This is a reasonable critique and I’ve never used Paris as a model for this reason. Being allowed to build six-story buildings isn’t going to make your city Paris any more than having free speech is going to make you Marcel Proust.

But let’s flip the lens around: What about those buildings Collison chose to exemplify “what is actually on offer”? That’s the Batik Apartments in Seattle, completed in 2018. Strong YIMBY policy have made Seattle a renter’s market:

I agree that the Batik is pretty ugly. I count at least 7 distinct exterior materials interspersed even within a very small area. Why? It’s not the cheapest option, which would be to stick with one, maybe two finishes for simplicity. Nor are the various small protrusions, each of which adds cost and reduces resilience.

So why was it built like this? It could be that customers want this and they just don’t share my preference for simplicity. It could reflect the artistic values of the architects, who seem to be very proud of it.

A third possibility is that the Batik looks unique in exactly the same way every other new building is unique because it had to clear Seattle’s famously strict design review (which has since been pared back by YIMBY-led state laws). Here’s the developer’s 81-page response to the city’s Early Design Guidance (EDG) Report feedback. (The city has a helpful website outlining the 22 steps to submit plans for EDG, which of course is just one of many approvals before construction may begin.)

The EDG response has many renderings of the structure and lovingly presents this awful palette of colors and textures.

Could Seattle architects have legally built classically-styled apartments? I can’t find a single modern example. There’s a good chance that many neighborhood Design Review Boards would have rejected a Haussmann-style building (or even a copy of the Cobb Building) as “pastiche”. In the silly world of contemporary architecture, it’s dishonest to pretend your building is older than it really is, but mandatory to “break up the massing” and pretend your building is several different buildings. The obsession with articulation, multiple materials, and “doodads” yields a style I call “design review rococo.”

American building without design review

So what would American architects build if it was just between them and the market? Surprisingly few big cities allow us to test this idea. Even fast-growing Sunbelt cities like Miami, Austin, and Phoenix usually have design review. Thankfully, there’s Houston.

And…it looks pretty similar. The colors are perhaps a bit more muted on average, but that probably reflects the different climate. Houston builders presumably aren’t wasting their money on architects’ whims. The people with skin in the game believe that breaking up the massing and using mixed materials, although it adds costs, attracts more renters.

Personally, I love the exception among the Houston photos – the Marquis Enclave. It’s an industrial loft imitation complex which covers seven entire blocks and has created an excellent shady streetscape at the edge of the Fourth Ward:

But if you look at the Marquis Enclave’s advertising, it nowhere mentions the architecture or public realm. Instead, the word “modern” shows up four times on the recruitment page.

Aesthetic NIMBYs

If this casual analysis is correct, then Americans don’t care very much about exteriors. And to the extent that they care, they favor midrise buildings that Collison and I find ugly. I would very much like to be wrong about this!

Practically speaking, what it means is that Collison’s core point is probably wrong: offering Americans a product that he and I like better isn’t going to make them favor upzoning.

[Following up on a neighbor’s complaint,] Building Commissioner Dennis Manuwal reviewed the property and confirmed the shed, which sits just two feet from the property line, was in violation of city codes. However, while inspecting the Emmons’ property, Manuwal drove through the rest of the subdivision and observed numerous similar infractions.

During a Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) meeting on Monday, Plymouth Plan Director Ty Adley reported the scope of the issue. Of the 31 sheds located within the South Pointe Subdivision, only 13 currently meet setback requirements or have previously obtained a variance. The remaining 18 sheds are situated too close to the side yard, rear yard, or both.

The subdivision in question has just 41 houses. Almost half are out of compliance. The obvious solution would have been for Building Commissioner Manuwal to keep his observations to himself. A more sophisticated solution would be for the city to reduce its onerous 20-foot rear setback for accessory structures, which obviously don’t correspond to the normal practice.

The city chose neither of those. Instead:

Homeowners must now either physically relocate their sheds to comply with the 10-foot side and 20-foot rear setback requirements, or they must officially apply for a “variance of development standard.”

