Like Richard Nixon going to China, sometimes a change in policy is sold best by an unlikely proponent. Vice President Kamala Harris leading the charge for more housing supply in the United States shows just how far her party has come. Democrats have long been skeptical about overhauling supply and regulation to make housing more affordable. Harris’ $40 billion housing agenda, released last week, is a welcome recognition that drastic changes are needed to close a national shortage of 4.5 million homes.
Harris, who hails from California, the western epicenter of the national housing crisis, wants three million new homes in four years, on top of what homebuilders were already planning. That’s a punchy target: developers completed just 1.5 million units in 2023. Her campaign aims to encourage what it calls “innovative” approaches to affordable housing, like providing grants and loans to local developers and non-profit organizations. The plan leans heavily on zoning reforms and employs language about cutting red tape usually used by Republicans. Former President Barack Obama endorsed the shift in his speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night, saying his party needed to “clear away the ideas of the past” and slash outdated rules.
Nevertheless, a nationwide housing drive risks stoking homeowners’ ire in a country where the middle class derives most of its wealth from real estate and two-thirds of dwellings are occupied by their owners. Residents seek to defend property, opens new tab values at planning board meetings, for example by delaying projects so they become uneconomical. Harris’ plan would not remove local control but would use federal power to support more building.
That’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about. I’m constantly hearing people saying that “NIMBYs” are the cause of the housing crisis, which isn’t untrue, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Why do NIMBYs exist? I think the prevailing assumption is that they’re just greedy, miserly boomers who love money and hate young people, but I think the problem is systemic, not simply caused by some individuals who happen to have character flaws.
It’s easy to call these property owners greedy, because it’s not your wealth. If it were your wealth, I bet many of you would be NIMBYs too. Because, again, it’s not just a matter of you having better moral character than them, it’s about the incentives, and how people with opposing financial interests have different incentives. People with wealth have an incentive to protect their wealth, and people without wealth have an incentive to try and acquire wealth.
This is why I’m a critic of capitalism, and why I want to move toward something that could be called socialism (although, not necessarily a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism). I think capitalism creates too many oppositional relationships. It causes people to have opposing interests. Owners and workers, companies and consumers, home buyers and home owners. I think it would be better to try and build a system around our shared interests, around the things we have in common, as opposed to one where we are constantly in opposition to one another.
We all need housing. It is a universal human need. So why have a system that incentivizes some to restrict other’s access to it? Why have a system that creates an adversarial relationship between those who have a home (and the wealth associated with it) and those who don’t?
All of these oppositional, adversarial relationships cause conflict and division.
Other nations like Canada, the UK and Australia operate under a social democracy, where the gov’t “seeks to reform capitalism through policies such as progressive taxation, universal healthcare, and workers’ rights, while still maintaining a market economy.” Source
While our issues (in Canada) can sometimes mirror that of America, we have programs like universal healthcare that blunt capitalism’s brute force.
That said we still face the encroachment of neo-liberalist ideologies that have warped our social structure into something more like what America is, ie: far too many former public institutions have been privatized (which happened after Reagan/Thatcher’s trickle down economic force had its way).
Imo we’re gonna need a big bonfire to move the needle back to a social-based structure, if for no other reason than the rich will absolutely stonewall any regulation or limitation on their wealth-hoarding.
Absolutely nailed it and interesting take on capitalism.
I live in a rural area and I’m sort of a NIMBY. I live in my area because there are forests and fields and nature. I didn’t build a house, I bought one built in the 1970s. I don’t think everything needs to be growing all the time, new houses are being built on every road around here and what was a nice rural area is gradually becoming the same Walmart and McDonalds suburbs as you see all across the USA. If I wanted to live in suburbs it would have been easy to move to suburbs.
The board of supervisors here is always saying “We need more jobs and we need more growth.” Ironic because the majority of them are developers, and my property taxes have gone up over 12% each of the past 3 years.
I don’t think the housing crisis is being caused by people who live in rural areas and don’t want there to be endless urban and suburban sprawl. Most people want to live in urban areas, because those areas are where the jobs, shops, and infrastructure are. Sprawl is expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. It should be prevented as much as possible. But, the only way to prevent it is to make housing in urban areas, the area where people want to live because it’s where everything is, more affordable, and that means building more, dense housing in those areas. The real NIMBYs are people who own low density, single family homes in urban areas and don’t want higher density housing to be built in that area because it would bring down their property values.
like thedemonbuer said many folk would love to live in the city and many live further due to cost. I live in the suburbs of a city because of cost but I would absolutely love to be in a condo in the city proper and estatic to live in a highrise downtown. Theoretically these should be some of the cheapest per square foot given the efficiency with building.