Don't Just Sell YIMBYism in San Francisco! Sell It in Cleveland.

Think like a golf cart salesman opening new markets - and every walkable neighborhood is a new market, one more place you can cross by cart

The Villages in Florida

Urbanism and YIMBYism outside big cities do not mean towers. What it does mean is neighborhoods dense enough to walk and oftentimes with enough destinations close enough together that a golf cart covers the rest for day-to-day, and better yet, pleasant enough that if you need a car, it could be a japanese style kei car or truck.

Golf carts? Well, being able to travel around town is so nice. So nice that we have places like Peachtree City, Georgia, and The Villages in Florida becoming popular because they are golf cart-friendly. In Peachtree, roughly eleven thousand registered golf carts carry its residents along more than a hundred miles of paths to the school and the store. The Villages is a 55+ master-planned community (with a big old waitlist) that is purpose-built for carts, featuring over 100 miles of dedicated multi-modal paths, tunnels, and bridges that connect homes to town squares, shopping, and medical centers.

These particular towns aren’t exactly what YIMBYs are selling but a (very) rough version of the thing. They are low-density and master-planned sprawl (one of them age-restricted). The golf cart is a fun way to get around, and they have enough foresight to plan for them. That said, it is still incredibly difficult and costly to plan around “golf carts,” let alone walkability with zoning and minimums on the books. Not to mention, the ride to the store still runs ten or fifteen minutes. The destinations still sit far apart, and the cart was added to cover the gap. We also have new developments like the Culdesac that’s based on walkability, not golf carts, with the biggest limit being how states and cities limit and restrict any sort of development.

The appetite is fifty years deep and almost entirely unmet. The product that meets it is the same legal freedom built at real density inside a city that already exists, where the destinations sit close together and the ten minute ride becomes three. Done right, the cart stops being a substitute for the car and becomes a small daily delight on top of a neighborhood you could also just walk.

One legal permission separates that product from getting built, and the movement is fighting for it in the wrong places. The fight runs from San Francisco and even to supposedly “technocratic” places like Berlin, where prices broke long before the movement existed. The places where the supply problem is now most fixable are the small and mid-size cities where demand is arriving, where land is cheap, and where the political opposition is real but not yet entrenched. The movement is not there. The demand already is.

Limited Frames

The U.S. housing crisis is routinely framed as a supply failure in the places where prices are already highest. That framing is not wrong on its own terms. The biggest issue it is very limited and based on where a lot of YIMBYs and urbanists live in.

I would argue that the secondary problem after NIMBYism is geographic demand concentration. Gyourko’s Superstar Cities identified the dynamic. A handful of metros combine inelastic land supply with a rising national share of high-income households, producing a bidding-up of land prices that sorts lower-income households out. Ganong and Shoag’s Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined? supplied the consequence. From 1880 to 1980, U.S. state incomes converged at 1.8% per year. After 1980, the convergence collapsed. The mechanism is housing cost. Tightening land-use regulation in the highest-wage metros raised housing costs to the point where, after housing, the returns to migration for low-skilled workers turned negative.

Some YIMBYs’ response is to build more where the rich already are. Yes, I have written articles where I celebrate removing zoning restrictions in rich enclaves with utter glee. I do very much believe in getting rid of zoning, and even mid- and small-sized cities can benefit from this. I don’t share the idea that the concentration is fixed and focusing on economic of scales is the way to go. People love brands and having choices at the end of the day. A “monopoly” of a few superstar cities has shown that it is dangerous, especially if governance in said superstars is less than ideal. My home city of Houston is more affordable than most, isn’t because of Houston’s mayors. In fact, Houston mayors have historically tried to make housing more expensive via trying to implement zoning, which is defeated by local groups.

So, the alternative is to treat the concentration as a variable and change it by strengthening other small to mid-size brands/cities and promoting YIMBYism and urbanism.

The right to build is itself a product to sell, not an ideology

Conventional housing-policy frame treats zoning as a constraint on construction. Build new units and supply rises, thus so prices fall. The frame is correct but again a very incomplete and limited way of thinking. Legal entitlement to build is itself an asset whose value capitalizes into land prices the moment the entitlement changes, regardless of whether anyone builds anything.

