Great essay! To another commenter’s point about the narcissism of small differences — this is the norm, and not just in activism. It happens so much so that we should not be surprised to see it.
Great explanation. I, too, am a member of all three. At last year's CNU in Charlotte, I appreciated the debate between Kevin and Laura. Having seen the ramifications of not paying attention to design and context I tend not to go into the supply at all costs, but am a huge advocate for incrementally increasing supply. I really appreciate you laying this all out.
Paige Saunders captures one piece of this dynamic well in his Youtube series on housing: people move to particular neighborhoods because they like them. Someone whose land-use policy stances are motivated primarily by a love for traditional, mid-density urbanism is a YIMBY in suburbia, and a NIMBY in San Francisco or Boston.
I'll add, too, that from a Strong Towns perspective, the YIMBY desire for more supply -- especially using the existing financial tools, which are very top-down -- frequently undermines the YIMBY goal of price reduction in a way that I find both obvious and frustrating. Large scale upzoning distorts land prices. Large leaps in the development pattern stagnates development. Reliance on a few top-down, corporate construction ensures supply will always be constrained.
Try having this conversation with a true believer, though, and it is bewildering. Build, build, build, is an effective mantra for its simplicity, but it doesn't capture even half the problem with housing affordability today.
Is your objection to YIMBYs who favor large scale upzoning but oppose smaller scale upzoning? (I'm not aware that such people exist.) Or is it to YIMBYs who favor upzoning larger than Strong Towns favors? Or is it to YIMBYs who participate in, validate, and compromise to preserve the current regime of targeted large-scale upzonings while leaving incremental development generally illegal?
First off - I am coming to this late - thank you for writing this and breaking down a rift I see in housing discourse, but often is poorly explored on mediums like Twitter. Unfortunately, in activism broadly there is a huge tendency for the “narcissism of small differences” to get in the way of making common cause. As someone who comes from the younger YIMBY side of things, it is easy for us to dismiss the perspective of an older movement - probably mostly to our detriment (that said, most YIMBYs I know, including myself, really enjoy Strong Towns and have learned a lot from its perspective, for what its worth)
I think one point that would be interesting to explore is how the location you live in shapes how you approach the dichotomy. To your point, YIMBYs tend to live in places where housing has genuinely become a crisis - which is thankfully not most cities in America. In a crisis, one fundamental truth is that speed matters - and to achieve speed, you need some level of top-down action. So the YIMBY ethos is partially shaped by this environment. There is also a personal dimension to this - the fact that we are younger and disproportionately likely to have had the housing crisis impact our own lives and our friends is part of this too. I remember getting quite angry when a CNU-affiliated person in LA was blocking a housing project in his neighborhood that he did not like because of the architecture - knowing that his single-family home had appreciated 3x in the last 10 years, while at the time my wife and I were struggling to buy anything.
That said, in most cities in America that are not yet in acute crisis, taking a more organic, incremental approach is almost certainly better than broad sweeping change, especially if there is an effort to try to regularly revisit those policies and continue to change in response to changing circumstances. So more Strong Towns, less pure YIMBY (though again, I think there is much overlap here!)
I think there is a separate dimension to the disagreement, which concerns a post-modern critique of how architectural taste and wealth are intertwined. But that is for another day 🙂
Thank you, yes location/region matters a lot, as does generation. I'm from one of the most expensive places on earth (Silicon Valley).
I don't think most people are really economic home voters, though it's easier to despise their views on account of their (unrealized) gains. My parents are still in their now $3.5m ranch. But it's not really money, because to obtain the gains you have to sell and then there's no where to move to. So they sit. People do really care about the status quo in their community and feel threatened by change. Traffic and parking is a big one. If everyone has to drive everywhere new people make getting around worse. They don't believe in walkability because they've never lived that way. I very much get the personal experience of it; I've been economically displaced twice, I have lost friends and communities I love to the housing crisis in multiple regions. Older people really do have a hard time feeling this in their bones. It basically wasn't a thing 30-years ago.
I don't know that I agree that speed requires top-down action. Suburban expansion was the solution to the last housing crisis, and that did require top down infrastructure planning and coding. But prior to that, American cities grew very quickly in the industrial era through small scale, massive deployment, incremental development everywhere. We have lost that ecosystem and we barely understand or remember it. But I think we should bring it back and I think it will work better than a new round of top-down planning. Suburban expansion DID solve the housing crisis of its time, but it did so in a way that seeded many subsequent problems.
