Are We Entering the Affordability Era?
Voters are trying to send a message. Who’s listening?
In news that should surprise no one, exit polls last week showed voters listing “the economy” and “the cost of living” as their top issues. Voters across the United States delivered a simple message in last week’s election — not only is the rent too damn high, so is the cost of groceries, childcare, transportation, and everything else.
As YIMBYs, we often focus on how more housing is a key way to address affordability — and we saw that dynamic play out not just in the headline races, but in local elections too. With a growing active base and popular messaging, YIMBY-endorsed candidates racked up wins in cities like Fort Collins, CO and Pittsburg, PA. This cycle, we made endorsements in 40 races. We won in twenty-nine of those races, with another four that are headed to runoffs. Not bad!
Across the country, voters want to attack the problem of unaffordable housing, and when given the opportunity to vote for affordability, they generally vote yes. In Santa Cruz, California, voters approved $4.5 million yearly in new taxes to fund affordable housing and homelessness services. In New York City, voters approved four measures that liberalized the city’s zoning rules. Denver voters passed a series of bonds that included $59.3 million for housing. Bellingham, WA strengthened its tenants’ rights law. And voters in Louisville, Colorado rejected a feel-good measure that would have reduced the new supply of housing. Even the famously NIMBY Marin county in California seems to want to do the right thing (at least some of the time). In general, in almost every jurisdiction in which pro-housing policies were on the ballot, voters approved them.1
The takeaway: Affordability is good. Candidates should run on affordability. If you do, you’ll win. And one of the best ways to tackle affordability is to tackle the cost of housing.
Bonus takeaway: Voter complaints about “the economy” are also complaining about housing. When there is more housing construction in places with jobs, everyone is able to access high-resource communities and economic outcomes improve. I dug into that topic on the Boyd Institute podcast last week.
It’s no surprise to YIMBYs that affordability is top of mind for voters. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median age of a first-time homebuyer in the United States recently rose to an all-time high of 40 years old. As a bitter, stunted, renter millenial I deeply feel this statistic. (By comparison, the median age of a first-time home buyer in 1991 was only 28 years old.) “It’s kind of a shocking number,” said Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist and vice president of research at NAR.
This ties into what public opinion data is showing us too. In a Pew Research Center survey taken last year, 69% of Americans said they were “very concerned” about the cost of housing, a dramatic rise from previous years. As the Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told NPR after the election, “voters are feeling strapped. They’re concerned about their standards of living.”
In the three big races last week, the candidates who were the most focused on affordability won their races — Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. What should excite and terrify YIMBYs is that the three candidates differed on how to tackle it. Affordability is very much a jump ball, and that’s not even counting how Trump is trying to capture the idea too. YIMBYs have the opportunity to prove that pro-housing policies create affordability, but our ideas are not a given.
“What’s notable isn’t just what the above messages have in common but what they don’t have in common,” wrote the journalist Derek Thompson. “Affordability is a big tent.”
I’m not even sure it is a tent. Affordability is a vibe.
What’s the lesson here? National pundits have framed the election in terms of Democrats gaining on Republicans, following President Donald Trump’s promise during the last election to fix the economy. And Democratic strategists are (correctly) obsessed with trying to figure out how Democrats can shed their elitist vibes and adopt the affordability vibes. But for me the takeaway is that when it comes to affordability, voters agree on the problem but not always on the solution. And that’s why our work is so important.