To obtain a variance, residents will need to present their case to the board and explain specifically why their shed cannot be relocated to meet the standard setbacks. Adley emphasized that there is no blanket solution, and the board will consider each variance application individually on its own merits.

There is a blanket solution – relax the zoning – but the city officials are too committed to their codes to be responsive to their citizens.

After decades of background study and advocacy – see here for a research compilation – legislators in Maine and Texas passed bills that allow starter homes by putting guardrails on local minimum lot sizes. Without guardrails, localities often require every new house lot to be much bigger than what local families can afford.

California took another approach, allowing small developments of up to 10 starter homes statewide under specific parameters. I don’t know of any data yet, but Californians tell me this is much more successful in generating new home starts than other, higher-profile reforms the state has passed.

With those successes, several more states have serious proposals on the table for 2026. Here’s a brief comparison, emphasizing the lot size that’s required under the law, where the law applies, and whether the law has detailed protections against local poison pills.

The “detailed protections” are important because it’s very easy to shadowban small lot homes via large setbacks, width or depth requirements, and so on.

Some interpretive points:

• Typical of California lawmaking, its statute is highly complex and covers many scenarios in detail. It has been continually refined with updates to the initial 2021 law.
• The Maine and Texas laws have been enacted. However, they’re still too new to know how they’re working out in practice.
• Texas’ bill is limited to a narrow range of sites in big cities, a compromise that was necessary to pass it.
• Massachusetts’ ballot measure on minimum lot sizes is a key test case for public support for YIMBY policies.
• Indiana’s bill passed, but its minimum lot size provisions were amended out.
• The Maryland Starter & Silver Homes Act specifies that town houses are allowed everywhere. I think the authors’ intent is that 3 or 4 town houses could be built on a 5,000 square foot lot via condo regime, but that might require amendment or implementing regulations.
• Connecticut’s bill follows Maryland’s on many points, but its text clearly allows a jurisdiction to limit townhouses to one per 5,000 square feet of land, which is effectively a ban.
• In Colorado (as in Texas), developers often build out utility systems. The law thus doesn’t require a connection to public utilities but allows standard local utility requirements.
• The Idaho bills ban minimum lot sizes above 1,000 or 1,500 sq ft in starter home subdivisions on parcels of 4+ acres, but allows a locality [or HOA] to require 30 feet of frontage and 70 feet of depth, implying a minimum of 2,100 sq ft. In one bill, localities can also limit density to 12 units per acre, which means an average of 3,630 sq ft per lot.
  • The HOA preemption applies only to newly-written HOA deed restrictions so that it isn’t going back and changing existing contracts.
  • I’m skeptical that the HOA preemption can work as written. HOA deeds have so many detailed provisions which a judge may find “reasonable” (e.g. house size, landscaping), the only way to effectively build what they didn’t contemplate is to (a) require that they allow starter home subdivisions and (b) fully void all deed restrictions on a qualifying starter home subdivision.
• Kentucky’s HB 617 has minimum lot size provisions adapted from Texas. Legislators adjusted the population cutoffs for applicability. But they left the 5-acre site minimum, which is probably too much for a state of small cities, which cannot easily absorb Texas-sized subdivisions. The bill also has parking and RICZ provisions.

It may be impossible to legislate minimum lot size guardrails that clever local regulators can’t sneak around. But I’m impressed with the thoughtfulness and quality of these bills. Removing excessive requirements for new homes is a key step to enabling starter homes in more places.

Honorable mentions: Illinois, New Jersey, Utah, and Virginia have bills which would gently nudge localities to allow starter homes but without enough compulsion or incentive to be likely to work. Vermont’s 2023 HOME Act was the first clean minimum lot size preemption, but at 5 units per acre (8,712 sq ft) it doesn’t make the cut for ‘starter home.’

