From Baptists and Bootleggers to Landlords and Homeowners
What YIMBYs and NIMBYs can learn from public choice
While taking urban planning classes in undergrad, I learned about the problems of single-family zoning. How it was racially exclusionary, promoted urban sprawl, and a public finance disaster. The planners I knew were all in favor of abolishing single-family zoning, almost unequivocally, but they weren’t YIMBYs. In fact, YIMBYism had been derided by classmates as nothing more than gentrification from newcomer tech bros to our small city. Instead, they proposed a slew of alternatives, typically focused on reviving public housing in the US. I was never personally swayed from my YIMBY positions, but I left undergrad still grappling with the disconnect. We had non-profit developers and activists come to our classes and say we needed more supply, we needed fewer zoning regulations, but many of the planners I knew never made the jump. What explained the desire to hold on to this policy tool that was ripe for abuse?
At the core of the debate between “left-NIMBYs” and YIMBYs is a difference in presumptions of how (local) government works. The YIMBY states that we should abolish/severely reform America’s land-use rules to increase the supply of housing and thus lower housing costs overall. The left-NIMBY not only rejects the “market logic” of the previous statement, but also finds the suggestion that we should remove a government tool from its own repertoire abhorrent. Zoning, in this line of thinking, is one tool advocates and community-oriented urban planners can use to squeeze demands out of private developers. Patrick Condon, a Canadian urban planner and professor, opposes zoning deregulation in favor of a more aggressive inclusionary zoning model. He developed this position based on the experience of Vancouver eliminating single-family zoning, which he argues did not meaningfully improve housing affordability.
Urban planning professionals and academics often scoff at the YIMBY desire to eliminate zoning regulations. For them, zoning is another tool in a long list of government tools, and, in their view, it is a useful one for reaching certain desirable social goals. It may be a tool for bringing in community input on major projects, preventing the abuses seen under urban renewal. It may be used to promote sustainable urban design, environmental justice, and affordability. From this perspective, the blanket elimination of zoning regulations or other development regulations seems preposterous.
What is missing from this analysis is a healthy dose of public choice. Not so much “politics without romance”, but instead, “urban planning without romance”. Lacking in their approach is a sober analysis of how often the state’s rules are used to benefit a small minority at the expense of the broader majority. The incorporation of public choice analysis in urban planning may not make all of these stated goals above moot, but it should give us pause and add a healthy level of suspicion of our current zoning regime, including the complex sets of rules that planners themselves may favor.
Brief Intro to Public Choice Analysis
Public choice theory is, put simply, the application of economic logic to government and public policy decision-making. Rather than believe that government decision-makers are inherently benevolent or motivated by civic duty, it suggests that government actors are still economic actors, primarily motivated by self-interest and economic factors. It then applies economic principles to analyzing how and why certain decisions are made, like why pork barrel spending has been so common or how prohibition succeeded politically.
Public choice theory was first fully realized by the Scottish economist, Duncan Black, and solidified and popularized by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. In Buchanan and Tullock’s book, The Calculus of Consent, they lay out the basic principles of public choice theory and how it applies in the context of both legislation and constitutions. Its development by Buchanan and Tullock, both noted for their classical liberal views, has drawn ire from ideological opponents who fear that the deployment of public choice theory is part of a conspiracy by right-wing ideologues to degrade our democracy and knee cap government policy.
Public choice theory, despite its associations with libertarians, provides very little in the way of concrete policy recommendation. It is, however, a powerful lens for thinking through policy analysis and a filter for approaching new policy proposals. In the case of urban planning, and specifically modern zoning regulations, much can be gained from understanding how the otherwise morally-neutral tools of urban planning can be used to further concentrated private interests.
The Baptists and Bootleggers of Local Politics
An outgrowth of public choice theory that is particularly resonant for urban planning is that of “bootleggers and baptists”, originally put forth by Bruce Yandle. This concept uses the history of Sunday blue laws and its promotion by a coalition of religiously-motivated activists (“Baptists”) and bootleggers, those who sold alcohol illegally and benefitted from the reduced competition on Sundays. Despite their disparate interests and motives, they worked together to form a powerful coalition that opposed liberalized alcohol laws, despite public resistance or any consideration of optimal policy outcomes.
In the sphere of local urban policy, especially zoning laws, similar patterns begin to emerge. Those who oppose liberalized zoning laws often are not motivated purely by civic good. Instead, landlords are often fans of restrictive zoning laws to prevent new competition and keep rents high, and homeowners often side with them against removing zoning laws in order to protect their property values. These positions are not new to those familiar with urban politics and planning, but it can be easy to forget these interests when the arguments are accompanied by the arguments of the “Baptists”.
In the case of zoning reform, small, local organizations with names like “Friends of XYZ Park” and “Coalition for a Livable Community” pop out of the woodworks to oppose any new reforms, but rather than talk about property values, they talk about green space, parking, traffic, and community “character”. In the college town of Chapel Hill, for example, the Chapel Hill Alliance for a Livable Town (CHALT) is a notorious NIMBY organization. Rather than talk in purely economic terms, however, they focus on climate change and environmentalism. They suggest that their opposition to new housing construction or looser regulations is driven by a concern for local parks, greenways, and to prevent gentrification.
When planners and local politicians are meeting to discuss new rules or allow a new apartment complex, they are met with a swath of concerns from both the Baptists and the Bootleggers, and their voices often overshadow the interests of the community at large – the community who don’t have the time to attend local town halls or post about every new zoning change on social media. They also don’t include the interests of the newcomers who haven’t even arrived yet, or the renter just trying to make ends meet. So the interests of the broader community are abandoned to meet the interests of those who benefit the most from our restrictive zoning regime.
Better Engagement
As mentioned above, public choice theory provides few serious answers for policymakers and analysts. It does, however, provide the tools to think seriously about policy reform, and it is in the fundamentals of public choice where a gap often exists between the YIMBYs and the planning professionals. The YIMBYs see how these concentrated interests work to prevent optimal policy outcomes at the expense of everyone else, while planning professionals are often still hesitant to relinquish zoning laws from their toolbox. However, as public choice theory makes more clear, the same interests that created our current disastrous zoning regime will still be present when new laws are added that intend to make housing more affordable or to make the process fairer. The same Baptists and Bootleggers will be working to use these new laws to their advantage at the expense of all of us.
Those on the left may still be hesitant to eliminate zoning or to believe it’s a meaningful solution. What I would argue in response is that zoning, as it manifests in the US, is uniquely bad at leveraging the types of socially desirable outcomes mentioned previously. It may be good at doing so in the short run with individual projects, but the nature of our community input processes makes it highly unlikely the most vulnerable people show up to these meetings. Additionally, there are still other opportunities for accomplishing these same goals, ones with fewer social costs, including public land purchases and community land trusts (CLTs).
For me, and for many YIMBYs, the clear answer is to abandon America’s arbitrary zoning laws. Beyond the basic laws needed to prevent industrial factories from being put in our backyards, each new addition to the zoning code is another opportunity for concentrated interests to use the law to their ends. The answer is simply fewer laws and regulations prone to manipulation by private interests like landlords and homeowners.