In 2012, I graduated college and moved to the DC area for what proved to be a short-lived journalism career. What endured was my occupancy of and affection for missing middle housing, which we will define as a structure of between two and 50 (more likely a dozen) residential units. Ranging from duplexes to small apartment buildings, this medium-density housing, in the middle ground between detached single-family homes and large multi-family, blends into any neighborhood but is now seldom built.

Without knowing what to call it, as a renter I noticed that missing middle was often cheaper than an apartment in a large building while offering perks like a small private yard. I did not want to feel isolated and split my utility bill with hundreds of people. After two stints in intern housing, I lived in the following places (with the year built):

• A room in a DC rowhouse, for only a month (1900)

• A room in a “single-family” gray market boarding house in Arlington, VA (1940)

• A room in a two-bedroom apartment in a fourplex in Arlington, VA (1940)

• My new wife’s one-bedroom garden apartment in Alexandria, VA (1925)

• The three-bedroom townhouse we now own in Alexandria, VA (2000)

YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the volunteer advocacy group I founded, helped enact zoning reforms that legalized small multiplexes across Arlington County and Alexandria City, though a judge struck down Arlington’s reform. Whatever the final outcome of that legal challenge and another in Alexandria, these policy victories still marked a new chapter in our region’s local politics, shifting power away from NIMBYs and scarcity-minded homeowners. The reforms reflected the jurisdictions’ broadly pro-housing leadership, and subsequent elections have strengthened the pro-growth majorities on the Arlington County Board and Alexandria City Council.

As for actually building more missing middle housing, that would require additional specific zoning reforms: curtailing or eliminating rules around minimum parking requirements, lot coverage, setbacks, etc. Yet even where the law permits multiplexes and small apartment buildings, they tend to be old and otherwise rare. The story of why middle housing went missing in America over the past century and became difficult to build is legal and political, but also economic and, in particular, financial.

After digging into the missing middle housing financing gap for a year, I am ready to share what I have learned about the current landscape. This explanation draws from roughly 50 conversations with various real estate professionals, including developers who create middle housing today.

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The Townhome Exception and Institutional Capital

Townhomes are the exception that proves the rule of missing middle, because they are still built in significant numbers. They are certainly popular here in the DC region. Amid the deepening housing crisis, townhomes are receiving well-deserved attention for being more attainable and scalable than detached single-family homes — a palatable compromise for American homebuyers.

Townhome is really just an upscale term for rowhome or, in Britain, terraced housing, meaning homes built in a row with shared side walls. My basic explanation for townhomes’ staying power is that they are easy to build en masse and thus finance.

The home we live in first sold in 2000 for about $400,000, less than half of what it is worth now. (I should mention that my dad bought us the home about six years ago, which has left me eternally grateful and slightly haunted by guilt.) There are about 150 homes like ours. We could pretend they were a stand-alone development worth about $60 million in 2000, almost $111 million in 2025. You might assume that financing gets more complicated as the numbers get bigger, but if anything, the opposite is true. In 2000 as now, finance was dominated by large institutions, which naturally prefer commodification and scale. A large bank or fund investing in real estate is deploying hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to assemble its portfolio. “The Birth of a Building” explains this well. A developer might need to be raising $100 million total to be worth an institutional investor’s time — there are only so many hours in a day. Under ordinary circumstances, missing middle is too small for institutional capital.

Townhomes are easy to construct in large numbers. Even with variations in floor plans and exterior design elements to spice things up for buyers, work crews are executing a fairly standard design for each unit. I feel so blessed to have a good home for my family, and I have to say, it was clearly built by guys churning stuff out.

“Just” Add Financing

Housing can be a luxury good, a commodity, or something in between, but at the end of the day, it is a product. It gets built by sweat, money, and calculated risk. To help us appreciate this harsh reality, imagine being a neighborhood developer, a passion-driven individual who has pulled together a solid missing middle project.

You have locked down control of a nice lot in a streetcar suburb neighborhood on the upswing. You have successfully executed a couple of fourplexes and want to do another one. You have a good architect. You have a strong relationship with a reliable GC (general contractor) who has a slate of subs (subcontractors) who you know do good work. You and the contractors have plans to deal with labor shortages and material cost spikes. And the local government is open to growth. Planning department and other staff are reasonable and efficient. But wait, there’s more!

Based on your prior experience, you are sure you can hit an IRR (internal rate of return) of 25%, a number that will grab prospective investors’ attention. With all of these stars lined up, you just need to find financing. “Just,” ha. You know you will end up spending half of your time chasing down money — friend and family money, country club money, maybe hard money. Historically, you would have gotten a community bank loan, but that sector tightened up over the past fifteen years.

If you are a developer and this story rings true, please reach out. I would love to talk.

If I got something wrong or you just want to share your take, please leave a comment.

Risk and — Maybe — Reward

A likely question from any potential investor or loan officer is, “Why not just do a big single-family home and call it a day?” That would certainly be easy to finance. If you find an affluent buyer who wants a custom home, they will not care about financial return, though they might take out a $1 million mortgage for tax reasons. Even if you are building on spec (speculation that you can hit a certain sale price), a large, luxurious single-family home caters to a wealthy clientele willing to pay a premium.

However, four or two or even twelve units are still more valuable than one big house. Spreading the cost of multiple units over the same land is still economically efficient. It can be tough because an infill lot in a nice neighborhood will have a high per-acre cost. Developers make or lose most of their money based on what they pay for land. Large multi-family projects either benefit from cheap land in the peripheral locations that dense housing is often limited to, or have the large-scale unit economics to cover the high cost of an expensive urban lot. This is another reason institutional capital might balk at missing middle. “The unit economics are just not there,” a big investor would complain from his corner office. “I have the same closing costs for a 150-unit building as for one of these little twelve-unit garden apartments. There is no secondary market for the debt if a building has fewer than 50 units. And what if your GC goes AWOL? ‘Congratulations,’ I own a half-finished fourplex, now what?”

That last question is on the mind of any prospective investor. Real estate is messy, complicated, and just plain risky. Some deals go sideways. And there are always contingencies. City officials might inexplicably delay an inspection for months, a subcontractor might do a shoddy job that needs rework, materials might be damaged in transit, on and on and on. Even a small real estate project feels like a miracle.

What happens if and when a project blows up is a serious matter the developer must account for and address up front with investors. Equity investors get an ownership stake with the understanding that they might not get their money back. Debt investors have more security because they can take possession of a property or maybe even go after the developer’s personal assets, but that means disposing of a half-finished build where corners were probably cut as things broke down. has a great explanation of that dynamic and broader financing issues:

Noahpinion

Why small developers are getting squeezed out of the housing market

I’m perpetually interested in how to build more and better housing, and also how to create nicer cities. So when my friend Coby Lefkowitz, owner of a sma…

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2 years ago · 215 likes · 57 comments · Coby Lefkowitz

The basic answer here is that even small developers have ways of dealing with failure risk, from offering more generous terms to liability protection to girding themselves and signing a personal guarantee on a loan. This is a big reason why the traditional way that individuals get started in real estate development is drawing from significant family wealth. If you flame out, you will still be invited to Thanksgiving. (I wonder if some kind of apprenticeship arrangement would help more people enter development.)

Pitfalls of Conventional Financing Sources

Equipped with all of this context, we can delve into why traditional sources of capital balk at missing middle, and why developers might not find them attractive either.

I do need to touch on loan-to-value ratio (LTV). Things were looser pre-2008, but these days a developer can expect to get a loan for at most 65% of a project’s value from a bank or experienced investors, likely less. There are exceptions but the point is: the developer must raise equity, convincing investors to buy into a project. Developers are expected to put some of their own cash into a deal as equity too (skin in the game).

Community Banks

Historically, the primary financing option for neighborhood developers, these fairly small regional banks focus on a local market. They were a fairly reliable source of capital for missing middle until mergers and acquisitions significantly consolidated the sector in the past fifteen years, partially due to standards imposed by the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Many community banks and their loan officers were absorbed into institutions with bigger fish to fry.

Community banking is heavily relationship-driven, which made it a natural fit for neighborhood developers who need to explain so many aspects of missing middle, starting with what it is and why they want to pursue it at all. Local loan officers have local knowledge (what Hayek called tacit knowledge) that helps them assess whether the developer can sell for a certain price per square foot or charge a certain rent.

Trust is the one essential element that makes a missing middle deal work. Even for a rock-solid project with conservative assumptions, the lender or any other investor needs to take time to understand the numbers. Community banks are more likely than bigger players to give developers a bit of flexibility too. As a prime example, an infill developer told me he sticks with a loan officer he has developed a good relationship with, even though he could get a lower rate elsewhere, because he knows they will understand if he tells them that he wants to spend 7% more on windows.

Still, lending is all about managing risk, and any real estate deal is risky. It is always easy enough to just say no. And small banks are especially risk-averse. As a veteran grassroots developer explained to me, if a community bank has one bad loan on their balance sheet, their regulator is going to spot it during a regular exam, give them grief about it, and likely require that they increase their capital reserves, limiting how much money they can lend out and profit they can make, which is a big problem.

Much Ado About Comps

Underwriters are the financial professionals who formally assess the risk of a potential investment. Missing middle sets off alarm bells in their heads for a couple of reasons, captured in its name. This middle housing is more complex than a single-family home but without the scale of a commercial-scale residential project, which provides a certain kind of stability. One tenant not paying their rent in a 100-unit building is annoying; in a fourplex, it could be a disaster. On the other hand, the more expensive a project is, the bigger the financial fallout if it blows up, all else equal.

Middle housing properties, especially new ones, are also generally rare, making them “non-standard” in underwriter speak, which brings us to the issue of comps. Short for “comparables,” comps are the properties a prospective lender or investor uses as a reference point to evaluate the financial assumptions around a proposed project. A new single-family home in America has as many comps as you can shake a stick at, which, along with favorable federal policy, makes single-family mortgages easy to commoditize (as illustrated by the financial crisis that led to Dodd-Frank). Likewise, finding comps to validate the projections for a commercial-scale property is routine.

Even as they perform due diligence to ensure that risk is well-managed and carefully review comps, underwriters are used to viewing them as open-and-shut. Telling an underwriter, “Let me explain my comps to you,” will stop them in their tracks, leaving them confused, maybe even suspicious. Even if a developer has five comps they can point to in the same neighborhood or similar ones, all built in the past year or two, a loan officer might not have the patience to walk through each one. A critical issue for missing middle projects is that banks and underwriters systemically underestimate the price per square foot that they ultimately sell for. So a bank offers a higher interest rate, one that the developer may not even be able to accept.

All of this is surmountable. Neighborhood developers still can and do secure loans from community banks, often thanks to accumulated trust and goodwill. But at a macro level, the pairing broke down. Put simply, community banks lending to neighborhood developers worked reasonably well 15 or 20 years ago, but not anymore.

Bank loans also have some built-in limitations. Banks are, you may have noticed, tightly regulated and bureaucratic. The overhead costs they must cover put a floor on the interest rates they charge. And they may take multiple months to approve a loan.