The paper’s arguments seem to fall into four general categories:

1. “Regulation isn’t related to housing supply”– As a matter of common sense, it seems obvious that if laws that allow almost no new housing will be amended to allow some housing, more housing will be built than if the law was unreformed. But the authors write that “evidence suggests that upzoning is not meaningfully related to improvements in regional affordability.”  (page 7) They cite a 2023 study by Yonah Freemark.  But Freemark’s study does not support this.  Freemark’s introduction to his article states  “Downzoning policies are largely associated with reduced construction and less affordability. … Early data suggest that upzonings generate positive effects on regional construction and affordability, but more research is needed. (emphasis mine)”  This might be a more ambiguous than YIMBYs would like, but it certainly is not the flat rejection of upzoning that the authors seem to say it is.

Second, they claim that  because “between 2000 and 2020, no major urban area experienced growth in household formation that exceeded its growth to supply, suggesting that there were not significant differences in supply growth between regulated and unregulated regions” (emphasis mine) (pages 7-8). Census data show that about 34,000 of San Francisco’s housing units were built after 2000, and that about 150,000 of Austin’s were. So if the authors really believe that there is no difference between high growth and low growth cities, they must have been very careless indeed.

I think the first half of the sentence (about “growth in household formation”) shows what the authors really mean: the number of households didn’t grow as much as San Francisco as in Austin, therefore supply must have been consistent with demand rather than lagging behind demand. This would make sense if demand for San Francisco was limited to people who stayed there. But as a matter of common sense, demand for San Francisco should include people priced out of San Francisco. Thus, the number of households in San Francisco is not an appropriate measure of demand.

2. “Even if supply is important, Housing supply will never increase fast enough for rent to become affordable”- Through complicated calculations, they claim that in San Francisco, it would take as many as 124 years to meet their definition of affordability.  (page 13)

But this is based on two questionable assumptions: first, they assume that there can at most be a 1.5% annual growth rate in housing.  But they admit that Austin grew by twice this much- despite the fact that Austin still has conventional zoning.  If Austin had no zoning, perhaps its housing supply would grow by even more. 

More important, the authors’ 1.5% assumption is based on growth rates between 2000 and 2020.  But because of the 2008 recession, this was not exactly a high-growth period. About 34 million housing units were built between 2000 and 2020, about the same as between 1960 and 1980- despite the fact that the U.S. population increased by over 50 percent (from 179 million to 281 million) between 1960 and 2000.   To put it another way, in the 2000-2020 period, Americans built one housing unit for every eight people, while in the 1960-1980 period, Americans built one for every five people. 

So if the authors really wanted to imagine a deregulation-fueled building boom, they should have used data from the most growth-friendly metros in the 1960s.  (Nationwide, there were 58 million housing units in 1960, and so if 34 million units were built in 1960-1980, this means that the nationwide housing supply increased by almost 60 percent, or about 3 percent per year.  Presumably, housing supply in some places increased more rapidly).

Second, their idea of an “affordable rent” is very low indeed.  They define “affordability” as making the median one-bedroom apartment affordable to someone earning between $30,000-40,000 a year (well below median U.S. salaries) – which means bringing the average rent in San Francisco down to $971 (p. 13),, cutting rents by more than half. What’s wrong with this? It seems to me that as a matter of principle, any rent decline is a good one: just as reducing cancer or car crashes by 5 percent is worth pursuing, so is reducing rents.

By contrast, when describing their preferred policies, the authors show no interest in quantitative data or weighing trade-offs. The authors vaguely conclude that cities need to “directly increase access to affordable housing among low-to-moderate income households.” (p. 30). But do they bother to ask how many years of housing construction it would take to make half of San Francisco’s apartments this affordable, or about the level of tax increases this would take? Of course not.

3. “Our arguments above were actually too optimistic”  The authors make several arguments as to why they think the scenario discussed above may be too optimistic rather than too pessimistic.  First, they argue that “Upzoning and deregulation likely have positive impact on land values and increase wealth inequality between landowners and renters (p. 14)” and again cite the Freemark study. But Freemark writes: “Keeping land-use policies as they are today—or, more problematically, implementing downzonings—could reinforce inequalities. Research on downzoning shows that it, too, can increase housing costs by limiting construction in the most desirable neighborhoods.” So it does not seem to me that the authors have read Freemark correctly.

