“Are We Kind of Being Pricks?”

Or, why it's time to end performative local control.

Earlier this week, a new YIMBY folk hero was born.

At a Marblehead, Massachusetts public hearing on the town’s plan to comply with a state-mandated transit-oriented upzoning policy—colloquially known as 3A for its code section—David Modica asked a simple question: “Are we kind of being pricks?” Whether out of genuine confusion or rhetorical tact, it came after a member of the planning board admitted that the plan wouldn’t actually result in any new housing.

Now that’s what I call a neighborhood defender. (MHTV)

“So like, this is a way to comply with 3A, without doing any of the 3A stuff? … Are we trying to do nothing? Because it seems like we’re doing nothing. I’m not an expert on this,” Mr. Modica asked, with a healthy dose of Boston orneriness. “We’re trying to make sure we build no houses? I don’t get it. People live in houses.”

The full clip is worth watching.

As someone who works as a professional YIMBY, it was refreshing to see such a pure case of classic YIMBYism: Mr. Modica showed up at a hearing packed with NIMBYs, called attention to the absurdity of the situation, and argued for more housing. It was contrarian public comments like this in the (other) Bay Area that kicked off a global movement in the early 2010s.

Yet it was also a tough reminder of the limits of what we’ve accomplished so far. The grand compromise of the first phase of YIMBYism has been a pseudo-détente with local control. Local governments were allowed to keep almost unlimited discretion over whether they permitted housing, with two exceptions:

1. On certain margins, YIMBY reforms directly limited the powers of local governments. Here in California, local governments lost their power to ban ADUs or impose parking requirements near transit, among other things.¹

2. More broadly, local governments were obliged to develop plans for how they would allow a lot more housing. Here in California, this involved beefing up the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) process.

Notwithstanding the prevailing mood of pessimism over YIMBYism, I think these reforms have been more successful than many realize, and I’m confident that they will scale up over time. But it would be silly to pretend like the results haven’t been at least a little underwhelming so far.

Even these small encroachments on local control initially precipitated meltdowns by League of Cities chapters—the taxpayer-funded statewide organizations tasked with lobbying on behalf of local governments. But over time, they wised up. Today, League chapters often proactively push for the second category of reform, arguing that yet more local planning is the solution.

Why do they do this?

Partly to head off the first category of reform, no matter how minor the constraints on local control. But also, because they know it’s trivially easy for local governments to comply with such planning mandates without permitting a single new housing unit. Indeed, California has enforced such planning mandates since RHNA was enacted in 1969, and it has manifestly failed to avert our current housing crisis.²

As Mr. Modica concluded on Marblehead’s 3A plan, “I just want to make sure, we’re voting on nothing substantive.” He was right: the town’s plan was carefully calibrated to comply with state law—as confirmed by state regulators—without permitting any new housing. Even in California, after a decade of laws beefing up RHNA, infamously NIMBY cities can still get “bad faith” plans certified by state regulators.

I think that pro-housing advocates underestimate the cost of such poor policies. There is, of course, the monetary costs: across an army of planning consultants, endless litigation, and a vast state bureaucracy, California very likely spends over a billion dollars every eight years allowing every city and county in the state to come up with a creative plan to avoid building anything.

But the costs are deeper: As evinced by Mr. Modica’s exasperation, I think such meaningless exercises reduce public trust in planning. How silly must one feel, attending a public hearing for a plan that a commissioner willingly admits is a charade? Why would otherwise smart, civically-minded people waste their time participating in such a system?

This “local control” approach to pro-housing reform has also put local elected officials and planners in a bind: On the one hand, it shifts the burden of figuring out how to come up with a plan to build housing onto the level of government with the fewest spare resources. On the other hand, it doesn’t do anything to improve the local politics surrounding this work.

In NIMBY cities, trying—and usually failing—to thread this needle can easily end the careers of otherwise well-meaning local officials.³

In the case of Marblehead, it seems like the town tried and failed to pass a plan that might have actually resulted in housing, only to have it shot down by NIMBYs.⁴ If you listen to the full video, the commissioners frequently sound frustrated by the catch-22 they face. What does any of this accomplish, except to turn bright-eyed civil servants into cynical consultants?

