It Doesn't Matter Whether Your Mayor Is a Democrat or a Republican. Your City Still Won't Build Enough Housing

Four decades of data show that the party in charge doesn't determine how much gets built. The real obstacle is closer to home.

The median home in San Francisco costs $1.3 million. In Miami, prices have roughly doubled in a decade, going from 150,000 in 2016 to over 600,000. Across scores of American cities, a household earning the median income cannot afford to buy the median home, and in many cases cannot comfortably rent one either. The political class continues to treat this as a problem the right election result could solve. Elect more Democrats, and cities will build the affordable housing their residents need. Elect more Republicans, and deregulation will unleash the market.

It sounds good, you know, but it just doesn’t smell right.

A study by Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko, published in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2026, asks whether the party affiliation of a city’s mayor affects how much housing gets built. Drawing on four decades of mayoral elections matched with Census Bureau building permit data, the answer seems to be a hard no. Not a small effect that fails to reach significance. Not an effect that shows up in some subsamples. Again, a null, full stop.

The real levers of housing policy lie elsewhere: in the incentives, social networks, zoning regimes, and democratic failures that constrain supply regardless of which party holds the mayor’s office. Drawing on the paper’s empirical results and on case studies from Houston to Carmel, Indiana to show why.

Identifying a Causal Effect

Republican-led cities do issue more housing permits than Democrat-led ones in raw averages, about 17 percent more. But Republican mayors tend to govern in Sun Belt cities with flat topography and abundant land. The raw correlation tells us almost nothing about causation.

Ferreira and Gyourko exploit a regression discontinuity design built on close elections. In a race where a Democrat wins by a single percentage point, the city is virtually identical to one where a Democrat loses by a single point. By comparing housing permits across this threshold, the authors isolate something close to a pure partisan treatment effect.

2,094 Democrat-versus-Republican elections from 1980 through 2017, matched to the Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey covering roughly 20,000 permit-issuing places. Manipulation tests show no evidence that either party disproportionately wins close races; covariate balance confirms that cities on either side of the threshold look similar on population, housing stock, and voter turnout.

No Effect, No Matter How You Look

Across every bandwidth, kernel function, and way of measuring permits, electing a Democrat rather than a Republican has no meaningful effect on housing supply.

In the main specification, electing a Democrat is associated with a 0.016 percentage point increase in total permits per housing unit, against a sample mean of 0.97 percent. That is less than 2 percent of the mean, with a standard error nearly five times the point estimate. The null holds for single-family and multifamily permits separately, for permits measured at the end of a term versus averaged across it, and for differences against the prior term.

The most telling test involves incumbency. A Democrat mayor who barely wins a first election is more than 20 percentage points more likely to win reelection. If partisan preferences about housing exist but are initially constrained, they should emerge in second terms, when incumbents have consolidated power. They don’t. Permits during the term following reelection show no discontinuity.

Ferreira and Gyourko also test whether partisanship matters more in particular settings: big cities, fast-growing metros, areas with little jurisdictional competition. Drawing on Tiebout’s model, they find modest evidence that Democratic mayors in less competitive metro areas permit slightly more housing, but it doesn’t survive alternative specifications. There is no evidence that partisanship matters more in larger jurisdictions, faster-growing ones, or more recent decades. That last point is notable given documented increases in partisan intensity nationwide.

The one published study reaching a different conclusion, by De Benedictis-Kessner, Jones, and Warshaw (2025), finds a modest increase in multifamily permits under Democrats. But the result is fragile: it disappears on Ferreira and Gyourko’s larger dataset, under alternative specifications, and when the sample is varied by city size or time period.

Real Life Case Studies

This section draws on external sources, not the Ferreira and Gyourko paper.

If party labels drove housing supply, we would expect a clear pattern: red cities building freely, blue cities strangling supply, or vice versa. Actual cities defy that at every turn.

Houston and its neighbors. Houston is the only major American city without conventional zoning, a distinction maintained since voters rejected zoning in referenda in 1948, 1962, and 1993. Its regulatory flexibility has kept median home prices below the national median despite explosive growth. Between 1999 and 2016, over 25,000 homes were built on lots smaller than 5,000 square feet, enabled by a 1998 reform reducing minimum lot sizes to 1,400 square feet.