I should briefly mention credit unions as well as community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which are more lightly regulated entities with a mandate to invest in local economic development. Though they might seem like appealing alternatives to community banks, they end up being fairly similar in practice, with the same broad limitations. So ideally a neighborhood developer can tap into …

Friend and Family Money

This is exactly what it sounds like: family members and friends of a developer who have the financial means and personal inclination to buy equity or lend. Having a rich dad to step in and personally guarantee a loan is unfair but also extremely helpful, especially for a developer early in their career. Just to acknowledge the elephant in the room, real estate, even at a small scale, favors individuals who have money, come from money, or know people with money. At the same time, it rewards scrappy self-starters who claw out a niche for themselves.

Hard Money

Hard money lending, backed by the “hard” or real property in a real estate deal, is a high-risk, high-reward sector specializing in short-term, high-interest loans. They traditionally focus on financing house flips (quickly buying, renovating, then selling a home). These private lenders or something like them could conceivably evolve into a source of capital for missing middle development. However, they charge a lot and have, depending on who you ask, a bruising reputation, but that is not a hard and fast rule. (I seem to have a few hard money lenders subscribing — thank you!)

Country Club Money

Similar to friend and family money, country club money is what it sounds like. I never got a sense that the name is a euphemism. These investors tend to be upper-middle class or simply upper-class professionals like doctors, lawyers, and dentists. They have something like $100,000 to spare that they want to “put to work” in an investment other than stocks, bonds, or even REITs (real estate investment trusts, typically with tradable shares). A few from the same profession may pool their capital into a fund.

High-net-worth-individuals (HNWI) invest in real estate for a few reasons. It tends to be a hedge against inflation and has tax advantages. Returns can be close to or even in excess of the stock market. And investing in a physical asset carries psychic value. There is also the appeal of investing in something that has a social benefit, though I have not found that missing middle generates mediocre financial returns.

A developer who networks effectively can become friendly with a family office, which is a private firm dedicated to managing the finances of a wealthy family. They can deploy lots of capital but are not (necessarily) too big for missing middle.

Affluent individual investors are difficult to generalize about. The big question is whether a developer can find them, then cultivate relationships and build trust. Developers view HNWIs as more easygoing and flexible than a bank. But a developer getting involved with high-agency people operating outside their domain of expertise may find that they are prone to interfere, micromanaging a project. Either way, the larger the average cheque size, the faster a developer can assemble capital.

Missing But Not Lost

Lest you get discouraged, remember that missing middle is still financially sound. Being a YIMBY makes it easier to see the overwhelming demand for missing middle, not merely because it is ‘another housing option.’ Forget affordability — missing middle housing is convenient and enables a community-oriented lifestyle. My wife and I brought our first child home to a structure that is now a full century old. New missing middle represents an extraordinary, exciting opportunity.

The puzzle of missing middle housing, from financing to the basic knowledge needed to efficiently build a fourplex with a shared stairwell, is somehow largely a matter of status quo bias, a Catch-22. A lack of comps limits financing, which limits comps.

As explained to me by Strong Towns Board Chair and Co-Founder , the Great Depression kicked off the long-term decline of middle housing in America. Many of the mom-and-pop developers who created missing middle were wiped out in waves by the depression and the Great Recession, or slowly died off. But the numbers still add up. Two or twelve is still more than one.

It is obvious how missing middle enriches neighborhoods. This is not a tragedy of the commons; it is a tangible product with willing buyers. We can revitalize the market.

The consistent refrain I heard in conversations about the missing middle housing financing gap is that it is “a real problem” because the projects make sense economically. Many folks went on to say that someone should do something about it.

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Thanks to my 1,020 subscribers, especially my 16 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

I was a federal tax journalist for four years, starting in November 2014, which turned out to be a pivotal period. My first beat, for two years, was Capitol Hill, where I witnessed the twilight of pre-Trump American politics and aftermath of his election.

The stories I share below mix the fading vestiges of good humor in Congress — which January 6th killed off — with the complacency of Senate Democrats and rowdy dysfunction of House Republicans, which facilitated Trump’s courtship of working-class voters and crushing of the GOP establishment. To quote a friend, Trump’s superpower is making his opponents the worst versions of themselves (lately, his supporters too). Another friend observes that over the past ten-plus years, Washington has gone from colorful and full of possibility to paranoid and angry.

I promised myself I would never write an opinion column about national politics, but the spectacle of Trump bragging about his month-old second term in a joint address to Congress while Democrats played into his hands with performative gestures finally got to me. An old man waving his cane at another old man is not our country’s future.

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An Opening for Abundance Liberals

Trump’s chaotic incompetence — exemplified by his choice to raise consumer prices and tank the stock market with tariffs — and progressives’ impotence in confronting him have created a large political opening. Disciplined operators can seize it by tenaciously prioritizing voters’ perennial top concern, the economy, which now centers on inflation in the short term and cost of living in the medium term (build more housing). Political leaders will have to help restore our sense that we live in a positive-sum world and can build a better future for ourselves and our loved ones.

I respect people in the arena and fully recognize that it is too easy for me to criticize from afar. I grasp the turbulence and temptations of online media and the rabid bases’ emotional bite. I think all the time about my mentor ’s 2016 diagnosis of American political insanity as the product of weakening political parties and institutions that attention mongers had reduced to publicity platforms.

House Republicans are ‘terrified of their voters,’ a House GOP staffer told me about three years ago. Still, I have to wonder why so many holders of Federal office do not hold to the discipline that I, a political amateur, picked up as a YIMBY group founder, from message discipline, to not letting opponents bait you, to focusing on a few top priorities. I understand that single-issue advocacy is simpler than being a member of Congress. But our leaders’ antics do not have to be this mind-numbingly predictable.

And yet, I am unsure that the past decade’s political insanity is different in kind from the Congress I saw up close, which barely passed budget and appropriations bills, only meekly asserted its war-making authority, and struggled to build coalitions around any issue. The only exception that united lawmakers was praising the state of Israel, with jarring forcefulness and uncannily precise repetition of specific phrases.

The Senate was more deliberate and restrained, which I liked, yet all of Congress was petty and flamboyant and disconnected from regular people’s everyday economic concerns. I do not recall any mention of the high cost of housing or childcare. I did watch senators open a tax oversight hearing by gushing about their iPhones to Apple CEO Tim Cook. In retrospect, it makes sense that many working-class voters abandoned Democrats for Trump. Democratic shrugging amid weak job and GDP growth prefigured gaslighting about inflation under President Biden. The late Harry Reid, longtime leader of Senate Dems, was amused and baffled when asked (by the phenomenal reporter Alan Ota) about the emerging idea of a student debt bubble.

Bumbling My Way Around the Halls of Power

Roaming the halls of the Capitol and congressional office buildings thrust me against American politics’ sweaty underbelly. My first big memory on the job is watching a reporter query Bill Nelson — former astronaut, then a Democratic senator from Florida, later the administrator of NASA. It was just the three of us. Leering at the reporter, he ignored her question, then said, “You remind me of Madonna in ‘Evita!’ ” It was, mercifully, the most inappropriate behavior I ever witnessed as a journalist.

Notwithstanding the importance of transparency, reporting taught me that legislative negotiations must be confidential, even as I worked hard with my colleagues to extract every possible detail from behind closed doors. I particularly remember when a Senate staffer gave us a draft of a sensitive compromise the Obama Administration was negotiating with the Senate Finance Committee, to kill it, which our article did.

Before we get too far, I need to disclaim that I was too inexperienced and, more than anything else, immature to handle being a congressional reporter or, really, almost any professional setting. I was world-class at getting questions answered, an above-average writer, but struggled with deadlines and normal human etiquette. I was part of a team that did excellent, technical work, and I was a dumb kid. On that note …

At the time, I was a philosophical anarchist. So my ideology was easy to separate from my work, which I was very intentional about. The only potential exception was my feeling of disgust as I decided not to write about a press conference where business owners expressed hope for a higher minimum wage to damage their competitors. My biases were so impractical as to be irrelevant. I did relish the bizarre dramatic irony of first shaking hands with IRS Commissioner John Koskinen — a good man — in a conference room at the IRS “mothership,” smiling and thinking to myself, “You have no idea that I am an anarchist.”

I comfortably cultivated Democratic staffers on the Hill, leaning into my lefty-flavored stances like, ‘Obviously drugs should be legal,’ effectively enough that a couple of them actually glanced around then told me, ‘OK, I can see you are on my side of things, so let me tell you what’s going on.’ If anything, I was harder on the Republicans I nominally agreed with, which was just as well because so was the press corps in general. Reporters’ personal politics leaned heavily left (duh). A few young Politico reporters mocked Senator Bob Corker’s Tennessee drawl, but the vast majority of journalists I worked alongside truly tried to avoid bias, inevitable as it was.

I had positive and negative impressions of and interactions with GOP and Dem members of Congress without too much of a pattern.1 I gravitated toward the Senate, controlled then by Democrats, which is probably why they feature prominently here.

A World Unto Itself

You have to understand that Capitol Hill is a world unto itself. You cannot assess it from the outside. By the end of my abortive journalism career, I only trusted someone to know what was going on in Congress if they had been on the Hill in the past 24 hours. Caucus leadership largely entails trying to control the narrative and place blame. Republicans were always at a slight disadvantage, which was just the reality.

Still, Harry Reid, every bit as pugilistic as you could hope a former boxer to be, undeniably excelled at this dark art, though Mitch McConnell was a worthy foil. I will never forget Reid forcing Republicans to vote down an amendment to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that he had poison-pilled. With a self-satisfied smirk visible from space, Reid took the Senate floor to lecture his foes: “These Republicans …”

Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley had his own singular gift for knowing which way the wind was blowing in the moment. As a teenager, I thought he was insincere and of dubious principle, which I guess he was, but up close I came to appreciate and even respect him as the ultimate political animal. Maybe my favorite memory from the Hill was with him on the Senate’s little subway:2

Me: ‘Hi senator, may I join you? I want to ask you about something.’

Grassley: ‘Oh sure.’

Me: ‘But we can talk off the record.’

Grassley, immediately and offhandedly: ‘Oh, I don’t care.’

Though Grassley was not trying to be funny, senators had a sense of humor that seems to be missing from Congress these days.

Another favorite memory was with Ohio Republican Rob Portman, who had a fondness for me, maybe because I was always asking technical questions (he was reputedly the smartest member of Congress), plus I was barely older than his son. Late one day, Portman and another senator, I think John Hoeven, sauntered up to me and another reporter outside of the Senate chamber. ‘Look at these reporters! What are these guys doing?’ one asked; the other replied, ‘Yeah, no one really likes reporters.’ And I looked straight at them and said, ‘Well, you know who is even less popular than reporters?’ A bit edgy of me, but they were good sports, immediately lowering their gaze, feigning mournful regret and self-reflection. The whole thing was hilarious.