Good points here - a couple of thoughts in response
1) I would agree 90% with what you say about the homevoter explanation is simplistic - its 100% true that new housing causes genuine practical change/disruptions (parking, traffic, noise, etc) and I think its fair to infer that for the majority of NIMBYs, these issues are at the forefront of their mind, not home values
That said - at its core, home values are playing a very distortionary role by shielding these folks from the negative impacts of the housing crisis, and making those negative tradeoffs (parking/traffic/etc) more salient in proportion to the positive benefits. As you say - they are protected from feeling the crisis in their bones. Thus I still think behavior ends up lining up pretty closely to homevoter mental model in the aggregate - even if individual people are far more complex and nuanced
2) I would push back on the idea that a YIMBY-framework is a perfect symmatry to top-down suburban sprawl of the Post WW2 era. The development pattern of the Post WW2 era was not just the product of land use rules - but also unprecidented infrastructure investment by all levels of government that made this development feasible. YIMBYs have embraced a top-down model of removing land use rules - but I think most believe that what is built in its place should be market-driven, which would look very different city by city, block by block. We can debate the drawbacks of this approach in theory - but honestly the biggest issue top-down YIMBYism is having now in CA is ineffective legislation (SB9 is not producing units) not massive unintended consequences.
3) I would argue that for all the flaw of the suburb experiment of 1946-1970, most of the damage was done not in that initial period, but from 1970 to 2010. I actually think that alot of the flaws of the suburban development pattern would have started to be addressed, had there not been further draconian action by local governments that doubled down and made the problem far worse.
For instance in CA - alot of municaplities started to run into the cost of infrastructure issue in the 1970s, as they ran out of new land and put in more strict growth controls. But homevoters rebelled at the property tax increases, passed prop 13, and in the 1980s cities started to rely on massive impact fees on new development to pay for infrastructure (even infill development where the cost of the infrastructure was minimal compared to the low density neighborhoods).
1) I agree here broadly, I just don't know what actions this suggests--is it useful in persuasion or mobilization or communication? idk.
2) Yeah, I don't mean to imply it's all top-down, i just think it's comfortable with both top down and bottom up, and there are those (myself somewhat included, that are skeptical of the top down). I don't know that I think of the state taking away local zoning powers as top-down though, I suppose I mean the reliance on big firms, big finance, big engineering, etc. (5:1's, sprawl). But it is really interesting that we're not seeing the movement in CA yet (ADU's excepted), I don't think we really understand housing markets as well as we think we do.
3) This is an interesting point. I tend to focus on the earlier period b/c that's when the most damage was done to existing fabric (urban highways, etc.). But you're right that the real double, triple, quadruple down on the unproductive development pattern is later, as are the tax revolts. The tax revolts I think are a big deal that I don't think we've really got a good alternative history for--like what other thing could have been done in the face of rising values vs. incomes in the 1970's. What does that imply about the politics and economics of housing, property taxes, and development. Something to think about.
Even Mike's case against "missing middle housing" isn't that it's bad, only that it's a distraction. He's coming in large part from a climate perspective, and from that perspective I have to agree. Legalizing 2-6plexes on all lots isn't likely to rapidly change cities.
There's a little CNU/YIMBY fissure here in Portland too. Here's a comment exchange I had the last few weeks, reacting to an exercise from some local CNU-aligned thinkers.
As somebody who's probably in the NNE (YIMBY-YIMBY-CNU) sector of your two-axis grid, I will say that the best way for a CNU-aligned person to drive me up the wall personally is for them to pipe up against large or tall buildings - especially those near them personally - on the grounds that 3-7 story buildings would be better. The day that person turns out for any of the many opportunities to legalize more 3-7 story buildings in exclusive areas, I will forgive them. I haven't seen it happen yet. Some people just love holding seminars, I guess.
