[But the core thing to understand is this: Just because the government is the developer of housing doesn’t mean you can ignore the fact that local opposition, zoning restrictions, building regulations, and environmental rules exist. ]
I think a lot of the pro-public housing people sort of know this but don't really believe it. They believe that the government could in fact pass a "ignore local opposition, zoning restrictions, building regulations, and environmental rules" law. That's why WWII gets invoked so often, the idea that if it's really a national crisis, why can't the government just do it and ignore the haters and the rules?
And in a lot of countries, I guess the government could do that.
It's like they are not understanding that the current first step is the local government STOPPING new construction, with the support of the population typically.
If a local government truly wanted lots of development, we would already be so so far ahead of where we are now.
Most state governments are already exempt from local zoning codes for state owned land.
But this is almost never used to build housing projects. It is instead normally used for the purposes of building state roads and the occasional state office building (although they will often work with local governments on those state office buildings).
The political blowback from the state using this power to build public housing would be massive. I am unaware of any examples of states using this power over the objections of the local government.
I have worked in housing construction for years and I truly believe the only way out is for government to start buying land like any normal developer and using their bully pulpit to get locals to approve the projects. then they sell the homes/apartments to investors and use the money for the next project. Developers don't have incentives to build like we need and a bevy of these projects would add competition driving down prices across the board.
I agree that the state governments need to take a stronger hand enabling housing.
But I am extremely skeptical that it will be done with the state government buying actual land as an end run around zoning restrictions. I don't think that is an efficient use of their power and it would be extremely difficult to actually accomplish on a case by case basis.
States can require that municipalities approve certain projects. And they can create programs where if a municipality fails to allow a certain amount of housing be built then the state will come in and take over their zoning powers. States already do that with towns that have failing municipal governments who get into financial troubles or failing schools.
This is purely from a financing lens. There’s no incentive for developers to build affordable housing. Zoning is done by little fiefdoms that will never relent that power and we provably shouldn’t make them.
It's not important that housing be affordable when it is built. Anyone moving into expensive housing isn't homeless before they move, so it's just the hermit crab effect. The rich move into the new housing, the less rich move into the housing the rich left behind, the poor move into the housing the less rich left behind, and the homeless move into the housing that the poor left behind.
I work in housing construction. The current model is what you’re advocating for and it’s going to only dig the hole deeper for people trying to buy their first home
I live in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan which was a postwar public housing project and actually the largest housing project in the country (>10k units).
It's an incredibly nice place to live, especially w kids.
I am pretty sure it would be easier and faster to build a moon base than build another stuytown anywhere in NYC.
Also, unrelated, but I think one of the reasons that stuytown is such a nice place to live is that its owned and run by a giant corporation (Blackstone lol).
The oversights from the original pieces JD outlines here are so extreme you have to wonder if the original writers knew they were lying and just didn't care or if they're so down a rabbit hole they don't even realize it anymore.
Law professor + NYT op-ed = hot garbage. Many such cases (often involving Tim Wu and Zephyr Teachout, who suckle from the same funding teet as these two idiots)
The original article really reminds me of all the lefty Abundance critics who clearly didn't read it. The most salient point of that book for me was that we need to deregulate the *government* because there are so many restrictions on the government itself! As you point out, it is more expensive for the government to build than for private actors to do so because government is subject to stricter regulation than the private sector.
I also think it's quite striking how insulated academia seems to be from the reality that we've left the Obama era when it comes to the national debt and interest rates. It's really obvious to me because I work in tech, where only the AI companies are offering the kinds of perks we used to see in the 2010s during the "no one has to be profitable but we need the best talent" era. My assumption is that things for academics haven't really changed at all, which tells me that they need to get out more.
The NYT should install a group of adversarial editors to push back on the factual content of its opinion pieces.
In my fantasy world, it would be fine for opinion writers to say crazy stuff no one agrees with, but they can't get away with outright falsehoods or statements carefully crafted to mislead the audience, especially when it comes to topics like this where they're flattering their readership 's priors.
It's a real blessing comments don't seem to be enabled on the article. Comments on housing articles in the NY Times are truly the dumbest on the internet.
Nothing makes less sense to me than the genre of criticism, "actually, [the thing you want that isn't happening currently] is a worse idea than [this other thing I want that also isn't happening currently, but is also less likely to happen]." It is not literally true that it is always a bad idea to solve hypothetical rather than real problems — some proposals ("delete USAID") are in fact just that bad — but it's wrong frequently enough that I tend to agree with this piece's commentary on the very likely presence of ulterior motive.
Glad to see you flag Serkin's earlier position on exclusionary zoning as a positive good in itself. His posture in this piece comes across as deeply dishonest, for those familiar with that 2020 piece (and several others).
why does it seem that every shortcoming in society can be traced back to quotas and demands of professional groups? lobbying to save their own skins on the backs of the rest of us.