The Devolution was Televised

Ominously, it turned out, members loved being on TV. Elizabeth Warren — a nice person but the least sincere member of Congress in my experience — did not bat an eye when she got the exact same question from the same reporter twice in one press conference, several minutes apart. They were “getting the shot” for TV: ‘We’ve been hearing a lot about compromise this week, senator, but is this a compromise that goes too far??’ I tried to pin Warren down as she vaguely threatened to block some must-pass legislation, only to have other reporters condescendingly explain, as the presser broke up that she never was going to answer. In fairness, the most dangerous place in Washington was between Charles Schumer and a television camera. Maybe it still is:

However, TV coverage seemed to become truly dominant on the Hill around 2017. Print reporters — who write the news, with detailed information — lost a lot of ground. The cause was not Trump’s election per se, but rather Congress and the media’s reaction to it. My colleagues still on the Hill beat said the Capitol suddenly had twice as many reporters, many seeking reactions to Trump’s latest incendiary or simply insane statement. Hallway press scrums became chaotic. Longtime reporters struggled to simply ask lawmakers questions. Senators were mobbed on their way to floor votes; the press galleries (career staff who credential reporters and manage their designated workspaces) had to step in for fear that elderly lawmakers would be knocked over. Capitol Police began randomly stopping reporters to check press passes.

A few reporters started prowling the halls with a small digital TV camera in tow. One from CNBC interrupted me mid-question to interview Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who of course obliged her, all of us walking briskly, my exasperated reaction just out of frame. I stuck with him and got my questions in, then peeled off, feeling incredulous as I stood alone. I do not want to know what the Hill is like now.

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Congressional Leaders Did This to Themselves

Politicians have always prioritized reelection, and performative gestures have been supplanting the discrete and thus unglamorous work of actually legislating at least since Newt Gingrich oozed onto the national stage. “Why don’t you write the article about how they should bring back earmarks so they can at least get something done around here?” a particularly flinty reporter told a colleague as they commiserated in the Senate press gallery on April 16th, 2013, when I was still just an intern. I immediately jotted that down because it struck me as outrageous. Wikipedia defines an earmark as “a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process.” This parochialism, also called pork barrel spending, is widely viewed as a form of graft or even outright corruption.

The next year, the same reporter elbowed me away from Reid, who graciously turned to let me finish my follow-up question. But maybe because of his personality, that reporter spoke a hard truth: limiting parochial appropriations fueled Congress's ineffectiveness and empty show. A few million dollars would be a small price to pay for a Congress that regularly passes bills — for some semblance of state capacity in our national legislature. It is difficult to imagine how, without earmarks, to reform entitlement or national defense spending and put the national debt on a sustainable course, which a few Republicans back then still claimed to care about, which was nice. A dozen years ago, $10 billion over ten years was a big tax bill — how quaint.

John Boehner crusaded against earmarks, consolidating power in the speakership and committees, limiting rank-and-file House Republicans’ role in legislating to such a degree that they had nothing better to do than depose him, push out his successor Paul Ryan, and depose his successor Kevin McCarthy. Nancy Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell similarly centralized power and eroded regular order. Boehner was rough around the edges but had a good heart. I watched his famously weepy eyes well up as he expressed concern about a potentially disturbed young man who was arrested for plotting to poison him, saying something like, ‘I hope he gets the help he needs.’

Boehner also has the unfortunate distinction of being the only politician I ever saw respond to a shouted question after they left a podium. Someone asked a retreating Boehner, “Is a shutdown off the table?” Then some bro-ish reporter said, “So a shutdown’s on the table.” And Boehner turned and said, “What??? ... Agh ... No!” Everyone laughed, a welcome break in a tension that is today almost normal.

McConnell calculated that he could appease MAGA by voting — against his conscience — not to convict Trump for inciting the January 6th riot, because he thought Trump’s political career was dead. He gave it life. He failed to do his duty.

Re-Domesticating Our Nation’s Political Animals

Ezra Klein has recently been exploring our … institutional challenges on his podcast, surfacing useful insights. Yuval Levin gave him an astute diagnosis that included Congress surrendering its primacy as the most important Federal branch. I strongly urge you to listen to the whole conversation using a podcast app. Levin notes that our political system no longer aligns ambition with good governance or problem-solving.

Politics inherently attracts plenty of egotistical, feckless, venal people, no question, but even some of our most degenerate elected officials are still extremely talented at getting things done. We must rediscover how to harness all of that slippery talent.

Media theorist Martin Gurri offered Klein a grim prognosis: America’s future leaders must master — as Trump has — always-on, performative social media while still somehow engaging in complex statecraft. I am skeptical and think we can do better.

Klein has recognized and cogently argued that Trump’s political position is fundamentally weak. MAGA is drunk on a razor-thin popular vote win and a Republican House majority that Levin said is the smallest since the U.S. added its 50th state. Levin argues that presidential elections have been narrow for decades for the simple reason that neither party has a clear majority; the constitutional system was designed to incentivize elected leaders to build coalitions and broaden their appeal. Trump’s gains with non-white and young voters in 2024 dispelled any lingering notion of demographic trends inherently, systemically favoring Democrats. Trump won some 43% of the Latino vote in 2024. And states that Vice President Harris won could lose 12 electoral college votes in 2030. Build housing, build power!

Perhaps now that Trump and Musk are showing just how powerful the executive branch is, Democrats will internalize the need to limit that power. One last story:

In the shellshocked aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, my senior editor gave me a special assignment. I was to ascertain whether Trump, as president, would be able to unilaterally enact tariffs, without legislative action. After I researched the matter and interviewed some experts, the definitive answer was no: a president technically has authority to enact tariffs as an emergency measure on national security grounds, but that would be a heinous abuse of power. Then, one way or another, Trump … unilaterally enacted tariffs. Biden kept many of those trade restrictions in place, under the same authority. And now Trump is back at it, trashing our alliance with Canada.

For our institutions to function, our leaders will have to mortify themselves enough to respect the bounds of their authority, especially if we are only able to reform our institutions on the margins. It is fashionable for both warring political factions to scoff at “norms.” Right-wing reactionaries grotesquely compared the 2016 election to Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on 9/11 (the memorial is beautiful and worth visiting). Biden left much of Trump’s executive overreach in place and tried to amend the Constitution by fiat days before leaving office. Now, Senate Democrats debate whether to shut down the Federal government.

Three Women Showing Disciplined Leadership

Three Democratic women in Congress have recently shown how our leaders should speak and act in this difficult, divisive era, focusing on solving problems.

House member Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat representing a rural Washington State district that Trump won, got a lot of attention after the 2024 election, drawing praise for her pragmatic, plainspoken devotion to working-class issues like right to repair. As chronicled by , Gluesenkamp Perez told the story of how a constituent complained that daycare workers were not allowed to peel bananas to give kids a wholesome snack, which was considered food preparation, but could open bags of chips. The congresswoman investigated and, after various bureaucrats told her the claim was false, discovered that food preparation laws did in fact regulate banana-peeling. Instead of giving up or dismissing her constituent, she got to the bottom of the issue. Then she set to work on legislation to fix it.

Eating Policy

Stop telling constituents they're wrong

There is a little dust-up about Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s claim that childcare workers in her state aren’t allowed to peel bananas or oranges to serve to the kids in their care. Do the regulations prohibit this? Don’t they? The whole spat is missing the point…

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a year ago · 248 likes · 91 comments · Jennifer Pahlka

Representative Sarah McBride, a freshman Democrat from Delaware, refused to take the bait when House Republicans sought to limit her access to women’s restrooms. As the first out trans person elected to Congress, McBride was already in an inherently tough position before the House GOP debased itself. She pointedly does not want to be reduced to her gender identity. With that understood, her dignity and resolve are truly exceptional and worth celebrating. This is real leadership I rarely saw on the Hill:

I honestly had barely heard of Elissa Slotkin, freshman senator from Michigan, before she delivered the Democratic response to President Trump’s recent joint address, so the standard caveats apply. Yet her speech was an obvious triumph, all the more notable because response speeches are usually tinny and often embarrassing. I think her CIA and DoD background contributed to her authoritative poise and cool restraint, rare qualities in the standard former prosecutor/trial lawyer politician. (I do not like the national security state, just work with me here.)

The speech itself, including her delivery, seemed like it might actually connect with normal people and effectively speak to their kitchen table concerns, starting with the economy and the cost-of-living crisis. I can only assume a lot of folks on the left hated her appeals to Regan conservatives, but you know what? Reagan conservatives are the new Reagan Democrats, which is to say, potential Democratic voters. You want to defeat MAGA? You need moderates and some conservatives. You need a coalition of people who think differently from each other and have fundamental disagreements. Please, figure it out. Trump has hardcore Zionists and antisemites working for him.

Unfortunately, Senator Slotkin’s message was overshadowed by her fellow Democrats’ theatrical interruptions of Trump. My greatest concern for the YIMBY and abundance movements is that we might allow ourselves to be distracted, and lose our focus.

An Abundance of Hope

Mood music:

Covering Congress shifted my politics from idealism and a rejection of institutions to pragmatism and a desire to make them work on a basic level. I am no longer an anarchist. I realized that coercion is a fact of life, core to human nature, if you like. It cannot be eliminated, only minimized. As the impulse to justify my most extreme beliefs faded, I saw value in centrism and taking more situational stances on issues. I want to underline this point. Partisans and ideologues scoff at centrism and moderation, but pragmatists gravitate toward them because they are effective. The median voter picks the winner of an election. Broad appeals work best in the long run.

All of this reflection leads me to cautious optimism and, I hope, reassurance to my friends and fellow travelers in the YIMBY and abundance movements, that we are on the right track. One good sign is that our work is dry and obscure. Another is that we are building power from the bottom up, into a community of action-oriented, results-driven individuals and organizations. The YIMBY movement really is as simple as trying to figure out how to build more housing. The abundance movement similarly seems to boil down to: How do we build the things we need, create state capacity, and restore major institutions to be functional? How do we make our civilization succeed?

Longtime readers know I often come back to the four core values I set for my YIMBY group: civility and integrity, action orientation, focus on housing, and non-partisan pluralism. The Abundance Network’s values are humility, curiosity, and outcome-focus. We are offering an alternative for Americans frustrated by the politics of hubris, rage, and legalism. They will be attracted to our vision and work. We will win.

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Thanks to my 964 subscribers, especially my 14 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

As discussed previously, the two paths to inexpensive housing are growing supply and decaying quality, which both have the effect of reducing price. If we can agree that the fundamental driver of the housing affordability crisis is a literal, actual, numerical shortage of homes, then the essential question becomes how to build more.

There are three major stories we can tell ourselves to answer that question. They are not mutually exclusive but can come into tension. Government officials definitely see trade-offs between them, including local electeds shaping a city’s housing policy and spending, or considering whether to approve a proposed development project and what special conditions to place on it, if any.

1. Let private developers build lots of new privately financed (profit-driven) housing, much of it too expensive for many or most people to afford. Then, rely on the people who move into those new units to open up space in less expensive, older housing. That process is called vacancy chains, because a succession of vacancies allows some low-income people to move into very cheap housing.

2. Build significantly more committed affordable housing, which is subsidized and income-restricted. That means only people below a certain income threshold are allowed to move into the units. They can remain in place even if they win the lottery, paying a capped amount of their income as rent.