Thank you Michael. Being a developer really grounds me though in these debates because I can understand what the developer is doing and why. I'm sympathetic to the NU concern about the increment of development. I'm also the guy on my team pushing to do a little bit more. But with more comes more capital, more risk, etc. I think the merits to the more incremental development system (which built our cities in the 1st place) is not just in urban design but in economic resilience. But, once your housing system is as broken as the west coast (I'm from Menlo Park, CA)... well what is the appropriate next increment when a 5k sf house on a 10k sf lot costs $5M. I honestly don't know. Land price should be <20% of TDC, so that's a $25M building, at $500 psf (guessing high) hard cost, that would suggest a 40,000 sf building of FAR 4, which is... probably what a 7-story (5 floors of Type V over 2 floor podium?) or do you go to the grey area of light steal and up to like 10-stories? Probably costs more... And the politics of doing that in a neighborhood of SF houses is probably impossible. So there you are... Next best is what, building $3M townhouse condos where land cost is >33%? But once you do that, that land is now locked up for ~30-40years because of the nature of condos. Its' a really wicked problem.
Seth, I'm going to come back to this after I've finished my last City of Yes piece. https://www.cnu.nyc/newurbanism/coyho/ But I listened to the Upzone podcast today that leads off with an article by you, which I look forward to reading.
In the meantime, income inequality is obviously a big factor. Providence used to have a lot less of that. Those days are over. Here's an article on New York by Sam Stein. If you don't know his work, you should, starting with his book Capital City. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/26/musical-chairs-nyc-housing/
Here's a quote: What explains this state of affairs? Is New York City, like its nearby suburbs, failing to build enough new housing? There are still parts of the city where little housing gets built, but the number of housing units grew by about 61,000 between 2021 and 2023, and by 175,000 between 2017 and 2021. Over the last twenty-five years, a rocky period for New York during which both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the global financial crisis occurred, developers grew the city’s housing stock by about 666,000 homes (accounting for demolitions and apartment combinations), while its population grew by as much as 796,000—0.84 homes for every new resident. That is short of a one-to-one ratio, but most homes do not house just one person; the average New York City household size is 2.55 people. If new households mirrored the city as a whole and the type of new construction being built met their needs, they could theoretically fit in fewer than half the new homes. Why then...
Also worth referencing for future mention is the fact that New York City is shrinking. 2023 QUOTE from FT: Over the past three years, the population has declined by almost 500,000. On a ranking of the country’s contracting cities, New York handily takes the top spot, shrinking by 400,000 more than the next on the list (Chicago). New York City is 6 per cent smaller than in 2020, the most severe decline in the largest 50 US cities over this horizon, after San Francisco (-7 per cent).
New Urbanists have been YIMBYs since before the word existed, promoting walkable, sustainable, mixed-use urbanism in place of single-family sprawl AND working in cities. I understand the Sunbelt / New Urbanism and Not Cities generalizations but consider the work of Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) and Duany Plater-Zyberk's (DPZ) in cities. The former designed the two most profitable buildings in the history of New York City, both towers, and masterplanned the new Times Square. The latter wrote the Miami21 code that governed the design of all the new towers in Miami.
Steve mainly works in a particular part of the New Urban development spectrum (projects with lots of single-family houses and low buildings), but look at the Charter which spans the transect. And look at the Chapters. Boston is very successful, Maine is successful, Chicago is very successful and the former CNU HQ. New York has a state chapter and a city chapter. Your own Providence has Buff Chace and had the late great Bill Lennertz.And then there's Paddy...
Cutting to the chase, I frequently oppose New York YIMBYs because we've had twenty years of "just let developers build what they want and we'll have plenty of housing" and it has contributed to a more expensive and unaffordable city while simultaneously attacking the urbanism that makes New York a place people love.
I'm an urbanist. I'm a New Yorker. I want housing that 80% of the city can afford. Our current policies won't give us that. In the words of Mayor Bloomberg (the richest man in the city) and the McKinsey report he commissioned, they will give us a luxury city you have to pay for.
The way to get affordable housing is to build affordable housing. Luxury towers drive up land cost. Tower construction is expensive. Building in what are already are the densest neighborhoods are expensive. I've written about this elsewhere.
John, I think you meant Bill Dennis. Mr. Lennertz is doing a great job representing the Chapters on the CNU National Board. Cheers! And, yeah, Bill Dennis was great.
Thanks, Howard. Yes, of course I meant the great Bill Dennis. But Bill Lennertz is great too, and they were business partners with Steve Coyle at one point, as you know.
I will always remember Bill at three in the morning at a charrette reciting appropriate lines from Seinfeld. And when he came to say hello at this last CNU, unable to speak. But we still managed to communicate. Bill died too early.
