The Rise and Fall of the YIMBY Consensus
The lack of affordable housing is a complex problem. And every complex problem, as the saying goes, has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. In this instance, free market fundamentalism has long provided one such answer — the notion that invisible economic forces will solve affordable housing crises, if we only step aside, wait patiently, and let them work their magic. It has, of course, never worked out that way; but free-market apologists have always found a way to blame the world for its failure to conform to mechanistic economic models. This has kept their totalizing theories roaming the earth like zombies, providing intellectual cover for their policy application, and forever eluding the grave where bad ideas go to rot. And in recent years, these zombies have gotten a makeover and started to pop up in unexpected places.
The Bay Area is a land hospitable to technoutopianism and invigorated by the perennial search for hacks and technological fixes for life and its vicissitudes. It should then come as no surprise that it was here that the current iteration of the YIMBY movement came to be. Folks dismayed by the region’s high housing costs looked around and rediscovered a simple technical solution: deregulation. In their account, land use controls had inhibited housing construction and constrained supply, leading to higher housing prices. This intuitive connection was made by reference to single-family-home districts and to a history of exclusionary zoning practices— a move that gave the movement’s deregulatory platform the semblance of a progressive plea. Thus framed, YIMBYism gained traction and was promulgated across the country in the name of social equity by useful zealots and self-interested cynics, willfully or blissfully unencumbered by the weight of historical counter-evidence, the contingencies of context, or the nuances and limitations of contemporary housing research. Before long, the old wine of deregulation started showing up in YIMBY bottles at the table of housing policy debate and, increasingly, it was the only drink on the menu.
The story of an intractable crisis caused by regressive regulation holds tremendous appeal for those in the business of selling simple, dramatic stories — journalists and politicians. Both contingents seemed all too eager to pack their things and move into the echo chamber of YIMBY orthodoxies. To judge from mainstream newspaper coverage, official statements across all levels of government, and the occasional half-baked pop-journalism best seller, you’d assume that, as a matter of consensus: housing was unaffordable across the income scale; a housing shortage was the reason for it; and land use regulation was the reason for that shortage. And yet, there has been an abundance of disagreement on all those points. But you would not have known that unless you happened to follow housing research closely.
Is the YIMBY fever about to break? Maybe. In recent weeks, two papers have come out independently bucking the supposed YIMBY consensus, Buchholz et al. (2026) and Louie et al. (2025). This in itself is not news (although it might be to the Department of City Planning, which either ignores or publicly disavows the existence of any evidence that undermines the rationale for the hamfisted upzoning schemes that it keeps passing off as actual plans). What’s news is that it got covered by the national media. The fact that the authors include some of the most cited scholars in the field might have something to do with that. But we’ll take it, because this work reinforces our own long standing efforts to call attention to empirical evidence that contradicts the YIMBY narrative (see here for an overview).
Several assumptions undergird the deregulationist push to override local land use controls and to undermine, in the name of housing affordability, the influence of communities in the development of their neighborhoods:
- Lack of affordable housing stems from a lack of overall housing supply;
- An increase in overall housing supply will make housing affordable to those in need; and
- The relaxation of land use regulation provides an effective means to stimulate the new construction.
Numerous studies call all three into question. With regard to the third, Buchholz et al. (2026) points to a range of cross-regional studies that conclude that housing supply and and prices respond similarly to demand fluctuations, regardless of the degree of land use regulation. It also references Freemark (2023), a survey of all peer-reviewed empirical English-language research on housing-related, land-use regulatory change that finds conflicting or inconclusive evidence on the impacts of deregulation on housing production at both local and regional levels.
With regard to the second assumption, the study cites research showing that new housing supply can cause an increase or a decrease in nearby housing prices, depending on neighborhood type and market tier and that, in any case, the impact is modest. It then describes attempts to measure the speed at which the price effect of new housing construction filters down to segments of the market available to lower income households. The rates tend to be small and occasionally negative. Moreover, when downward filtering does happen, it has been found to result in higher housing costs burdens. To illustrate these dynamics, the authors conduct a simulation exercise based on assumptions gleaned from the above findings to illustrate the impact of a housing boom on housing prices. They conclude that “no realistic [supply] shock could be large or quick enough to provide significant relief to today’s cost-burdened households in major U.S. cities.”
Finally, with regard to the first assumption, Buchholz et al. (2026) disputes the relationship between rising housing prices and housing supply shortfall in two moves. First, it points to research disputing the presence of a housing shortage—Schwartz and McClure (2024), for one, argues that findings of housing shortage at a metropolitan and national level fail to account for the large surplus of housing produced during previous decades. Second, it advances as an alternative explanation the national increase in income and wealth inequality. This argument has long been part of housing policy debate (see, for instance, Tilly (2006)). But the present study contributes a geographic dimension to it, demonstrating that, because housing prices track average income growth, the affordability crisis closely tracks the national distribution of high-earning college graduates. This tendency, the authors explain, accounts for the acuity of the crisis in the country’s largest and densest urban areas:
Non-college educated workers must compete for housing against residents whose incomes have benefited from globalization and technological change, amplified by agglomeration economies. Housing prices track average income growth, but that average obscures increasingly unequal income growth, with decades of stagnant wages for many workers. This gap between prices and stagnant incomes is the central driver of the affordability crisis.
We welcome the deserved attention that this paper has received. But we should point out that, despite the mindless media saturation of YIMBY talking points, there has never been a shortage of research and data debunking the narrative that undergirds the deregulationist platform. Just last month, housing scholar Alan Mallach posted a two part review casting doubt on the relation between regulation, housing supply, and housing prices. Local housing groups, like the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, have been saying for years that we’re not dealing with a housing supply crisis, but with an affordable housing one—a mismatch between housing prices and household incomes at the bottom of the market. And we ourselves have produced reports and highlighted scholarship demonstrating that deregulating housing markets will not only fail to solve affordability problems; it will likely make them worse.
The political appeal of peddling deregulation—a straightforward policy solution that just happens to redound to the benefit of the real estate sector—has been plain to see (as it ever has). We hope that the new administration will part ways with its predecessor and take the less expedient path of tackling the affordability crisis as it exists in the real world and not as real estate interests and its YIMBY mouthpieces would like it to.
References:
Buchholz, M., Kemeny, T., Randolph, G., & Storper, M. (2026). Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis. Retrieved from osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/95trz_v1
Freemark, Y. (2023). Zoning Change: Upzonings, Downzonings, and Their Impacts on Residential Construction, Housing Costs, and Neighborhood Demographics. Journal of Planning Literature, 38(4), 548–570.
Louie, S., Mondragon, John, A. & Wieland, Johannes. (2025). Supply Constraints do not Explain Housing Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities (NBER Working Paper No. 33576). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w33576
McClure, K., & Schwartz, A. (2024). Where Is the Housing Shortage? Housing Policy Debate, 0(0), 1–15.
Tilly, C. (2006). The Economic environment of housing: Income inequality and insecurity. In Bratt, R. G., Stone, M. E., & Hartman, C. W. (Eds). A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda (pp 20-37). Temple University Press.