3. Stand up a vast public enterprise to build and manage a huge amount of new housing units. This approach is called public or social housing, with government squarely in the driver’s seat, perhaps as part of a public-private partnership.

YIMBY is a broad movement with enthusiastic advocates for all of these approaches. We often champion an eclectic vision. Positivity is politically potent, more people should try it. Nearly all YIMBYs, including myself, like the first two answers. All three have unique appeal, especially when you are thinking politically.

My purpose is to explain why the first answer is by far the most convincing, on its own merits and relative to the others. This conclusion makes me inwardly bristle when I hear that, ‘Of course we need to build more housing, but we have to focus on affordable housing,’ meaning subsidized housing. Here I reply: No, we don't.

New housing absolutely does not have to be affordable to make housing in general affordable. That is good news — salvific news — because making new housing affordable for all of the people who very clearly need inexpensive housing would be almost impossible. We can help all of these folks, not just a few, by — you guessed it — building a lot more housing. Only developers and private capital markets have demonstrated the capacity to do so. We must have abundance to have affordability.

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Why Subsidies and Public Housing Fall Short

This is not a broadside against committed affordable housing. That approach does some real good, but it does not scale. Many subsidized housing residents had to win a lottery to get in. Waiting lists stretch for months. As I had the chance to explain in Newsweek, housing subsidies do not scale. I laid out subsidies’ two major limitations:

First, they are expensive. Increasing subsidies to match the scale of the housing crisis would cost tens or hundreds of billions of public dollars — well beyond what is politically realistic in most of the U.S. Second, subsidies might exacerbate the problem. Injecting that much money into the housing market risks further increasing prices by boosting demand while supply remains limited.

Skeptical of the first point? Check out the back-of-the-napkin math I did to try to prove it. The DC region’s housing shortage dwarfs LITHC’s annual total budget. This is vitally important to understand. Building lots of housing requires lots of money, which has to come from somewhere. The tens or hundreds of billions of dollars needed can only plausibly come from private markets. Congress cannot be expected to cough up that kind of cash for housing, nor can state legislators.

Housing subsidies are an important tool that has to be used in a targeted manner. The status quo has left many people who truly need subsidies living in overcrowded slums or in a friend’s spare room or on the street. We must be clear-eyed about the current housing policy paradigm’s comprehensive inadequacy.

Savvy and personal resources partially determine who gets a subsidy. I live in Alexandria, Virginia, which has a program that gives people meeting certain income criteria the opportunity to purchase a home in the city below market value. I qualified for that program with two kids and an income just shy of $90,000. Sure, I have underachieved for this area in terms of income (do message me if you want to work together in the housing industry), but it is crazy that I was eligible for subsidized housing. Especially given my capacity to work the system compared with, say, a single mom juggling three part-time jobs.

I previously used a “why not both?” framing to discuss subsidized and market-rate housing. I still believe that, but was being polite when I called housing subsidies moderately overrated. They have serious limitations. Downplaying that makes it easier to convince ourselves, especially as observers with stable housing, that subsidies are a full-scale solution. Committed affordable housing at least has a proven track record in the U.S., which is more than I can say for public housing.

Admittedly, I know very little about public housing or newer so-called social housing proposals, and yet I am pretty sure they will not work. The politics are almost impossible, to put it mildly, especially after Trump’s popular vote win. Our country lacks the state capacity and bureaucratic competence, at any level of government, to manage such huge development projects and serve as a compassionate landlord to millions of people.

DC’s public housing authority is an extreme example. A 2022 Washington Post investigation found that almost a quarter of the city’s public housing units were vacant, because many were uninhabitable. A 2023 investigation found that the DC Housing Authority was overpaying rent by millions:

Arthur Simpson, 73, lives on the third floor of an apartment building in Northeast Washington. The elevator doesn’t work, so he climbs the stairs. He has no electricity, so he sees by the light of the street at night. The hallway outside reeks of musty carpet and cigarettes, so he shoves a towel against the door crack to block the stench.

The D.C. Housing Authority pays $2,467 in monthly rent for Simpson to live there, but his apartment at the Havana was never worth that, even when new. One real estate consulting firm recently put the median market rent for one-bedrooms in the area at $1,613.

DCHA agreed to the amount anyway, because it doesn’t check to ensure rents it pays on behalf of low-income voucher holders are in line with market prices, as required by local and federal regulations. As a result, the agency overpays landlords by millions of dollars every year, a Washington Post investigation found.

If you want to work toward public housing in our time, so be it. Maybe “real public housing has never been tried.” Maybe the real thing, whatever that is, would work. But there is no reason to wait for a revolution that may never come. We have a private industry that can build the housing we need. We should let it, even at the risk of someone who plays golf making more money. My children are getting old enough to wonder why so many people live in tents. I struggle for words when we talk about it.

Some people will always need some kind of housing subsidy. The key issue I see is that most people with an income should be able to afford a decent home, but many are deprived of the opportunity. The shortage creates insane bidding wars, even for old shacks. Forget giving a fish versus teaching to fish, there are not enough fish! The housing crisis is a shortage, a numbers game. We can win it, and YIMBYs are starting to learn how. Personally, I want to run up the score. I am here to fix the problem, not to feel vindicated or morally superior. Al Davis put it best: “Just win, baby.”

YIMBY Success Stories: Minneapolis and Austin

YIMBY critics, who flail wildly to land a rhetorical punch (and even talk big about actual fisticuffs), frequently complain that our theory of change is unproven, made up, even a trickle-down conspiracy. They demand clear, transferable examples of zoning changes and housing supply increases reducing rents. No, not Tokyo, humanity's largest ever metropolis. Japan is ethnically homogeneous. Its culture is weird. NIMBYs want proof in their backyard.

We have proof, not that it would prevent goalposts from suddenly relocating. YIMBYs have begun glimpsing abundant, inexpensive housing in the U.S. There is a growing list of local affordability success stories, including Houston, Minneapolis, and Austin. Houston has been pretty affordable for decades. Minneapolis and Austin built lots of new units in recent years and rents actually fell.

As discussed last post, parking reform was a big factor in Minneapolis, enabling the construction of many new apartment buildings. Correlation does not equal causation, but after being in the trenches of this issue, it is nice to see any U.S. city, other than distressed ones like St. Louis, adding housing faster than residents and reaping the benefits. Minneapolis is economically vibrant too. Governor Tim Walz has long boasted that Minnesota has some of the best quality of life indicators of any U.S. state for health, education, etc. Minneapolis has a lot of things going for it, from Target to Justin Jefferson. For it to also have falling rents is a serious housing policy victory.

August 2025: I need to add a big caveat. Friend of the blog Salim Furth, cited below, notes evidence that Minneapolis saw falling housing demand in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, which triggered riots, a pullback by police, and a spike in crime and public disorder. So we must be careful not to infer too much from Minneapolis housing prices. does excellent work and has written about the region’s housing market, check him out.

The story I found in Austin is more complex, maybe because I took a closer look, but still encouraging. Friend of the blog wrote about Austin’s experience for California YIMBY’s Metropolitan Abundance Project (MAP). He has a deep understanding of the housing crisis and Austin’s place in it. I got to meet Ryan at YIMBYtown 2024. After moving to Austin from San Francisco late in the pandemic, he joined the board of AURA, an original proto-YIMBY group. (I urge you to subscribe to Ryan’s City of Yes newsletter, where he just interviewed a leader of California Forever.)

The picture is a little fuzzy …

… but we can see that average effective rent in Austin fell between mid-2022 and 2024. Ryan documents that metro Austin, especially the suburbs, built way more housing than San Francisco in that period:

Rising interest rates have cooled the national market for multi-family housing, namely large-scale commercial projects, though things might be warming up again over these past few months. Metro Austin is also seeing big population growth, and the city proper is passing a series of YIMBY reforms.

With so many factors at play, I asked Ryan: What were the policy drivers of the recent growth of the housing stock in metro Austin? What new and existing policy factors enabled it? He kindly replied as follows.

When we talk about housing in Austin, there are really two stories: one about the city itself, and another about the suburbs that surround the city.

Growth within the city has been enabled by successful density bonus programs like Affordability Unlocked, which waives certain zoning restrictions and expedites approvals in exchange for income-restricted affordable housing units, as well as by plan-specific developments allowing for greater density in Downtown, around the commuter rail line, and in other areas.

Austin’s recent slate of pro-housing reforms — most notably the abolition of parking minimums and the rollback of “compatibility” height restrictions — will unlock potentially tens of thousands of apartments throughout the city, but new projects mostly came to [a] halt as interest rates rose and demand slowed relative to new supply. Meanwhile, our “missing middle” reforms, which increased the number of units allowed in single-family zones to three, are having an incremental impact in a city that is otherwise still zoned predominantly for single-family homes.

Austin’s suburbs did not have as many roadblocks to development as the city itself, which has allowed them to grow more quickly; indeed, the bulk of population growth in the region has occurred outside the city.

The thrilling takeaway from Austin and Minneapolis is that we can actually build our way to cheaper housing. We should be confident that supply and demand still apply. Some cities are inching toward abundance and affordability. The local government policies enabling this growth also pretty clearly boiled down to keeping out of the way.

Vacancy Chains’ Critical Role in Affordability

You might respond that we cannot assume we understand why housing became cheaper recently in Minneapolis and Austin, even if you concede that building more was part of the equation. I hazard to guess that you are struggling with a specific proposition: that building new housing, which is often expensive by any standard, directly reduces average or median rents, and makes housing affordable for low-income folks. High housing costs have crushed them for decades. We should be building housing for them, not for people who will be OK no matter what, right?

The answer to this question is vacancy chains: New housing is built, affluent people move in, vacating less expensive housing, which is occupied by lower-income people, who vacate even less expensive housing, which is occupied by people with a more limited income, and so on. As noted, this is also called moving chains. Friend of the blog Justine Underhill, recently elected to the Falls Church City Council in Northern Virginia, has a great video essay on the topic (the moving chains explanation comes around 9:48):

Justine’s goal here is similar to mine: explaining how luxury housing can make housing in general cheaper and even ultimately relieve homelessness. Friend of the blog and Mercatus housing economist has a piece that uses spare bedrooms as the unit of analysis for homelessness, adding nuance to the “homelessness is a housing problem” book Justine mentions. She links in the video description to multiple studies documenting moving chains and their impact on affordability.1

Part of my general optimism about abundant housing is that homelessness as we know it — lots of people sleeping outside, frequent evictions of women and children — is fairly new, emerging around the 1980s, coinciding with the emergence of the housing shortage. We must not accept homelessness as normal or inevitable.

I reject the notion that low-income and essential workers, including first responders and teachers, cannot possibly afford a decent home where they work.

That defeatist narrative risks demeaning huge swaths of the American public as incapable of supporting themselves. Housing defeatism also risks letting political leaders off the hook for their central role in the housing crisis. If nothing else, YIMBYs have clearly identified a plethora of destructive policies and regulatory processes that make housing artificially expensive, often by design. Moreover, boarding houses were banned, in the hope that the people who relied on them to avoid homelessness would simply go away. Now they live in the tents my children see.

