Heartbeat laws for room occupancy are also bad! I have three kids on one room (ages 5.5, 3.5, 1y) and it's going surprisingly well.
But if I were on Section 8 or under CPS attention, it would often be prohibited (and some local zoning codes prohibit it too). Let parents make reasonable tradeoffs + don't force us to rent/buy more home than we need or seek units the market isn't building!
How much of this is also just “Boomers voting for their own interests (yet again)”?
Like, it’s no mystery who shows up to all the P&Z meetings and drives/abuses the process. And out of even non-“affordable” projects, senior living centers that are basically enormous apartment complexes and look exactly the same as a 5-over-1 get ZERO opposition relative to the 5-over-1’s.
To me, this looks like Boomer bias against basically everyone else in the world.
The law sets up this generational warfare between seniors + families with kids but I want to underscore just how this screws over seniors too!
Most people who are 55+ don't want to go live in a segregated "olds only" community. They want to stay in their homes, their neighborhoods for as long as possible but often struggle to find accessible, affordable housing in the places where they have spent most of their adult lives.
I agree. My pet theory is that once the Boomers die off, we’ll have a senior housing crash and a lot of these buildings will get turned into apartments.
Boomers absolutely don't help, and they're retired and bored so don't mind butting their noses into things that really shouldn't affect them.
I worry though. A lot of lefty youth have an anti-child bent to them, and not just the usual "kids?? in this environment / political malaise?", but outright hostility. Maybe this is skewed from seeing comments form chronically online people on social media, but they seem to be the kind of people who would be big fans of continuing this kind of stuff.
I do hear some of the “instead of cutting Social Security, we should EXPAND it!” rhetoric from that crowd, but I think it’s mostly a sort of bitterness at feeling cheated by the Boomers and imagining themselves being owed something on the back end by their troubles (and paid for by someone else, usually the rich!), and not a genuine deep ideological program.
Boomer here. Totally agree with all points. I set up a YIMBY table at our summer community markets (12 weeks) to talk to people about why housing at all income levels is good and developers are good. I am clear that I was anti-development in the 1970s and I was WRONG. I do lose my temper when people whine about parking and traffic. Are cars more important than people??
Regarding senior housing, I live in Santa Rosa and we have just closed all our middle schools and several elementary schools are on the list for closing due to lack of enrollment. Sonoma County is 29% seniors and we cannot sustain a school district because there are not enough kids. The short-term as well as long-term consequences are deep.
Meanwhile the guy who installed my internet commutes 1-1/2 hours from the east bay where he lives with his mom. That's 3 hours/day of unpaid time, cost of car, and air pollution. All because we don't have enough apartments for the people who work here.
"Affordable housing" means government-controlled tenancy, NOT "housing that I or someone I know could afford". I had an interesting discussion with another senior in the Kaiser waiting room last week. She is looking for a new place to live due to her small garden apartment being converted somehow. I suggested some of the "affordable" opportunities both senior and general public, and she said "they have too much control. I would have to re-certify my income every year." This from an elderly white woman, so you can imagine what younger women go through in affordable housing projects. I've advocated on behalf of women whose adult sons or boyfriends want to live with them in a deed-restricted apartment but who are not allowed to live with them due to history of incarceration or drug use.
We need abundant housing at all income levels to allow capitalism to work.
Hi abbyinsm—I live in Marin County and have worked on YIMBY efforts. Completely agree with your withering dismissal of “affordable housing”, but unfortunately some pro-housing folks in Marin are resigned to it as a step in the right direction, which I think is a mistake. LMK if you'd like to discuss offline.
Thanks, Jerusalem, for the shout-out to my work with David B. & Josh K.! But I do have bit of an argument to pick, https://x.com/CSElmendorf/status/1960013978865897909. I'm not sure that the civil rights paradigm is a helpful one for getting landlords, or suburban cities, to provide housing for less-affluent children.
Hi Chris—long-time RTer, first-time interlocutor on the line ... I came to this comment section to make a point you just tweeted[1]:
“Yes, the tax code favors the old at the expense of the young, but that's readily explained by voter self-interest and the lack of electoral representation for children.”
For decades, the fraction of the electorate which is elderly has climbed, year by year. A long series of small changes in degree have become a change in kind. Insofar as Jerusalem wants to link Liberalism to representation, she'll have to confront the naturally anti-abundance politics of the powerful geriatric electoral bloc.
I think MattY said something very relevant to this a while back: libs and lefties have spent many years talking about implicit bias and such, but it turns out that explicit bias is still very common! Maybe we should focus on addressing that rather than trying to read people's minds so much.
What happens when you try to address explicit bias is that people typically retreat to having the same bias, but not saying it out loud, so mind-reading is still necessary. After all, the harm that's suffered by families with kids isn't having to hear their neighbors talk about how much it sucks to have kids around; it's simply being unable to find a home to rent.