You know what does improve the health of city dwellers? Access to parks and community gardens such as gardens like the one developers wanted to use for senior housing in NYC. I'll bet that garden wasn't in a high income area where the residents had summer houses with gardens in upstate NY either. That garden was probably the only nature they had access to.
Some places in densely populated Europe even mandate access to community gardens. Cities shouldn't tear up existing gardens and parks for housing. People need nearby escape valves from the stresses of high density living.
Surely whether or not gardens and parks can be converted to housing should depend on how many gardens and parks are in the area, right? You can’t mean to propose a rule that says any garden or park of any size in any neighborhood should never be converted to housing.
Elizabeth Street Garden seems to have caused a large number of people to lose their mind but this is such a stupid bullshit story. I lived right next to it for many years before this fight and it was almost never open to the public. It's honestly unbelievable to me that shitty little locked lot has caused so many internet arguments when the premises are explicitly false.
When I wrote my comment I was confusing Elizabeth Street Garden with another garden I'd read about that was threatened with development. I thought it was a community garden. I plead living on the far West Coast for my ignorance of the particulars. If it's not open to the public almost all the time then hell yes bulldoze it and build on it. A locked garden provides no public benefit and does not deserve protection.
New York City has a bunch of these little fake "public" gardens that are mostly locked up, controlled by a little local 'x garden association' that has effectively privatized it
I don't understand why you'd post something "I'll bet that garden wasn't in a high income area where the residents had summer houses with gardens in upstate NY either" when it's trivially easy to check to see if your hunch is correct.
You can look Elizabeth street gardens up on a map, and then check out asking rents and home prices in the immediate vicinity. Your hunch is completely wrong, it's around 3 million to buy and 6k a month to rent if you want to be near it. Non-wealthy areas of lower Manhattan are few and far between, which makes your hunch wildly improbable to begin with, and it's definitely not in one of them.
[But the core thing to understand is this: Just because the government is the developer of housing doesn’t mean you can ignore the fact that local opposition, zoning restrictions, building regulations, and environmental rules exist. ]
I think a lot of the pro-public housing people sort of know this but don't really believe it. They believe that the government could in fact pass a "ignore local opposition, zoning restrictions, building regulations, and environmental rules" law. That's why WWII gets invoked so often, the idea that if it's really a national crisis, why can't the government just do it and ignore the haters and the rules?
And in a lot of countries, I guess the government could do that.
At the top of every public housing proposal someone needs to add white text that says, "ignore all previous instructions".
It's like they are not understanding that the current first step is the local government STOPPING new construction, with the support of the population typically.
If a local government truly wanted lots of development, we would already be so so far ahead of where we are now.
Most state governments are already exempt from local zoning codes for state owned land.
But this is almost never used to build housing projects. It is instead normally used for the purposes of building state roads and the occasional state office building (although they will often work with local governments on those state office buildings).
The political blowback from the state using this power to build public housing would be massive. I am unaware of any examples of states using this power over the objections of the local government.
I have worked in housing construction for years and I truly believe the only way out is for government to start buying land like any normal developer and using their bully pulpit to get locals to approve the projects. then they sell the homes/apartments to investors and use the money for the next project. Developers don't have incentives to build like we need and a bevy of these projects would add competition driving down prices across the board.
I agree that the state governments need to take a stronger hand enabling housing.
But I am extremely skeptical that it will be done with the state government buying actual land as an end run around zoning restrictions. I don't think that is an efficient use of their power and it would be extremely difficult to actually accomplish on a case by case basis.
States can require that municipalities approve certain projects. And they can create programs where if a municipality fails to allow a certain amount of housing be built then the state will come in and take over their zoning powers. States already do that with towns that have failing municipal governments who get into financial troubles or failing schools.
This is purely from a financing lens. There’s no incentive for developers to build affordable housing. Zoning is done by little fiefdoms that will never relent that power and we provably shouldn’t make them.
It's not important that housing be affordable when it is built. Anyone moving into expensive housing isn't homeless before they move, so it's just the hermit crab effect. The rich move into the new housing, the less rich move into the housing the rich left behind, the poor move into the housing the less rich left behind, and the homeless move into the housing that the poor left behind.
To be fair the government can do that here. but it requires passing a law first...
And it should pass that law.
I work in housing construction. The current model is what you’re advocating for and it’s going to only dig the hole deeper for people trying to buy their first home
I live in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan which was a postwar public housing project and actually the largest housing project in the country (>10k units).
It's an incredibly nice place to live, especially w kids.
I am pretty sure it would be easier and faster to build a moon base than build another stuytown anywhere in NYC.
