Build more homes? Now, some say ‘yes’ in my backyard
Across the English-speaking world, the cost of housing —whether for rent or to own—has been increasing faster than incomes . That’s uncomfortable for middle-class families , but it really squeezes those with lower incomes. They have to spend an ever-larger share of their paychecks on rent; they have to live far from their jobs; and/or they’re forced into overcrowded units .
As a result, more government leaders are starting to say “yes” in my backyard . To understand what that means, you should learn two acronyms.
The first is NIMBY. It stands for “ not in my backyard .” NIMBY is a term attached to people—usually homeowners in wealthy areas —that oppose building new houses and apartments close to where they live. They may not oppose new houses or apartments in theory ; they just don’t want them anywhere near where they live, not in my backyard.
In many places, the local residents have a lot of influence over what and how much can be built in their neighborhoods. And many homeowners , having arrived in a place , want that place to never change —so they use their votes and their influence to block new construction of houses and apartments. This is certainly not everyone. But this NIMBY attitude—saying “you can’t do this in my backyard”—this attitude is common.
The other acronym is YIMBY—that’s “yes in my backyard.” People call themselves YIMBY’s if they think the best answer to high housing prices is to build more houses. They say “yes” to new apartments and houses where they live. They embrace the change in their neighborhoods and they think building more homes is an answer to high housing costs.
The law in many English-speaking places gives the advantage to the NIMBYs. England, for example, has a “green belt” that surrounds its towns and cities, including London. New construction is prohibited in the green belt. While that sounds lovely , most of the green belt is just vacant land or farmland . Only a small percentage is “green” in the sense of nature or preservation .
The green belt was created to prevent urban sprawl . But today, it means that everyone is crammed into the existing city limits or relegated to very long commutes . London’s population has increased from about seven to about nine million people in the last 30 years, but the number of homes has not kept up. Meanwhile, there’s a belt of vacant land surrounding the capital that can’t be used for new homes.
The U.S. and Canada are different. There, local zoning rules put strict limits on building. In cities, that means height : there’s a limit on how tall buildings can be. In the towns, it’s about space . In many areas, just one single-family house can be on each lot , and most towns require lots to be at least a minimum size. That means by law, many places have only single-family detached homes , with plenty of space in between them.
This makes construction of apartments complicated . Developers often have to apply for a variance or a special permit . Whenever someone proposes building taller buildings or apartments, local residents go to public meetings and oppose the building projects.
YIMBYs say these restrictive policies create artificial scarcity . They inflate the price of existing homes by limiting how many new homes can be built. And the people who bear the greatest burden are the ones who can least afford it : the people who work in the service sector , delivering packages , serving school lunches, making lattes, and driving buses.
But there are some legitimate arguments on the other side, too. Residents are concerned about traffic ; building high-rise apartments in an area without adequate parking or highways can lead to delays and pollution . There are concerns about schools, too; if a lot of new people move into a town, there will be more kids in school. And schools are a town’s biggest expense .
Some people argue that the residents of a place should be able to decide how their town looks. Some people want to live in a town with picturesque houses and lots of green space, small country roads, and not much traffic. Is that really so bad? Shouldn’t the residents of a town have the right to decide how the land in that town is used?
For decades, the NIMBYs pretty much got their way in established towns and cities. But now, the momentum is shifting in favor of the YIMBYs. The U.K. just got a new government. In the election campaign , the Labour Party was clear about its intention to allow more building around London. It wants to allow building on some of the green belt and has promised to encourage 1.5 million new homes in its first five years in power .
The U.S. and Canada are much more fragmented , since these rules are typically made at the town and city level. But some cities now allow small apartment buildings where only single-family homes were permitted before. Others allow homeowners to put a second, smaller house in their backyards. Some neighborhoods now have height minimums —not maximums—for new construction. Kamala Harris, the American vice-president and current candidate for the presidency , has voiced support for more housing construction .
In Australia, the state of New South Wales is scrapping many zoning restrictions around public transport stations. In Canada, the province of British Columbia, which includes Vancouver, passed an expansion of the number of units allowed on each city lot. The federal Minister of Housing has made homebuilding and housing affordability a priority .
Jeff’s take
So you might be wondering —I’ve seen all these pictures of big new houses in the United States. Where are they? Often, they are on the outskirts of town. These are newer areas being built, they’re not new homes in existing towns and cities. For homebuilders , it’s far easier to build a new home farther from the city than to fight existing regulations and get new homes inside an established town or city.
Here’s an extreme example, just to give you an idea of how strange this is: you think of New York City as a city of tall buildings. When I lived there, I lived on 55th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenue. This is a five-minute walk from Columbus Circle, at the corner of Central Park. It’s a fifteen-minute walk from Times Square, where I worked. This is the middle of everything. My building—and almost every building on my street—was five stories high . Five.
And it’s like that in a lot of Manhattan. People are desperate to move to New York City, rents are sky-high , and yet large, large parts of the city are full of old, low-rise buildings. It’s not because the landowners don’t want to build higher. There are limits on how high the buildings can be, and how many units can be built per square meter of land.
New York is a special case, but this basic story is true almost anywhere in the U.S. Local governments put limits on how many units can be built per square meter of land. And these limits mean that if a metro area grows, it has to grow out—by taking up more land far from the city center—rather than up.
Voters, though—they like this kind of zoning: once someone owns a house in an area, they don’t want to let others in. And it contributes to high housing prices in the most productive cities.
I liked New York a lot, but ultimately I didn’t love it enough to pay those prices. After three years of renting, I moved away again.
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