The biggest misunderstanding or, maybe, misrepresentation of housing policy I see among housing advocates and policy professionals is that different parts of the housing market are largely disconnected. Thinking of housing as a market is unintuitive. Thinking in economic terms is fairly unnatural. I cannot blame a regular person who thinks that anyone who says luxury apartments fight homelessness is lying or stupid, maybe downright evil. Is the housing supposed to trickle down?

Obviously, that is not how I would put it … but the weird thing is … it actually does. More accurately, people move up to the best housing they can afford, creating vacancies in less expensive homes that can be filled by other people with less money.

Signs of What Abundant Housing Would Change

A real-world counterexample is affluent people paying top dollar for deeply flawed housing. Consider Del Ray, a local streetcar suburb I write about a lot. The charming neighborhood is a mix of single-family homes and multiplexes on small lots, plus garden apartments like the one my wife and I brought our first child home to, with lots of street trees and a strip of charming local businesses and great restaurants. JD Vance chose to live there (which is how I once ended up at the same mass as him).

The dirty little secret of Del Ray is that the housing stock is pretty terrible. The typical Del Ray home is 50 to 100 years old. The really old stuff is just plain old, while the newer stuff is from the neighborhood’s mid-20th century nadir. There is a peculiar species of Del Ray NIMBY who helped gentrify the neighborhood in the 1980s and ‘90s and now wants to freeze the place in amber.

These Del Ray houses are small: wooden bungalows literally ordered out of a Sears catalog or drafty brick boxes. They are cute, sure, but also terribly out of date, from wiring to insulation. If I wanted to find lead paint and asbestos in my city, I would ask an architect to meet me in Del Ray. And the bedrooms in these sorts of homes are minuscule, basically a dealbreaker for me and my wife.

Then there are Del Ray’s basements, which chronically flood with sewage. Del Ray started as the town of Potomac some 100 years ago, marrying progressive vigor with unvarnished white supremacy, evolving into a working-class enclave that Alexandria city government pointedly neglected, leaving the infrastructure inadequate to this day.

Who in their right mind would want to buy such a home in such a place? Lots of reasonable people, it turns out, not just JD Vance. Del Ray is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the DC region, even though Alexandria’s public schools are not particularly good. Here are the current home listings:

Ignore the $4 million listing for some kind of condo build. $800,000 is not unheard of in this day and age, except that in Del Ray it only gets you half a duplex with about 1,000 square feet of floor space. Price per square foot is uncomfortably close to $1,000.

The case of Del Ray holds a couple of essential lessons for us:

• People highly value walkable streetcar suburbs, as they should

• Shoveling sewage out of your basement is not an $800,000 experience

If a lot of newer housing were built in the neighborhood, or one like it, Del Ray’s old housing stock would command lower rents or property values. Some of it would be vacated by affluent folks moving into something newer and better. The folks taking their place would pay less than they did and probably, on average, have lower incomes. And so the moving chain would unfold.

What about genuinely decrepit housing that might not even be safe to live in? Should we expect poor people to move into indecent housing? Of course not. Abundance is actually our best hope for helping vulnerable people move out of bad housing.

In a market with more, better options, subpar housing is much more likely to be redeveloped. We worry today about shoddy housing being torn down because we worry that the people living there have nowhere else to go. Ideally, they could live in a newer, nicer apartment — nothing fancy, but definitely not hazardous to their health. But that slightly nicer apartment is currently rented by a young professional just starting out or someone else with decisively more earning power. It is a bit odd that they live in that place … but they cannot afford anything better. The more you stare at the housing crisis, the more the solution stares back at you. Build more housing.

This vision is a hopeful one. The future is mutually beneficial abundance, not clawing for every dollar of subsidy from a political class obsessed with cultural warfare. A healthy housing market is full of opportunity, not sacrifice. It is a joyful dance.

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P.S. All of this context helps us see why rent control is so destructive. It limits housing production amidst a shortage. Rent control creates visible winners, which makes it easy to defend, but also widespread scarcity. If I wanted to cause poor people to suffer, I would insist on strong rent control. In a famine, it is desperately important to give people more food. If instead we focused on aggressively enforcing price limits, a few people would get cheap food, but our hubris would cause many more people to starve.

Thanks to my 850 subscribers, especially my 13 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

As a political movement with growing influence and a decent first crop of policy wins, we YIMBYs face an essential question of which policy changes to actively fight for. I want to make the case for parking reform, meaning abolition of government-mandated minimum parking requirements. Parking reform is:

• Effective at enabling more housing

• Feasible for local YIMBY groups

• A way to subsidize driving much less

• A natural vehicle for coalition building

The organization Parking Reform Network is dedicated to the cause and actively seeking partnerships with YIMBYs. I have met the executive director and one or two board members a few times at various events, but have no affiliation with them. My endorsement of PRN and its cause is freely given. As I was winding down my involvement in YIMBYs of NoVA, my last personal goal was pushing my leadership teams in Arlington and Alexandria to prioritize parking reform, due to favorable political conditions and the policy’s huge short-term upside.

Parking reform is exciting because it offers YIMBYs a feasible path to immediate impact on the housing shortage, while enabling more efficient land use and helping us build power for the policy campaigns that await us in the years and decades ahead. If you are a YIMBY hungry for results, you should prioritize parking reform.

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We must first define minimum parking requirements and explain to any civilians reading this that, yes, U.S. local governments have traditionally dictated how many parking spaces a new development will have, like a bad satire of Mao’s China.

Though not as destructive as ordering the eradication of the sparrows that eat bugs that eat crops, requiring a new apartment building to include one or two parking spots per unit adds significant cost, around $28,000 per spot. An underground parking stall can cost around $50,000. And remember, that is for each unit in a building: 100 parking spots could mean about $5 million of mandated cost. That is more than enough to blow up a residential project’s pro forma (financial projections). In this way, minimum parking requirements are a significant, binding constraint on housing production. Remove that one constraint and boom: a place will build more housing.

Admittedly, financial institutions sometimes impose parking requirements, refusing to invest in projects without lots of parking. Though slow to change and prone to status quo bias, banks like making money and will eventually react if they realize they can make a lot more money from real estate with less parking. Moreover, banks doing something destructive is a weak argument for government to keep doing it too.

Building More Housing

Minneapolis is famous as the first U.S. city to eliminate single-family-only zoning but, somewhat infamously, saw little new construction of multiplexes after that 2019 reform. Economists have attributed this dearth to the continuation of other zoning restrictions, limiting the dimensions of multiplexes in line with single-family homes. Yet Minneapolis rents have fallen while other Midwestern cities’ rents rose.

Reason journalist and friend of the blog Christian Britschgi investigated Minneapolis’s experience in 2022, finding that parking reform had likely enabled the construction of many new apartment buildings, which otherwise would not have penciled (been financially feasible), placing downward pressure on rents. Minneapolis enacted parking reform in 2021, attracting far less attention than missing middle reform had.

Another friend of the blog, Mercatus Center housing economist , recommends parking reform as an effective measure to boost housing production.

I need to emphasize what a huge deal this is. Most individual zoning changes do not move the needle on housing production, at least not in the first few years. This attribute of parking reform is by itself sufficient reason to aggressively pursue it.

A recent New York Times article finds that parking reform does indeed result in lots of housing construction — Hallelujah! — but also chronicles resident complaints about parking scarcity. Some of the worst fears appear to be hypothetical. Many complaints predate any parking reform: ‘I have to drive around downtown to find street parking and this will make that worse.’ Folks complain that their street has too many cars parking on it, so they struggle to even access their driveway. These broad issues are both, on balance, easier to solve than endemic homelessness: Price public parking and create a simple permitting system for parking in residential areas. I grant that this may be a nontrivial undertaking for a local government, especially one with limited capacity, but again, the solutions are rather simple. As the Times reported:

Christof Spieler, a structural engineer and urban planner at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston … argued that mandating a possibly-arbitrary quantity of parking also did not address people’s gripes about available spaces. “That’s not just about quantity, it’s also about management,” he said. “A huge bit of this is managing street parking well,” which he says many cities fail to do.

Local government folks, if you cannot figure out street parking then I am not sure how you will tackle bigger issues like high truancy rates and dangerous arterial roads.

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Locally Feasible

A growing parade of local governments have enacted parking reform, showing that it is within the Overton window for local YIMBYs and their allies. If you are going to spend political capital on the issue, you might as well go for full repeal. So far 99 places in 8 countries have enacted parking reform, including (by population):

• Mexico City

• London

• New Zealand (yes, the entire country)

• Toronto

• Austin, TX (which might be the real YIMBYtown)

• San Jose, CA

• San Francisco, CA

• Vancouver, BC

• Portland, OR

• Sacramento, CA

• Raleigh, NC

• Minneapolis, MN

• Durham County, NC

• St. Paul, MN

• Anchorage, AK

• Buffalo, NY

• Richmond, VA

• Spokane, WA

• Birmingham, AL

• Newport News, VA

• Gainesville, FL

• Ann Arbor, MI

• South Bend, IN

• Roanoke, VA

Below is part of1 PRN’s map of places that have fully repealed parking mandates:

The regional and, I would argue, political diversity of cities and counties that have abolished minimum parking requirements is encouraging. College towns seem to be overrepresented, but there are also plenty of extremely car-dependent examples like Newport News in my state, Virginia. It is in the car-dependent Hampton Roads region, where local governments have a history of bickering and failing to cooperate. Your city or county as a self-contained political unit can make parking reform happen.

Roanoke, a southwestern Virginia city in the Blue Ridge mountains, is small, fairly conservative, and about as car-dependent as you can imagine. (It does include the excellent, rail-heavy Virginia Museum of Transportation, which is worth a visit.)

Richmond introduced the world’s first large-scale electric streetcar system in 1888 and today boasts a BRT (bus rapid transit) Line but, like Roanoke, struggles with car dependency. YIMBYs and transit advocates in Northern Virginia were amused and slightly annoyed that Richmond got rid of parking mandates before we even tried.

Local elected officials are, I hope, realizing that “people want things,” as my pal likes to say — things such as a home for their family, good schools, and nice parks. Free parking spaces are pretty far down the list. The political risk or cost of land use reforms has been clear and salient for decades (NIMBYs, etc.). But abundance also has political benefits, and the housing crisis is always growing more painful.

Local governments want things too, starting with tax revenue. They are leaving significant money on the table by not charging for public parking, especially in their downtown districts where traffic congestion is exacerbated by drivers trolling for a free curbside spot. Moreover, privately owned surface parking generates less property tax revenue than, say, a building. The housing directly enabled by parking reform tends to be a clear fiscal winner: apartments and condos with many young residents who consume few local services. Not to say that I would object if parking reform sparked a baby boom. Less parking will give us more housing, and that is a great start.

Less Mandated Parking, Less Subsidized Driving

I will keep this section simple, borrowing from my essay arguing that transit-oriented development is overrated and, at worst, creates a false pretense to limit density.

The assumption that rail transit uniquely enables car-lite density is worth examining. “Does TOD Need the T?” asked a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Author Daniel Chatman concluded: not really.

