You wrote: "zoning reform in slow-growth metros can potentially lead to higher prices and rents, as developers seize on the opportunity to appeal to the most affluent buyers and renters"
As a housing economist, I very much doubt this happens often for three reasons.
(1) To have any impact, upzoning has to allow growth that wasn't possible. But as you noted, places like Englewood have swaths of vacant land. If developers were looking for a way to introduce a luxury product, they could easily do so: single-family homes on vacant lots are very simple to permit & market.
(2) Deindustrialized metros like Canton and Flint are *already* building as much net new housing as expensive coastal places, mostly via suburban expansion. It's a modest rate of growth. It may create challenging city/suburb dynamics. But it's not as though the housing stocks are shrinking and upzoning would suddenly introduce growth.
(3) The most affluent buyers & renters are already well-served. After all, they have the money. They're the ones getting the big new suburban houses or the flipped downtown condos. I have yet to see a city where rich people are struggling because nobody is offering them good housing options.
I do think - quite in the opposite direction - that YIMBYism poses a serious threat to disinvested places. If California and the Northeast built homes for an extra 10 million people over the next decade, where would those people come from? Some would come from the Englewoods of the world. That same dynamic could play out regionally: suburban construction around Chicago soaks up some demand, pushing some marginal properties into vacancy and lowering the return on maintenance, etc.
Cities with declining demand are a much, much harder problem than cities with increasing demand! The world is going to get a hard lesson in this very soon, as population decline sets in. But even in a declining-demand environment, water doesn't flow uphill.
Thanks for your comment. When I made that point about a short-term increase in housing prices and rents after upzoning, I was referring to two papers that documented this activity.
In a completely rational world, you'd be right that vacant land in a community like Chicago's Englewood would be easy to permit, even affordable to construct. But builders know the socio-cultural truth as well - they'd be difficult to sell.
Neighborhood conditions like crime, poor quality schools and a lack of neighborhood amenities might trump otherwise redeeming features like having a walkable scale and bountiful transit access. Upzoning of strong demand neighborhoods, like those Freemark studied in his paper, does exactly what you state in your reason #1 - it allows growth that wasn't previously possible. Former commercial sites become multifamily residential, single-family home neighborhoods may add 2-6 unit apartment buildings targeting upper-middle income renters. Developers are willing to take a shot here because if they're successful, the payoff is big.
I agree that YIMBYism poses a threat to disinvested communities, but not quite as you see. Upzoned cities, wherever they are, will first attract people suburbanites who desire the city lifestyle. The suburbanites who leave will be replaced by people who desire (for now) the suburban lifestyle they've never been able to attain. Using Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs as an example, suburban Schaumburg residents are more likely to relocate to Ravenswood than Englewood residents. Today's Englewood residents might be more likely to be attracted to Schaumburg's offerings than Ravenswood.
I know Freemark's piece - it's a puzzle (including to him), because it found price effects despite finding no building effects.
You and I think perhaps on different geographic scales. When I'm talking about big coastal city upzonings, I mostly have suburban places in mind, and I think of housing markets as metro-wide. This is perhaps a difference that's natural in a coastal/Midwest mindset. In Chicagoland, middle-class people can afford to live almost anywhere, so there's a real sense that one town or neighborhood might lose out to nearby substitutes. In Greater Boston, middle-class people can't afford 2/3 of the region unless they already have equity. So it's much more likely that people are making a "stay in the region / move to North Carolina" tradeoff.
Zoning reform in small subsets of broadly supply constrained areas could indeed cause the problem you describe, and I think generally YIMBY's support more broad based reforms to avoid those kind of issues, letting the market do the work of figuring where it does or does not make sense to build. If you then put your urbanist hat on and want to target housing or mixed use growth in some underdeveloped area that the market is not providing, at least zoning won't be standing in the way of whatever it is you want to try.
I don’t understand what the matrix is supposed to communicate or what exactly the city did. It sounds like they relaxed rules to allow people to have more control over what they did with property in the neighborhood. While YIMBYs don’t talk much about it, it seems broadly consistent with YIMBYism as a whole.
You wrote: "zoning reform in slow-growth metros can potentially lead to higher prices and rents, as developers seize on the opportunity to appeal to the most affluent buyers and renters"
As a housing economist, I very much doubt this happens often for three reasons.
