The great New York City politics and policy journal Vital City has a new issue on housing. I contributed an essay on what Albany can learn from Sacramento regarding both the importance of state-level housing reform and the best way to go about it.
Here’s how it starts:
After decades of climbing rents, City Hall is finally treating New York City’s housing shortage with the urgency it deserves. That was the message of City of Yes, the sweeping 2024 rezoning that represents the biggest transformation in the local land-use system since the City’s 1961 downzoning. That misbegotten overhaul helped precipitate the current crisis by constricting the city’s ability to build more housing when its population once again began to grow.
But for all its ambition, City of Yes is still only a first step. The package is expected to yield 80,000 new housing units over 15 years; credible estimates of the city’s actual housing needs suggest a deficit of closer to half a million homes.
Many are the plans to produce more housing. Mayor Eric Adams has what he considers an aggressive agenda, as does Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running for mayor as an independent.
But the five boroughs’ housing supply problem can’t be solved by the five boroughs alone. Metro areas function as ecosystems, and New York City has long been surrounded by suburbs with terribly restrictive housing production rules (along with a few decidedly pro-growth places like Jersey City). That exclusionary zoning only increases pressure on New York City itself to generate all the new units New Yorkers need.
Not even Albany can touch exclusionary suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey, but New York lawmakers can certainly upzone Westchester County and Nassau County, which together send thousands of commuters to the city each day, and which could serve as release valves for the five boroughs’ growing population. Only the governor and State Legislature can overcome the collective action problem that throws the burden of solving a regional housing crisis on a handful of individual municipalities — while white, affluent, single-family-only communities free ride off the metropolitan area’s booming economy.
To summarize, the big lessons I draw from California’s experience are as follows:
You need informed, tenacious, and effective champions in the legislature to get anything done. California has been blessed by the presence of state senators and assemblymembers like Scott Wiener, Buffy Wicks, Nancy Skinner, Chris Ward, etc. I don’t think anyone in Albany has stepped up to fill this role, but hopefully someone (or multiple someones) will soon.
The outside game is just as important. California would not have accomplished half as much without an army of volunteers across the state. Currently, most of New York’s YIMBY forces are massed in the five boroughs for obvious reasons. The movement needs to make greater inroads in the rest of the state.
Financial feasibility is everything. If the state legalizes new housing typologies and they don’t pencil, then it’s like nothing happened. But truly airtight legislation that allows private actors to make a bit of income off of new housing development — California’s ADU reforms being a primary example — can make big things happen.
I don’t get too deep into this in my essay, but I would caution YIMBYs in other states against pursuing the “pass something now, clean it up later” strategy that we tried in California with bills like SB 9. It’s one thing to wait a year and then pass cleanup amendments that truly are modest technical fixes. But if you trade something important away to get a bill passed, then it’s a lot harder to reinsert it later on unless something dramatic changes in the political climate. “Pass now, clean up later” was a reasonable thing to try out on some legislative priorities, especially in an environment like Sacramento, but I would argue that the results have been ambiguous at best.
Over the past couple of weeks, a handful of Substack pundits — particularly the ones who maintain a lively presence on X — have been complaining about “Blueskyism,” which they describe as a political ideology associated with Bluesky that exerts a malign influence on the Democratic Party and political discourse in general. I’ve avoided commenting on this because it’s not really worth commenting on. But recently a reporter who is writing a piece about Blueskyism contacted me for comment, as someone who spends too much on Bluesky. Here is how I responded:
I’m not sure I’m the best person to defend Bluesky in your article, as my relationship to the platform is ambivalent at best. I value it as a source of niche expert commentary on various academic disciplines and policy domains. But I don’t think there’s really any such thing as a “good” microblogging site, or a good social media site, period. Microblogging has been good to me professionally, but it is also a demeaning time suck and probably has the same cognitive side effects as constant, low grade lead poisoning.
I prefer Bluesky to X because the latter site is owned by a fascist who uses the platform as a vehicle for his ongoing attack on global democracy. But I’m not going to defend the honor of any one social media site over another. I just don’t think that it’s a very interesting subject. When I see how much time and emotional energy grown-ass professional commentators have expended on the topic, my main feeling is one of secondhand embarrassment. If I have anything to say in response, it’s that they should log off of both platforms and read a book.
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help!
That’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject.
Lastly, I recommend this essay from the Works in Progress newsletter about how the food bank network Feeding America redesigned its groceries distribution system. It connects to a larger hobbyhorse of mine, which is the conflation of “markets” with “untrammeled capitalism” and the resistance from some corners of the left to implementing any sort of resource allocation program that resembles a market.
As Evan Zimmerman details in the linked essay, Feeding America made its distribution system far more efficient, productive, and generally socially beneficial by introducing some internal market mechanisms. But their approach wasn’t really “capitalist” or “neoliberal,” at least in a normative sense: it was a pragmatic response to some of the knowledge and coordination problems that were causing an enormous amount of food to go to waste while many food pantries were denied the supplies they actually needed.
There’s a lesson here that’s generalizable to U.S. housing policy and many other domains as well. As I wrote a few months back in Dissent: “Instead of simply reversing the moral polarity on folk neoliberalism, the left should think its way out of neoliberal habits of mind entirely. … If government sets the rules of the market, then the market does not have to inherently be any one thing or satisfy any one set of goals; the state can establish and tinker with various markets in the interest of producing certain outcomes. Whether these are the right outcomes is a political question. Whether market mechanisms are the best instrument for producing them is both a political question and a technical one.”