“Auto ownership, commuting, and grocery trip frequency were substantially lower among households living in new housing near rail stations … but rail access does little to explain this fact,” stated Chatman. “Housing type and tenure, local and subregional density, bus service, and particularly … parking availability, play a much more important role.”

UC Berkeley scholar Robert Cervero’s “5 Ds” of VMT (vehicle-miles—or kilometers—traveled) tell a similar story. His analysis of several U.S. studies, summarized below, shows that job accessibility by car alters driving much more (by a coefficient of -0.20) than distance to transit (-0.05) or even household and population density (-0.04). Intersection and street density also has a sizable effect (-0.12) on VMT. Both studies indicate that reducing minimum parking requirements and underpriced parking would significantly reduce VMT.

Mandating private parking or providing free public parking is a de facto government subsidy of driving, creating more traffic, pollution, and so on than we would see if developers could choose how much parking to build or government embraced radical new technologies such as the parking meter and residential parking permits. If we are not going to price congestion can we at least stop subsidizing gridlock?

Parking policy is a huge driver of land use, including land use patterns that are designed around cars and hostile to people outside of them. The two big levers I see for creating walkable urbanism at scale are enabling denser development and removing subsidies for driving, creating room for bikes and buses and kids who want to play outside — which I can tell you is something they need the way a songbird needs to fly. Parking reform directly, powerfully addresses both of those issues.

To be clear for new readers, I am not anti-car, far from it. The problem is, when we treat driving like the only practical way to go anywhere, everywhere ends up looking like a highway. Car-centric land use is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it is not destiny, and parking reform is a huge step to giving people more ways to go from place to place, and to making those places more productive and suitable to human habitation.

Building Broad Urbanist-Aligned Coalitions

This final point is speculative but also a big motivation for prioritizing parking reform in my backyard. In Arlington our YIMBY group worked in the background to assemble and coordinate a coalition for missing middle housing reform that featured local branches of the NAACP and Sierra Club and an interfaith social justice network called VOICE. Advocates of subsidized housing were part of our coalition too, but parking reform would have a much bigger impact on their mission. YIMBYs building a coalition around parking reform would be able to fully engage “smart growth” advocates who heavily focus on high density near train stations and transit hubs, as well as street safety advocates, plus maybe even more environmentalists, etc.

So you bring together this big coalition and, if you win the reform, within a few short years you may well have hundreds of new homes to point too, plus less traffic. That sets you up for your next big campaign, maybe at the state level.

Two Notes of Caution and Lots of Hope

Parking reform does carry a couple of risks for housing advocates. The biggest one I see is scope creep. When I was getting into urbanism and land use, I realized that you cannot fully separate housing and real estate from transportation, which is to say the places where we spend time and the means we use to travel between those places.

However, I did conclude that my YIMBY group could not delve into transit issues. Focusing on our mission of housing affordability has been one of our four core values and helped us stay consistent and effective. We advocated for BRT because it would politically enable denser development, but I cannot imagine us getting involved in the wrangling around the Metrorail budget, for example. Curbing the dominance of cars in the U.S. is an uphill fight and, frankly, our country’s transit agencies do themselves no favors with incompetent administration or bloated payrolls. For me at least, being the most effective housing advocate requires sacrificing my interest in other issues. Folks may not want to hear that, but activism at its worst is sloppy and self-indulgent.

Parking reform also plays into the concentration of density in places already zoned for it and the economic and racial segregation of American cities and neighborhoods. I suspect smart growth advocates talk so much about how to make TOD equitable in a social justice sense because their vision narrowly prescribes housing and concentrates economic activity. The opposite of smart growth is organic growth, not dumb growth.

As for missing middle, it is more feasible without parking requirements but still faces other barriers, not all of them legal. The YIMBY vision and agenda must normalize and disperse dense development throughout a city and region. Some places will still be much denser than others for financial and economic reasons. I would never advocate for parking reform by saying, “This will not put apartments in single-family neighborhoods.” That might simplify the politics, but it is not the end of the story.

I do think parking reform is the end of the beginning of a bigger story, the story of how YIMBYs build more housing. So I hope you will advocate for parking reform where you live, if your city or county has not already enacted it. Email Parking Reform Network at “info@parkingreform.org”2 and feel free to tell them that Luca says, “Hi.”

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At the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, a merry band of housing advocates, including members of the YIMBYs of NoVA leadership team, came together to try to push four supply-side housing reform bills through the Virginia General Assembly, which convenes only a few weeks each year. Happily, one bill did become law, directing an advisory group to study changes to the state (excuse me, commonwealth) building code that would legalize single-staircase apartment buildings up to 6 stories.

I was minimally involved, attending a few virtual meetings, gleaning bits of information along the way. Most memorably, I learned that some rural lawmakers expressed concern that zoning reforms would cause large apartment buildings to organically sprout up in the small towns in their districts.

Such anxieties betray a profound and seemingly widespread misunderstanding of how real estate development works. We should not encourage people to view tall buildings and the hundreds of individuals who might live in one as threats or burdens. Yet I still believe it would be useful to try to gauge the likely intensity of truly unlimited development in various contexts. The following thought experiment is my attempt as a non-expert. I ran this essay by a housing economist friend who indicated that my claims and prognostications seem “generally” reasonable. But there is a “lot of variation and uncertainty,” my friend added, “about what would play out where.” So let me explicitly caveat my conjunctures as directional and tentative.

Any errors or shortcomings are mine alone.

As a preview, I do think eliminating all limits on density would lead to most places looking more like downtown Manhattan — the one in Kansas, not New York:

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Zoning apologists somehow conflate these extraordinarily intricate government regulations with a market outcome, as if they are straw-manning their own argument. At the risk of saving them from themselves, I declare that we wave a magic wand to completely eliminate all density restrictions. We would retain basic rules to safeguard public health, not that they prevent overcrowding today. Wishing away the laws that YIMBYs are currently fighting to reform will help us imagine a pure market outcome for housing. No restriction of units per lot. No height limits or setback requirements. No minimum parking requirements, which I now mentally associate with Communist Romania. Liberal rules for single-staircase apartment buildings.

No one would be able to control where other people live through political means. The law would generally respect and uphold strong property rights. Governments would have to scale up infrastructure to serve the needs of residents. Even if externalities (largely from cars!) were aggressively internalized, this policy regime would still be extremely permissive of development and housing construction.

Building Height Reflects Material Costs

Developing a building costs a lot of money for reasons that go far beyond the land use regulations we just wiped out. Land is expensive, so is construction. Understanding how building height dictates building cost calls for an (oversimplified) history lesson.

When Europeans reached North America, it had an unimaginable wealth of old growth forest: tall, straight trees perfect for ship masts and, you guessed it, buildings. So while Europeans have traditionally favored homes framed in stone or brick, wood framing is at least as American as apple pie or amber waves of Old World grain.

You can use conventional wood framing for at least part of a building up to about 7 stories. A 5-over-1 structure exploits U.S. building code rules that allow up to 5 stories of fire retardant-treated wood framing, on top of a concrete podium of 1 or 2 stories. Such wood is classified as a “type 5” material while the concrete is “type 1.”

Beyond 7 stories, you must use stronger materials such as steel-reinforced concrete. Mass timber is also suitable for framing high-rise buildings, but the great shows that it may actually cost more than conventional alternatives.

The point is, concrete costs a whole lot more than wood. So you will rarely find a building between 7 stories and 10 or 11 stories, essentially the minimum height for a concrete building to pay for itself. And high rents are needed to cover the high cost of constructing a concrete building.

Definitions vary for low-, mid-, and high-rise based on the number of stories. For simplicity I will be referring to these classifications I picked up early in my housing journey from some official source I cannot track down. But it does not really matter.

• < 5 stories = low-rise

• 5 to 12 stories = mid-rise

• > 12 stories = high-rise

Based on common sense, I do think most people would stop calling a building “short” at 4 or 5 stories. And 10 stories seems too low for a high-rise. That would include all steel-reinforced concrete buildings, and a skyscraper can have dozens of stories.

An affluent individual might spend a few million dollars on a custom home. A truly rich person might spend tens of millions of dollars, enough to build a high-rise. But the vast majority of us as housing consumers are playing in a market where stuff has to pay for itself somehow. Financial return and opportunity cost are part of the equation. Nonprofit developers of subsidized housing must have budget discipline too.

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When a developer, or financier for that matter, is evaluating a real estate project, they are asking themselves: ‘What is the local market like? Can we correctly time the local boom and bust cycle? What is the underlying demand around this site?’ Thus, even if any development is allowed anywhere, a high-rise in a small town is highly unlikely.

An aside, but an important one: today’s cheap housing is often yesteryear’s expensive, fancy new housing. Its construction financing was paid off many years ago, and it may have had multiple owners. Working-class people could afford some types of new housing back in the day. However, the expectation that new housing should be “affordable” is somewhat ahistorical. Not to mention the double standard multi-family housing is held to. An increasingly popular refrain among YIMBYs online is that a detached single-family home is the most “luxurious” type of housing. By design, it makes the least efficient use of land. And land is expensive. A truism among developers is that you make or lose most of your money when you acquire land. Overpaying for it is arguably the biggest mistake a developer can make.

I wish more housing had been built in the past three decades, but the second-best time to plant a tree is today, and we must plant many seeds to resuscitate our housing market.

Maximum Density in Different Contexts

Now we are able to consider what “unlimited density” might actually look like.

First off, any change would happen fairly slowly. Many big buildings would sprout up in extremely high-demand areas like New York City, LA, Denver, etc. Yet current single-family-only neighborhoods would change gradually, a few lots here and there, year by year. For the cost reasons noted above, a lot of new density would be wood-framed gentle density, blending unobtrusively into single-family neighborhoods. We naturally imagine new development as high-rises, but allowing for a wider variety of housing types, and experimentation with novel building typologies, would produce many new mid- and low-rise multi-family homes.

My friend recommends this AEI analysis of how gentle or “light-touch density” would unfold over time. I probably think the change would happen faster than the median housing nerd does, especially if we fully deregulated density. The critique that real-world missing middle reforms have produced very few homes seems to largely overlook the fact that localities have ended single-family zoning while retaining significant restrictions such as setbacks and strict limits on lot coverage.

Still, there are many unknowns. Roughly a century of economic and regulatory headwinds caused middle housing to go missing. Creating it is a lost art, one that developers, contractors, and financiers would need at least a few years to rediscover.

Relatively few places would economically support high-rise development. Some instances might surprise you, but the overall picture would be less dramatic than you might expect. Current land use regimes often direct intense development to specific areas, causing it to erupt like a geyser, in part because developers are only allowed to build at high densities in so few places. I am hopeful that allowing density more broadly would make it less concentrated and draw less negative attention.

Local Changes to Population Growth

The two big winners would be high-rise development in urban centers like Washington, DC (where we of course vaporized the height limit, defying Congress) and mid-rise development, which would become much more common overall, especially in inner suburbs like Arlington and Alexandria. The U.S. would have more megacities with ten million residents. Our cities would start to approach the densities of European ones. Ten-thousand people per square mile is dense by American standards, but five times sparser than Paris, beloved city of light mid-rises.

