NIMBYism Stifles Housing Construction in Previous Growth Areas

In a recent article in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma, describes how NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) forces have been increasingly stifling housing construction many areas – including Sun Belt cities – where it was previously relatively easy:

Something is happening in the housing market that really shouldn’t be. Everyone familiar with America’s affordability crisis knows that it is most acute in ultra-progressive coastal cities in heavily Democratic states. And yet, home prices have been rising most sharply in the exact places that have long served as a refuge for Americans fed up with the spiraling cost of living. Over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas. (Over that same stretch, prices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have increased by about 75 percent, 76 percent, and 97 percent, respectively).

This trend could prove disastrous. For much of the past half century, suburban sprawl across the Sun Belt was a kind of pressure-release valve for the housing market. People who couldn’t afford to live in expensive cities had other, cheaper places to go. Now even the affordable alternatives are on track to become out of reach for a critical mass of Americans.

The trend also presents a mystery. According to expert consensus, anti-growth liberals have imposed excessive regulations that made building enough homes impossible. The housing crisis has thus become synonymous with feckless blue-state governance. So how can prices now be rising so fast in red and purple states known for their loose regulations?

As Karma describes later in the article, the main cause of the problem is the growth of exclusionary zoning and other regulatory restrictions on construction in areas where the were previously relatively lax. He relies in part on an important new  new National Bureau of Economic Research study by leading housing economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, which I analyzed here.

The trend is not entirely uniform, and there are bright spots. As Karma notes, cities like Raleigh, NC have enacted zoning reforms curbing NIMBYism. The same is true of Austin, Texas. The Texas state legislature recently enacted valuable statewide reforms., and California enacted a useful YIMBY law just yesterday.

I am also a little skeptical of the claim – advanced in Karma’s article – that increases in the proportion of wealthy and highly educated residents in an area necessarily boost NIMBYism. Survey data on attitudes towards NIMBYism and housing construction is equivocal, and much depends on how questions are framed. Moreover, much survey data does not find a significant difference in attitudes between affluent homeowners on the one hand and renters on the other. Economic ignorance is often a bigger driver of support for exclusionary zoning than narrow self-interest by homeowners. Indeed, many current homeowners actually have much to gain from curbing exclusionary zoning and other NIMBY excesses.

That said, it is also true that studies find that local NIMBY activists are disproportionately affluent, white, and relatively older homeowners. Such activists can be quite effective in blocking housing projects even if their views are not representative of a general divide between, say, homeowners and renters. Katherine Levine Einstein and her coauthors demonstrate this in detail in their important book Neighborhood Defenders.

The good news is much can be done to curb NIMBYism. Statewide legislation can abolish or at least limit the zoning rules and other regulatory restrictions NIMBYs rely on. In a 2024 Texas Law Review article coauthored with Josh Braver, we argue that exclusionary zoning and other similar restrictions that greatly limit housing construction violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and outline ways in which a combination of litigation and political action can be used to combat them.  See also our much shorter non-academic article  in the Atlantic. State-constitutional litigation may be an alternative path to success, along with state constitutional amendments (which in many states are much easier to enact than amendments to the federal Constitution).

The spread of NIMBYism is not inevitable. It can even be reversed in places where it has previously taken root. But we YIMBYs need to do a better job of using the various tools available to us.

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