It's true that there has been great new urbanist work in cities. I'm addressing the way people tend to understand new urbanism/ists, which is through the suburban work. Those other stories are much less visible in this debate, unfortunately.
I'm not I would agree with the statement "we just let developers build." New York's per capita housing construction has been quite low for decades. It's a great city that lots of people want to live in. When there's not enough housing to go around, those with more money bid up the prices for what they want, and others are left with the scraps. At the same time, it's a phenomenally difficult and expensive city to build in, so new buildings are always going to be expensive. Lowering the cost of construction is a paramount goal. I haven't seen new urbanists lead on building code reform, are there folks I'm missing?
We certainly need more "A" affordable housing. But a lack of low-income housing is not what caused prices on my street (in Providence) to double in a 5-years. It's the lack of supply for upper middle income families (the marginal buyer who sets the market price), who would happily pay less if they could. Everyone is worse off when the housing market breaks for the middle class. That's my focus.
One of my replies above should have gone here. Your comment suddenly showed up on my phone this morning. When I went to reply the app automatically put the response up above.
BTW, NYC is one of the easiest places to build as of right. I live in one of the two or three densest neighborhoods in the western world, and there is building going on all around me. Within 1,000 feet are 6 buildings going up, with the shortest one being 12 stories. The problem in my neighborhood is that land is expensive and construction is expensive. The Governor and the Mayor may have just succeeded in reducing all residential height caps, which will make land and construction more expensive, not less. Only luxury apartments can pay for expensive land, and tall towers are more expensive per sq foot.
The solution is to focus on less expensive land in the rest of the city and the region and to build less expensive building types. That will also make better, less expensive cities.
But luxury towers in expensive neighborhoods is what has produced the best profits, so that is where Big Money and Big Real Estate want to go. They control planning in New York, and they’re not interested in affordable housing, where the profits are low or non-existent.
Great essay! To another commenter’s point about the narcissism of small differences — this is the norm, and not just in activism. It happens so much so that we should not be surprised to see it.
Great explanation. I, too, am a member of all three. At last year's CNU in Charlotte, I appreciated the debate between Kevin and Laura. Having seen the ramifications of not paying attention to design and context I tend not to go into the supply at all costs, but am a huge advocate for incrementally increasing supply. I really appreciate you laying this all out.
Paige Saunders captures one piece of this dynamic well in his Youtube series on housing: people move to particular neighborhoods because they like them. Someone whose land-use policy stances are motivated primarily by a love for traditional, mid-density urbanism is a YIMBY in suburbia, and a NIMBY in San Francisco or Boston.
(https://youtu.be/kgW7qjLP12s?si=okqQ2OtRODaJ5GqF)
Fantastic article!
I'll add, too, that from a Strong Towns perspective, the YIMBY desire for more supply -- especially using the existing financial tools, which are very top-down -- frequently undermines the YIMBY goal of price reduction in a way that I find both obvious and frustrating. Large scale upzoning distorts land prices. Large leaps in the development pattern stagnates development. Reliance on a few top-down, corporate construction ensures supply will always be constrained.
Try having this conversation with a true believer, though, and it is bewildering. Build, build, build, is an effective mantra for its simplicity, but it doesn't capture even half the problem with housing affordability today.
Is your objection to YIMBYs who favor large scale upzoning but oppose smaller scale upzoning? (I'm not aware that such people exist.) Or is it to YIMBYs who favor upzoning larger than Strong Towns favors? Or is it to YIMBYs who participate in, validate, and compromise to preserve the current regime of targeted large-scale upzonings while leaving incremental development generally illegal?
I'd say a combination of the second and third, although there is obviously some nuance there.
Great overview and synthesis! - from a New Urbanist YIMBY Californian
First off - I am coming to this late - thank you for writing this and breaking down a rift I see in housing discourse, but often is poorly explored on mediums like Twitter. Unfortunately, in activism broadly there is a huge tendency for the “narcissism of small differences” to get in the way of making common cause. As someone who comes from the younger YIMBY side of things, it is easy for us to dismiss the perspective of an older movement - probably mostly to our detriment (that said, most YIMBYs I know, including myself, really enjoy Strong Towns and have learned a lot from its perspective, for what its worth)
I think one point that would be interesting to explore is how the location you live in shapes how you approach the dichotomy. To your point, YIMBYs tend to live in places where housing has genuinely become a crisis - which is thankfully not most cities in America. In a crisis, one fundamental truth is that speed matters - and to achieve speed, you need some level of top-down action. So the YIMBY ethos is partially shaped by this environment. There is also a personal dimension to this - the fact that we are younger and disproportionately likely to have had the housing crisis impact our own lives and our friends is part of this too. I remember getting quite angry when a CNU-affiliated person in LA was blocking a housing project in his neighborhood that he did not like because of the architecture - knowing that his single-family home had appreciated 3x in the last 10 years, while at the time my wife and I were struggling to buy anything.