A certain species of online commenter loves to crow about how American cities are existentially doomed and our hope for the future lies in suburbs populated by, implicitly or explicitly, ‘the right kinds of people.’ Yet the District is still the most expensive part of the DC region to buy a home. Central locations still offer the most. Some people want to live a short distance from a lot of other people, which they must rely on zoning to do. (Yet I seem to recall lectures about hard work and earning things.)

Archetypical exclusionary suburbs like Fairfax County, Virginia would have to let themselves meaningfully grow — no more minimum lot sizes. Much of that growth would likely come from townhouses, which are easy to build. A small row of townhouses can fit on a large suburban lot. We would also expect many new ADUs.

Transit-oriented development would become a thing that naturally happens around train stations and bus depots, not something governments hire consultants to study. My economist friend does note that decades after Arlington, VA, embraced TOD to great acclaim, sites very close to its Metrorail stations remain ripe for redevelopment.

The biggest loser of new residents would be currently booming exurbs that are close enough to the city for a soul-crushing, family time-stealing commute by car but far enough away that people without generational wealth can qualify for a mortgage. This would slow or maybe start to reverse the most environmentally destructive type of development: greenfield sprawl that clears forest and paves farmland.

Cities would still grow outward, horizontally, but not as much as they do now. Here again, I am more optimistic than people who formally study these issues, though perhaps less naive than some of my fellow urbanists, who seem to think that driving has no redeeming qualities. The status quo of limiting growth in city centers and affluent suburbs walling themselves off appears close to the optimal strategy for maximizing sprawl and paving the Earth. That reality is driving a largely, though not entirely, intergenerational culture war among American environmentalists.

Rural areas might also lose a lot of residents, who are finally able to seek a better life elsewhere. Jobs and opportunity would resume their rightful place as the primary driver of internal migration in our great nation.

I recently saw a Facebook ad that was literally just someone saying that they moved to Michigan because the cost of living is low and they could afford to buy a house. That was the pitch. Obviously we should aspire to more. (For the record, Michigan is fine.)

In summary, I think we could expect fully deregulating density to supercharge agglomeration: City centers would be much denser, the gradient of density out to the suburbs would be more gradual as missing middle and mid-rise apartments filtered in, sprawl would be less extreme overall, and rural areas might lose significant population. My friend recommends this analysis of a paper estimating the macroeconomic effects of housing deregulation and larger cities.

Closing Thoughts on Dynamism

It is common for people to worry about rural America depopulating, even if — rather revealingly, in my view — they do not live there. This can be an emotional issue and I know little of rural places, as much as I have enjoyed visiting Appalachia and western Iowa and traveling across the Midwest. If someone is able to move to a different part of the country for a better job or education, and reasonably affordable housing makes it possible, that strikes me as a good thing. The workers who remain will be able to demand a higher wage, based on my understanding of the relevant research. More dynamic land use might help some small towns stabilize and start growing again.

This exercise leaves me wondering how different our country would be if Americans had an abundance of options for where they could live and what kind of home they could live in. We would be freer by any definition. I wonder about the unrealized promise of a dynamic America where people welcome each other as neighbors.

In such an America, high-rises would not pop up everywhere, but I get the feeling that all kinds of beautiful things would.

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Thanks to my 501 subscribers, especially my 11 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

Cheese turns out to be a surprisingly rich metaphor for urbanity. In 2004, PBS docuseries Frontline profiled French marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille. His schtick was identifying an archetypal “code” for different products and categories. He seems to have been fairly influential as the new millennium dawned, telling CBS in 2003 that the code for SUVs was domination — aggression and imposing machismo. So we might have Monsieur Rapaille to blame for today’s SUV arms race.

Anyway, the Frenchman offered cheese as an example of his code thesis to Frontline. Below is an extended version of his comments at the 35-minute mark:

[I]f I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don't want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that's where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

I started working with a French company … trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn't understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that's why you have to read the age of the cheese [when you buy it]. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive. … The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.

This elegantly summarizes two competing mindsets about how successful American cities and towns, including suburbs, will look. Like cheese, all urban communities are fundamentally alive, the literal agglomeration of their residents. The question is, should they be, functionally, a dead, static system or a living, dynamic one?

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Obviously, I am on team dynamism, as are most folks reading this (unless I go viral for the wrong reasons again). As one YIMBY friend likes to say, there is no healthy way to decline — for a community to lose population or economically contract. Cities either grow or die. On that basis, the death and life of American cities is truly existential.

Though the image of a healthy, balanced system could be instructive, I actually think the more insightful half of the analogy is the dead cheese, the dead urban form, sanitized and monocultural. It allows us as urbanists to tell the story of and even empathize with the things people like about single-use zoning, single-family neighborhoods, and expansive, environmentally toxic, and underutilized private lawns.

Though not the whole story, I do agree with the common urbanist assertion that many Americans know only the prevailing sprawling suburban ideal.

In high school, I experienced a rapid economic awakening as I read books like Freakonomics. For example, setting aside your own feelings about the policy, I found myself questioning whether the minimum wage actually leaves the people it is meant to help better off. I think many American urbanists go through a similar process, progressively rejecting blasé status quo opinions about bike lanes and dense housing. My own conversion in the spring and summer of 2021 felt almost religious.

As I have changed my mind about economics, urbanism, and other issues, especially when my opinion has shifted away from the prevailing majority, I have tried to hold onto the memory of my prior opinion. Some of these shifts have been philosophical, working through the logical consequences of basic values. But certainly for economics and urbanism, I was simply exposed to information or ideas that the average American probably does not critically engage with, through no real fault of their own.

The dead cheese strategy of a quiet suburb with single-family homes on large lots that would not permit corner stores (never mind a lack of foot traffic to sustain them) is a deliberate choice, a risk avoidance strategy. The milk was pasteurized to make the cheese safe and consistent. Many people living in such places have no mental model for a viable alternative. It is not accurate or, moreover, helpful to assert that housing reform opponents are evil. Nor is it fair to suggest that the vast majority of normies who vaguely like suburbs and dislike true cities are simply prejudiced.

The biggest challenge for us as urbanists is, I am realizing, institutional more than political. We have a playbook for winning land use reform, and I believe we will get there, after years of hard work. Much less clear is a path to American cities that inspire unequivocal pride worthy of the greatest nation on earth, where residents of all backgrounds can get a good education and fully participate in the economy.

I recently toured around Alexandria with Patrick Murphy, one half of the couple behind my favorite urbanist YouTube channel, Oh The Urbanity!

I, of course, showed Patrick Del Ray, the streetcar suburb where I used to live. Then we headed over to Old Town, ending up on two pedestrianized blocks of King Street and the Potomac River waterfront. Patrick explained that in Canada, there is no association between cities and low-performing public schools, and noted that Toronto has about ten times fewer homicides than Chicago, an order of magnitude difference he found shocking after feeling totally safe in the Chicago neighborhoods he visited.

American commenters on their videos frequently ask, ‘What about crime? What about schools?’ and as he put it to me, ‘I’m not sure because those aren’t problems for Canadian cities.’ Patrick also said that the Canadian experience gives him hope for American cities. And as thorny as American cities’ problems are, I agree with him.

American cities’ institutional shakiness is not destiny, even though it has been shaped by centuries of historical factors from the post-Reconstruction nadir of American race relations to urban renewal (what an Orwellian term) and so on. Sticking with the example of Toronto, it is incredibly ethnically and culturally diverse, with about half of its residents born outside of Canada, much lower median incomes than Chicago, and a slightly larger population to boot.

All of this is causing me to question, slightly, my own adulation for streetcar suburbs. How alive is the cheese in such neighborhoods, given that hardly any people with low incomes can afford to live in them, because their relative rarity in the U.S. has made them so desirable? What does a successful American city — prosperous and functional, socially, economically, and racially integrated — actually look like today?

For months, I have been actively grappling with the Gospel metaphor of the dog eating the crumbs that fall on the floor from the master’s table. The way advocates talk about and celebrate committed affordable housing (that is, subsidized) makes me a bit uncomfortable, because it feels like a kind of surrender.

Constant is the refrain: ‘The private sector cannot provide housing affordable to the lowest-income residents.’ Maybe that suggests that the market is beyond repair, and I can understand why people might feel that way. Maybe, to be frank, it is an important narrative for the nonprofits that provide this important service, and I truly cannot fault them. I know fundraising is brutal, especially for housing work. But maybe, I worry, it signals a lack of confidence among the members of the professional-managerial class (which I obviously belong to) who do such work, that low-income residents can fully participate in educational and economic institutions, that they can improve their station in life and build a better future for their families. My biggest fear is that we do not, in our heart of hearts, believe they are capable of it.

But I really do believe that they are. I am hopeful. I reject any notion that great American cities are a utopia. The bar we need to clear is low: Safe neighborhoods, good jobs, abundant housing. There will always be some crime, some injustice, some suffering, but no circumstance requires Chicago to have almost as many murders as all of Canada (about 39 million people, the same population as California and Tokyo).

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As I wrote previously about committed affordable housing, I cannot really object to distributing life preservers when so many people are struggling to keep their heads above the water. With that fully understood, I do see a serious risk of fixating on problems that feel intractable, to the detriment of identifying ways to think and act that will create an American urbanism with a seat at the table for everyone.

To leave you with something more concrete, here is how 1974 economics Nobelist Friedrich Hayek might put it. The story goes that Hayek and his friend John Maynard Keynes drew different conclusions from economic depressions. Keynes wondered what caused markets to destabilize and economies to dramatically contract. Hayek considered the long arc of human history and the striking recency of the widespread prosperity we associate with modernity, which left him asking a different set of questions. What causes economies to grow? As another great economist put it, what were the nature and causes of the wealth of nations? What causes societies to prosper?

What causes cities to succeed?

A dead cheese view of urbanism is mechanistic, prizing control and certainty. Artifice is a means of minimizing danger. ‘Things are just cleaner this way.’ A city where the cheese is alive is more like a garden or a forest, ideally a teeming rainforest or coral reef, a natural system that evolves gradually as different factors play off of each other. Making cities nurturing places is a tough question. We have to let our cities evolve and grow and accept such complexity. We must embrace difficult answers to the biggest challenges our cities face, to actually do better. Dead cities have no future.

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Thanks to my 443 subscribers, especially my 11 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, especially on my concept for a real estate financing platform, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

This first chart, showing new privately-owned housing units started (red) and completed (blue), divided by total households, might be the ultimate documentation of the U.S. housing shortage. Dividing by households rather than population is important because one household inhabits one housing unit (at least in theory) and U.S. household size is shrinking over time as fewer individuals marry and have children. Multigenerational families are presumably far less common now than they were during, say, the progressive era heyday of immigration. Part of me wonders how much expensive housing delays or limits marriage and childbirth, on the margin (extremely high density seems to discourage parenthood, a topic for a future post).