I share the frustration that the availability of senior affordable housing as an option results in more of it being built than housing that accommodates non-seniors but I don’t think it’s all about discrimination against kids. There is discrimination against anyone lower income who isn’t old that is also built into it. A recent infill development in my neighborhood required some affordable housing component and it was the developer rather than our neighborhood association who made it senior housing presumably because that would be less off putting to the purchasers of the single family homes making up the rest of the development.
Anika Singh Lemar is a fantastic housing advocate, and there are far worse examples of municipalities in Connecticut being very explicit that their goal is to exclude school age children by denying housing.
I often hear local governments say that they are requiring "senior housing" from a municipal budgetary perspective. Seniors cost municipal governments very little, while school age children are the highest cost residents for municipal governments.
But at the same time these are suburbs almost exclusively single family homes with backyards, which is the kind of housing most attractive to parents with school age children. They block market rate dense apartments that would mostly be inhabited by childless young people and the elderly. So they are either stupid or lying about their goals.
I'm afraid that getting rid of this sort of law will backfire. If somewhere is willing to build low-income senior housing but not willing to build low-income family housing, that still seems like a pretty good thing to me. It's better than places like San Francisco where every form of new housing is banned.
Let's make YIMBYism a big tent, and not complain about people who are building housing just because it isn't exactly the ideal form of housing that we would build if we were in charge.
Wouldn't rental market efficiency go up if it was legal to charge different prices depending on who was living there? It sounds like the basic issue here is that the law is preventing the market from equilibrating, by making it illegal to charge different prices despite the fact that the supply curve is different between housing for seniors and housing for families.
Obviously, allowing price differences would have bad distributional effects. But I generally think it's better to optimize for efficiency when making microeconomic policy, then address distributional issues later. (And even if you don't want to do that, I think it's at least good to remember that laws preventing equilibration is the fundamental source of the problem.)
“The community said ‘I don’t want to live next to a three-year-old; the only thing worse than living next to a three-year-old is living next to an eight-year-old,’ so they wanted senior housing
Heartbeat laws for room occupancy are also bad! I have three kids on one room (ages 5.5, 3.5, 1y) and it's going surprisingly well.
But if I were on Section 8 or under CPS attention, it would often be prohibited (and some local zoning codes prohibit it too). Let parents make reasonable tradeoffs + don't force us to rent/buy more home than we need or seek units the market isn't building!
Bunkbeds are quite functional
How much of this is also just “Boomers voting for their own interests (yet again)”?
Like, it’s no mystery who shows up to all the P&Z meetings and drives/abuses the process. And out of even non-“affordable” projects, senior living centers that are basically enormous apartment complexes and look exactly the same as a 5-over-1 get ZERO opposition relative to the 5-over-1’s.
To me, this looks like Boomer bias against basically everyone else in the world.
The law sets up this generational warfare between seniors + families with kids but I want to underscore just how this screws over seniors too!
Most people who are 55+ don't want to go live in a segregated "olds only" community. They want to stay in their homes, their neighborhoods for as long as possible but often struggle to find accessible, affordable housing in the places where they have spent most of their adult lives.
I agree. My pet theory is that once the Boomers die off, we’ll have a senior housing crash and a lot of these buildings will get turned into apartments.
Some Boomers, but if passed Congress in the 90s, that’s a lot of Greatest Generation folks.
Boomers absolutely don't help, and they're retired and bored so don't mind butting their noses into things that really shouldn't affect them.
I worry though. A lot of lefty youth have an anti-child bent to them, and not just the usual "kids?? in this environment / political malaise?", but outright hostility. Maybe this is skewed from seeing comments form chronically online people on social media, but they seem to be the kind of people who would be big fans of continuing this kind of stuff.
Continuing what exactly?
I do hear some of the “instead of cutting Social Security, we should EXPAND it!” rhetoric from that crowd, but I think it’s mostly a sort of bitterness at feeling cheated by the Boomers and imagining themselves being owed something on the back end by their troubles (and paid for by someone else, usually the rich!), and not a genuine deep ideological program.
Boomer here. Totally agree with all points. I set up a YIMBY table at our summer community markets (12 weeks) to talk to people about why housing at all income levels is good and developers are good. I am clear that I was anti-development in the 1970s and I was WRONG. I do lose my temper when people whine about parking and traffic. Are cars more important than people??
Regarding senior housing, I live in Santa Rosa and we have just closed all our middle schools and several elementary schools are on the list for closing due to lack of enrollment. Sonoma County is 29% seniors and we cannot sustain a school district because there are not enough kids. The short-term as well as long-term consequences are deep.
