Comment by grafmax
2 days ago
Abundance YIMBYism has many shortcomings. It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement, the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing, or the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities. Journalistic ideologues deserve little praise for dismantling the weakest counterarguments of their opponents while ignoring core criticisms.
Abundance YIMBYism in housing decreases gentrification. Gentrification happens when the only housing that is affordable is in low-income neighborhoods. If there is plenty of housing supply throughout a city, the demand for those low-income neighborhoods is lower.
Nothing in the Abundance agenda states that direct public housing is bad, per se. The argument is that what we need is more housing, and the only realistic way for that to happen is to make housing easier and cheaper to build, typically by easing zoning restrictions and other things like parking minimums that drive up costs.
These are ironically the weakest counterarguments to abundance housing. Rich people don't move to a city because of their love of 5 over 1 buildings. Otherwise, developers could just build them in rural Kansas and everyone would be happy. They move the jobs and culture, which doesn't change regardless of any new housing built. Making it easier to build privately owned housing also makes it easier to build publicly owned housing. Public housing projects are also delayed by permitting and environmental reviews and have to pay for inflated land prices and parking spaces.
Jobs and culture are indeed reasons for people to move to the city, but it’s odd to claim that housing types don’t factor into consumer demand. Because housing types do, developers are incentivized to build housing that is the most profitable (such as less dense and luxury housing) not housing that best serves the needs of low income people (as more expensive units make more money). At best we can only expect minor effects from deregulatory mechanisms.
Which brings us to public housing. The main obstacle to public housing is funding these projects. Reasonable deregulation of public housing projects makes sense, sure, even though that is not the main blocker.
But public housing deregulation is not the argument of abundance, it’s YIMBY deregulation. Its proponents claim that it’s market based supply/demand effects that need to be unleashed by deregulation to provide adequate housing. Because “abundance” holds that YIMBY deregulation is the solution - not public housing - it misdirects efforts to address housing issues faced by low income people.
What YIMBY deregulation do you view as problematic? YIMBYs aren't calling for more billionaire row towers and multifamily to single family townhouse conversions. They are calling for more apartment complexes, ADUs, and other utilitarian forms of housing.
New housing developments only gets branded as "luxury" because that's the way that housing is priced right now. It costs the city of San Francisco over $1 million to build a single affordable housing unit. Blindly throwing more money at the problem doesn't help. SF is spending $846 million on housing, over $1000 per resident. Despite this, homelessness is actually increasing. Increasing funding is something that should be prioritized after you made development as frictionless as possible. If public housing is cheaper and faster to build, more voters would be willing to support funding it.
I gave SF a lot of shit, but to be clear, they're the least problematic city in the Bay Area, as they at least allow some denser development.
> It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement
This is a puzzling critique because it seems very much in the wheelhouse of "abundance YIMBYism" to advocate for cheaper housing--an argued byproduct of which is that fewer people are displaced. It probably changes the problem statement of gentrification since, if housing is abundant and displacement is low, there's not much to distinguish "gentrification" from just "investing in the neighborhood".
>the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities
This isn't a problem caused by YIMBYism, nor one whose solutions are obstructed by it. We could by that reason malign it for not solving heart palpitations or cancer too.
This “abundance” ideology which aims to influence Democratic policy promotes YIMBYism to address housing shortages by deregulating construction. It’s this claimed benefit I’m criticizing. Public housing does address this issue, which is why I bring it up.
Similarly, gentrification is enabled by this narrow focus on YIMBYism. Upzoning increases land value. Developers build profitable market rate houses there. This increases prices in the neighborhood leading to gentrification. This in turn leads to displacement - a key phenomenon that this ideology purports to address.
My issue is not YIMBYism in particular but that it’s offered as a solution to these problems.
You are arguing as if buildling more make things worse, when in fact, this is not the case. The opposite of buildling more is building less. Building less will increase existing price a lot more on an existing neighborhood than building a new buildling will ever do.
When there's not enough housing for people to live in, people start competing on rent and bidding wars on purchases, this drives price very fast.