That said, in most cities in America that are not yet in acute crisis, taking a more organic, incremental approach is almost certainly better than broad sweeping change, especially if there is an effort to try to regularly revisit those policies and continue to change in response to changing circumstances. So more Strong Towns, less pure YIMBY (though again, I think there is much overlap here!)
I think there is a separate dimension to the disagreement, which concerns a post-modern critique of how architectural taste and wealth are intertwined. But that is for another day 🙂
Thank you, yes location/region matters a lot, as does generation. I'm from one of the most expensive places on earth (Silicon Valley).
I don't think most people are really economic home voters, though it's easier to despise their views on account of their (unrealized) gains. My parents are still in their now $3.5m ranch. But it's not really money, because to obtain the gains you have to sell and then there's no where to move to. So they sit. People do really care about the status quo in their community and feel threatened by change. Traffic and parking is a big one. If everyone has to drive everywhere new people make getting around worse. They don't believe in walkability because they've never lived that way. I very much get the personal experience of it; I've been economically displaced twice, I have lost friends and communities I love to the housing crisis in multiple regions. Older people really do have a hard time feeling this in their bones. It basically wasn't a thing 30-years ago.
I don't know that I agree that speed requires top-down action. Suburban expansion was the solution to the last housing crisis, and that did require top down infrastructure planning and coding. But prior to that, American cities grew very quickly in the industrial era through small scale, massive deployment, incremental development everywhere. We have lost that ecosystem and we barely understand or remember it. But I think we should bring it back and I think it will work better than a new round of top-down planning. Suburban expansion DID solve the housing crisis of its time, but it did so in a way that seeded many subsequent problems.
Good points here - a couple of thoughts in response
1) I would agree 90% with what you say about the homevoter explanation is simplistic - its 100% true that new housing causes genuine practical change/disruptions (parking, traffic, noise, etc) and I think its fair to infer that for the majority of NIMBYs, these issues are at the forefront of their mind, not home values
That said - at its core, home values are playing a very distortionary role by shielding these folks from the negative impacts of the housing crisis, and making those negative tradeoffs (parking/traffic/etc) more salient in proportion to the positive benefits. As you say - they are protected from feeling the crisis in their bones. Thus I still think behavior ends up lining up pretty closely to homevoter mental model in the aggregate - even if individual people are far more complex and nuanced
2) I would push back on the idea that a YIMBY-framework is a perfect symmatry to top-down suburban sprawl of the Post WW2 era. The development pattern of the Post WW2 era was not just the product of land use rules - but also unprecidented infrastructure investment by all levels of government that made this development feasible. YIMBYs have embraced a top-down model of removing land use rules - but I think most believe that what is built in its place should be market-driven, which would look very different city by city, block by block. We can debate the drawbacks of this approach in theory - but honestly the biggest issue top-down YIMBYism is having now in CA is ineffective legislation (SB9 is not producing units) not massive unintended consequences.
3) I would argue that for all the flaw of the suburb experiment of 1946-1970, most of the damage was done not in that initial period, but from 1970 to 2010. I actually think that alot of the flaws of the suburban development pattern would have started to be addressed, had there not been further draconian action by local governments that doubled down and made the problem far worse.
For instance in CA - alot of municaplities started to run into the cost of infrastructure issue in the 1970s, as they ran out of new land and put in more strict growth controls. But homevoters rebelled at the property tax increases, passed prop 13, and in the 1980s cities started to rely on massive impact fees on new development to pay for infrastructure (even infill development where the cost of the infrastructure was minimal compared to the low density neighborhoods).
1) I agree here broadly, I just don't know what actions this suggests--is it useful in persuasion or mobilization or communication? idk.
