It seems like just yesterday that “Jane Galt” was just a humble blogger. Now (her real name is Megan McArdle) she has a column in the Washington Post and in her most recent column she points to an issue that divides the Democratic consensus: housing. Her take on it is that it will be difficult because it’s a wedge issue for them:
Housing activists have had some success using state governments to override local opposition to building low-income housing. And a group in California decided to try to do something similar for market-rate development: A proposed law called SB-827 would have wrested control of zoning decisions near mass transit from local communities that often use ordinances to block denser development.
That bill just died in the California Senate, unable to even get out of committee.
It’s not really that surprising that it died. YIMBYism — yes-in-my-back-yard-ism — is always a tough fight against entrenched local interests. What’s remarkable is who killed it. It wasn’t just prosperous suburban homeowners, snug on their one-acre lots. The list of opponents reads like a who’s who of Democratic Party interest groups: the Sierra Club, the construction unions and, incredibly, even some affordable-housing activists, who think that encouraging market-rate development will encourage gentrification without helping lower-income families get access to housing. In the narrow areas where SB-827 would spur development, they may even be right — but city- or state-wide, the only way that California can hope to relieve the rent crisis among struggling families is to build enough new units that those families no longer have to compete with the affluent for the sharply limited housing stock.
YIMBYism is shaping up to be for the Democrats what free trade was for the Republicans — an issue where the policy elites are all singing from the same hymnal but a substantial portion of the base simply refuses to come in on the chorus. Hopefully Democrats can do better than Republicans have at finessing the divide between their base and their wonketariat. But if so, they’ll need to find a way to expand their activist coalitions.
What I find interesting about that is that it provides a rubric for creating policies that will gain broad support within the Democratic coalition. In essence such a policy must a) increase or maintain regulation; b) provide subsidies to blacks and Hispanics disproportionate to their numbers in the population; and c) leave the urban gentry alone.
A good case study is the Affordable Care Act. It increased the scope of government regulation in health care, gaining the support of the federal bureaucracy, it provides subsidies disproportionately to blacks and Hispanics, and, except for the lowest tier of the “creative class” who pay for it, it leaves the urban gentry alone.
I’ll leave how this same approach may be applied to other issues to the interested but I suspect we’ll see that as the model for the party going forward.