Capozza and Helsley laid out the theory in two foundational papers. “The Fundamentals of Land Prices and Urban Growth” in the 1989 Journal of Urban Economics showed that in rapidly growing cities, the value of expected future rent increases (the growth premium,) can account for half of total land price. “The Stochastic City” added the option-value insight. Uncertainty about future rents imparts an option value to undeveloped land independent of any planned development. Glaeser and Gyourko’s “Zoning’s Steep Price” inverted this framing.

Gap between house prices and marginal construction costs is the zoning tax. It is the implicit price of the right to build that the regulatory system has confiscated. The zoning tax exceeded 50% of housing costs in San Francisco by the early 2000s, and Gyourko and Krimmel’s follow-up shows it is now moderate-to-high in nearly every American central city for which data exist.

This isn’t just a California thing. Greenaway-McGrevy and Phillips’s evaluation of Auckland’s 2016 Unitary Plan in Regional Science and Urban Economics in 2024 found land-price gradients shifting in upzoned versus non-upzoned areas consistent with a 23.7% increase in equilibrium floorspace, capitalized into land prices the moment the plan was announced. Cheung’s Urban Studies paper reconfirms this. Parcels where land dominated total value gained after upzoning, while parcels where the existing structure dominated lost relative price, because the new entitlement made redevelopment more likely.

We see this with California’s accessory dwelling unit reforms. Beginning with AB 2299 and SB 1069 in 2016, California systematically stripped local barriers to ADU construction on single-family parcels. The FHFA’s tracking of Enterprise-backed appraisals shows the share of California appraisals with an ADU rose from 1.8% in 2016 to 3.0% in 2023. Industry appraisal data shows ADU-equipped properties trading at 25-50% premiums to comparable non-ADU homes, with Los Angeles markets reaching 58%. UCLA’s Lewis Center has an ongoing parcel-level analysis explicitly designed to “isolate the impacts of ADU legalization (i.e., the option value created for existing parcels) on land values.” Every single-family lot in California gained the right to host a second dwelling unit and that right capitalized into land values before most owners exercised it.

São Paulo is another example. The city’s Certificates of Additional Construction Potential (CEPACs) are tradeable bonds granting the holder the right to build above the baseline floor-area ratio in designated zones. Between 2004 and 2009, São Paulo raised approximately $812 million by auctioning CEPACs. It’s not a policy I would prefer, but push comes to shove, development rights became a financial instrument with a quoted market price if we have to.

“Zoning reform produces new housing” is true and slow. “Zoning reform unlocks value already in your land but legally suppressed” is also true and fast. Value is a very subjective thing. It could show up in the comparable sales the week the plan is gazetted. It could show up in the fact that building an ADU will let the homeowner bring in their aging parents or just to rent out. That is a proposition you sell to a landowner, and there are many others. The affordability case turns on what happens next.

Yes, building more lowers prices

The NIMBY counter-argument arrives in two reliable examples.

The first is the denial of supply on prices aka supply skepticism. It is the claim that building more housing just attracts more demand, so prices won’t fall. Most YIMBYs are familiar with this.

The second example, called spillover skepticism, isn’t talked about as much. It is the claim that building in Buffalo cannot help San Francisco even if reform works locally.

Both objections are wrong. We many papers like the 2024 Furman Center Supply Skepticism Revisited synthesis gathered both theory and the evidence time and time again.

Locally, new construction lowers prices in the immediate neighborhood. Kate Pennington’s San Francisco analysis finds rents fall 2% for parcels within 100 meters of new construction, decaying to zero within 1.5 kilometers. Xiaodi Li’s New York study finds that for every 10% local stock increase, rents decrease 1% and sale prices decline within 500 feet. The “luxury housing causes gentrification” claim is the inverse of what the data show.

Within a metropolitan area, new construction creates moving chains that benefit lower-income households. Evan Mast’s JUE moving-chains paper found that 100 new market-rate apartments in 12 major American metros produced 45 to 70 openings in below-median-income neighborhoods within five years, with 19 to 39 of those openings reaching the bottom income quintile. Bratu, Harjunen, and Saarimaa’s Helsinki replication and Mense’s 2025 JPE Macro paper confirm the mechanism. Most demand redistribution happens within metropolitan footprints, which means the suburb is doing more supply work than the rival metro.

