With Local Control Comes Local Responsibility
Local electeds will allow more housing to be built or watch state government step in
I finally read former California YIMBY policy director
’s survey of the discourse surrounding Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s hot new book Abundance (via ’s thoughtful riff). Ned makes a great point that is routinely overlooked: YIMBY is a grassroots movement. We are a popular uprising against the housing shortage and crushingly high prices. Everything the YIMBY movement has achieved in eleven years of existence — our organizations, agenda, and raw political power — emerged organically, from the bottom up. Politicians have had to accept or at least engage with our supply-centric framing of the housing crisis.YIMBY clearly inspired the emerging abundance movement. California YIMBY and the Abundance Network share a co-founder, for example. Much of the discussion around Abundance is how to emulate the YIMBY movement’s success in other domains. Just as the YIMBY movement grew out of the housing crisis, abundance or, if you prefer, supply-side liberalism (with a very small l that includes right-of-center liberals like me) is a direct response to the cost of living crisis and broader failure of heavily regulated or government-run industries from housing to transportation infrastructure to energy to childcare. No matter what anyone says, normal people’s frustration will grow as these problems continue to worsen, especially the housing crisis. And they will, as people do, naturally look for someone to blame.
That should give pause to local politicians because they have formal authority over permitting, which slows down or scares off many development projects, and, with rare exception, the zoning that has literally outlawed inexpensive housing. They control the chokepoints that are driving the housing crisis. The buck stops with them.
My argument is straightforward: Granting that the housing affordability crisis is at root a shortage driven by a failure of local government regulation, local elected officials will either play an active role in fixing those regulations or be overruled as the YIMBY movement and other advocates enact legislative fixes at the state level.
This is not a threat or even a promise, really just an observation. YIMBYs recently wrapped up a disappointing but instructive second annual legislative session in Richmond. My friends make electoral endorsements, lobby, and partner with lawmakers at the local and state (commonwealth) level. Some of the most pro-growth local electeds I know might read this, people I genuinely like and who in my experience genuinely agree with the YIMBY policy platform. So why am I putting such a fine point on this? In part to try to push local officials toward YIMBY policies, sure, but also to appeal to their self-interest. Because I have honestly started to think of local control over land use and housing policy as a use it or lose it proposition.
To tell the story of housing’s evolution into a salient political issue, I need look no further than my own perception over time. I arrived in the DC area around 2012 and after a year of internships got a job and started paying my own rent. A good place was not exactly easy to find but I was able to pay ~$800 a month, maybe around $1,000. I met my wife in early 2016 and we got engaged at the end of the year. We married the summer of 2017. Rent for her large one-bedroom was $1,200. Maybe because I was looking to the future, I started noticing around that time that housing was getting pretty expensive, and I wondered if we would ever be able to afford to buy a home.
As a topical aside from my days as a journalist, during the debate over Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the main tax lobbyist for the National Association of Realtors — otherwise a very helpful and all around nice guy — put me in a mind-bending distortion field as he argued against cutting the mortgage interest tax deduction. Citing a commissioned consulting firm study, the lobbyist claimed that even though the deduction was priced into housing and thus did not actually save homebuyers money, cutting the deduction would cause a shock of reduced home values, triggering a cataclysmic economic depression. Obviously that argument holds no water today.
It was maybe around 2018 that I was lamenting to a friend that I wished presidential candidates would choose three important issues to focus on. She asked what I would prioritize and I mentioned housing. ‘What about healthcare?’ my friend asked. ‘You have to have a healthcare plan.’ Fine, I said, I would find some super-smart conservative healthcare expert, but housing felt like the biggest issue no one was talking about. As a DC reporter in the years prior I had detected hardly any mention of housing affordability on Capitol Hill.
During the few years before 2020, the housing crisis transitioned from being a pure kitchen table issue and started showing up on politicians’ radar as a voter concern. The YIMBY movement gave voice to that concern, making national news.