Moreover, if retaining the regulatory status quo kept land costs down, the regions with lots of new housing would have exploding land costs while those with very little new housing (such as Long Island) would have stable land costs.  In fact, land costs seem to go up even in regions that basically shut off new housing. (I wrote about this issue here).

Second, they write that new supply “ought to significantly increase the short-term cost of construction labor … influencing the cost of new units.” (p. 14).  Do the authors really think that construction labor is cheaper in New York or San Francisco than in fast-growing, pro-construction Sunbelt cities like Houston? If so, they are wrong. (Having said that, I don’t know whether the pay gap between these cities has grown or shrunk in recent decades).

Third, they argue that “developers often delay construction in anticipation of higher future returns” (p. 15) and that “there is no reason to believe that developers would ever knowingly build enough housing to drive investment returns below market rates.” (id.) In other words, developers somehow have enough foresight to never build too much housing.  If this was true, development at an Austin-like level can never happen, because developers are so wise that they know not to build when rents are coming down.   But of course, such development IS happening in Sunbelt cities and happened even more rapidly in the mid-20^th c.  So I am not quite sure I understand the authors’ argument.

4. “Its all about demand.”  The authors heavily rely on one statistic: growth rates in mean income.  They point out that San Francisco’s rents have risen at about the same rate as mean income, and therefore conclude that rising incomes cause rising rents (pages 25-26).  (They also look at Houston and Cleveland, but not any other cities).   

Leaving aside this article’s miniscule sample size, a few things seem questionable about this part of the article.  Their definition of mean income includes “non-wage and salary employment income (e.g. employer contributions to health insurance or 401ks).”  But since no one is going to use their health insurance premiums or retirement accounts to pay rent, this means that their definition doesn’t seem all that relevant to rent growth.  And because health insurance premiums were lower in 1980 than they are today, this calculation method seems designed to exaggerate income growth.   Furthermore, if the authors wanted to compare income and rent among renters, they should have looked at mean income for renters rather than mean income for all human beings. (In fairness, I do not know if data exists on this point).

Furthermore, their definition of median rent seems unrelated to real-world rent growth: they define rent as Census-calculated median rent, but Census calculations seem unrelated to market data.  For example, the Census says that the median gross rent for one-bedroom apartments is a little above $2400- but out of the 1900 apartments available on Zillow, 1570 rent for more than this.  (Having said that, if you are trying to compare rent growth over time, maybe the Census data is the best you have).

More broadly, they treat income as something that goes up and down independently of housing costs. But I doubt that this is the case: if lower- and moderate-income residents shun or leave city X because of high housing costs, this means that high housing costs cause high regional incomes, as well as vice versa. To put it another way: government uses zoning to increase housing costs, causing less affluent people to move to cheaper cities, causing regional income to rise, causing academics to believe that rising regional income causes housing costs to rise.

In sum, there are many things in this article that seem questionable or even downright wrong. Having said that, there is a grain of truth to it: demand goes up and down a lot more rapidly than supply (as I learned in the early 2020s, when rents in Manhattan bounced up and down rapidly). On the other hand, supply could be a lot more flexible than it is today.

*This suggestion seems to me to be simply weird. Lower marriage/birth rates and longer lifespans mean that MORE people will be living alone or with just one or two other people- in other words, households should be smaller. And in turn, smaller households mean demand for MORE housing units, not fewer.

The report points out that owner-occupied units built since 2010 are far larger than in the 1980s- 58 percent had over four bedrooms, as opposed to 33 percent built then. Renter-occupied units are smaller- 55 percent of newer units had two or more bedrooms, as opposed to 65 percent of 1980s. One might think that at least the first of these developments is more desirable. Right?

