Sometimes You Just Need to Win

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Ned Resnikoff has written the authoritative guide to the big decisions that have shaped the American city in the twenty-first century, from housing to transportation to public safety. This is essential reading for those who wish to make the city all it can be.”—Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

Trying to change housing law can be difficult, frustrating work. The legislative process moves slowly, and so does the regulatory process, but neither really pauses at the end of regular business hours. Meanwhile, all kinds of factions and narrow interests want to intervene and put their stamp on whatever it is you’re trying to do. Sometimes—in fact, quite frequently—you need to swallow bitter compromises if you want to get something done. And sometimes, even after you trade away most of your original bill, you still lose. Or, if you win, NIMBYs immediately figure out how to deploy legal challenges and clever workarounds to substantially undermine your victory.

There’s also the reality that pro-housing advocacy is inevitably going to make a lot of people hate you. And being hated feels shitty! Especially if the haters are your neighbors or people in your general social and professional environs!

If only there were some kind of shortcut that allowed you to skip past all the struggle, the late nights, the difficult choices, and the vituperation. If only we could solve the housing crisis through a process of peaceful consensus-building rather than through head-to-head political combat.

In a recent essay for Works in Progress, political scientists David Foster and Joseph Warren offer one potential shortcut: “grant a clear property right over development to local residents and minimize transaction costs within land use regulation.” They write:

It’s an appealing notion: with the right institutional design, maybe the local NIMBY coalition can be reduced to a tiny rump faction that YIMBYs can then safely ignore. But this argument relies on a handful of misunderstandings regarding the nature of NIMBYism in the American context. First, many local governments across the United States already have plenty of mechanisms that are ostensibly meant to “guarantee that developers provide benefits matching local preferences.” These include local inclusionary zoning ordinances, development impact fees, and discretionary permitting procedures that allow city councils and planning commissions to negotiate additional developer concessions as a condition of project approval. These mechanisms don’t seem to have diminished NIMBYism; instead, they can serve as a weapon in the hands of local NIMBYs who want to pile on enough community benefit requirements to make all development financially unworkable.

Second, Foster and Warren’s argument downplays the very real benefits that multi-family development provides to incumbent residents, even in the absence of any specific concessions from developers. A growing population means more tax revenue, an expanding local economy, and more demand that can stimulate the creation of new community amenities, like restaurants and coffee shops, that are open to everyone. Relatively low-cost new housing makes it possible for the children of longtime residents to establish their own families in town, instead of being forced to move elsewhere. And greater density is a precondition for establishing certain types of public services, in particular high-quality transit systems. Multi-family homebuilding is very often positive-sum, at least when viewed from one angle.

Which brings us to the third misunderstanding, having to do with the interests that motivate organized NIMBYism. Here is how Foster and Warren characterize the approach to housing advocacy taken by many YIMBY groups, including my former employer, California YIMBY:

That’s one way to characterize the argument behind state preemption of local land use, but it isn’t the only one. The theory of incentives Foster and Warren describe isn’t a necessary premise for the argument; you can be agnostic on why some cities fight new housing development while still accepting the conclusion that YIMBYs should respond to this opposition by pursuing state preemption.

In fact, Foster and Warren elide a couple of important observations in the document they point to as the source for their theory of incentives. That document, a 2018 letter to the California Senate’s then-Transportation and Housing Committee chair by a group of pro-preemption scholars, notes that existing local “constraints on new housing catered to the concerns of existing residents, who worried about traffic congestion, neighborhood aesthetics, the ease of parking on the street, and the nature or character of people [who] might live in multi-family housing.” Foster and Warren omit several of these concerns from their own gloss on the theory, most notably “neighborhood aesthetics” and “the nature or character of people [who] might live in multi-family housing.”

