What exactly is YIMBYism? During the week of September 8, the journal Environment and Planning C: Politics and Place published an article entitled “Introducing the YIMBYs: Renters, Housing and Supply-Side Politics in Los Angeles.” This article, by Renee Tapp, has received some attention, and it claims to describe the views and actions of Abundant Housing Los Angeles (AHLA).
AHLA often works with academic researchers, and we encourage all manner of inquiry into the Los Angeles housing crisis. “Introducing the YIMBYs” however, contains many mistakes, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations. We will take this opportunity to clarify the record, and then make a few observations about academic research into the housing crisis.
AHLA is a pro-housing organization committed to advancing realistic solutions to address the urgent housing and homeless crisis in our County. We advocate for the elimination of exclusionary barriers to housing production, which are extensively documented as being created and perpetuated for racist, classist, and segregationist purposes. Exclusionary barriers have led to housing scarcity, which leads to enormous prices to maximize the bottom line. In addition, we advocate for the funding and creation of subsidized affordable housing, and planning practices that center equity and sustainability. Ultimately, we advance a holistic housing policy that includes production, housing preservation, and renters’ protections. Thus, we were surprised and concerned that our work was misrepresented in the subject article.
As best we can tell, the thesis of Tapp’s article is that YIMBY groups, including AHLA, “facilitate financialization” in the housing market, but the author never quite spells out what “financialization” is. Here’s the closest she comes to a definition: “The extension of financial actors into previously untapped markets and the shift in capitalist accumulation away from commodity production and towards financial channels.” Defining a term by using that term in the definition (it’s financialization because financial actors are working in financial channels) is unhelpful, to say the least.
Having not defined financialization, the author also struggles to lay out how, exactly, AHLA and other YIMBY groups facilitate it. Apparently, AHLA facilitates financialization because we believe building more homes is important. We remain puzzled by how that makes us complicit in financialization, however it is defined.
The author’s method was to interview only 11 members of YIMBY groups, 11 members of other housing and tenant groups, 6 developers, and 7 government officials. In other words, for an empirical investigation into YIMBYs, she employed a research design where YIMBYs accounted for less than a third of the interview sample. Also, for the record, no member of the AHLA staff was interviewed for this article. Apparently, one former member of our board was interviewed, in 2017, under the pretense that the author was writing a dissertation on “historic preservation, modernist architecture, land use planning, and urban development.” False (or semi-false) pretenses aren’t out of bounds in academic research, but in general, honesty is the best policy.
Perhaps because the author reached out to relatively few AHLA members, and never double-checked anything with the organization itself, she gets some things wrong. The article says AHLA doesn’t support rent control. This is incorrect. Our website makes it very clear that we support rent control, and that we supported AB 1482, a successful effort in 2018 to expand rent control via the legislature.
The article also suggests that YIMBY groups are part of an effort to “Foster… a business-friendly climate, post-2008, [which] requires not only subsidizing private market activity (Tapp, 2019b) but also leveraging the state to implement market discipline and direct finance into particular housing markets.”
It isn’t clear what this refers to, or even what it means. AHLA strongly supports subsidies for below-market-rate housing and has never argued for subsidies to market-rate developers. Our argument has always been that more market-rate development should be allowed, but that’s quite different from saying it must be subsidized.
One more statement from the article:
“YIMBY groups have remained committed to forcing the market’s hand primarily where land is cheap.”
Again, this could be clearer, but if it means our goal is to concentrate development in lower-priced, lower-income areas, then it is demonstrably wrong. Like, really wrong. Wrong in the way it is wrong to say 2+2=7. Almost all our work is geared toward getting more housing legalized and built in the higher-income, exclusionary parts of Los Angeles. We have no desire to “force the market’s hand where land is cheap”. We want to force the government’s hand—to legalize more housing–in places where land is expensive. AHLA worked tirelessly two years ago to pass the Coastal Plan for regional housing allocations, which would force higher-value, higher-income cities to absorb more of the region’s development. One of our ongoing signature initiatives is the equitable distribution of the RHNA, which pushes for the City of Los Angeles to allow more housing development in its most expensive, highest-land-value neighborhoods, thereby alleviating pressure on lower- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
Almost all of AHLA’s work is geared toward getting more housing legalized and built in the higher-income, exclusionary parts of Los Angeles.
