The pro-housing consensus that wasn’t

These days, it seems as though everyone is something of a YIMBY: a “Yes in My Backyard” activist advocating for more housing and fewer barriers to making that happen.

“For decades, thanks to restrictive zoning laws and increasing construction costs, we simply haven’t built enough new housing,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith in the New York Times earlier this fall.

“Housing is too expensive, and we need to increase the housing supply,” Kamala Harris said as she campaigned for president, building off Joe Biden’s earlier call to “build, build, build” to “bring housing costs down for good.”

And Donald Trump has complained about regulations leading to high housing costs, telling Bloomberg, “Zoning is like … it’s a killer.”

Yet as three recently published books reveal, this YIMBY-ish agreement across the political spectrum can mask deeper divides, including about property rights, community development, and the very meaning of democracy in housing policy. Escaping the Housing Trap by urbanists Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges of Strong Towns advocates for a slower-paced, locally driven form of development that they believe will be more sustainable over the long term. On the Housing Crisis by journalist Jerusalem Demsas challenges this kind of incrementalism, arguing the severity of today’s housing shortage demands bolder intervention. And in Nowhere to Live, James Burling, a lawyer with the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation, frames the housing shortage as the result of diminished respect for private property, something he argues will have to be reversed for any real change.

Read together, these new books tell us that while it has become mainstream to say that America needs more homes — and even to acknowledge that zoning rules and self-interested homeowners play a role in blocking new housing — there’s not a clear consensus about what kinds of homes we should build, how we should build them, and who should decide where they go. While it’s tempting to think a pro-housing consensus at least forecasts positive changes, the authors say a close read of history should leave us unconvinced that policymakers will ultimately take the necessary steps for reform. There’s an opportunity, but we should be clear-eyed about the obstacles. 

Who should chart the future of housing policy?

For decades, the federal government largely deferred to state governments on matters of land use. States mostly deferred to local governments, which in turn typically deferred to their home-owning constituents who backed restrictive zoning laws that barred new construction. But with housing now consuming a greater portion of households’ budgets, even federal lawmakers can no longer avoid addressing the dramatic rise in rents and mortgage payments. Unlike past housing crises that primarily affected the poor, today’s challenges reach deep into the middle class.

Experts say the US is short somewhere between 3.8 million and 6.8 million homes. As of 2022, households earning the median income could afford only 20 percent of the homes for sale across the country. Most renters feel priced out of homeownership entirely, and the lack of affordable housing is causing homelessness to rise.

But as policymakers and voters focus more intently on the housing emergency, thorny questions about democratic participation have emerged. Research increasingly shows that local planning meetings are deeply unrepresentative, with participants skewing older, whiter, more likely to be a homeowner — and therefore more likely to support measures that prioritize their property values and the status quo. Even making meetings virtual, which should theoretically increase access, hasn’t solved this participation gap.  

Yet the problem runs deeper than just representation. When polled, voters often express the most enthusiastic support for indirect interventions like government subsidies and rent caps, policies that housing experts say would do little to address affordability and could even make things worse long term. Meanwhile, voters frequently oppose the fundamental solution — building more housing — even though restricting new development is what perpetuates the shortage. This raises a fundamental question: How much should democratic preferences matter?

This is a central concern in Demsas’s book, and explored to a lesser degree in the two others. In one of her most agitating chapters — “Community Input Is Bad, Actually” — Demsas makes the case that democracy works best when the views or needs of people are accurately transmitted to their leaders, leaders take action, and voters can express their approval or disapproval in the next election. Invoking historian Paul Sabin, she argues this form of democratic accountability was upended in the 1960s and ’70s by a new emphasis on citizen participation, including new public interest law firms that challenged rules and laws while expanding judicial influence over policy. 

The Pacific Legal Foundation emerged from this 1970s institutional ferment. While Burling, a staunch defender of property rights, shares Demsas’s concerns about regulatory barriers to new housing, his book makes a passionate case for litigation as a crucial check on government power, particularly through a compelling chapter on how litigation has buffered eminent domain abuse. Without it, he writes, “entire neighborhoods of ‘undesirables’ — the poor, the ethnic minorities, and those least able to mount meaningful political resistance — can be condemned in order to revitalize their neighborhoods.” 

Public interest litigation and community input rules emerged to protect neighborhoods from destructive top-down planning like the urban renewal that devastated Black neighborhoods in the 1960s. But this democratic vision has evolved into a more routine participatory veto, where multiple choke points, from environmental impact reviews to historic preservation requirements, allow individuals to block housing projects or make them so financially unfeasible that developers withdraw their bids. 

Today’s YIMBYs are organizing within this existing system, forming local groups to mobilize pro-housing voices at planning meetings and provide political cover for elected officials to make risky decisions. But this strategy of trying to counter the NIMBYs in public life faces inherent scaling limitations. It’s possible to pack local meetings in major cities with dissenting voices, but it’s much harder to sustain that level of organizing across thousands of small- and medium-sized jurisdictions, especially given the housing crisis’ mounting urgency.