These are not incidental omissions. Objecting to “the nature or character of people [who] might live in multi-family housing” is usually classist at best and racist at worst, given that people who rent apartments in a given area tend to have lower incomes than their neighbors who own the single-family homes in which they reside. And this objection motivates a great deal of opposition to multi-family housing, particularly in what are sometimes referred to as “high-opportunity neighborhoods.” This is a feature of American NIMBYism going back to the origins of modern zoning law; as Yoni Appelbaum notes in his splendid book on the origins of the housing crisis, the first quasi-zoning rule in the United States was a blatantly segregationist ban on Chinese laundries across much of Modesto, California. Shortly before Berkeley implemented the first single-family-only zoning ordinance, one of its leading proponents explicitly noted in the local press that restrictive zoning would help preserve the Elmwood Park neighborhood as a “high class residence tract.” Thus the neighborhood would avoid the fate of the area surrounding Dwight Way Station, where the presence of a Chinese laundry "deteriorated the neighborhood until only negroes and Orientals would rent the nearby buildings."

Where NIMBYism is motivated by a desire to preserve the economic or racial homogeneity of a given area, two things follow. First, developer concessions are unlikely to erode this opposition, because the most vocal NIMBYs will object to multi-family construction of any kind, period. Second, even if trying to accommodate this attitude was not fruitless as a practical matter, we should, as a matter of political principle, refuse to make any concessions to segregationism.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all NIMBYs are personally racist, let alone that racism is the sole motivating force behind NIMBYism. What I am suggesting is that it’s impossible to understand the significant headwinds that multi-family development faces in the United States without taking race and class into account. Furthermore, wielding higher levels of government to preempt segregationism at the local level is pretty much the way successful desegregation efforts have always played out in this country.

So why not pursue the same strategy today? Well, according to the headline for Foster and Warren’s essay, “housing reforms keep failing.” That’s a very bold claim, but it seems to belong to the Works in Progress editors more than to Foster and Warren, who are more equivocal:

Far be it from me to deny that “challenges remain” even after the passage of major housing reforms. But I still think Foster and Warren are downplaying the importance of those reforms. Later on, they write: “In many cases, dramatic reforms have yet to show a positive effect on housing construction. This is plausibly because many have been, by political necessity, surgically targeted at specific areas like transit stops, while reforms with potentially wider impacts face backlash and retrenchment.”

A couple of problems here. First, the “surgically targeted” line appears to be a swipe at SB 79, which took effect only this year—far too early to evaluate its impact on housing production or affordability. Second, the “many cases” hedge obscures the many other cases in which major housing preemption efforts have had a marked effect on housing production. California’s aforementioned ADU reforms are just one example; see also the Live Local Act in Florida, where Foster teaches.

At the local level, too, we have reams of evidence that straightforward upzoning and land use reform approaches can produce a lot of new housing and lower rents. Austin, Texas provides us with perhaps the most dramatic recent example. Sacramento is another case in point. These aren’t examples of state-level preemption, but they’re nonetheless proof of concept for the old zoning-and-permitting-reform approach that Foster and Warren wish to discard.

So why are they in such a hurry to discard it? It’s worth noting that Works in Progress has published a couple other recent pieces advising YIMBYs on how they can sap the strength out of NIMBY opposition and build a broad pro-housing consensus. First there was “How ugliness helps NIMBYs,” then, on a similar theme, “Do people prefer traditional architecture?” The former essay argues “that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question,” while the latter measures “ugliness” according to popular sentiment. Taken together, these pieces would seem to present a program for how aesthetic purity can defang a key source of opposition to new housing.

I am deeply skeptical of this program for some of the reasons we discussed above. But you can see the common thread: a fundamental conviction that political conflict is ontologically bad, and that well-educated professionals can design it out of the political system. This is essentially the same view that many of the original capital-P Progressives held around the turn of the twentieth century. This view also appears to have helped motivate the California Forever project—which was, in its original form, an attempt to short-circuit grueling zoning reform battles in existing cities by building a brand new city from scratch in rural Solano County. Works in Progress is housed within the tech company Stripe, whose CEO, Patrick Collison, is an investor in California Forever.

I think Works in Progress does a lot of great work. But I also think this attempt to chart a YIMBY course that circumvents normal conflictual politics is woefully misguided. Most of the time, you can’t really govern a heterogeneous democratic society by consensus. And you really can’t rely on a broad societal consensus when you’re dealing with deeply rooted social problems. The best you can do is what YIMBYs everywhere are currently doing: keeping conflict within democratic guardrails while patching together a big enough coalition to emerge from the conflict victorious. Sometimes you just need to win.