Wrong. According to this report, larger owner-occupied units “continued to be larger, potentially limiting the availability of smaller, lower-cost homes.” (page 12) So does that mean smaller apartments are good? The report states that “lower-income households- especially families with children- are likely left with fewer housing options that meet their needs” (id.) In other words, new housing might be assailed as being the “wrong size” no matter what. If houses/apartments are larger, some will complain that they might be more expensive than smaller units. If they are smaller, some will complain that they aren’t “family-friendly,”

*Incidentally, I am not sure I am persuaded by the overall message of the report. The section most likely to attract attention states: “Lower-Income Households Experienced Greater Rent Growth In Most Areas.” (page 24) This section claims that in six metros with lots of new supply, “lower-income households without a rental subsidy faced larger rent increases than higher-income households.” The report added some bar graphs with three different types of low-income households: low-income, very low-income, and extremely low-income. In one metro (Washington), all 3 categories did better than the rest of the market (that is, had lower rent increases). In two (Phoenix and Houston) all 3 did worse. But in three (Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle) the results were mixed: one or two of the three low-income groups had lower rent increases than the rest of the market and one or two had higher rent increases. This seems much more ambiguous than the center’s characterization of the data. Furthermore, the report does not contrast these metros with those that did NOT have much new housing.

David Broockman, Christopher Elmendorf, and Joshua Kalla have a paper out that has a more nuanced version of the “pretty buildings” argument. Their argument is not about the sort of architectural features that distinguish modern architecture from, say, Victorian architecture. Instead, they claim that NIMBYs might be motivated by broader aesthetic concerns about height (i.e. dislike of tall buildings) and fit (i.e. that apartment buildings are bad when they are on a block full of houses, but less bad in already-dense areas). They rely primarily on public opinion surveys that support this view.

Even so, I’m not completely persuaded. What the average disengaged citizen thinks is not necessarily what the average person who bothers to testify at a zoning hearing thinks, let alone the hard-core NIMBY who organizes opposition to development or files suit to stop it.* This isn’t to say that Broockman et. al. are wrong- but I do think that more research might either bolster their argument or discredit it (or a little of both).

*In fairness, they do claim that “aesthetics are the most commonly voiced objection from people who speak against development in public hearings.” But since they cite an unpublished paper that is apparently not online for this, I am not sure how to evaluate this claim.

Yass and Moore’s second mistake is that they forget what people do when they sell a house: they go out and buy another one. If the people in question are downsizing or moving to a nursing home, then the cap gains tax isn’t a liquidity barrier, just a wealth effect. If they need the full value of their very-expensive home to buy their next home, then they’re adding just as much to the demand side as to the supply side. Once again, Yass & Moore have it backwards: taxing affluent movers puts a wedge in between their contributions to supply and demand. (That’s not proof that it’s a good thing, just an honest accounting for its effects.)

Housing tax policy is under-discussed in YIMBY and pro-affordability circles. The 1982-1987 period was one where highly favorable tax treatment led to a major condo-building boom. A much better policy for affordability than the one that Yass & Moore propose would be to decrease taxes on new construction (there are several ways) and offsetting that with a tax increase on existing homes. This is classic capital taxation policy: to optimize growth, you want to minimize taxes on new capital. What’s a fair way to increase taxes on existing homes? Many have suggested eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. But that would create weird incentives vis-a-vis other investments. (In general, interest paid is deductible). Rather, housing cap gains could be better aligned with other cap gains. Yass & Moore are 1/4 right after all: cap gains on housing could indeed be indexed to inflation going forward, but only if paired with removing the $500,000 exclusion.

I welcome more research and creative thinking on housing tax policy. But it has to begin with an honest account of the existing policy baseline.

So I decided to replicate his analysis but for no-car households: that is, for the ten (mostly growing) cities in his video, did the percentage of households without cars increase or decrease? For seven out of CityNerd’s top ten cities, the percentage of carless households actually went down: the largest declines were in Boston (where 36.5 percent of households lacked cars in 2010, as opposed to 34 percent in 2024), Miami (decline from 20.9 percent to 18.6 percent) and Atlanta (decline from 17.5 to 14.9). So at first glance, one might say: “So much for peak car! Even in Boston more people have cars.”