(1) To have any impact, upzoning has to allow growth that wasn't possible. But as you noted, places like Englewood have swaths of vacant land. If developers were looking for a way to introduce a luxury product, they could easily do so: single-family homes on vacant lots are very simple to permit & market.
(2) Deindustrialized metros like Canton and Flint are *already* building as much net new housing as expensive coastal places, mostly via suburban expansion. It's a modest rate of growth. It may create challenging city/suburb dynamics. But it's not as though the housing stocks are shrinking and upzoning would suddenly introduce growth.
(3) The most affluent buyers & renters are already well-served. After all, they have the money. They're the ones getting the big new suburban houses or the flipped downtown condos. I have yet to see a city where rich people are struggling because nobody is offering them good housing options.
I do think - quite in the opposite direction - that YIMBYism poses a serious threat to disinvested places. If California and the Northeast built homes for an extra 10 million people over the next decade, where would those people come from? Some would come from the Englewoods of the world. That same dynamic could play out regionally: suburban construction around Chicago soaks up some demand, pushing some marginal properties into vacancy and lowering the return on maintenance, etc.
Cities with declining demand are a much, much harder problem than cities with increasing demand! The world is going to get a hard lesson in this very soon, as population decline sets in. But even in a declining-demand environment, water doesn't flow uphill.
Thanks for your comment. When I made that point about a short-term increase in housing prices and rents after upzoning, I was referring to two papers that documented this activity.
Yonah Freemark, currently with the Urban Institute, wrote this paper in Urban Affairs Review in 2020 (https://yonahfreemark.com/2021/04/13/upzoning-chicago-impacts-of-a-zoning-reform-on-property-values-and-housing-construction/). And while I can't find the direct link now, the Dallas Fed noted in its research that "expectations-driven explosive appreciation", or exuberance, was a feature in housing markets when a "fear of missing out" heightened expectations of price and rent hikes. I quoted that paper last year (https://petesaunders.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-housing-affordability?utm_source=publication-search).
In a completely rational world, you'd be right that vacant land in a community like Chicago's Englewood would be easy to permit, even affordable to construct. But builders know the socio-cultural truth as well - they'd be difficult to sell.
Neighborhood conditions like crime, poor quality schools and a lack of neighborhood amenities might trump otherwise redeeming features like having a walkable scale and bountiful transit access. Upzoning of strong demand neighborhoods, like those Freemark studied in his paper, does exactly what you state in your reason #1 - it allows growth that wasn't previously possible. Former commercial sites become multifamily residential, single-family home neighborhoods may add 2-6 unit apartment buildings targeting upper-middle income renters. Developers are willing to take a shot here because if they're successful, the payoff is big.
I agree that YIMBYism poses a threat to disinvested communities, but not quite as you see. Upzoned cities, wherever they are, will first attract people suburbanites who desire the city lifestyle. The suburbanites who leave will be replaced by people who desire (for now) the suburban lifestyle they've never been able to attain. Using Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs as an example, suburban Schaumburg residents are more likely to relocate to Ravenswood than Englewood residents. Today's Englewood residents might be more likely to be attracted to Schaumburg's offerings than Ravenswood.
I know Freemark's piece - it's a puzzle (including to him), because it found price effects despite finding no building effects.
You and I think perhaps on different geographic scales. When I'm talking about big coastal city upzonings, I mostly have suburban places in mind, and I think of housing markets as metro-wide. This is perhaps a difference that's natural in a coastal/Midwest mindset. In Chicagoland, middle-class people can afford to live almost anywhere, so there's a real sense that one town or neighborhood might lose out to nearby substitutes. In Greater Boston, middle-class people can't afford 2/3 of the region unless they already have equity. So it's much more likely that people are making a "stay in the region / move to North Carolina" tradeoff.
Zoning reform in small subsets of broadly supply constrained areas could indeed cause the problem you describe, and I think generally YIMBY's support more broad based reforms to avoid those kind of issues, letting the market do the work of figuring where it does or does not make sense to build. If you then put your urbanist hat on and want to target housing or mixed use growth in some underdeveloped area that the market is not providing, at least zoning won't be standing in the way of whatever it is you want to try.
I don’t understand what the matrix is supposed to communicate or what exactly the city did. It sounds like they relaxed rules to allow people to have more control over what they did with property in the neighborhood. While YIMBYs don’t talk much about it, it seems broadly consistent with YIMBYism as a whole.