Is Donald Trump a NIMBY or YIMBY? Because the housing crisis is a central issue across the country, whether the president-elect favors housing development or not is a critical question.
But Trump is wrong on housing, as on many other issues. It’s hard to know where he really stands.
The idea of eliminating zoning restrictions to produce more housing has received bipartisan support at the federal level for decades. In a 1991 report titled “Not in My Backyard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing,” A Bipartisan committee “Local governments across the country are using zoning and subdivision ordinances, building codes, and permitting procedures to prevent the development of affordable housing,” noted Jack Kemp, appointed by then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But the feds do not control local areas, so their influence is limited.
As a former real estate developer – and an advocate of deregulation in general – Trump should be a YIMBY, pro-housing anti-NIMBY. In reality, In an interview last summer with Bloomberg, He has criticized zoning, calling it “killer” and promising to lower housing costs.
Except, apparently, when doing so threatens suburban neighborhoods with single-family zoning, the most sweeping restrictions on development in California and beyond. Trump has consistently said that the idea of high-density suburban housing threatens the American way of life. He added: “The destruction of the suburb will end with us.” pledge During his first term.
NIMBYism cuts across traditional political lines, cracking down on housing in some of California’s ostensibly more liberal pockets, but also often overlapping with Trump’s coalition. MAGA activists who love their suburban homes and neighborhoods are increasingly at war with the YIMBY movement, as… Strong resistance to more housing in places like Huntington Beach And it showed.
Recently Trump and Co. took it up Blame the housing crisis on illegal immigrationWhich suggests that the real estate market will be fine once the 10 million or so immigrants are deported. But illegal immigrants tend to occupy minimal housing, often in crowded conditions. Therefore, even if mass deportation occurs, it is unlikely to help the millions of native-born Americans who have been locked out of the market achieve the dream of suburban homeownership.
One of the few specific ideas Trump has proposed to increase housing supply is opening up federal lands for residential development. Last year, he floated the idea of using federal lands to build “Freedom Cities,” a type of informal enterprise zone for housing, businesses and manufacturing industries. Flying cars.
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, could be crucial to any housing management strategy. Burgum would control the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, which owns vast land holdings in California, about half of which is federally owned, and throughout the West. (The U.S. Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, also claims much of the state and territory.) While much of the news coverage of Burgum’s appointment has been concerned with the prospect of extracting more fossil fuels from federal lands, Burgum may also be a key factor for plans to build housing on American property.
But developing federal land is legally difficult, as is transferring that land to local governments that might want to build on it. For example, the Bureau of Land Management is in an ongoing battle with Clark County, Nevada, over whether more land should be made available for development in the Las Vegas area. Moreover, much of the federal government’s lands are mountainous, remote, or both.
Burgum has been a strong advocate not only for… Zoning reform And housing development in general, but also building more high-density housing in cities and suburbs, which seems to go against the MAGA agenda in some ways. A wealthy technology entrepreneur, Burgum has poured millions of dollars of his own money into it Revitalizing the downtown area in his hometown of Fargo.
Of course, the federal government also owns a lot of land in urban and suburban locations. But that land would be beyond Burgum’s control, and federal agencies with other missions have proven very resistant to giving up their property for housing, as The latest battle over the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles open.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt also promoted the idea of building much housing on federal land, in both the United States and Europe. Suburbs and rural sites. Although the efforts generated some innovative ideas, only a few subdivisions were ultimately built.
Trump’s Freedom Cities are likely to face the same fate. It is difficult for the federal government to reform local zoning and housing development. It becomes more difficult when the president cannot decide his position on this issue.
William Fulton is editor and publisher of the magazine “California Planning and Development ReportHe is a former mayor of Ventura and a former planning director in San Diego.