But Houston’s permissiveness is not a product of Republican governance or even its Democratic mayors. The city has had Democratic mayors for most of recent history, including during the lot-size and parking reforms. Lower-income and moderate-income Houstonians voted overwhelmingly against zoning in 1993, against both parties’ wishes.

The contrast sharpens when you look next door. Pasadena, Texas, a conservative, blue-collar refinery city that is officially “non-zoned” like Houston, has weaponized the regulatory tools it does have. The Institute for Justice and Strong Towns documented the city requiring a sole-proprietor mechanic named Azael Sepulveda to build 28 parking spaces before opening his shop in a building that had been an auto repair business for 30 years. The cost, $40,000, was nearly half what he paid for the property. He averaged two to three cars a day. Pasadena actually increased its parking minimums in 2022, nearly doubling the requirement for auto shops to a standard exceeding every major Texas city. Meanwhile, an hour south on 288 is Lake Jackson. The hometown of libertarian congressman Ron Paul (and myself), a full zoning ordinance has governed land use since the city’s founding as a Dow Chemical company town.

A Democrat-led city with genuine permissiveness. A conservative suburb that is nominally unzoned but aggressively restrictive. A libertarian icon’s hometown with comprehensive zoning. The variable that explains the differences is not ideology but path dependence and institutional incentives.

Austin. A liberal city in a conservative state, Austin was the NIMBY capital of Texas, until the election of progressives YIMBYs. Existing homeowners wielded a century-old state law allowing just 20 percent of neighboring landowners to trigger a supermajority requirement for zoning changes, repeatedly killing comprehensive reform. The NIMBY coalition included conservative homeowners and progressive anti-gentrification activists in roughly equal measure. The resulting 135,000-unit deficit was the product of institutional rules, not partisan preferences.

The breakthrough came from the Republican-controlled state legislature. HB 24, passed in 2025 with bipartisan support, raised the protest threshold from 20 to 60 percent and reduced the council override to a simple majority. Even Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made affordability a top priority. The tool Austin’s NIMBYs had wielded most effectively was a Jim Crow-era law with no connection to contemporary partisanship.

New York City. The 2025 mayoral race demolishes the left-right frame entirely. Andrew Cuomo, the centrist former governor, assembled a coalition of NIMBY homeowners, large developers, and building trades. His housing plan proposed 500,000 units but implicitly promised to protect low-density outer-borough neighborhoods. Bloomberg, whose mayoralty produced tower clusters in hotspots and downzoning everywhere else, contributed $8.3 million to an allied Super PAC.

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, ran and won as an unabashed YIMBY: citywide upzoning, expanded public housing, rent freeze on stabilized apartments. He won. The Republican, Curtis Sliwa, made opposition to the “City of Yes” upzoning reforms a central plank. The centrist was the NIMBY candidate. The socialist was the builder. The Republican was the most anti-housing of the three.

Voters also passed charter amendments shifting zoning powers from council members, who had exercised de facto vetoes over development in their districts, to the mayor. The “no” voters were concentrated in neighborhoods that had supported both Cuomo and Trump: an outer-borough homeowner coalition hostile to density regardless of partisan affiliation. The alignment tracked renters versus homeowners, not left versus right.

Carmel, Indiana. Carmel, a suburb north of Indianapolis with a median household income of $130,322 and historically deep-red politics, underwent an urbanist transformation under James Brainard, a Republican mayor from 1996 to 2024. He built 155 roundabouts, a walkable city center with 362 residential units and a 1,600-seat concert hall, and pushed townhome development along a rail-to-trail conversion. Banks initially refused to finance the townhomes; they now sell for two to five times initial projections. The city quadrupled from 25,000 to over 100,000.

Brainard used public-private partnerships and tax increment financing. He borrowed ideas from European cities and sat on Obama’s climate task force. A conservative suburb embracing density and mixed-use development does not emerge from any partisan playbook.

Pattern keeps on coming. Montana’s 2023 pro-housing reforms passed under a Republican governor. A Republican judge held for Minneapolis 2040 for years. Connecticut’s Democratic governor vetoed an ambitious housing bill. Illinois Democratic governor is pushing for state wide zoning reform.

