AA debate is stirring nationally around single-family housing. Last year in California, which is experiencing a severe housing shortage, efforts were made—and thwarted by homeowners—to change zoning to allow more dense development, part of an attempt to decrease housing costs by increasing the housing supply. The Minneapolis City Council passed similar legislation.
An often-vitriolic discourse has emerged online about the best ways to reduce the cost of housing in cities, with the solutions falling mainly into two camps. The first is the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) camp, which argues that the housing crisis can be mitigated by upzoning and increasing housing supply, and that affordability will come in the form of either “filtering” (essentially trickle-down housing economics, where increased supply means decreased demand and therefore lower rent) or by incentivizing developers to allocate a certain percentage of new units as being explicitly affordable at different income levels. The other camp has been dubbed “PHIMBY” (public housing in my backyard), a catch-all term for changing affordability through social housing, rent control, community land trusts, and other similar measures. Meanwhile, the enemy of both are the NIMBYs—the not in my backyard coalition—who oppose new development at all costs on the grounds that it will alter “neighborhood character,” decrease availability of parking, or lower property values.
Most of this debate revolves around not the houses themselves, but zoning and land use. That makes sense. The houses cannot be extricated from the land upon which they sit and the policies that govern its use. And perhaps it’s no surprise that the vitriol toward single-family housing tends to center in urban areas where housing is scarce, and where other housing types are visible. But the debate also raises larger questions about single-family homes: What is their value in this current political moment? And is it immoral for us to keep building them?