Across metros, the substitution channel operates at the national scale. Mondragon and Wieland’s Housing Demand and Remote Work estimates that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.92% increase in local house prices after controlling for migration spillovers. The Bush Institute and SMU Build Homes, Expand Opportunity report runs the counterfactual. If all 250 largest U.S. metros had adopted Sunbelt-Mountain housing policies, 5.6 million more homes would have been built between 2010 and 2023, average home prices would be $115,000 lower, and rents would be $450 lower.

Let’s Talk About Houston

Houston is the only major American city without conventional use-based zoning. Three citywide referenda failed, but that hasn’t stopped the city from enforcing deed restrictions and minimum lot sizes. Still, despite the best efforts there is no zoning map. Both local groups and developers pushing, in 1998, Houston cut the minimum lot size within the I-610 Loop from 5,000 square feet to 1,400 square feet. They also removed the open-space and setback requirements that had made small-lot construction infeasible, and extended the reform citywide in 2013. Mercatus Center analyses document nearly 80,000 small-lot houses built since 1998. Not to mention more dense SFH areas with 34,000 detached townhomes added between 2007 and 2020 on lots that would have been illegal in any other major American city.

Just to give you idea on how much a superstar Houston is, in 2024, Houston issued 65,747 residential building permits. That’s the second-most of any U.S. metro. Texas as a whole issued 225,756 permits, more than any other state. The Bay Area, by contrast, issued 9,100 permits across all nine counties. Houston permitted more than seven times what the Bay Area permitted, on a population base roughly twice the size. Manhattan Institute analysis puts the Houston metropolitan median house-price-to-income ratio at 4.7.

It is worth noting that Houston does have its problems. It does have rising rents and a serious affordable-housing shortage at the lowest income tiers. Other cities have it worse. The reason I made the point is Houston’s model is not “housing is cheap.” It is “housing is buildable, so the price spiral does not run away.” The within-metro filtering mechanism documented by Rosenthal, Mast, Bratu et al., and Mense supplies the distributional payoff. The chain runs because the chain has units to consume.

Houston also shows what kind of reform wins. The conventional planning instinct is to find the optimal middle, a little zoning and a little density, both held back. Houston went the other way and deregulated use almost entirely, abolishing the rule dictating what you can put on a lot. The cities that tried to find a defensible middle produced the most disappointing outcomes. The optimal middle does not exist in housing policy.

A caveat about transferability deserves naming. Houston’s no-zoning baseline is path-dependent on three failed referenda, Texas property-rights doctrine, weak local government, and the absence of a state income tax. None of that package transfers cleanly to Ohio or Michigan or upstate New York. What transfers is the moves, meaning the lot-size cut, the by-right approval for small-lot construction, and the removal of open-space and setback rules. Texas proves the point inside its own borders, because the 2025 reform package kept zoning but reformed it in the same operational direction.

Texas Triangle and the Sunbelt

We all know about Houston. Why are we talking about Houston? It is the largest city in the Texas Triangle. DFW issued 47,045 single-family permits in 2024, Austin issued 16,521, and San Antonio issued 10,916. You are starting to see the structural difference between Texas and California. California has two superstar metros that absorb most of the in-migration and price most of the population out. Texas runs four mid-market metros, not to mention the many smaller markets inside and surrounding the Triangle. None of the Texas Triangle cities are really “dominant”. So, that lets prices set where wage-earning households can still buy.

What happens if that balance breaks? Well, we see the Texas system starts to revert to the superstar dynamic. Austin’s 2020-2022 absorption is the best-documented example. Home prices rose nearly 60% in 24 months, and smaller Texas cities including College Station absorbed demand shocks of 34% to 57%. By 2026, Austin has flipped to outmigration. Home prices are retreating from the former superstar, and inventory is recovering faster than any major U.S. metro. The demand reversal was not Austin’s doing. Higher interest rates and energy shocks are usual suspects. It didn’t help that the destruction of the hiring rates for white-collar professionals also helped cool every hot market in the country. Where supply is inelastic, a demand reversal shows up as frozen sales and prices that refuse to move. Where the building infrastructure already exists, it shows up as falling prices and recovering inventory.

