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.
Well said. The challenge: Using local control responsibly inherently involves giving up extortionate power over developers, but the ability to extort developers or block them entirely is the entire point of local control for most of its advocates!
Even in the best case scenarios, local control supporters who want to be responsible will make incremental changes at most. In one city I work in, the most anti-housing council member strongly supported an upzoning ballot measure because it went from 5 to 8 stories of maximum height and concentrated all housing in existing commercial areas, leaving the ~80% of the city zoned single-family untouched. The max height only applied to a few dozen parcels anyway. The measure is certainly a positive step for that community, it’s just so far from what’s needed.
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.
Well said. The challenge: Using local control responsibly inherently involves giving up extortionate power over developers, but the ability to extort developers or block them entirely is the entire point of local control for most of its advocates!
Even in the best case scenarios, local control supporters who want to be responsible will make incremental changes at most. In one city I work in, the most anti-housing council member strongly supported an upzoning ballot measure because it went from 5 to 8 stories of maximum height and concentrated all housing in existing commercial areas, leaving the ~80% of the city zoned single-family untouched. The max height only applied to a few dozen parcels anyway. The measure is certainly a positive step for that community, it’s just so far from what’s needed.