By the time our first child arrived in early 2019, my dad’s generosity had resolved my own housing anxiety, but I still worried for our peers (some of our dear friends just moved into a beautiful townhome after years of trying). Then the pandemic hit. As explained by friend of the blog
, the California/coastal cities+Denver housing crisis metastasized nationwide. People fled high-cost metro areas and sought more space as they spent more time at home, causing a demand shock. I wondered if office buildings could be converted into apartments (usually not worth it, I would later learn). Federal politicians had to talk about housing, even though they could not really do much to make it cheaper. At the local and state levels, zoning reform fights ramped up. I discovered urbanism in early 2021 and founded YIMBYs of NoVA that August. We led two campaigns to legalize missing middle in Arlington and Alexandria. Realizing years of work lay ahead, my team settled into the grind, God bless them.We can now properly survey local control over land use. The key point to understand is that it is the most important power reserved for local government, especially in Dillon Rule states like Virginia where local governments only have the paltry powers formally granted to them by the state. I am sure lawyerly, savvy council members and mayors could give me compelling, substantive arguments in favor of local control. But their position pretty clearly boils down to, ‘I have this power and do not want to give it up.’ That is totally rational, predictable behavior. It would be weird for a politician to blithely go along with another level of government impinging on their most important power, one their voters and other stakeholders care a lot about. I do know a former mayor who was baffled that pro-housing local electeds chafe at state-level reform, but she is about as hardcore a YIMBY as you can get. Tellingly, local electeds tend to change their tune about state land use authority when they “level up” to state-level office, in the words of one or two California housing advocate friends.
A silver lining of this essay’s long gestation is that I can shamelessly borrow from another piece Addison wrote, about “Zoning and Subsidiarity,” a Catholic principle that larger institutions should not interfere with or overwhelm smaller ones. This is similar to federalism and often conflated with localism, but has a major caveat: “Yet larger institutions have essential responsibilities when local institutions cannot adequately protect human dignity, meet human needs, or advance the common good.”
Addison straightforwardly argues that housing is a regional issue that local governments have mishandled. States delegated control over housing and land use to localities via zoning enabling acts, further undermining localities’ claim. My only quibble with Addison is that zoning from its inception was overtly intended to limit housing construction and exclude certain people. White Californians targeted Chinese and black Americans. Fifth Avenue business leaders wanted to get Jewish and Italian garment workers off of their sidewalks and out of their neighborhoods.1
As Addison summarizes his argument:
I think there’s a difference in both the framing and the substance of the argument between “We should take these powers away from local governments” and “Land-use powers may properly belong to a level of government higher than localities.”
Amen. Housing market dynamics are regional; people live daily life and commute across local jurisdictional boundaries. “Just live further out” is the retort. (NIMBY thinking really does boil down to, “I got here first,” which especially in an American historical and political context is another way of saying, “Might makes right.”)
Local control is under threat because of its failure to meet the needs of residents, including local voters paying exorbitant rents and property taxes. A shrinking segment of people truly benefits from tight zoning, even in California where Prop. 13 capped many homeowners’ property tax payments decades ago. Enjoy your million-dollar view of people sleeping in cars, motorhomes, parks, and on the sidewalk. (“I got mine” is another core feature of NIMBY thought, even in the face of abject suffering.)
Local elected officials’ best hope of conserving local control over land use and housing is to use that power to enable the construction of many more homes, which is the only way to bring housing prices down to a level needed to help vulnerable people at scale, even if they still require a subsidy. Here I mandatorily acknowledge that some people will always need help paying for housing. However, I want to push back on a few advocates who intone that supply alone cannot make housing affordable. These chamber echoes risk picking a losing argument. Because saying that supply alone cannot make housing affordable is like saying that ending a famine requires more than just food. Or that firefighters cannot put out every fire with water. It is correct but only in a specific context that muddles the nature of the problem. If California were — hypothetically — on fire, water would matter most. If we agree there is a massive housing shortage, downplaying supply in broad strokes is confusing and unhelpful.
Before negativity sidetracks us, I should note that local electeds can make the case for zoning reform by throwing their predecessors under the bus. Few current electeds were in office in the 1970s when some housing affordability started being a middle-class problem. Or even in the 1980s and ‘90s when many municipalities downzoned with a swift decisiveness that might be procedurally illegal today. Liberal icons Harvey Milk and Dianne Feinstein were among the San Francisco council members who voted for the downzoning that sealed the city’s fate as a housing disaster zone. So did the city council member who assassinated Milk a couple of months later. This is a messy, mixed up issue. Mistakes were made, mostly in the politically distant past.
