BY JUAN RIVERO : village conversation – excerpt

The lack of affordable housing is a complex problem. And every complex problem, as the saying goes, has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. In this instance, free market fundamentalism has long provided one such answer — the notion that invisible economic forces will solve affordable housing crises, if we only step aside, wait patiently, and let them work their magic. It has, of course, never worked out that way; but free-market apologists have always found a way to blame the world for its failure to conform to mechanistic economic models. This has kept their totalizing theories roaming the earth like zombies, providing intellectual cover for their policy application, and forever eluding the grave where bad ideas go to rot. And in recent years, these zombies have gotten a makeover and started to pop up in unexpected places.

The Bay Area is a land hospitable to technoutopianism and invigorated by the perennial search for hacks and technological fixes for life and its vicissitudes. It should then come as no surprise that it was here that the current iteration of the YIMBY movement came to be. Folks dismayed by the region’s high housing costs looked around and rediscovered a simple technical solution: deregulation. In their account, land use controls had inhibited housing construction and constrained supply, leading to higher housing prices. This intuitive connection was made by reference to single-family-home districts and to a history of exclusionary zoning practices— a move that gave the movement’s deregulatory platform the semblance of a progressive plea. Thus framed, YIMBYism gained traction and was promulgated across the country in the name of social equity by useful zealots and self-interested cynics, willfully or blissfully unencumbered by the weight of historical counter-evidence, the contingencies of context, or the nuances and limitations of contemporary housing research. Before long, the old wine of deregulation started showing up in YIMBY bottles at the table of housing policy debate and, increasingly, it was the only drink on the menu…

Is the YIMBY fever about to break? Maybe. In recent weeks, two papers have come out independently bucking the supposed YIMBY consensus, Buchholz et al. (2026) and Louie et al. (2025). This in itself is not news (although it might be to the Department of City Planning, which either ignores or publicly disavows the existence of any evidence that undermines the rationale for the hamfisted upzoning schemes that it keeps passing off as actual plans). What’s news is that it got covered by the national media. The fact that the authors include some of the most cited scholars in the field might have something to do with that. But we’ll take it, because this work reinforces our own long standing efforts to call attention to empirical evidence that contradicts the YIMBY narrative (see here for an overview).

Several assumptions undergird the deregulationist push to override local land use controls and to undermine, in the name of housing affordability, the influence of communities in the development of their neighborhoods:

1. Lack of affordable housing stems from a lack of overall housing supply;
2. An increase in overall housing supply will make housing affordable to those in need; and
3. The relaxation of land use regulation provides an effective means to stimulate the new construction…

The political appeal of peddling deregulation—a straightforward policy solution that just happens to redound to the benefit of the real estate sector—has been plain to see (as it ever has). We hope that the new administration will part ways with its predecessor and take the less expedient path of tackling the affordability crisis as it exists in the real world and not as real estate interests and its YIMBY mouthpieces would like it to.

References:… (more)