I'm Not a YIMBY
Maybe Rent Control Isn't All Bad?
If you read my writing here regularly, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I’m a YIMBY. I want more and denser housing development as the primary strategy for reducing housing costs and making cities more livable. I want more and better transit and am willing to forego some of the permitting in order to get it done. It makes intuitive sense, to me, that transit should not be held to the same environmental impact standards as auto infrastructure, given that auto infrastructure is environmentally worse on pretty much every metric, for example.
Perhaps the thing that most makes me seem like a YIMBY is that I do, in fact, want all of this development in my backyard. I have actively worked within my city of Albuquerque, New Mexico to try to get the city to increase the density of development, add BRT, and maintain and improve pedestrian and cycling infrastructure even in my otherwise suburban neighborhood. I don’t just want this stuff in my city. I want it right next to me.
But I’m not a YIMBY. For instance, I am more sympathetic towards rent control policies. Applied with the right nuance, political goals, and an eye for learning and rent controls can do good things. The problem is that analyzing policies through the lens of ideology, rather than the politics of who they help and who pays the (not always monetary) costs can lead to overly dogmatic positions.
I live in Albuquerque now, but I grew up in Aurora, Colorado near Colfax Avenue (first Colfax, now Central. I must be secretly attracted to stroads because I’ve lived near what are probably two of the most significant stroads in the U.S.). In 2006, the University of Colorado completed their new medical campus at what used to be the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado at Colfax Avenue and Peoria Street. It includes the university’s six health sciences related schools, the university hospital, and a cancer treatment center. Co-located on the campus is also a Children’s Hospital and a VA hospital. The new Anschutz Medical Center dramatically changed the whole area.
East Colfax in Denver and Aurora had (and still has, though to a lesser degree now) a reputation for being a dangerous and undesirable part of town. For as long as I can remember, people not from that area had a nickname for the area: Saudi-Aurora. Some people say the nickname comes from the lack of tree cover causing a heat island effect more severe than other parts of the city. Others have claimed that it refers to how far away Aurora was from Denver when the state capital was still just a cow town. Sort of like saying “all the way to Timbuktu.” Yet others swear that it’s because Aurora is the “far east” of the metro area. I suspect the true origin of the term has been lost to time and rumor, but it was always clear to me, as a resident who didn’t use it, that it was meant to be derogatory.
East Colfax was notorious for gang activity, violent crime, and prostitution. When I was learning to drive I got pulled over driving at night along Colfax because I was going slow. I was a nervous, inexperienced driver being overly cautious, but the office thought I was there to solicit prostitutes. When my highschool classmates and I went away to college we loved bringing back more affluent friends and watching their horrified reactions. To us, being from Aurora was a point of pride. We felt like we’d “made it out” so to speak.
But it isn’t like that anymore. With this absolutely massive new medical campus came doctors, nurses, medical students, and other staff. All of them needed housing, and most of them had the money to get their pick of it. Demand skyrocketed, and new housing development along with it. Combine that with both Denver and Aurora implementing policies to encourage transit oriented development (TOD), since the area is also close to two light rail stations, and this should be a happy story for YIMBY’s.
In recent years, new housing development in the area has been so rapid that rental prices have actually been relatively stable. This should be a YIMBY victory story on par with housing price decreases in Austin. And I do love the area. I think no reasonable person could argue that it isn’t a more pleasant place to be than it was when I grew up there. The area is vibrant, active, and filled with a variety of thriving local businesses. I can walk from my parent’s house to restaurants, groceries, and most importantly to me, multiple local coffee shops! But that isn’t the whole story.
My parents used to own a home in the area. Now they rent. When the home prices in the area started to skyrocket, their mortgage lender saw that their home had more than doubled in value. Even selling the house at a fraction of its market value after foreclosing would make a lot more money than my parents’ mortgage. So they illegally changed the terms of their escrow without notification, and then foreclosed within days of my parents’ underpayment. By the time my parents found a real estate lawyer willing to work for a percentage, the home had already been sold and rented out to a new family. Long story short, while they did get some compensation, it wasn’t enough to buy a new home.
We were lucky. After being homeless for two years my parents were able to find a rental within the same general area. I won’t say it wasn’t difficult. In the end my parents went from owners to renters, but at least they weren’t completely displaced. Many have to leave for good, or become chronically homeless.
