Vice President Kamala Harris gestures while speaking at a campaign rally at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona in August 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0
Has the national Democratic Party finally embraced the YIMBY cause?
That’s certainly the buzz on once-Twitter-now-X in the wake of former President Barack Obama’s surprising remarks on housing in his epic, Tuesday night speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“If we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units, and clear out the outdated laws that have made it harder to build homes for working people,” Obama told thousands of party delegates and activists gathered in Chicago.
Calls for zoning reform are rare on the national level, and even rarer coming from a president – even a former one.
Obama’s remarks were hailed by members of Greater Boston’s growing and lively YIMBY movement.
“Obama wanted to stand up in front of 21 million people and talk about broken municipal zoning laws… …we may actually fix this thing!” tweeted Jonathan Berk, a planning board member in Salem and a board member as well of Abundant Housing Massachusetts.
And it follows Vice President – and Democratic presidential nominee – Kamala Harris’s similar remarks last Friday during her big economic plan reveal in North Carolina.
“In many places it’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up,” Harris said in her big economic address Aug. 16. “We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels.”
What Took So Long?
In one respect, it’s fair to ask what took leading Dems on the national stage so long to call attention to the housing crisis, and, in particular, the barriers holding back construction that have driven prices and rents to insane levels.
After all, Democratics still like to claim they are the party of working and middle class America, and there is arguably no bigger issue for many people, beyond the independently wealthy, than housing costs.
Yes, for homeowners in some deep blue metros, like Greater Boston and San Francisco, the surge in the value of their biggest assets has been a boon of sorts.
Yet, those crazy high values have also locked a lot of homeowners in place, preventing them from moving up to larger or more functional homes, since, after all, everything is priced crazy now.
And anyone who has kids knows they face big challenges simply trying to land an apartment they can afford, let alone trying to buy a house before they are 40.
I suspect that one reason it has taken Democrats so long to embrace the YIMBY cause is that elements of it – cutting local and state regulations to free up housing plans bottled up by government red tape – sounds more like a traditional, Republican issue.
No one would think twice to hear, say, Mitt Romney, talk about cutting regulations to help a particular industry do its job – in this case, home builders and developers.
Cross-Party Collaboration Needed
But it’s something else to hear Democrats like Obama and Harris take up the cause, even if it’s related to a specific industry with specific circumstances, as opposed to a blanket, Reagan-like call for government to get out of the way and let business thrive.
Yet our nation’s challenges are too complex and varied to be solved by adherence to ideological purity by either party.
The only way to truly solve the housing crisis is to rev up the engines of private industry and free up developers and home builders to meet the huge, pent-up demand out there is for all types of housing.
But government has a key role to play in fueling those engines and clearing the way forward, as well as addressing those market niches that the market can’t or won’t, such as public housing.
Certainly, the founder of the modern Democratic Party and one of history’s pivotal leaders would approve of putting pragmatism over ideology, which is what the YIMBY movement, with its focus on results, is all about.
In the depths of the Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made it clear he was ready to try whatever would work to get the country back on its feet and preserve Democracy and a more civilized version of capitalism.
“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another,” reads one of FDR’s most famous quotes. “But above all, try something.”
Amen to that.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