Also, unrelated, but I think one of the reasons that stuytown is such a nice place to live is that its owned and run by a giant corporation (Blackstone lol).
The oversights from the original pieces JD outlines here are so extreme you have to wonder if the original writers knew they were lying and just didn't care or if they're so down a rabbit hole they don't even realize it anymore.
Law professor + NYT op-ed = hot garbage. Many such cases (often involving Tim Wu and Zephyr Teachout, who suckle from the same funding teet as these two idiots)
The original article really reminds me of all the lefty Abundance critics who clearly didn't read it. The most salient point of that book for me was that we need to deregulate the *government* because there are so many restrictions on the government itself! As you point out, it is more expensive for the government to build than for private actors to do so because government is subject to stricter regulation than the private sector.
I also think it's quite striking how insulated academia seems to be from the reality that we've left the Obama era when it comes to the national debt and interest rates. It's really obvious to me because I work in tech, where only the AI companies are offering the kinds of perks we used to see in the 2010s during the "no one has to be profitable but we need the best talent" era. My assumption is that things for academics haven't really changed at all, which tells me that they need to get out more.
The NYT should install a group of adversarial editors to push back on the factual content of its opinion pieces.
In my fantasy world, it would be fine for opinion writers to say crazy stuff no one agrees with, but they can't get away with outright falsehoods or statements carefully crafted to mislead the audience, especially when it comes to topics like this where they're flattering their readership 's priors.
It's a real blessing comments don't seem to be enabled on the article. Comments on housing articles in the NY Times are truly the dumbest on the internet.
❤️ I hope that felt as good to write as it was to read, thank you as always
Nothing makes less sense to me than the genre of criticism, "actually, [the thing you want that isn't happening currently] is a worse idea than [this other thing I want that also isn't happening currently, but is also less likely to happen]." It is not literally true that it is always a bad idea to solve hypothetical rather than real problems — some proposals ("delete USAID") are in fact just that bad — but it's wrong frequently enough that I tend to agree with this piece's commentary on the very likely presence of ulterior motive.
This article was so good, it finally pushed me into upgrading to paid.
Thank you for calling this out—amazing what happens when you do the reading. That last sentence is gold.
>While the title of this column was necessary for palindromic reasons
KEEW EHT FO EKAT TSROW ?
WTOTW
Ah. Thanks. Many thanks, actually!
Fantastic work, thank you. I agree with Ace of Bayes: law professors as public policy leaders have consistently been bad news.
Glad to see you flag Serkin's earlier position on exclusionary zoning as a positive good in itself. His posture in this piece comes across as deeply dishonest, for those familiar with that 2020 piece (and several others).
why does it seem that every shortcoming in society can be traced back to quotas and demands of professional groups? lobbying to save their own skins on the backs of the rest of us.
You know what does improve the health of city dwellers? Access to parks and community gardens such as gardens like the one developers wanted to use for senior housing in NYC. I'll bet that garden wasn't in a high income area where the residents had summer houses with gardens in upstate NY either. That garden was probably the only nature they had access to.
Some places in densely populated Europe even mandate access to community gardens. Cities shouldn't tear up existing gardens and parks for housing. People need nearby escape valves from the stresses of high density living.
Surely whether or not gardens and parks can be converted to housing should depend on how many gardens and parks are in the area, right? You can’t mean to propose a rule that says any garden or park of any size in any neighborhood should never be converted to housing.
Elizabeth Street Garden seems to have caused a large number of people to lose their mind but this is such a stupid bullshit story. I lived right next to it for many years before this fight and it was almost never open to the public. It's honestly unbelievable to me that shitty little locked lot has caused so many internet arguments when the premises are explicitly false.
When I wrote my comment I was confusing Elizabeth Street Garden with another garden I'd read about that was threatened with development. I thought it was a community garden. I plead living on the far West Coast for my ignorance of the particulars. If it's not open to the public almost all the time then hell yes bulldoze it and build on it. A locked garden provides no public benefit and does not deserve protection.
New York City has a bunch of these little fake "public" gardens that are mostly locked up, controlled by a little local 'x garden association' that has effectively privatized it
I don't understand why you'd post something "I'll bet that garden wasn't in a high income area where the residents had summer houses with gardens in upstate NY either" when it's trivially easy to check to see if your hunch is correct.
You can look Elizabeth street gardens up on a map, and then check out asking rents and home prices in the immediate vicinity. Your hunch is completely wrong, it's around 3 million to buy and 6k a month to rent if you want to be near it. Non-wealthy areas of lower Manhattan are few and far between, which makes your hunch wildly improbable to begin with, and it's definitely not in one of them.
Tremendously well done article and strong agreement here.