East Colfax is one of the poorest and one of the most diverse areas in the Denver Metro Area. Crossing the boundary between Aurora and Denver, 10% of the area's residents don’t speak english. It is culturally diverse, long being a hub for refugees from as far back as the Korean war. Today, refugee communities from Burma, Ethiopia, and Haiti all call the area home, among many others. For a long time, East Colfax was one of the last areas of the metro area that was even remotely affordable.
But when the Anschutz center fully ramped up operation, that started to change. Although housing supply ramped up to meet the new increase in demand, it matters that this demand was coming from upper middle class hospital and university employees. The New Urbanist development at the old Stapleton Airport, now called “Central Park,” is designed to be walkable, bikeable, dense, community oriented, and accessible to transit. And even though pricing there is relatively stable, the median rent is over $3000 a month, and the median home price is over $800,000! Many even newer developments in Aurora itself suffer from the same problem. Their prices are inaccessible to existing residents. Home values have increased so much that some owners could no longer even afford their property taxes. But over 60% of residents in the area are renters, and existing landlords haven’t been ignoring the new wealthier residents. Rental prices in the area have gone up $300 year over year, and the median price is over $2,200. The previous residents, some of the most vulnerable in the whole metro area, are being displaced.
The best case scenario is that they have to move further and further away from the city. Many people commute from as far away as Colorado Springs. The worst case scenario is that they become homeless, as my parents did, but that they don’t ever make their way back into housing.
The place where I grew up demonstrates the shortcomings of the preferred YIMBY strategy to cool the market through increasing supply. Supply increased dramatically, and I’m quite certain that if it hadn’t prices would have gotten even more out of control at an even faster pace! But that comes as little solace to the refugee and immigrant communities that are now afraid of being displaced.
I think rent control, among other policies, could have been a useful tool here. As Unlearning Economics discusses, the issue with rent control isn’t necessarily an objective one. It isn’t that rent control is bad and building more housing is good, but rather, to the extent that the two policies are mutually exclusive, they benefit different groups. Any form of rent control is a prioritization of existing residents over potential new residents. When looking at the scale of the city we might reject such policies because of the many benefits of growth, even to existing residents! Certainly I wouldn’t suggest that the whole city of Aurora or Denver implement rent control policies everywhere. But in more targeted situations, where the existing residents are almost entirely from vulnerable populations and new residents are largely affluent, it makes much more sense to implement policies that advantage existing residents because it advantages a population that is otherwise disadvantaged.
But, I hear your objection, don’t rent control’s actually reduce the supply of housing? To which I say, no one is demolishing housing because of rent controls. When the rental supply decreases, the likely means a corresponding increase in ownership, which is a neutral consequence when discussing displacement and housing prices. Nor do rent controls have to apply to new housing. In the case of East Colfax, much of the new housing was built on un or underdeveloped land, not conversions from existing housing stock. So even a policy limiting the ability of existing landlords from evicting tenants to build new “luxury” housing would not necessarily have had a deleterious effect on new housing as long as new housing wasn’t included in the rent control policy.
Overall, rent control isn’t just one policy. It doesn’t have to apply broadly, but can be targeted to areas where it would be most beneficial. It doesn’t have to freeze rents either. It can allow for a limited annual increase to keep up with inflation, or allow for rent increases to compensate landlords for demonstrable improvements to the units or for better maintenance. Such policies might be a compromise between keeping rents low and increasing the quality of rental units.
Nor do rent control policies have to exist in a vacuum. Local activists on East Colfax have suggested alternative policies, like land trusts. The idea is that local community groups could get assistance from the local government to purchase existing rental properties and manage them without a profit incentive. Thus they can keep rents lower than the new market rate housing. Such policies have the same end effect as rent controls: existing units don’t increase in price rapidly, but do so without a government ban. This model has been used to great effect in Toronto's famous Kensington Market.
The problem I have with the YIMBY aversion to rent controls isn’t a fundamental disagreement with the goals of the movement. I think most YIMBYs want what I want: more vibrant, livable, cities that are affordable for everyone. The problem comes about when YIMBYs are too fanatical about how we get there. The aversion economists have to policies like rent controls are not purely objective, but also political. And the YIMBY aversion is as well. Thus, the YIMBY commitment to market solutions is also political. My experience has often been that YIMBYs choose their commitment to market solutions over their commitment to cities that work for everyone whenever those two things come into conflict. This is one of the reasons I don’t call myself a YIMBY, because that kind of fanatical dedication to a particular method tends to get in the way of one’s desired results.
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