Meanwhile the guy who installed my internet commutes 1-1/2 hours from the east bay where he lives with his mom. That's 3 hours/day of unpaid time, cost of car, and air pollution. All because we don't have enough apartments for the people who work here.
"Affordable housing" means government-controlled tenancy, NOT "housing that I or someone I know could afford". I had an interesting discussion with another senior in the Kaiser waiting room last week. She is looking for a new place to live due to her small garden apartment being converted somehow. I suggested some of the "affordable" opportunities both senior and general public, and she said "they have too much control. I would have to re-certify my income every year." This from an elderly white woman, so you can imagine what younger women go through in affordable housing projects. I've advocated on behalf of women whose adult sons or boyfriends want to live with them in a deed-restricted apartment but who are not allowed to live with them due to history of incarceration or drug use.
We need abundant housing at all income levels to allow capitalism to work.
Hi abbyinsm—I live in Marin County and have worked on YIMBY efforts. Completely agree with your withering dismissal of “affordable housing”, but unfortunately some pro-housing folks in Marin are resigned to it as a step in the right direction, which I think is a mistake. LMK if you'd like to discuss offline.
Thanks, Jerusalem, for the shout-out to my work with David B. & Josh K.! But I do have bit of an argument to pick, https://x.com/CSElmendorf/status/1960013978865897909. I'm not sure that the civil rights paradigm is a helpful one for getting landlords, or suburban cities, to provide housing for less-affluent children.
Hi Chris—long-time RTer, first-time interlocutor on the line ... I came to this comment section to make a point you just tweeted[1]:
“Yes, the tax code favors the old at the expense of the young, but that's readily explained by voter self-interest and the lack of electoral representation for children.”
For decades, the fraction of the electorate which is elderly has climbed, year by year. A long series of small changes in degree have become a change in kind. Insofar as Jerusalem wants to link Liberalism to representation, she'll have to confront the naturally anti-abundance politics of the powerful geriatric electoral bloc.
[1] https://x.com/CSElmendorf/status/1960013988345077773
I actually agree with JD Vance that parents should be allowed to cast votes on behalf of their children until the children turn 18.
I think MattY said something very relevant to this a while back: libs and lefties have spent many years talking about implicit bias and such, but it turns out that explicit bias is still very common! Maybe we should focus on addressing that rather than trying to read people's minds so much.
What happens when you try to address explicit bias is that people typically retreat to having the same bias, but not saying it out loud, so mind-reading is still necessary. After all, the harm that's suffered by families with kids isn't having to hear their neighbors talk about how much it sucks to have kids around; it's simply being unable to find a home to rent.
I share the frustration that the availability of senior affordable housing as an option results in more of it being built than housing that accommodates non-seniors but I don’t think it’s all about discrimination against kids. There is discrimination against anyone lower income who isn’t old that is also built into it. A recent infill development in my neighborhood required some affordable housing component and it was the developer rather than our neighborhood association who made it senior housing presumably because that would be less off putting to the purchasers of the single family homes making up the rest of the development.
Anika Singh Lemar is a fantastic housing advocate, and there are far worse examples of municipalities in Connecticut being very explicit that their goal is to exclude school age children by denying housing.
I often hear local governments say that they are requiring "senior housing" from a municipal budgetary perspective. Seniors cost municipal governments very little, while school age children are the highest cost residents for municipal governments.
But at the same time these are suburbs almost exclusively single family homes with backyards, which is the kind of housing most attractive to parents with school age children. They block market rate dense apartments that would mostly be inhabited by childless young people and the elderly. So they are either stupid or lying about their goals.
Wow, eye opening piece!
I'm afraid that getting rid of this sort of law will backfire. If somewhere is willing to build low-income senior housing but not willing to build low-income family housing, that still seems like a pretty good thing to me. It's better than places like San Francisco where every form of new housing is banned.
Let's make YIMBYism a big tent, and not complain about people who are building housing just because it isn't exactly the ideal form of housing that we would build if we were in charge.
Would you apply this standard to these guys? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/realestate/arkansas-white-housing-return-to-land.html
Wouldn't rental market efficiency go up if it was legal to charge different prices depending on who was living there? It sounds like the basic issue here is that the law is preventing the market from equilibrating, by making it illegal to charge different prices despite the fact that the supply curve is different between housing for seniors and housing for families.
Obviously, allowing price differences would have bad distributional effects. But I generally think it's better to optimize for efficiency when making microeconomic policy, then address distributional issues later. (And even if you don't want to do that, I think it's at least good to remember that laws preventing equilibration is the fundamental source of the problem.)
“The community said ‘I don’t want to live next to a three-year-old; the only thing worse than living next to a three-year-old is living next to an eight-year-old,’ so they wanted senior housing
Can someone help me make sense of this quote?