For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals: not enough bike lanes and transit, too many restrictive zoning laws.
The event began in 2016 in Boulder, Colo., and has ever since revolved around a coalition of left and center Democrats who want to make America’s neighborhoods less exclusive and its housing more dense. (YIMBY, a pro-housing movement that is increasingly an identity, stands for “Yes in my backyard.”)
But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting, which was held at the University of Texas at Austin in February. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.
The first day featured a speech on changing zoning laws by Greg Gianforte, the Republican governor of Montana, who last year signed a housing package that YIMBYs now refer to as “the Montana Miracle.”
Day 2 kicked off with a panel on solutions to Texas’s rising housing costs. One of the speakers was a Republican legislator in Texas who, in addition to being an advocate for loosening land-use regulations, has pushed for a near-total ban on abortions.
Anyone who missed these discussions might have instead gone to the panel on bipartisanship where Republican housing reformers from Arizona and Montana talked with a Democratic state senator from Vermont. Or noticed the list of sponsors that, in addition to foundations like Open Philanthropy and Arnold Ventures, included conservative and libertarian organizations like the Mercatus Center, the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation.
Legislators in states including California, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Oregon, and Texas have reached for a similar basket of solutions. Invariably, they revolve around loosening zoning and development laws to speed construction, expanding renter protections for tenants and increasing funding for subsidized housing.
In plenty of places across the country — particularly blue states, where land use tends to be more heavily regulated — there is serious and organized opposition to these policies. Especially at a local level, voters have blocked developments of all sizes. (In many places, the divide over what to do about housing comes down to homeowners versus renters, rather than breaking along more typical political lines.)
And not all of these housing measures would be considered bipartisan. Republican legislators tend to be leery of price caps like rent control. Democratic legislators often push for streamlining measures to be paired with new funds for subsidized housing, for instance.
But since the highest-impact policies revolve around increasing the pace of building to backfill the decades-old housing shortage that is the root of America’s housing woes, there is still plenty of overlap. So much so that two frequently opposing think tanks — the American Enterprise Institute and the Progressive Policy Institute — recently hosted a joint event in Washington on increasing housing supply.
“Some issues become a horseshoe,” said Cody Vasut, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives’ Freedom Caucus, using a very Texas analogy. “We have different views of government but sometimes we arrive at the same conclusion.”
Housing has several features that make it an ideal issue for bipartisanship, said Jake Grumbach, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Housing laws are hyperlocal and so don’t get much attention from national parties, which tend to push toward polarization. The subject is full of dense and wonky material that gets litigated through binder-thick planning reports instead of sound bites. It’s also hard to weaponize, since someone’s position on housing can be framed in ways that hew to either party’s ideology.
Take, for instance, the YIMBY mantra of allowing taller buildings and reducing the permitting hurdles to build them. Is this, as many Democrats say, a way to create more affordable housing, reduce neighborhood segregation and give low-income households access to high-amenity areas and schools?
Or is it, as Republicans say, a pro-business means of reducing regulation and enhancing property rights by giving landowners the freedom to develop housing?
Is it, somehow, both?
Consider Montana, which last year passed a package of new laws that essentially ended single-family zoning by allowing backyard homes and duplexes on most lots in the state. Or Arizona, where a bipartisan group of legislators passed similar changes this week.
These laws followed, and in some cases were modeled on, state-level zoning changes that have already swept through legislatures in California and Oregon dominated by Democrats. To sell them in more conservative territory, advocates who had worked behind the scenes in Arizona and Montana gave tips to other Yimbytown attendees. They suggested hiring both liberal and conservative lobbyists and crafting pitches that lean into each party’s politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/b...smid=url-share
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