That's why you have to build more. To avoid the biggest issue which is a housing shortage.
Is that the ONLY solution? Of course not! Public housing is great. But the same things that prevent YIMBY policies is the same thing that prevents public housing to be built. When you advocate for more zoning to prevent new condos in your neighborhood, it's not just new condos at market price that will be prevented, it's a whole range of housing.
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"Upzoning increases land value. Developers build profitable market rate houses there"
Unless you are upzoning ONLY in low-income neighborhoods, this doesn't add up. The assumption is that upzoning makes development more attractive. But this would apply to the entire city, and would therefore increase housing supply outside those low-income neighborhoods as well, which actually reduces the propensity for displacement.
> Public housing
You can't have Vienna style public housing without having Vienna style zoning codes and building codes.
Most of the housing in Vienna would be illegal to build in like 99% of American cities.
Public housing construction typically has to follow the law as well, so how does it help in cities where increasing housing units is heavily restricted, and outright banned in 90%+ of the city? YIMBY upzoning is strictly necessary no matter what funder you want for development.
Market rate housing doesn't need to trickle down. Most NIMBY regulations focus on the prevention of building low-value housing. Let developers flood the market with small, high density units, and they'll be cheap right away.
Developers are incentivized to build whatever units are most profitable, not what lowest income people need. More expensive units make more money.
Besides that, land and construction are both limited resources that constrain developers ability to “flood the market with small, high density units.” For example in high-land-value urban areas, developers need to build expensive units to be able to make a profit.
Yes, developers are incentivized to build whatever units are most profitable, but the price per square foot is much higher for small units than for large units, so without regulations prohibiting high-density projects, you'll end up with far more units for a given amount of resources. Instead of building 20 units of 2,000 sq ft, if allowed a developer could instead build 40 units of 1,000 sq ft, for a similar cost, and sell them for less per unit but more per square foot. Without using any more land, foundation, or roofing, and only needing extra fixtures and interior walls, it would reduce the labor and materials needed per unit, while increasing the income.
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there are a ton of build code issues in the US that raise the cost of construction without substantionally improving benefits. As an example, I am in Europe right now, most apartment buildings here have single stair entry and smaller elevators, both of which are prevented by US building regs for bad reasons. Fixing these regs would expand the market for new construction at the low end (lower costs for marginal opportunities) and the high end (makes 4 unit condos feasable).
Western Democracies usually (always?) have planning laws that allow for democratic (ie for the benefit of the people) building plans. In short, we don't have to allow developers to choose.
We could equally levy pressure to improve quality.
In UK, house price inflation has well outstripped material and wage inflation, we should be getting exceptional housing that fits the need of the demos.
> the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing
Slow and unproven? Supply and demand is the most reliable law of economics. Cities like Austin that are building market rate housing are actively seeing affordability improve.
Furthermore, even if it wasn't sufficient, abundance YIMBYism would still be helpful and necessary.
> gentrification displacement is not a thing
Studies show the same percent of people move out of neighborhoods regardless of whether or not the neighborhood is gentrified. They also show that those low-income people who stay in a gentrified neighborhood see their incomes rise. Those low-income people who are in a neighborhood that is not gentrified see their income go down.
Your intuitions are wrong following them is making the problems worse.
https://www.youtube.com/@justine-underhill
Your arguments are not backed up by anything.
> gentrification and displacement
These are not actual issues with regards to housing being too expensive. These are pet issues divorced from economics.
> the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing
This is absolutely proven in the data, and even a basic thought experiment using the pigeon hole principle will show that more houses means the prices drop of existing stock.
> critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities
Why is this a critical need? More housing being built could also mean more public housing, but removing zoning and land use regulations doesn't hurt this.
It seems you are more disappointed that your personal pet political issues are being ignored in favor of a market solution to house prices.
> gentrification
Gentrification isn't actually a problem if it doesn't force lower income residents to leave. They wouldn't be forced to leave if their housing wasn't some of the only options for higher income people to inhabit
What it doesn’t address is the role of finance and the financial sector in explaining why things are the way they are.