That’s why many pro-housing advocates have turned to state-level intervention — essentially arguing that sometimes real democracy requires overriding local democratic processes.  

“Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well,” Demsas writes. It’s a paradox that echoes earlier civil rights battles: using higher levels of government to ensure broader participation and protect minority interests, even when that means overruling local control.

Escaping the Housing Trap offers an alternative vision: promoting smaller-scale, community-led development. Strong Towns advocates for all cities to accept some level of change while taking “radical neighborhood transformation off the table.” This “grand bargain,” as they put it — where single-family homes can transform at least into duplexes — aims to turn NIMBYs skeptical of development into more self-interested partners. Strong Towns also argues this approach will lead to more sustainable fiscal growth.

But it’s hard to ignore that this more patient, conflict-avoidant strategy runs up against the pressing need of the housing shortage in big, desirable cities like Seattle or Los Angeles. It also misses that even in lots of local communities, residents have ardently fought even modest developments like accessory dwelling units.

Despite their divergent paths to housing reform, all three authors agree on who loses most from the country’s failure to build: renters, first-time homebuyers, and poor people. Perhaps most importantly, it’s everyone who doesn’t yet live in a community but who might benefit from its resources — the future residents who never get a say in today’s planning meetings.

Are we moving forward?

After years of inaction, there are reasons to be optimistic that lawmakers might finally be ready to tackle the housing supply gap.

Over the last five years, states across the political spectrum — from Oregon and California to Florida and Montana — have moved to update zoning codes and transform residential planning rules. This year alone, Maryland, Arizona, New Jersey, and Colorado passed new housing laws.

Housing was a top issue during the presidential campaign, and high costs remain a pressing concern for voters. Even those against new development know they have to couch their opposition in vague YIMBY language these days, acknowledging that yes of course we need more housing but we must guard against displacement, corporate developer influence, and environmental harm.

Still, we’ve seen promising moments before. As Burling notes, a 1991 federal report warned that “increasingly expensive and time-consuming permit-approval process[es], exclusionary zoning, and well-intentioned laws” were pricing out young families. More striking still, that same report acknowledged that in the previous 25 years, “no more than 10 federally sponsored commissions” had examined these exact issues, “usually to little avail.” The YIMBY battles of 2024 echo debates we’ve been having for generations.

I asked the authors if they believe this time will finally be different or whether we’re on the verge of seeing yet another generation succumb to the status quo.

Demsas warns that some YIMBYs have taken “premature victory laps.” While mainstream figures like Barack Obama now vocally acknowledge the importance of increasing housing supply, she argues the implications of this position remain less examined. “When this comes into tension with historic preservation or public meeting participation norms … then what?” She points to Harris’s housing proposals, which avoided the thorny details of zoning reform in favor of more populist ideas targeting corporate landlords.

Burling finds hope in the crisis’s unavoidable visibility. “The manifestation of the problem is much more clear than it used to be with the vast number of homeless encampments,” he told me. “We reached and went over a tipping point … the predictions that this crisis is going to get worse unfortunately have come true.”

Marohn of Strong Towns also sees potential for change, though he believes it will have to be locally led given constraints in our national financial system.

Marohn argues that today’s housing crisis stems from a post-WWII experiment in urban development. Determined to avoid another Depression, policymakers created an approach centered on rapid expansion, incentivizing cities to pursue growth that ultimately depleted tax bases and created unsustainable liabilities. Now, he warns, cities are discovering that all this infrastructure is too costly to maintain with current tax revenue. Yet he sees cities as uniquely positioned to lead on reform: Unlike traditional bank lenders constrained by the 30-year mortgage, cities can access low-interest capital to support the smaller-scale projects he sees as essential for lasting change.

Housing reform’s next chapter

The political path forward is murky. Early in Trump’s first term, his administration showed YIMBY tendencies, establishing a White House Council to tackle local zoning restrictions. But by 2020, Trump’s rhetoric shifted dramatically toward NIMBYism, warning voters that Democrats would “totally destroy the beautiful suburbs.” 

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint reflects these tensions by advocating deregulation while also emphasizing local control and prioritizing single-family homes, exactly the kind of housing that puts ownership out of reach for many Americans. Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, but he’s already tapped some of its key authors and supporters to join his new administration. Trump’s selection of a former NFL player with no clear housing record to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development adds another layer of uncertainty to how his administration will ultimately govern. 

Yet the pressure for reform continues to grow. The recent launch of a bipartisan YIMBY caucus in Congress signals housing’s staying power as a national priority. The fact that even critics of market-rate development now frame their arguments in more supply-friendly terms suggests a genuine shift in how we talk about housing.

But as these three books reveal, consensus about the problem doesn’t ensure agreement on solutions. The philosophical divides they explore will shape housing policy for years to come. What’s different now isn’t the substance of these debates, but their urgency. The expanding ranks of Americans priced out of stable housing have transformed the crisis from an abstract policy concern to an unavoidable, immediate challenge.