2) Yeah, I don't mean to imply it's all top-down, i just think it's comfortable with both top down and bottom up, and there are those (myself somewhat included, that are skeptical of the top down). I don't know that I think of the state taking away local zoning powers as top-down though, I suppose I mean the reliance on big firms, big finance, big engineering, etc. (5:1's, sprawl). But it is really interesting that we're not seeing the movement in CA yet (ADU's excepted), I don't think we really understand housing markets as well as we think we do.
3) This is an interesting point. I tend to focus on the earlier period b/c that's when the most damage was done to existing fabric (urban highways, etc.). But you're right that the real double, triple, quadruple down on the unproductive development pattern is later, as are the tax revolts. The tax revolts I think are a big deal that I don't think we've really got a good alternative history for--like what other thing could have been done in the face of rising values vs. incomes in the 1970's. What does that imply about the politics and economics of housing, property taxes, and development. Something to think about.
Nicely observed post, Seth.
Even Mike's case against "missing middle housing" isn't that it's bad, only that it's a distraction. He's coming in large part from a climate perspective, and from that perspective I have to agree. Legalizing 2-6plexes on all lots isn't likely to rapidly change cities.
There's a little CNU/YIMBY fissure here in Portland too. Here's a comment exchange I had the last few weeks, reacting to an exercise from some local CNU-aligned thinkers.
https://bikeportland.org/2024/02/22/legos-growth-and-dynamic-density-in-irvington-384088#comment-7516488
As somebody who's probably in the NNE (YIMBY-YIMBY-CNU) sector of your two-axis grid, I will say that the best way for a CNU-aligned person to drive me up the wall personally is for them to pipe up against large or tall buildings - especially those near them personally - on the grounds that 3-7 story buildings would be better. The day that person turns out for any of the many opportunities to legalize more 3-7 story buildings in exclusive areas, I will forgive them. I haven't seen it happen yet. Some people just love holding seminars, I guess.
Thank you Michael. Being a developer really grounds me though in these debates because I can understand what the developer is doing and why. I'm sympathetic to the NU concern about the increment of development. I'm also the guy on my team pushing to do a little bit more. But with more comes more capital, more risk, etc. I think the merits to the more incremental development system (which built our cities in the 1st place) is not just in urban design but in economic resilience. But, once your housing system is as broken as the west coast (I'm from Menlo Park, CA)... well what is the appropriate next increment when a 5k sf house on a 10k sf lot costs $5M. I honestly don't know. Land price should be <20% of TDC, so that's a $25M building, at $500 psf (guessing high) hard cost, that would suggest a 40,000 sf building of FAR 4, which is... probably what a 7-story (5 floors of Type V over 2 floor podium?) or do you go to the grey area of light steal and up to like 10-stories? Probably costs more... And the politics of doing that in a neighborhood of SF houses is probably impossible. So there you are... Next best is what, building $3M townhouse condos where land cost is >33%? But once you do that, that land is now locked up for ~30-40years because of the nature of condos. Its' a really wicked problem.
Seth, I'm going to come back to this after I've finished my last City of Yes piece. https://www.cnu.nyc/newurbanism/coyho/ But I listened to the Upzone podcast today that leads off with an article by you, which I look forward to reading.
In the meantime, income inequality is obviously a big factor. Providence used to have a lot less of that. Those days are over. Here's an article on New York by Sam Stein. If you don't know his work, you should, starting with his book Capital City. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/26/musical-chairs-nyc-housing/
Here's a quote: What explains this state of affairs? Is New York City, like its nearby suburbs, failing to build enough new housing? There are still parts of the city where little housing gets built, but the number of housing units grew by about 61,000 between 2021 and 2023, and by 175,000 between 2017 and 2021. Over the last twenty-five years, a rocky period for New York during which both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the global financial crisis occurred, developers grew the city’s housing stock by about 666,000 homes (accounting for demolitions and apartment combinations), while its population grew by as much as 796,000—0.84 homes for every new resident. That is short of a one-to-one ratio, but most homes do not house just one person; the average New York City household size is 2.55 people. If new households mirrored the city as a whole and the type of new construction being built met their needs, they could theoretically fit in fewer than half the new homes. Why then...