In 2025, the Texas Legislature passed a bipartisan housing reform package explicitly modeled on the Houston template. SB 15 preempts minimum lot sizes in large cities, SB 840 authorizes multifamily by right on commercially-zoned land, HB 24 limits NIMBY protest power, and SB 2477 fast-tracks office-to-housing conversions. The coalition spanned business associations, free-market groups, faith-based organizations, racial and ethnic minority groups, and progressive housing advocates.

What’s in it for Cleveland and Atlanta

The empirical case for supply is settled. The political case is not, and it fails for a specific reason. The usual YIMBY argument does not explain why a Cleveland homeowner would vote for zoning reform when their property values are stagnant and their tax base is hollowing out. The option-value-of-buildability framework answers exactly that, and it is most powerful where it has been least applied.

The demand is already arriving. Zillow’s 2024 hottest-markets list put Buffalo first, with Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Providence rounding out the top five. Realtor.com’s 2026 forecast had Hartford, Rochester, Worcester, Toledo, and Providence as the top five “refuge markets” for buyers fleeing high-cost metros. The Philadelphia Fed’s great-reshuffle paper documents the welfare accounting. Originating cities saw housing-cost relief, and receiving markets absorbed the income shock. Hartford, Providence, and Chicago remain 55-76% below pre-pandemic inventory levels. As Austin showed, the supply infrastructure has to be in place before the demand arrives, not after.

Homeowners can be allies or adversaries. Either case, homeowners can still be customers. A homeowner in Cleveland watching their property value stagnate has the opposite economic interest from a San Francisco homeowner with seven-figure equity. Capozza-Helsley showed that the growth premium can account for half of urban land price, scaling with expected future rent growth. Buffalo, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, and the recovering Connecticut and Rhode Island metros have demand fundamentals that produce larger option-value gains than Detroit, Toledo proper, or Cleveland city center, where the premium is thinner. The sign is positive in every case, and only the magnitude varies. Apply the mechanism to a Cleveland parcel assessed at $80,000 in a tract zoned exclusively for single-family use. The right to build a duplex, a triplex, or an ADU raises its value the day the entitlement is granted, and the homeowner who voted YES becomes wealthier. Even if the homeowner voted NO, that homeowner is still a customer. Often times, as we see with the ADU reform in California, NIMBY homeowners can and will build their own ADUs and other housing if it benefits them.

The obvious objection is that this cuts against affordability. If the right to build raises land prices, hasn’t housing just gotten more expensive? The resolution is in who gets what, and when. The option capitalizes into the owner’s land the day it is granted, but it pays out in cash only when someone exercises it, and exercised across thousands of parcels it produces the units that run the filtering chains. The owner is paid for the option. The renter is paid in the housing the option eventually builds. The two conflict only when the entitlement is scarce. Spot-upzoning one block while everything around it stays frozen lets capitalization run ahead of construction, because the lucky parcel becomes rare and worth hoarding. Broad, by-right upzoning does the opposite. It spreads the option value thin enough that holding out for the rezoning lottery stops making sense, and it maximizes the parcels that actually build. “Build everywhere” is not only fairer than “build on the rezoned block.” It is the configuration under which the land-price effect resolves into housing instead of into windfall. The renter in Cleveland is the person the chain is for.

The fiscal multiplier is largest for cities currently trapped. The National League of Cities’ fiscal conditions datashows cities with growing populations maintain a per capita ending balance of $566, against $438 in cities with declining populations. The mechanism is visible in Carmel, Indiana, whose mixed-use district generates land assessment values 20 times greater per acre than comparable single-use development, per Redevelopment Director Henry Mestetsky’s presentation to City Council. Carmel’s property tax rate is fifth-lowest in Indiana at $2.0354 per $100 of assessed valuation, and yet its high tax bills, a median $3,804 on a median home value of $455,500, reflect the assessed values the bundle produced rather than the rates. The commercial base expanded so far that low rates still funded the residential side. A city at the bottom of the assessment curve, which is to say Cleveland, gets there by allowing the parcel to be something other than a single-family home.

