How NIMBYs drive up housing prices in California

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• published: 10 Feb 2017
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In this interview, Carson Bruno explains how NIMBYs are making California’s affordable housing crisis even worse by blocking much needed, high-density urban development projects. Carson Bruno is an Assistant Dean at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy. Twitter: @CarsonJFBruno https://twitter.com/CarsonJFBruno?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Carson’s Real Clear Markets article on NIMBYism and Affordable Housing: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2016/03/24/nimby-ism_and_the_california_housing_shortage_102078.html The Millennial Project Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Millennial-Project-1465969280366569/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewmurphydavis/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/?lang=en Interview Summary Introduction: California’s affordable housing crisis is primarily driven by supply and demand. More people are moving to California every year and California is not building enough new housing supply to satisfy this increased demand. The result is a price increase. Rents are going up, home buyers are paying more for new houses, and homeowners are paying more in taxes (as property values increase) to hold on to property that they already have. This crisis is especially severe in California’s largest cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The cure for this crisis is increasing supply by constructing more housing units. However, NIMBYs are blocking the construction of these new units across the state. Interview begins 1:30 Carson begins the interview by explaining that “NIMBYism by itself isn’t necessarily a problem” because it “isn’t anti-development per say”. However, what has happened in California is that NIMBYism has “merged with residentialism”, which came out of Palo Alto in the 1960s and is very anti-development and very anti-growth. Residentialists, Carson says, seek to block development because they want to preserve the “culture” and “intrinsic feel” of their communities “at the time that they bought into that community”. 2:11 Carson goes on to explain that this is one of the hardest political problems to understand because it doesn’t fall neatly on “partisan lines”. Instead, you can find everyone from Republicans and Democrats to Communists and Libertarians in the Residentialist-NIMBY movement. The locality of zoning decisions also further complicates the issue. 3:16 Next, Carson talks about “the NIMBY toolkit” and how NIMBYs influence local governments to do what they want. According to Carson, development is already a very long process and NIMBYs attempt to further “elongate” or “frustrate” the process until it “kills the process entirely”. 4:56 They do this with three primary tools. The first is “misinformation”. Here, NIMBYs build strawman arguments like the idea that Airbnb—rather than a NIMBY fueled restriction on development—is driving up housing prices. NIMBYs also perpetrate misinformation by exaggerate problems associated with development, like traffic congestion, in order to make those problems seem unsolvable and keep projects from getting approved. 5:50 The second tool is “co-opting the political process”. NIMBYs get their own members elected to local political office or appointed to local planning and advisory boards. They also “flood” city council meetings, committees, and hearings “with their members, making it seem like they are the only voices that really have a stake” in the project. And this strategy can be very effective because, in politics, “the squeaky wheel gets the oil”. 6:49 The third is CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA allows anybody to file appeals against a project on the grounds that it may be harming the environment. NIMBYs utilize this law to gum up the permitting process for projects, by demanding more environmental impact reports and reviews. The goal here, Carson says, is to “stall, stall, stall in the hope of eventually killing” projects. 8:35