However, there is a complicating factor: these data are based on surveys that, according to the Census Bureau itself, have a margin of error. For example, Miami’s vehicle ownership estimates are subject to a 1.7 (2010) or 1.8 (2024) margin of error, which means that the percentage of carless households could have been anywhere between 19.2 percent and 22.6 percent in 2010, and between 16.8 and 20.6 percent in 2024. As a result, I am not sure Miami’s changes were statistically significant. Data for the other cities in CityNerd’s video also had a margin of error (usually in the 1-2 percent range; for example, Atlanta and Boston had error margins of 1.5 percent in 2010, making their changes equally questionable). So I’m not sure the changes reflected in Census data are real.

What about the three cities where car ownership apparently decreased? There are three such cities: Madison, Washington and Seattle. In two of these cities, changes were clearly within the margin of error: in Madison, the carless percentage increased by less than half a percentage point (13.3 to 13.7) and in Washington, DC, the carfree percentage increased from 35 to 36.5, well within the 1.5 point margin of error). The only possible exception is Seattle, where the percentage of car-free households increased from 15.7 percent to 19.8 percent. With a 1 to1.5 percent error margin (the former in 2010, the latter in 2024), that means that Seattle’s car ownership rate was probably between 13.7 and 16.7 percent in 2010, and between 18.3 percent and 21.3 percent in 2024. Thus, it seems to me that the number of Seattleites living car-free almost certainly increased; as for the other nine cities, any changes are so minor as to be undetectable.

PS You might be wondering “what about long-run trends?” I looked at 1990 Census data, and found that the answer seems to depend on how car-dependent the city is. In Seattle, 16.7 percent of households were carless- fewer than today. In the most transit-oriented cities on the CityNerd video (Washington and Boston) car ownership patterns were not significantly different from today: the percentage of car-free households in 1990 was 37.4 percent in Washington and 38.3 percent in Boston. But in some of the more car-dependent cities, far fewer people owned cars in 1990: in Miami, 28.9 percent- and in Atlanta 28.6 percent, almost twice as many as today,

Is there any empirical way to test this sort of argument? It occurred to me one possible technique might be to look at Sunbelt regions with a reputation for permissive zoning policies. Even in those places, central cities are presumably far more built-out than suburbs. So if the existence of a spare land was a major constraint, central cities would build at anemic New York City levels, and suburbs would build far more. So I looked at data for Austin, a boomtown with lots of new housing.

There were about 115,000 new units built in the city of Austin between 2010 and 2019. Given that Austin had 795,000 people in 2010, that means 145,000 units per million residents over a decade, or around 14,500 per year. There were about 170,000 units built in the rest of metro Austin (which had about 933,000 people) during this period, or 182,000 units per million residents per decade or around 18,200 per year. (See Census Tables S0101 for 2010 data, B25034 for housing data). This does not seem like a huge difference to me- so if Austin has much less spare land than its suburbs, that does not matter very much. Perhaps the higher demand for close-in land balances out the higher supply of suburban land.

How does New York and its suburbs compare? New York had 8.184 million residents and just over 241,000 housing units in the 2010s, so that’s about 29,000 housing units per million residents during the decade, or 2900 per year. In other words, if the city of New York had built at the same level as the city of Austin, it would have had over 1.17 million new housing units in the 2010s(145,000 times 8.1). What about the suburbs? The rest of the metro area had about 10.73 million residents in 2010, and built about 263,000 housing units in the 2010s, so that’s about about 24,000 units per million residents. In other words, the suburbs actually allowed less housing than the city, despite having more spare land. And if New York’s suburbs had allowed as much housing as Austin’s suburbs, there would have been over 1.9 million housing units built (182,000 x 10.7).

In other words: if spare land was what mattered, NYC suburbs would have allowed more housing than New York City. Instead, they allowed less housing.

And if spare land was what mattered, the differences between city and suburb would have been greater than regional differences. But instead, regional differences mattered more. Austin allowed five times as much housing as New York City but only 20 percent less than its suburbs.