The Yimby movement was born in 2014, when Sonja Trauss founded SFBARF, the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Foundation. Twelve years later, Yimbyism, rebranded as Abundance, has bipartisan support in Congress. “Pro-housing” legislation has passed in dozens of states. It’s the law of the land in California. Its advocates call the shots in reputedly progressive cities such as San Francisco and Berkeley. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has surrounded himself with Yimby advisors.
How did the Yimbys come so far so fast?
A major, unheralded source of their success is the mainstream media’s virtual blackout of their critics. By “mainstream media,” I mean venues ranging from Mother Jones to The Wall Street Journal, as well as NPR. Thanks to its reach and stature, the liberal New York Times is the most influential pro-Yimby censor. When did you last read a serious challenge to Yimby orthodoxy in the Times, other than in the readers’ comments? Never.
So it’s newsworthy that, on Sunday, February 1, The Washington Post, of all things, published a story that reports on the growing scholarly dissent from the Yimbys’ supply-side housing agenda. After noting “a wave of Yimby legislative victories,” reporter Julie Weil turns to “supply skeptics,” starting with Michael Storper, an economic geographer who teaches at UCLA and the London School of Economics.
“‘To put it bluntly,’” Storper tells Weil, “‘in America we haven’t actually been underbuilding….The problem is demand is now split in a very unequal society. The supply you get is the wrong kind of supply.’” Weil cites the new paper that Storper co-authored:
Despite “broad consensus in public discourse” embracing the YIMBY push for deregulation, “Links between regulation and supply, and between supply and prices, are weak at best.” Simply unleashing developers to build more homes won’t make housing affordable, the paper says.
It explores a hypothetical: Imagine that a city increases its housing stock by 1.5 percent each year — a rate that is more than twice the growth of New York or San Francisco from 2000 to 2020, though lower than Denver, Phoenix or Houston. If all that new housing caused prices to fall by 4 percent a year, it would take 18 years before a median one-bedroom apartment becomes affordable for a worker without a college education in San Francisco, or 11 years in the District or eight years in Boston, the paper says. If housing prices fall more slowly, less than 1 percent per year, it would take as much as 124 years in San Francisco and 109 years in Los Angeles.
Storper and his colleagues conclude: “That’s no way to fix affordability….Focusing on deregulation is a “harmful distraction” to more direct approaches like publicly funded vouchers to help pay for housing.” (They also suggest “vigorous investment in alternative strategies such as community land trusts, or some combination.”)
Weil cites other scholarly criticism of Yimbyism/Abundance, such as the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper “attacking the idea of constrained supply as the problem with housing, claiming instead that rising home prices basically tracked local income, regardless of zoning laws in a given city;” and LSE professor Andrés Rodriguez-Pose’s doubts about “filtering” as a path to greater housing affordability.
She briefly quotes supply siders, such as Kevin Corinth, “a former Senate and White House staffer who works for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute,”’ journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who wrote “the influential 2025 book, Abundance,” and former Redwood City Mayor Giselle Hale, who is “now involved with Yimby Action and…leads the ‘Abundance Network,’ a group of state and local elected officials across the country who espouse the ideas of the book.”
The last word goes to advocates of housing in the public domain. Unai Montes-Irueste, “a leader of the left-leaning People’s Action,” tells Weil that “instead of reforming permitting and zoning laws to allow housing to be built,…the government should just build it.”
As a rule, the Yimbys and their academic enablers do not reply directly to their scholarly critics. Indeed, they eschew debate. That’s a sign of weakness. (Perhaps that’s why Redmond reports that the only book author who has refused an interview in his 40 years of reviewing books was Abundance author Ezra Klein).
The closest any of Weil’s sources come to engaging the new paper co-authored by Storper is Adam Guren, who teaches economics at Boston University. Guren “thinks some key questions are still up for debate.” He told Weil,
“[t]he real question is: How segmented are housing markets? There’s one model where if you add floor space to the city, that drives down prices. Another where luxury apartments … are completely different, and there’s not going to be this trickle-down cascade where that drives down prices.”
It’s likely that Weil edited Guren’s interview. But his cited comments dodge the problems raised by supply skeptical scholarship: rampant economic inequality and the inability of the private real estate industry to build housing affordable to the least affluent.
The studies Weil considers have all been covered by Tim Redmond in 48 hills, one—if not the only—publication that regularly reports scholarly challenges to the Yimby program. Here, for example, is Redmond’s January 20 account of the new paper co-authored by Storper.
As far as I know, not a single Yimby or Abundantista has responded to that article or to Redmond’s coverage of the NBER study or of earlier papers written by Storper and Rodriguez-Pose. Would the piece in WAPO move them to acknowledge the growing scholarly pushback against the supply side agenda?
Yes, it would—only to elicit their disdain.
On Sunday morning, California Yimby President and CEO Brian Hanlon reposted the dismissive tweet posted by CA Yimby Senior Director of Legislation and Research Nolan Gray:
Storper and his colleagues state at the outset that their paper “challenges [the] ‘deregulationist’ consensus.” The “structural problem in how media engages with academic research” is that the mainstream media doesn’t engage with academic research that criticizes that consensus. It thereby panders to the Yimbys’ refusal of debate evidenced by Nolan’s dismissive tweet.
Storper and his colleagues state at the outset that their paper “challenges [the] ‘deregulationist’ consensus.” The “structural problem in how media engages with academic research” is that the mainstream media doesn’t engage with academic research that criticizes that consensus. It thereby panders to the Yimbys’ refusal of debate—evidenced by Nolan’s dismissive tweet.