Yet that only goes so far. It remains true that today’s local electeds preside over the system that created the housing shortage and affordability crisis. They might protest that setting an agenda and implementing reform takes time; my reply would be that today is a fine day to start. They might worry that there is little they can do in the short term to unlock housing supply — parking reform can! And I can only briefly touch on the fiscal benefits of letting one’s locality grow and add new taxable property. Dense housing is a big fiscal winner, using infrastructure efficiently, consuming comparatively modest government services, and generating lots of taxes.
In a sense, localities are addicted to the housing shortage.
One challenge is that pro-housing local electeds tend to strongly support programs like bonus density that grant developers additional housing units if some share of them are subsidized. But as
put it so well, “inclusionary zoning relies on exclusionary zoning” to limit housing significantly below what renters and buyers demand, enough that developers are willing to deal with the complication and risk of including income-restricted units in a project. In a sense, localities are addicted to the housing shortage as leverage over developers and an enabler of exclusionary zoning.I must mention
’s excellent deep dive, which explores this tension:Inclusionary zoning and the discourse around it illustrates a dichotomy between approaching the housing crisis in a spirit of scarcity or in a spirit of abundance. The policy is politically attractive and gives leaders some real-world committed affordable housing to point to. They also think of their power over land use as a limited resource. As housing advocates we should steer local electeds away from feeling threatened by helping them understand that there is a larger, positive, passionate voter base and political coalition to build around solving the housing crisis than around perpetuating it and ensuring long-term demographic and economic decline.
Remind local leaders that they were elected — congratulations are in order. They can not only change laws but set the agenda. The riskiest posture they could take toward our issue is ignoring it. The housing problem is so bad and so pervasive that I can assume that every region has a rising tide of frustration, even resentment, about high rents and high property taxes and high housing costs and long commutes. We just watched high inflation take down incumbents worldwide. This is the kind of issue that makes voters angry and irrational. Local politicians who are complacent or try to downplay high housing costs while controlling housing policy are playing with fire.
State-level zoning and permitting and building code reform is gradually but steadily picking up steam. As housing continues to get more expensive in most places, it seems obvious that all of these political forces will ratchet in one direction. Local electeds are setting themselves up to lose their most cherished power. Again, it is a simple observation. This all boils down to whether the cost of housing falls on their watch or continues to spiral upward.
They have the power — to let more housing be built, to make it affordable, to fix this horrible crisis. Will they use it? They can admire that power like a dying flower or cultivate a healthy community where their constituents flourish and reward them.
Thanks to my 1,109 subscribers, especially my 18 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 am generally sympathetic to housing advocates and the YIMBY movement. That said, I do want to raise an issue worth consideration.
The local legislative limits on housing are passed by legislators. But on a day-to-day basis, the face of that legislation (zoning) is housed in the municipal planning department.
It is very hard to be the face of pro-housing legislation passed by state legislatures. The legislation does not take into account locational specifics. The planners do not have access to state legislators through which they can provide feedback about how the legislation works on the ground. And the local planners are still required to hold public hearings - often, those hearings are unanimously in opposition to the project which then creates an appearance that the planning department is ignoring the neighborhood opposition.
None of this is to argue against these state legislative solutions, but is simply to say that State legislatures and housing advocacy groups need to anticipate and understand that local planners have hard jobs and are often subjected to intimidation and threats in Trump’s America. Real efforts need to be made to provide information, testimony, and support…because in the absence of those things, most local opposition just sees a planning function that is unresponsive to their sincerely felt concerns.
Good piece, just wanted to raise an often overlooked element of this- the work isn’t done when the state legislation passes.
> …larger institutions should not interfere with or overwhelm smaller ones. This is similar to federalism and often conflated with localism, but has a major caveat: “Yet larger institutions have essential responsibilities when local institutions cannot adequately protect human dignity, meet human needs, or advance the common good.”
This is a great point, and also funny because this is one of the foundational justifications for large government: to enable a society to avoid multipolar/social traps by giving a single entity a God's eye view. It seems that YIMBYs are forcing the rest of the population to once again try to solve the tragedy of the commons.