Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent free.

This week’s newsletter takes a look at some of the housing policy arguments that made it into the Democratic National Convention (DNC) platform and whether they are evidence of the much-heralded YIMBY takeover of the party.

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YIMBYs triumph at the DNC?

In his speech on the third night of the DNC, former President Barack Obama said that Vice President Kamala Harris knows: “If we want to make it easier for more young people to buy their own homes, we need to build more housing units and eliminate some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it difficult for working people in this country to build their own homes. That is a priority.”

In her acceptance speech, Harris interspersed calls to provide capital to small businesses and protect social welfare programs with a brief promise to “end America’s housing crisis.”

The response from YIMBY activists and the professionals, academics and journalists traveling with them—all of whom favor liberalizing zoning and land-use regulations to increase housing supply and lower housing costs—was enthusiastic.

At BloombergMatthew Yglesias called YIMBY the “shooting star” of Congress. Business Insider said Obama had pushed Democrats into their “YIMBY era.” Mother Jones And Politico also published articles about the increasing influence of YIMBYs on the Democrats’ agenda and priorities.

The mere mention of “ending America’s housing crisis” makes Harris the “most pro-housing candidate,” the Center for New Liberalism think tank said at X.

Certainly, it is a significant victory for Democratic YIMBYs when a former president explicitly supports their own political agenda and a presidential candidate alludes to it in his speeches at the party convention.

This is evidence that the YIMBY worldview influences Democratic elites. Obama’s comments in particular are evidence that some Democratic elites believe YIMBY policies are not only right, but worthwhile.

All this is a far cry from the explicit NIMBYism of former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator JD Vance (Ohio)’s plan to reduce housing costs through mass deportations of immigrants.

Settle down

That said, the DNC provided much less evidence of a YIMBY takeover of the Democratic Party than many commentators claim. It is also far from clear that a Harris-Walz administration will actually advance YIMBY priorities and improve housing affordability.

Although the need to increase housing received more attention at this convention than at previous ones, it was hardly at the center of the agenda.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis, perhaps the most outspoken and active Democratic governor in the YIMBY movement, did not mention housing in his remarks to the DNC.

Former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge, in her speech at the convention, simply cited Harris’ goal of building three million new homes and her policies of limiting rent increases and subsidizing down payments. She made no mention of liberalizing zoning, eliminating parking minimums, simplifying the permitting process, or other YIMBY reforms that could make those three million housing units possible.

Even Harris’ rhetorical commitment to “ending America’s housing crisis” is less impressive when you consider that ending America’s housing shortage can mean very different things to many different people.

When a politician says he supports the legalization of marijuana or the abolition of the death penalty, he is committing to a fairly clear political position. His rhetoric creates a clear level of accountability.

But when a politician says he wants to end the housing shortage, this can mean that he is committed to dozens of different measures, some of which are good, some of which are harmless, and some of which are very bad.

Policy-oriented

And Harris’ concrete policy commitments on housing are, by and large, pretty poor.

She supports President Joe Biden’s call for federal rent control, a disastrous policy that has long reduced the supply and quality of rental housing. She called for a $25,000 down payment for first-time buyers, which might increase supply somewhat but would also certainly drive up housing prices.

Harris was also quick to scapegoat “corporate landlords” for buying up apartments that could have gone to private individuals and for using rent recommendation software to set “artificially high” rents – two highly controversial allegations.

In terms of policy details, Harris is arguably worse than previous Democratic candidates and administrations.

The Obama administration criticized land-use regulations for driving up prices and early on proposed a “YIMBY grant” to encourage local governments to liberalize their land-use regulations.

As a candidate, Biden’s housing program called for cutting off federal transportation funding to communities that did not liberalize their zoning plans. (In office, his administration settled for creating a small, poorly targeted YIMBY grant program.)

Not victory, but conflict

So Harris’s main claim to YIMBY fame is not that her policy proposals are better than those of previous Democratic candidates. Rather, she is more vocal about the need for housing than previous Democratic candidates.

That’s good. But don’t take that to mean she’s an avid YIMBY convert. Rather, take that to mean that housing affordability is a more important issue now than it was in previous campaigns, and Harris needs to talk about it more.

When it comes to housing, Harris draws on a mishmash of ideas that have broad support on the left, criticizing local utility restrictions while calling for rent controls and a crackdown on commercial landlords.

“When housing is at the centre of the political spotlight, there is a risk that both bad and good ideas will prevail,” writes Yglesias in his Slowly getting boring Newsletter today. He interprets Obama’s criticism of state and local utility restrictions as an attempt to focus Democrats’ attention on productive zoning reforms rather than on measures that would exacerbate the housing shortage.

I think that’s a correct interpretation. The implication, however, is not that YIMBYs are driving Democrats’ housing policy, but that their agenda is just one of several at stake.

Harris is trying to overcome this conflict by supporting virtually every liberal and left-wing housing policy on offer.

That’s a concern even if some YIMBY ideas are implemented into policy during a Harris administration. Ultimately, the federal government can only encourage more homebuilding so much. In the meantime, it could do a lot to reduce it.

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Direct links

• A lawsuit against the abolition of single-family home zoning in Alexandria, Virginia, is in court, reports The Washington Post.

• Berkeley, California, the first municipality in the U.S. to introduce a single-family-only zone, is in the process of completing a comprehensive rezoning of the city, says Planetize.

• Economist Tyler Cowen argues that to redevelop our cities and promote economic growth, we should focus on speeding up transportation rather than increasing density.

• Ilya Somin responds that true mobility (the ability to move wherever you want) requires the price-depressing effect of large, dense new housing construction.

• Alex Tabarrok explores the intellectual roots of YIMBYism.

• Utah argues in a new lawsuit that federal ownership of certain lands is unconstitutional.

The post “YIMBY’s Premature Victory Dance at the DNC” first appeared on Reason.com.