We clearly see that the U.S. has been starting and finishing fewer homes, with inflection points in the 1980s and around 2005. The lines are going back up, but 1990 is the last time they were anywhere near as low as they were in 2023. And in 2023, we see starts actually dip below completes, presumably because the Fed started raising interest rates in 2022.

One of my basic theses is that the housing market should be able to deliver units at significant scale without near-zero interest rates, which are a phenomenon unique to the 21st century. From around 1970 to 1985ish, we see huge ups and downs; maybe some of you, dear subscribers, have war stories of epic booms and busts during that era of real estate.

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With the caveat that generations are a largely arbitrary concept, Pew assumes that millennials were born from 1981 to 1996. We are famously the largest generation in U.S. history. Many of us hit the job market in the nadir or aftermath of the great recession, and reached our 20s and 30s around the time the meaning of “housing crisis” was transitioning from “my house lost value” to “I, a young professional with a decent job, might never be able to afford to buy a house.”

Someone born in 1981 was ~24 in 2005, when housing production collapsed, then stagnated for more than half a decade. The baby boomers who spend their days advocating against zoning reforms routinely brush off younger people’s frustrations about housing …

… Yet our protestations are not whining, laziness, or unrealistic expectations. They are a normal reaction to the empirically observable reality of a dire housing shortage.

The housing shortage is a literal shortage and, as we will now see in this series of maps, there really is a nationwide affordability crisis after decades of slowing home construction.

We begin in 1980 when coastal California was pioneering the disconnect between home prices and incomes. I take this as evidence that people not being able to afford a home they bought only a few years prior is a new, ahistorical phenomenon.

Two decades hence, a few areas, mostly the northeast and what looks to be Denver, had started to feel the squeeze. I grew up in South Carolina, so I can tell you the yellow at the bottom of the Palmetto State is Beaufort County, known for its resort and retirement enclaves (plus Parris Island, one of two U.S. Marine boot camps).

By 2019, there was a national “coastal” housing crisis, though Nevada and Arizona were also faltering, despite being two (reputed) epicenters of late 2000s overbuilding (or “overbuilding” with air quotes, as might prefer).

And of course, by 2022, the bottom had fallen out. Supply chain issues were snarling housing production, while any part of the country that people had any interest in moving to was swamped by demand. Note well that coastal California got worse. In the race to the bottom, its only competition is Hawaii and Collier County in South Florida.

Now, as a bonus, we can truly appreciate indices for home prices and monthly rent:

The basic necessity of shelter has become exponentially more expensive over time.

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Thanks to my 399 subscribers, especially my 11 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, especially on my concept for a real estate financing platform, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

Do you think abundance is a viable strategy to make housing inexpensive? My family’s recent visit to the Seattle area pushed that question to the front of my mind.

My friend has a new piece sharing his disappointment with Seattle, particularly the horrific spectacle of individuals living on the street, many tormented by hard drug use and festering medical conditions. These are human beings and Addison is careful to humanize them and recognize their inherent dignity. He also notes that he has not seen such mass homelessness and suffering in DC or New York City, which seem to have recovered better from the pandemic.

My wife and I drove our three young kids to and from Seattle’s Pike Place Market, never seeing the nearby blocks that have become skid rows. She did say, based on her own observations and her parents’ experience living in the area, that Seattle has gotten rougher in the past eight years. Redmond’s Target has had to lock away items due to organized retail theft. Happily, I never felt unsafe during our visit. I met someone for lunch near Nordstrom’s flagship store with a security guard out front, then walked around a little afterward. The area was fine, the architecture was above average! My lunch companion explained that the true “business downtown” with few residents has fared far worse, setting up conflict between the much reduced population of office workers and people living on the street or just milling around.

Though I did see many clusters of tents in Seattle proper while driving in the city, to me the deeper sign of dysfunction was ubiquitous graffiti. Some was political, with a message that doubling down on dysfunction is the only recourse of the oppressed in a capitalist system. Obviously my diagnosis is different. I saw “kill pigs” spraypainted on a sign at a park in the pleasant Green Lake streetcar suburb neighborhood, yet was somehow more surprised and disappointed to find “revolution is coming” tagged on a nearby children’s wading pool — extravagantly self-indulgent and out of place. Disregard for children’s innocence really rubs me the wrong way.

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Another Seattle YIMBY friend shared the most overt example of urban cynicism, the top photo. “Crime keeps housing affordable.” How much does the person who wrote that have to worry about being a victim of crime, I wonder. That all leads back to my original question: Do you think abundance is a viable strategy to make housing inexpensive? How confident are you that a reasonably unencumbered market could deliver enough homes to make housing affordable to anyone with a decent income?

As I have argued at length, subsidies cannot meaningfully scale, politically or economically. So the only other realistic path to inexpensive housing is low-quality housing. I refuse to accept that option for other people. Yet it gets a lot of credence.

Note: You might object that I am neglecting social housing — public development and management of housing. I have deep seated skepticism, in general and given inefficient American bureaucracy and public administration. Public housing is also not a mainstream idea in the U.S. — not fringe, but not within the Overton window in most regions. And it has a troubled history, which I need to learn more about. So I am setting it aside in this discussion. Strictly speaking, I do not think public housing is a viable path to inexpensive housing. Some YIMBYs do, which is fine. I freely admit that they know a lot more about it than I do.

“Naturally occurring affordable housing” is typically run down garden apartments occupied by working-class families in an expensive metro area. Garden apartments are low-rise structures, usually no more than three or four stories, characterized by lots with considerable open space and greenery and trees. My wife and I lived in such a building in Alexandria’s Del Ray neighborhood, which I regularly invoke. Monthly rent was $1,200 about eight years ago, cheap for a one-bedroom, especially of that size and near Metrorail in such a desirable neighborhood. But it had hallmark problems of an outdated building: Radiators that stayed on after the weather had warmed up, thin walls, and a fuse that would blow if the microwave and toaster oven ran in concert.

Garden apartments are easy to romanticize (especially as a rationale to block denser housing). The garden imagery is a textbook case of folks mistaking pastoralism — proximity to greenery — for environmentalism, which is using resources efficiently, reducing pollution, and actually limiting ecological damage such as new exurban sprawl. At least in Northern Virginia and DC, many garden apartments are ripe for redevelopment to a more intense land use, such as mid- or high-rises. Del Ray NIMBYs live in fear that one day the garden apartments I lived in — note well, near Metrorail! — will be redeveloped into larger apartment buildings. That economic tension raises the specter of displacing current residents of old garden apartments. Purchasing and “preserving” such housing is a respected regional housing strategy.

Since I mention displacement, my understanding is that empirical studies find that new market-rate housing has a positive or close to neutral effect on whether residents in the immediate vicinity can stay in their homes, and a robust positive effect at the regional level on housing affordability. You might be able to persuade me that new development will displace low-income families in the short term. Nevertheless, that population will ultimately suffer the most if their region builds no new housing.

As in my discussion of housing subsidies, I cannot fault someone who has these concerns and sees preserving “naturally occurring affordable housing” as a necessity. There are people suffering now who — I and presumably most people would agree — deserve help now. Yes, and: the stakes of these discussions are so high because the people living in cheap, low-quality housing have such meager alternatives.

The full implications are probably obvious to you, dear reader. Housing reform supporters of almost all stripes, including affordable housing advocates — in non-profits, in government, in academia and think tanks — will regularly acknowledge that supply is an underlying problem, the subtext being that ‘someone should do something about it.’ The YIMBY movement is so important because we are. We uniquely target the root cause of the housing crisis. Let that sink in for a moment. I know not to say that as a fundraiser to a community foundation, we should always emphasize our partnerships and the coalitions we build. Still, our role is unique.

Do not be discouraged by pushback from “neighborhood defenders” (do not get me started) or fellow advocates. We take the most NIMBY flack because we fly directly over the target. This is why the YIMBY movement must professionalize. This is why I intend to start a company that helps finance missing middle housing and the small developers who create it. Affordable housing always makes me think, “We need a bigger boat.” Building that boat is the essence of YIMBY. No one else will do it for us.

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On a recent road trip, we stopped in Pittsburgh to catch up with my best friend from childhood over lunch at a family-friendly bistro. Highland Park is a streetcar suburb about 15 minutes from downtown by car. I was blown away by its rich fabric of closely spaced homes with porches and small setbacks, the mixture of housing types, the compact walkability, and the eponymous monumental park which, along with a zoo and aquarium, covers about half of the neighborhood’s land.

Highland Park embodies urbanism’s entirely attainable promise of a better way of living, which captured my imagination and ignited my passion two years ago. Streets are forever, as the saying goes, so Highland Park’s narrow streets would be difficult to emulate in a newer suburb laid out for cars, but my visit was an exhilarating reminder that human-scale land use and gentle density are remarkably unremarkable. The basic ingredients were simple. Assembling them again today would not be a moonshot.

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The toughest element to replicate might be the fine details of the traditional architecture, reflecting accumulated taste and knowledge. Soaking in Highland Park’s quiet beauty, I sensed that the things I liked about it were not only acclimation to the traditional as the familiar, but also its builders’ subtle mastery of proportion, texture, and geometry. I am not an architect or even a conservative. If anything, my aesthetic opinions tend to be weak. Yet I do want to suggest that those old guys, so to speak, were onto something. The careful intention behind what I saw around me was palpable. Highland Park felt humanizing and timeless.

It was a place I wanted to spend time, perhaps the litmus test for good urbanism. My friend said playing kids have the run of local streets. The narrow rights of way, of course, naturally slow drivers down (and hint at the value of retrofitting wide suburban streets). Rowhouses, triplexes, modest detached homes, and gorgeous Victorian mansions all stand right next to each other. The neighborhood was clearly built with less economic segregation than we take for granted today. The people in the mansions did not yet have the innovation of exclusionary zoning.

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The namesake park is equally worthy of praise. I got excited as soon as I saw the giant columns flanking the entrance, topped with victorious bronzes, naturally.

The confidence and optimism projected by this entrance seems almost foreign today.

There is no substitute for large, old trees, which helped make time stand still.

The park’s up-to-date playground was pleasantly busy on a Thursday afternoon.

A reservoir is integrated into the site as another amenity for visitors to stroll around.

A Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation plaque dates the park to 1889.

A beautiful bay window in a house near the park embodied, for me, a marriage of private and public space that American urbanists are now working to recapture. Singing in the Rain star Gene Kelly was born in Highland Park. I felt a lot like him in that movie’s iconic titular scene. Wandering his old neighborhood filled me with exuberant wonder for something usually taken for granted, especially in its heyday.

Crucially, Highland Park’s beauty clearly emerged organically. I spotted a mansion with a large stained glass window in it. I doubt anyone had to be told by a local authority to do that, or receive permission from neighbors. The park was built without anxiety that someone would spend the night there or taint the reservoir. The streets were laid out in the expectation that they would be a place to socialize.

I would go as far as to argue that Highland Park is as natural as the rain. We can build places like it again, if we give ourselves permission.

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If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, I would love to hear from you at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I am more than glad to answer questions from readers. And totally open to suggestions of topics to write about! Visit my grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia at yimbysofnova.org.