So What is the Problem, if not Partisanship?

If partisanship is not the bottleneck, what is? New construction imposes localized costs on existing residents (congestion, noise, school crowding, changes to neighborhood character) while its benefits accrue largely to nonresidents who might want to move in but have no political voice.

Gyourko and McCulloch (2024) analyze over 263,000 home sales across 217 municipal borders, they find that homes cost roughly $40,000 more in areas with stricter density limits, that 65 percent of homeowners would experience welfare losses from increased density, and that the median homeowner would require $5,164 in compensation to accept modest density increases nearby. In affluent, low-density neighborhoods, the figure rises to $29,655. For rental housing, it reaches $263,192. Opposition to apartments is five to six times stronger than opposition to owner-occupied density, which helps explain why multifamily construction faces ferocious resistance even in cities that nominally support “affordable housing.”

This opposition is concentrated among the residents with the most political influence and the strongest institutional tools to prevent change. A 2025 Clever Offers survey found that 61 percent of boomer homeowners never plan to sell, 88 percent do not care if remaining prevents younger buyers from entering the market, and 59 percent would support a candidate who prioritizes home values even if it makes housing less affordable for others. When the median voter in a local election is a long-tenured homeowner sitting on six figures of untaxed appreciation, the incentives point toward restriction regardless of party.

Reform, Not Electoral Strategy

Duranton and Puga (2023) argue that the transfers needed to compensate existing residents are far smaller than the economic distortions created by housing shortfalls. But the mechanism design is harder than it looks. Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law, has made a persuasive case for how to get it right. She points out that the most prominent federal housing proposals, from the Center for American Progress, the Institute for Progress, and the Searchlight Institute, all recognize the issue as an incentive problem but target the wrong actors and reward the wrong things. Some plans pay renters who lack political power to change land-use decisions. Others reward cities for adopting pro-housing policies that are easy to game: Minneapolis’s missing-middle upzoning legalized duplexes that could be no larger than the houses they replaced; California cities imposed six-figure hookup fees on the ADUs the state told them to allow; Canada’s Housing Accelerator Fund paid billions for policy changes already underway that failed to prevent permit declines when rates rose.

Trauss’s alternative: pay cities directly through unrestricted general fund grants for every permit issued above an expected trend line. Don’t evaluate policies. Put money in the budget of the institution that controls permitting and tie it to the outcome you want. Research finds that when housing is fiscally beneficial, some elected officials are more likely to permit it. The approach also has bipartisan appeal, since general fund grants don’t look like welfare expansion and eligibility can include fast-growing Sun Belt and Midwest cities alongside coastal ones.

My Point?

Ferreira and Gyourko’s work demolishes the narrative that the right election on party alone could bring housing prices back to earth. Across four decades, the party of the mayor does not affect how much housing gets built.

I have used the word “institutions” as shorthand for what constrains housing supply: zoning codes, protest petition laws, parking minimums, discretionary permitting. That language is useful but it’s also very limiting. Formal rules don’t enforce themselves. Behind every zoning restriction is a persistent social network of people: the homeowners who show up to every planning meeting, the neighborhood association presidents who have each other’s phone numbers, the longtime residents who know which council staffer to call. These networks are partisan, but they predate the current alignment of the parties and will outlast it. They organized against apartments in liberal San Francisco and conservative Pasadena using different vocabularies (”anti-displacement” in one, “neighborhood character” in the other) but with identical effect. Austin’s NIMBY coalition held together across left and right for decades. New York’s outer-borough homeowner alliance spanned Cuomo Democrats and Trump Republicans without apparent tension. The partisan frame fails not because it oversimplifies ideology, but because it misidentifies the unit of analysis entirely. The relevant actors are not parties but durable, place-based networks of property owners whose interests in restricting supply are material, immediate, and largely indifferent to national political brands.

The task is not just to rewrite rules but to shift the underlying political economy so that the networks aligned against building are met by equally persistent networks aligned in favor of it. The YIMBY movement, at its best, is an attempt to build exactly that counter-network.