At the Democratic National Convention, President Obama came out in support of housing deregulation and said “we need to build more housing and get rid of some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it difficult to build housing”. Robert Kwasny asks in X, “What are the intellectual roots of today’s YIMBYism?”
Looking at MR I think the first YIMBY post was actually Tim Harford’s 2005 guest post, Red tape and housing prices, pointing to a Slate article by Steven Landsburg. Here is Landsburg:
Instead of the traditional formula of “house price equals land price + construction cost + reasonable profit,” we seem to be seeing something like “house price equals land price + construction cost + reasonable profit + part of the mystery.” And, most interestingly, the mystery part varies greatly from city to city.
Even in cities like San Francisco, where there is less building space and land is dearer as a result (on the order of $85,000 per quarter, compared to $2,200 in Dallas), you can’t use land values to define housing prices. The mystery part of San Francisco housing—that is, the residual value when you subtract land prices and construction costs from housing prices—is the highest in the country.
Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joe Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania have counted these mysterious parts in about twenty-two American cities. They think that the mystery part is actually “property tax.” That is, zoning and other restrictions put a brake on competitive power and keep housing prices rising. (Read one of their papers here.)
Zoning’s Steep Price, Glaeser and Gyourko’s paper is actually from 2002 (the famous version of their NBER piece was presented that year at the NYFed) so you can see back in the old days it took years for ideas to spread even among bloggers! Still, 22 years from the NBER paper to the Presidential campaign is quite an achievement. I see Glaeser and Gyourko as the source of YIMBY. Congratulations to Glaeser and Gyourko!
MR continued to promote deregulation for many years but I think it started around 2017 which is when the first YIMBY reference I could find to MR is from a mixed link. Here’s Tyler in 2017 pointing to a job market paper on how the law is driving up housing prices and here I am in early 2018 on Why Housing in California is Unaffordable. The proliferation of research on this topic has given us something to talk about which is an interesting model of how ideas are transmitted.
Kwasny also wonders why Democrats seem to have taken YIMBY more than Republicans, especially given that the repeal, anti-design, pro-growth, pro-progressors would seem to be more aligned with Republican rhetoric and political support. Indeed, Zoning’s Steep Price was published in Cato’s Regulation and the various link that introduced YIMBY to MR was in an article criticizing YIMBY to libertarians, Peter Theil and the tech bros! (Congratulations to Jeremy Stoppelman for the best EA contribution!)
Although it may have started as coded libertarian, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias will be credited with pushing YIMBY and housing boom among the Democratic elite. (Jon Favreau, Obama’s speechwriter, says Obama sounds like Ezra Klein!) But it is not too late for the Republicans to come home. Can’t we all agree to build more? Learn Bryan Caplan in the NYTimes!
Addendum: Tyler traces the intellectual roots of YIMBY far back to Nicolas Barbon’s An Apology for the Builder which was also recommended by Marc Andreessen. In Britain, Sam Bowman points to Mark Pennington’s excellent 2002 monograph Liberating the Land: The Case for Private Land-use Planning (pdf).
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