Atlanta is the in-between case. A high-growth Sunbelt metro with emerging affordability pressure, BeltLine-driven appreciation, and the beginning of zoning-reform discussion under “ATL Zoning 2.0,” but no Houston template installed. The political question is whether it adopts the Texas package now, while the coalition for affordability still exists, or waits until it has become San Francisco. Charlotte, Raleigh, Provo, and Greenville are running the Houston playbook. Atlanta has not yet.

There is a system-level case too. Braess’s paradox shows that adding capacity to a network and routing everyone through it can degrade performance for all users. The Hsieh-Moretti prescription of routing every worker to the highest-productivity metros is the housing-policy version of the same error, and the distributed answer scores higher on resilience and on the welfare of the median household.

The Rust Belt YIMBY argument is structurally simpler than the coastal version. Your property value rises, your tax base widens, and the affordability problem solves itself before the city becomes Austin in 2021. None of that is available in San Francisco. All of it is available in Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Detroit.

Implementation bugs galore!

My position is maximalist one, get rid of zoning. That doesn’t mean I am not aware of the side effects it could cause. Thankfully, issues with implementation of zoning reform are documented, and each has a known patch.

Displacement. High-income remote workers arrive in secondary markets and bid up existing single-family inventory, pricing out incumbents before reform-enabled supply can respond. The patch is closing the window between “old restrictions removed” and “new supply online” through pre-approved building typologies and by-right approval. Minneapolis 2040 produced 16-34% lower home prices and 17-34% lower rents (Gu and Munro 2025) without a construction boom, through the demand-side effect of a credible reform announcement. But an announcement is a promise the supply has to keep. Minneapolis got the announcement right and the follow-through wrong, which is why it shows up twice in this playbook.

Backlash. Auburn, Maine’s Mayor Jason Levesque earned the title “YIMBYest City in America” and then lost reelection 62% to 38% in November 2023 to a deputy police chief who organized the opposition. Levesque’s own self-diagnosis names the failure mode in one line. He had “campaigned for the people who want to live in Auburn, not for the people who live in Auburn.” The patch is a designed consent structure that delivers the upside to the incumbent at the parcel level. Israel’s TAMA 38 program is the applied case. More than 100,000 apartments were reinforced between 2005 and 2024 because each building voted on its own reconstruction and the owners received the upside directly, an elevator, a balcony, a seismic retrofit, and 20-40% property-value uplift. It made the incumbent the primary beneficiary by construction, not by the hope that option value would capitalize after the fact.

Partial-implementation. Minneapolis 2040 eliminated single-family-only zoning in 2019, and the reform was widely framed as solving the binding constraint. It did not. The City Council explicitly directed staff to keep height, setback, and lot-coverage regulations closely matching existing single-family requirements. The Minneapolis Fed’s tracker shows only 46 new two-to-four-unit buildings permitted from 2020 to 2022 citywide, with just 20 in formerly single-family zones. Justin Fox’s analysis puts the end of single-family zoning at roughly 1% of new units permitted since January 2020. Eliminating the use category was the easier political move, and the built-form rules were the binding constraint left in place. The fix is to change the binding constraint, not the label. The Texas 2025 package is the operational template, with minimum lot sizes (SB 15), commercial-zone multifamily by right (SB 840), protest limits (HB 24), and conversion fast-tracking (SB 2477) shipped at once.

State preemption is still limited. Oregon’s HB 2001 in 2019 was the first statewide elimination of single-family-only zoning in towns above 10,000, and by the end of 2022 all 56 affected jurisdictions had complied, because the state coalition had been built across multiple prior legislative sessions. When West Linn and other suburban councils searched for workarounds. The coalition had the capacity to defend the law in each one. Auckland did not have that. The mandate arrived from above with no local advocacy infrastructure to defend it. Hence, the mandate had no constituency to hold it and keep the local town to account.

My point being?

Urbanism and YIMBYism are fundamentally products to be sold to towns and cities like SAP selling ERPs to enterprise. Different firms will use SAP’s systems in different ways. Same with cities and towns. Most likely way they are going to use YIMBYism and Urbanism is that golf cart community I described.