Also worth referencing for future mention is the fact that New York City is shrinking. 2023 QUOTE from FT: Over the past three years, the population has declined by almost 500,000. On a ranking of the country’s contracting cities, New York handily takes the top spot, shrinking by 400,000 more than the next on the list (Chicago). New York City is 6 per cent smaller than in 2020, the most severe decline in the largest 50 US cities over this horizon, after San Francisco (-7 per cent).
https://www.ft.com/content/6c490381-d2f0-4691-a65f-219fab2a2202
Seth, I don't think what you say below accurately reflects the situation in New York City. "Location, Location, Location." I’ll say more later. John
@seth_zeren
New Urbanists have been YIMBYs since before the word existed, promoting walkable, sustainable, mixed-use urbanism in place of single-family sprawl AND working in cities. I understand the Sunbelt / New Urbanism and Not Cities generalizations but consider the work of Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) and Duany Plater-Zyberk's (DPZ) in cities. The former designed the two most profitable buildings in the history of New York City, both towers, and masterplanned the new Times Square. The latter wrote the Miami21 code that governed the design of all the new towers in Miami.
Steve mainly works in a particular part of the New Urban development spectrum (projects with lots of single-family houses and low buildings), but look at the Charter which spans the transect. And look at the Chapters. Boston is very successful, Maine is successful, Chicago is very successful and the former CNU HQ. New York has a state chapter and a city chapter. Your own Providence has Buff Chace and had the late great Bill Lennertz.And then there's Paddy...
Cutting to the chase, I frequently oppose New York YIMBYs because we've had twenty years of "just let developers build what they want and we'll have plenty of housing" and it has contributed to a more expensive and unaffordable city while simultaneously attacking the urbanism that makes New York a place people love.
I'm an urbanist. I'm a New Yorker. I want housing that 80% of the city can afford. Our current policies won't give us that. In the words of Mayor Bloomberg (the richest man in the city) and the McKinsey report he commissioned, they will give us a luxury city you have to pay for.
The way to get affordable housing is to build affordable housing. Luxury towers drive up land cost. Tower construction is expensive. Building in what are already are the densest neighborhoods are expensive. I've written about this elsewhere.
John, I think you meant Bill Dennis. Mr. Lennertz is doing a great job representing the Chapters on the CNU National Board. Cheers! And, yeah, Bill Dennis was great.
Thanks, Howard. Yes, of course I meant the great Bill Dennis. But Bill Lennertz is great too, and they were business partners with Steve Coyle at one point, as you know.
I will always remember Bill at three in the morning at a charrette reciting appropriate lines from Seinfeld. And when he came to say hello at this last CNU, unable to speak. But we still managed to communicate. Bill died too early.
Hi John,
It's true that there has been great new urbanist work in cities. I'm addressing the way people tend to understand new urbanism/ists, which is through the suburban work. Those other stories are much less visible in this debate, unfortunately.
I'm not I would agree with the statement "we just let developers build." New York's per capita housing construction has been quite low for decades. It's a great city that lots of people want to live in. When there's not enough housing to go around, those with more money bid up the prices for what they want, and others are left with the scraps. At the same time, it's a phenomenally difficult and expensive city to build in, so new buildings are always going to be expensive. Lowering the cost of construction is a paramount goal. I haven't seen new urbanists lead on building code reform, are there folks I'm missing?
We certainly need more "A" affordable housing. But a lack of low-income housing is not what caused prices on my street (in Providence) to double in a 5-years. It's the lack of supply for upper middle income families (the marginal buyer who sets the market price), who would happily pay less if they could. Everyone is worse off when the housing market breaks for the middle class. That's my focus.
One of my replies above should have gone here. Your comment suddenly showed up on my phone this morning. When I went to reply the app automatically put the response up above.
BTW, NYC is one of the easiest places to build as of right. I live in one of the two or three densest neighborhoods in the western world, and there is building going on all around me. Within 1,000 feet are 6 buildings going up, with the shortest one being 12 stories. The problem in my neighborhood is that land is expensive and construction is expensive. The Governor and the Mayor may have just succeeded in reducing all residential height caps, which will make land and construction more expensive, not less. Only luxury apartments can pay for expensive land, and tall towers are more expensive per sq foot.
The solution is to focus on less expensive land in the rest of the city and the region and to build less expensive building types. That will also make better, less expensive cities.
But luxury towers in expensive neighborhoods is what has produced the best profits, so that is where Big Money and Big Real Estate want to go. They control planning in New York, and they’re not interested in affordable housing, where the profits are low or non-existent.
More later,
John