The strange hypocrisy of the ‘just build housing’ YIMBYs
Steven Greenhut | October 2, 2024
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the Free Cities Center’s forthcoming booklet (“Building New Cities from Scratch: America’s Long History of Urban Experimentation”) about new cities, which was prompted by California Forever’s proposal to build an entirely new city on ranchland east of the San Francisco Bay Area. Its backers have pulled it from the November ballot amid political opposition, but they intend on pushing ahead after working with Solano County. The proposal provides an opportunity to look at new ways of building and operating cities.
California Forever’s statement in its promotional literature that “all cities were once new cities” is worth contemplating in the context of its proposed, albeit-delayed project. The urban-planning profession is dominated by people who seem to have forgotten that obvious point, as they idealize existing cities and snarl at the idea of new construction in undeveloped areas. Indeed, the modern urbanist movement – and many Western states’ official policies – are driven by the requirement that most new construction take place within the existing urban footprint.
That’s one reason California’s housing affordability problem has blossomed into a crisis. It’s more expensive to build within that footprint – and these policies have stopped many planned proposals elsewhere. Some major proposals for master-planned communities and new cities have been stymied for decades, as environmentalists file CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) and other lawsuits.
Smart Growth is the planning arm of the urbanist movement, which promotes various limits and growth-stifling policies such as Portland-style urban-growth boundaries. As Smart Growth Online explains, this philosophy “directs development towards existing communities already served by infrastructure, seeking to utilize the resources that existing neighborhoods offer, and conserve open space and irreplaceable natural resources on the urban fringe….”
Housing affordability is a stated concern of urbanists, so it’s odd for them to insist that building in the highest-priced regions, on the trickiest parcels in the highest-taxed locales with the costliest infrastructure limitations and union-dominated construction trades is the way to build enough housing to bring down prices for would be buyers. Urbanist opposition to “greenfield” development suggests that their goal isn’t primarily to promote housing construction but to de-suburbanize our society.
California Forever made the “urbanist case” for its project, arguing that the project “offers a model for how to create new communities that provide the benefits of dense, walkable life to more people. If the new community is ever built, it will become a demonstration of some sensible approaches to city planning that can be deployed to other cities, both old and new.” A few urbanists and YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yarders) were supportive, but many activists in that movement have actively opposed it. Others have remained oddly quiet – odd because urbanists love to talk about every tiny building proposal that takes place. To its credit, the state’s main YIMBY group, California YIMBY, did ultimately issue a statement of support in June 2024.
The YIMBY mantra has been “just build housing,” but the movement’s critics have long noted that the saying needs an asterisk after it: *Only high-density housing in existing cities of the type and style that we like applies here. This project, although delayed, shines a light on their inconsistencies, as California Forever most definitely would have built more housing and provided walkable communities. But it would have done so on open ranchland miles from existing urban areas. Most people who might live there almost certainly would buy dreaded cars.
I’ve also talked with NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) critics of the plan, who raise questions about whether the project will be able to lure enough businesses, whether there’s sufficient infrastructure to support the project and whether people will really want to live that far from existing job centers. Some complain about water scarcity, even though the project is on the edge of the California Delta, the West Coast’s largest estuary and the most water-rich site in California.
Yes, California policymakers need to do a better job building infrastructure and improving the state’s water and energy systems, but we shouldn’t deny new housing construction for that reason. For one thing, the state’s population isn’t even growing – the likely residents of the new city already live here and already are using resources. As an aside, environmentalists have long opposed resource and infrastructure improvements as de facto growth controls. Yet developers are capable of building and funding infrastructure to serve a new project. These Luddite arguments shouldn’t dissuade us.
Regarding the YIMBYs, the San Francisco Chronicle addressed their mixed reactions and some of their hypocrisy. The newspaper found one YIMBY movement founder, Sonja Trauss, who spoke favorably about it: “I’m excited about it – more is more, and we need housing.” Kudos to her, but others quoted from that movement were critical. Another prominent YIMBY called it “sprawl 2.0.” The newspaper noted that, “Other YIMBYs argued that the amount of money and attention going into the California Forever project will lessen the chances that dense infill housing will be added in Solano County cities like Fairfield, which has been desperately and unsuccessfully looking to attract multifamily developers to its downtown.” It’s a weird argument from advocates of more housing that the government should stop a project that promises to house tens of thousands of people because, well, building new stuff out there will stop people from building stuff over here, where we think it ought to go.
The group, Solano Together, reflects the main organized opposition to the project. It states on its website that its goal is “to support development and infrastructure investment in existing cities to preserve vital farm and ranch lands and prevent harmful sprawl development.” That reinforces my long-held view that many YIMBYs and NIMBYs are often similar in their willingness to use government to limit housing construction. Their only real difference is NIMBYs don’t want that construction within their existing communities and YIMBYs do. Neither side consistently advocates for more overall housing construction wherever the market determines it ought to go.
Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center.
