so perverse and try to moralize it or at least have people focus on non-monetary things such as, "this may not make us richer but it will strengthen our town".
It is impossible for a system to be resilient when it requires its participants to act against their incentives. A town will never be strong if it requires its citizens to be selfless. You have to figure out a way to allow people to act in their own self-interest while still ending up with a strong town.
Your example of the grandparent and the grandchild is a classic prisoners dilemma. If every town voted to increase housing supply then the grandchild would have affordable housing. But... if every town ...except the grandparents... voted to increase housing supply, the grandchild would still have affordable housing, plus the grandparent could leave money to the grandchild from the sale of their appreciated house. That is why this needs to be at the state level.
Finally, your claim about state zoning reform being a top-down approach is wrong. Setting permissive-zoning at the state level is a bottom-up approach. Setting restrictive-zoning at the local level is the top-down approach. When permissive-zoning exists the individual land owners decide what gets built (can't be more bottom up than that). When restrictive-zoning exists the government decides what gets built. If you value a bottom-up approach you should be for permissive state zoning.
You've started from your point of view then reasoned yourself into a caricature of my long-standing argument. Sorry.
Build more housing. Yes, even in your backyard.
Yeah, that part came through pretty clear the first time.
This is a super interesting discussion, I totally understand Yimby’s side of things where, more housing is needed now and the only way to make that happen is through the state level as a lot of the negative externalities are felt outside of the local level. On the other hand I also agree with Marohn here that local backlash is going to happen and could cause hostility to the movement as a whole, but also I don’t see this bottom up approach working in places like CA. After all local governments do everything in their power to stop housing from being built.
I wonder if the solution here is to incentivize people at the local level to benefit from development in general. If you can align incentives at every level it could become much easier to build.
Two places I’ve seen these ideas discussed have been:
This excellent podcast with Sam Bowman. https://youtu.be/sqA7xWV2Vms?si=QZz-NBJ0BvbCnjeH
He talks about 3 experiments with aligning incentives:
1. Street Votes
2. Benefit Sharing
3. Opt-Outs
I think he does a much better job explaining each of these I can.
The second place is this article talking about how Israel incentivized home owners to become YIMBYs
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-israel-turned-homeowners-into-yimbys/
I think there may be a larger issue that overrides Local vs State control. Not just with housing, but with all public policies and projects, Big Business interests are calling the shots. The captains of industry and commerce control the professions, and the well-paid, higher-educated class of Professionals are not abandoning the captains’ ship.
While Chuck Marohn may be a rare exception, most of these well-paid, educated and licensed professionals are not inclined to question the status quo, especially if doing so results in loss of employment, perhaps permanently. (SEE In the Matter of the Professional Engineer License of Charles Marohn. Filed April 10, 2023 Affirmed Wheelock, Judge Minnesota Board of Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design File No. 2020-004)
https://cases.justia.com/minnesota/court-of-appeals/2023-a22-1099.pdf?ts=1681931101
The gangsters calling the shots aren’t City Council members or State legislators, they’re business interests - the same AECOM, United Health Care, Wells Fargo, you name it big business lawyers, architects, engineers, “strategic communicators” and other credentialed employees that pass back and forth between private corporations and public agencies. This Professional class of employees works at all levels of government, from the local Library Board to the State DOT to the Federal Housing Authority.
For example, an SRF consultant becomes a City Public Works Director, then leaves the high-paid city job to become a presumably higher-paid salesman for some “intelligent” roadway business, and then, presumably after finding the sales gig more difficult and less lucrative than expected, goes back to another Public Works gig with another city. No need to name names, but this person, and I’m sure many just like him, exists. These high-paid Professionals, passing back and forth between high-paid gigs in public employment and private industry sales/consulting, are not the guys and girls likely to question the status quo. The SRF consultant-Public Works Director- “intelligent” roadway pitchman is the embodiment of the status quo. Just another schmuck with an engineering degree, or law degree, or an architecture degree, or a business degree, or heaven help us a Humphrey Institute degree, keeping the Corporate Welfare ball rolling.
Hm, maybe a good way to think about this (yet again acknowledging the ideological similarity between strong towns and YIMBY) is that In a specific situation where a ‘movement’ decides whether to push for state preemption on a particular issue (we can use parking reform as an example),,,,,,
it can be framed as a tradeoff. Do we decide to risk local power building and legitimacy, and agency for a bold solution ? OR, Do we take the harder path, the (arguably) more permanent, locally relevant, but slower one.
This is a question of responses. Seth Zeren had mentioned the original strong towns logic: ‘What is our response to this predicament?’
Well, it depends on what your movement wants. This problem cannot be solved online through Substack. It will extend to the actual practice of reform. And only then will we see who is right