How to lower America's sky-high home prices: be more like Paris

Cambridge, Massachusetts, may seem like an unlikely site for a YIMBY revolution.

The historic Boston suburb is home to both Harvard University and a bevy of affluent homeowners opposed to any new development. The city even features prominently in the book "Neighborhood Defenders," a seminal work about anti-building, not-in-my-backyarders. Despite all that, the city recently passed a series of laws that could pave the way for a cascade of new housing construction.

Cambridge could certainly use the new units. Data from Zillow shows the city's average rent is $3,400 a month — slightly higher than San Francisco's estimated average rent of $3,200. Homelessness in Cambridge has also been on the rise, particularly since the pandemic. In an attempt to ease this pressure, pro-housing groups that fall under the YIMBY umbrella (short for "yes in my backyard") — particularly the local group A Better Cambridge and the statewide organization Abundant Housing Massachusetts — have been trying to get more homes built in Cambridge for years.

In recent years, that work has started to bear fruit: The city enacted a 100% affordable housing overlay in 2020, which allows developers of below-market-rate apartment complexes to build more densely than would be permitted under base zoning. Three years later, Cambridge rezoned its Central Square neighborhood, allowing apartment buildings to rise up to 18 stories high.

But the latest measure is perhaps the most radical, and most promising. A measure passed in February will legalize the production of four-story apartment buildings across the entire city, with some larger lots zoned for up to six stories. Sure, these newly possible buildings aren't quite as dramatic as an 18-story tower, but this latest change is by far Cambridge's most ambitious. Unlike the geographically confined Central Square upzoning, the newest pro-housing ordinance has the potential to remake the entire city. The city's planning staff estimate that the new law may increase Cambridge's housing development capacity over the next 15 years from 350 units to 3,590 — a more than tenfold increase.

The likelihood that some neighborhoods will become denser has provoked the usual opposition from local homeowners. But viewed from another angle, this densification could make the city a more vibrant and beautiful place to live. There's a reason the Cambridge city councilmember Burhan Azeem has called the city's new plan "Paris-style zoning." As it turns out, Paris is a good model for midsize American cities to follow. By allowing more European-style construction, places like Cambridge can both lower housing costs and look good doing it.

Alongside the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, one of Paris' most iconic architectural hallmarks may be its most ubiquitous: the Haussmann-style building. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (better known as Baron Haussmann) was the famed urban planner who, under Emperor Napoleon III, redesigned central Paris in the mid-19th century. Paris became a city of wide boulevards and midrise apartment complexes with distinctive limestone facades — the aforementioned Haussmann buildings. Thanks in no small part to the prevalence of these structures, Paris has achieved a density higher than any other major city in Europe or the United States — although the city of lights still struggles to keep up with demand for housing.

While Haussmann buildings are specific to central Paris, plenty of other European cities have equivalent structures: four- to six-story apartment blocks with no buffer area between the front door and the sidewalk. Unlike the boxy, cheap-looking American five-over-one apartment building that has come to dominate much of our development — and which many people regard as an eyesore — Euro-style apartments generally contribute to the beauty and charm of dense, walkable tourist destinations like Stockholm and Rome. Plus, they're more efficient: thanks to European building codes and zoning rules, European-style apartment buildings can be built for less, on smaller lots, and with more family-friendly apartments in the interior.

"Sure," you might say, "but what's good for Paris, Stockholm, and Rome won't work in an American context." That's a common refrain from skeptics — citing cultural differences, the need for abundant parking, or their own gut instincts — when YIMBYs propose allowing more European-style zoning in the United States. But these assumptions are incorrect for two reasons.

First, upzoning cities like Cambridge is not the same thing as requiring them to build up to Parisian density. If you own a single-family home in Cambridge, and your lot has been upzoned to allow for the construction of a four-story building, you remain at liberty to keep your single-family home. If you want to redevelop the property into a multifamily building, that's great; if you decide to sell your home to a developer who will replace it with an apartment complex, that's great, too. But nobody is compelling you to do either of those things if you like your existing home.

Second, Cambridge — like many other older cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic region — already has a fair number of dense apartment buildings and townhomes. Rather than destroying the culture or character of these cities, building more Parisian-style housing would signal a return to the pre-single-family era. Many of Cambridge's mid-rise apartment buildings were constructed before single-family zoning became ubiquitous in the United States in the early 20th century. And the ones that have survived are now highly coveted as luxury homes and architectural treasures; yet, for decades, it has been effectively illegal to build more of them. As Azeem wrote on X, Cambridge's previous, single-family-focused zoning laws meant that "85%+ of the existing housing" in the city would be illegal to build. In other words, Cambridge's upzoning may actually help to preserve the city's architectural heritage and New England character. At the same time, it is a model for how other cities can upzone in a manner that actually eases housing costs.

While the patchwork nature of American land-use policy can slow progress in important ways, it can also be an engine for experimentation and friendly, productive competition. Pro-housing activists in cities across the country — in places like Minneapolis, Austin, and Sacramento — and far beyond, in the case of Auckland, New Zealand, have inspired each another, shared insights and tactics, and provided a push to see who can push through the most ambitious land-use overhauls. These pushes can even get a little cheeky: YIMBY advocates in Montana sold zoning changes by urging conservative lawmakers to move away from "California-style zoning." While it will take some years to assess the full impact of these revisions, the early data from places like Auckland is very promising.

Some changes make a bigger impact than others. One lesson from the past few years of YIMBY experimentation is that smaller tweaks to local zoning codes may yield negligible results; ambition is vastly superior to cautious incrementalism. Take Minneapolis, one of the recent YIMBY success stories. Citywide, the production of more housing has helped to keep rents and home prices in check, but as the housing researcher Zakary Yudhisthu has found, there's more going on underneath the hood. The parts of Minneapolis that moved from single-family to duplex or triplex zoning have seen little housing growth, while the corridors that allow for denser construction have seen more permit applications. In other words, going just a few steps further is how you get real results.

But to truly unlock housing production at the necessary scale, high-cost cities cannot stop at upzoning. They also need to reshape permitting rules and other onerous building requirements, such as off-street parking mandates. True European-style zoning would allow for mid-rise apartment buildings with no off-street parking and a single central staircase. (Five-over-ones exist in part because most American cities require multiple staircases in any apartment building over a certain height.)

So while other expensive cities should take inspiration from Cambridge, they should also see if they can go even further. There's still plenty of room for another jurisdiction to take the lead in the race to be America's YIMBY-est city. Any takers?

Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy consultant and writer. He is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and is currently working on a book about cities with an expected publication date of Fall 2026.