We could go on, but beyond its many individual mistakes, this article simply does not provide convincing arguments to support the causal claims it made. The author did not establish a clear and rigorous chain of how one thing leads to another, did not consider alternative explanations, and did not provide concrete evidence. Here is an example passage:
-
- YIMBY groups have looked to ‘disrupt’ high prices by flooding Los Angeles’s rental market with a glut of new luxury housing. Their logic rests on the assumption that the middle class will move into the new housing units, leaving behind older apartments for low-income communities. One YIMBY explained their group’s strategy, saying if “our goals are really about affordability, diversity, and inclusion in the built environment [then] build the luxury units. Over time those luxury units become less luxury as long as you keep building luxury units” (Interview # 20). However, in order to maximize short-term returns, private equity funds like Blackstone have scooped up older properties—many of which were rent controlled—and invested in cosmetic upgrades to raise rents.11 Such tactics effectively ensure prices never drop at the bottom of the market. Meanwhile, asset managers like Brookfield AM have acquired portfolios of newly constructed luxury buildings to churn returns, wherein the current—and inflated—rent levels are used to estimate asking rents and forecast yields in new projects (Weber, 2015; also see Aalbers and Christophers, 2014). With financialized pressures from the top and bottom of the market, the failure to filter guarantees tenants will continue to pay distorted prices into the future.
Let’s walk through this:
YIMBY groups have looked to ‘disrupt’ high prices by flooding Los Angeles’s rental market with a glut of new luxury housing.
The author needs to take another look at what “luxury housing” really is in Los Angeles. Anyone who looks at data on LA housing prices will see almost immediately that the region’s actual luxury housing is detached single-family homes. Single-family dwellings are far and away the most expensive homes, and they are where the overwhelming majority of LA’s affluent people live.
However, in order to maximize short-term returns, private equity funds like Blackstone have scooped up older properties—many of which were rent controlled—and invested in cosmetic upgrades to raise rents…Such tactics effectively ensure prices never drop at the bottom of the market.
The author falsely equates the mission of YIMBYism with Blackstone. But Blackstone is utilizing, for its bottom line, the housing scarcity that YIMBYs seek to eliminate. Blackstone buys up properties in LA because they are pretty sure prices won’t fall. And this certainty arises for a reason: lots of people want to live in LA, but the region doesn’t build enough housing. Eliminating exclusionary barriers to housing, as YIMBYs seek to do, would disrupt the exact practice that the author claims to oppose.
Meanwhile, asset managers like Brookfield AM have acquired portfolios of newly constructed luxury buildings to churn returns, wherein the current—and inflated—rent levels are used to estimate asking rents and forecast yields in new projects (Weber, 2015; also see Aalbers and Christophers, 2014).
Here is a straightforward assertion with two citations to back it up. Unfortunately, neither citation does what it’s supposed to. The Weber citation is a book about Chicago, not Los Angeles. A Google Books search for the phrase “Brookfield AM” or “Brookfield Asset Management” in Weber’s manuscript yields zero hits. So the evidence that Brookfield AM is buying up housing in LA comes from a six year old book about Chicago that never mentions Brookfield AM. The Aalbers and Christopher citation is a theoretical article that also never mentions Brookfield AM, or Los Angeles, so that’s no better. We made a quick trip to Brookfield AM’s web page, and what we found suggests that the firm owns all of three multifamily buildings in Los Angeles. All three are in the downtown, and at least one was developed by Brookfield itself. If this is correct (admittedly, we only took a quick look), it seems unlikely that Brookfield AM, whatever its other virtues or sins, is meaningfully influencing rents in Los Angeles. The more immediate point is that this is just poor bibliographic practice, and an academic should know better.
Are we paying too much attention to this one article? Maybe. But it’s annoying to be so badly misrepresented, and the article smacks of foregone conclusions. It’s hard to believe, reading it, that the author was ever really trying to understand the YIMBYs.
We fully agree, for the record, that speculation in LA housing is a problem. And while we believe housing scarcity is the primary fuel of speculation, we understand that others disagree, and we welcome those viewpoints. But policy-oriented research should model clarity, curiosity, and nuance. It should start us all on the same page, so we can, with generosity and good faith, see where we disagree and then map out the next steps. LA’s housing crisis should be more than an excuse to use jargon, grind ideological axes, or get tenure. It’s an actual policy issue that matters for the well-being of real people. We look forward to productive dialogue with all researchers of good faith, whether they agree with us or not.
