How I ended up on team YIMBY

A few observations changed my mind from “pro housing but we need deal with these problems” to “pro housing”.

The first observation is that in the face of high housing demand, our zoning laws are completely indifferent to the demographics of who can afford to move into a region, and only speak to the shape, size, and placement of the boxes that we live in.  Is a town, and a town’s “character”, the boxes that people live in, or the people who live in those boxes?  If the middle class can no longer afford to buy in a city or town, over time that city will lose its middle class, and its character will absolutely change.  But the boxes, those at least are preserved.

The second observation is that the problems associated with greater housing density are problems that we can deal with local-ish.  The two main problems are school funding and traffic; in both cases these have state and local/regional solutions, and we can elect people who favor solving these problems.  Traffic is a squishier problem but we also have a lot of tools that we can use to mitigate it.  We need to get our transit fixed; it worked decently well thirty years ago, why not make it work well again?  We can also run it even better, if we are willing to pay for it.  We could extend it further out, if we are willing to pay for it.  We can run better rail to suburbs and chip away at some of that traffic.  We can improve cycling in the cities and towns surrounding Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville; for plenty of people, their commutes (and their errands, actually more trips than commutes) are possible on a bike.  (If you don’t know how to deal with groceries, kid transportation, or winter, other people do, it’s not hard, it just requires the right bike and a little knowledge.)  We could pass a congestion tax, IF we do it before housing prices get too high — someone willing to pay $2million for a condo will not be substantially deterred by small fees for driving into crowded places.

The highest demand for more housing is closer to jobs, which are largely in Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston, so if new housing is created where demand is highest, it will generally have a higher chance of not needing a daily car trip.

Edit/addition, 2023-11-25: For many towns, “traffic” is also not caused by local density, but by people traveling through a town.  If those people are in cars, one thing they do, is always seek the currently fastest route, nowadays  updated with same-hour congestion reports.  This means that any locally-influenced traffic changes (increase or decrease) will be counteracted by cut-through traffic adjusting to that change.  The local “solution” to this problem is to decouple local transportation from automobile traffic as much as possible; allow businesses close enough to where people live that they can walk, provide safe and comfortable bike routes so people can bike, and reserve lanes for bus use so that traffic increases don’t affect bus speeds.  And, try to reduce cut-through traffic with long-haul alternatives, like better rail to suburbs.

The third observation is that the problems that result if we don’t build enough new housing to meet demand w/o substantial price increases, are problems that we cannot easily solve.  The higher prices are allowed to rise and the longer the high prices persist, the greater the effect on the town’s demographics.  That change is roughly permanent.  Adding supply at that point will perhaps, instead of stabilizing prices, depress them, leading to recent purchasers underwater on their mortgages; it’s a lot of real economic harm to them.  And at least the initial tranche of any new supply will be at the high market, and will continue (through addition rather than replacement) some of the same demographic changes resulting from the spiked-high prices.  

High unit prices also make it more difficult to construct legally-defined-affordable housing; any unit sold at an affordable-instead-of-market price means that someone, somewhere, is subsidizing that difference, and the larger the difference, the larger the subsidy.  One way out of this is to permit higher-than-usual density if some units are affordable, but that still throttles supply, and still leaves no housing supply for the middle (given high enough prices, upper-middle) class.