It’s not just a missing detail it’s fatal to their entire argument.
Which isn’t an accident, since the goal of the “abundance movement” is to stop the actual progressive movements that want to take on concentrated financial power.
This is a bad-faith description of the abundance movement.
The central thesis of the abundance movement is this: Every time we make a regulation, we are making a tradeoff. In the case of housing, an example would be "zoning only for single family housing". It's trading off affordability for quieter neighborhoods. Another might be "public housing contracts must favor minority-owned contractors". It trades off affordability for the development of a disadvantaged constituency.
Over time, many of these such regulations accumulate. Environmental reviews. Impact studies. Public comment periods. And while every individual regulation might be well meaning, the totality of them creates market distortions that disincentivize or even utterly prevent the very thing we're trying to accomplish.
So, the abundance movement looks at these and says we need to think about these in terms of tradeoffs, and pare back the regulations that have bad tradeoffs. This is often derided by critics as deregulation which makes developers more profitable. While that might be a side effect, it's not the main reason. It's deregulation to remove market distortions that, in the case of housing, constrain supply and therefore drive up housing costs.
The abundance movement IS a bad faith movement. It’s entirely the creation of the donor/billionaire set and its rollout is designed to stop the Democratic Party from taking the obvious next step of tackling concentrated economic power, following the utter and abject failure of corporate centrism.
There’s literally no ambiguity here, the abundance summits feature obvious had faith actors like Andreesen.
This kind of thing has been going on for decades. It’s the same playbook as Third Way and New Dems and so on.
These people’s ideas led to the current political situation we’re in today. They don’t want to be held accountable for that.
So we get this Calvinball style collection of principles that change weekly but never seem to ever even consider doing something that Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and their friends don’t like.
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> slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing, or the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities
Your claims are unsubstantiated. I've only ever seen vague critiques by anti-abundance commentators. If you think YIMBY is wrong, then be specific in your criticisms. There is nothing special about direct public housing. It is housing built by the govt. The govt gets caught between regulations, is slower, wasteful & pays higher wages to workers. It's market rate housing but worse in every way. Chicago [1] is contemporary proof that Govt. can't build housing.
On the other hand, YIMBY Austin [2] has seen slower rent growth despite rapid migration over the last decade.
> gentrification and displacement
You realize this is a home ownership problem right ?
YIMBY doesn't cause gentrification. It is a balm to reduce the pain of inevitable gentrification. A neighborhood gentrifies because increased economic opportunity draws new transplants in. If housing supply is limited, then existing residents are going to get priced out one way or another. As a neighborhood starts to gentrify, YIMBY redevelopment projects roll in & existing landowners see large windfalls. It's great if you own. Gentrification is only bad if you rent. Even then, YIMBY redevelopment projects increase housing supply, giving locals an option to move to home ownership and reduce the magnitude of rent spikes. It curbs the supply crunch.
Anti-abundance people don't have a coherent alternative other than rent control. Rent control has an unbeaten track record of failure in the western world. Either, prices diverge [3] and create a rental class system between new tenants and old residents. Or, they turn dilapidated like America's famous inner-city 'projects'.
There are 2 ways to look at it: the empathetic lens vs the pragmatic lens.
We've looked through the empathetic lens for the existing residents. But, from a pragmatic lens, why do they deserve to live exactly where they want to ? Yes, A city should provide sufficient housing to earning families within its boundaries. But, why should a person deserve to live on a specific block over another ? The existing renter had a choice to lock a spot down by buying it, and they didn't. Now, the renter is owed no such right. The newcomer and the old renter both have a valid claim to reside on the land, and rent control takes an unequal stance by favoring the older renter over the newcomer. Even in its best rendition, rent control is discriminatory. And rent control's best rendition lives in the same realm as Santa Claus or True Communism, called 'things that never happen'. At least YIMBYism buys time and opportunity for the older renter to figure out their next move.(opportunity to buy new housing, time because rents creep up slower)
[1] https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/construction-costs-for-...
[2] https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-the-la...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/rents-...