The purple is an active golf course. The orange is some of the only existing multifamily housing in the city. This is not a serious plan. (Town of Marblehead)

It’s time to admit that this approach has failed—or to quote Mr. Modica one last time, that “we’re doing a bad thing” with this schizophrenic approach to local control. I think there are two ways we could do better.

First, local mandates should focus on outcomes, and they should come with incentives that make achieving such outcomes both feasible and politically enticing. Plans in and of themselves are meaningless if they fail to achieve a desired outcome. We should stop rewarding cities for merely adopting plans, and start rewarding them for actually building housing.

Local governments that are hitting affordability or permitting targets—say, by keeping the median home price below five times the median household income, or by permitting above a rate of five units per 1,000 residents—should enjoy true local control. And those local governments that are going above and beyond should be rewarded with priority access to state dollars.

Cities like West Sacramento, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, don’t need planning mandates—they need cash to keep the existing growth machine pumping.

I don’t want to downplay the political difficulty of shifting to this approach, especially once a dysfunctional “local control” framework is in place. We tried and failed to stand up this approach in California this year with SB 1216, and faced opposition from NIMBYs and fellow YIMBYs alike.⁵ Don’t worry though—a good bill never fully dies.

Second, in cases where local governments with a severe housing shortage fail to act, the state should assume permitting authority. Particularly in smaller, homogeneous jurisdictions that are easily captured by NIMBYs, we should recognize that there is no “local control” solution except to shift these decisions up to a level of government that can take the broader view on housing affordability.

A unique feature of US local government is its extreme fragmentation. The typical “city” is actually dozens of separate permitting jurisdictions spread across various counties and special districts. Even if core cities adopt the full suite of YIMBY reforms, as in Salt Lake City—which only governs 16% of the metropolis—it will be nearly impossible to end the housing shortage if the remaining 84% does nothing.

Cities like Huntington Beach, California, and Milton, Massachusetts, are not going to find religion through state nudges. If you want these places to permit more housing, you need to take away their permitting authority.

If this seems dramatic, it’s only because of American policy parochialism. In the rest of the developed world—including Germany and Japan—entitlements, permits, and inspections are commonly handled by state-level governments. In France, national prefects can directly intervene when a local government misbehaves.

As usual, I’ve included Texas to illustrate permitting in a pro-growth state. (housingdata.app)

The most remarkable thing about the video of the Marblehead hearing is that much of the crowd seemed to have Mr. Modica’s back. Even in this most exclusionary of suburbs, attendees laughed and cheered as he frankly recognized this effort to block housing as selfish. I gather from the social media response that he spoke for a lot of frustrated New Englanders.

In a follow up interview, he clarified his general philosophy: "Any moment we spend bullshitting each other is just a sin.” In housing policy, as in many other aspects of American political life, that’s probably not a bad place to start.

1. Of course, SB 79—which I believe signals the beginning of the second phase of YIMBYism—is hardly a marginal constraint on local control, even if it retains an “alternative plan” mechanism.

2. Two caveats: (1) New Jersey instituted a similar system in the 1980s. It seems to have been more successful thanks to strict judicial oversight, within a state court system far more predisposed than California’s to defend property rights. Nonetheless, it has been enormously controversial, and the most exclusionary local governments have managed to comply without allowing housing at scale. (2) Over the past decade, YIMBY-supported reform has substantially beefed up RHNA, making it much harder for cities to outright disregard the law. I think the failure of these recent reforms is slightly overstated in popular discourse. Even so, I think their potential is limited by the constraints I discuss here.

3. And occasionally, ends their lives.

4. At least, that’s my superficial read based on local coverage. Please don’t get too mad at me if they have been cynical from the start.

5. The former recognized the risk of finally holding local governments to an actual permitting standard; the latter took offense at the idea that local governments should be released from any state mandates, no matter how well they were doing.