Single-family homes are partly to blame for our housing mess, but they can also be a tool to solve our problems A debate is stirring nationally around single-family housing. Last year in California, which is experiencing a severe housing shortage, efforts were made?and thwarted by homeowners?to change zoning to allow more dense development, part of an attempt to decrease housing costs by increasing the housing supply. The Minneapolis City Council passed similar legislation.
An often-vitriolic discourse has emerged online about the best ways to reduce the cost of housing in cities, with the solutions falling mainly into two camps. The first is the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) camp, which argues that the housing crisis can be mitigated by upzoning and increasing housing supply, and that affordability will come in the form of either ?filtering? (essentially trickle-down housing economics, where increased supply means decreased demand and therefore lower rent) or by incentivizing developers to allocate a certain percentage of new units as being explicitly affordable at different income levels. The other camp has been dubbed ?PHIMBY? (public housing in my backyard), a catch-all term for changing affordability through social housing, rent control, community land trusts, and other similar measures. Meanwhile, the enemy of both are the NIMBYs?the not in my backyard coalition?who oppose new development at all costs on the grounds that it will alter ?neighborhood character,? dec...