The main theory of America’s high housing costs goes like this: Homes are expensive because excessive regulations make it impossible to build enough of them. This view, most closely associated with the YIMBY—“Yes in My Backyard”—movement, has become so widespread among policy experts and elected officials that several states have passed laws loosening housing restrictions, and a giant federal housing bill encouraging others to do the same is currently making its way through Congress.
I’d long been a believer in this theory too. But then I watched as my home state of California, the birthplace of the YIMBY movement, spent the better part of a decade passing law after law designed to make housing easier to build. Each new bill was touted as the kind of transformative change that would finally bring an end to the state’s housing crisis. But months and years would go by, and nothing would get built. A decade into the YIMBY experiment, California is still building the same number of homes annually that it was building when the first laws were passed. What if everything I thought I knew about the housing crisis was wrong?
I spent the past few months trying to get to the bottom of this mystery. I spoke with developers, activists, state legislators, and academics both inside and outside California to piece together what had gone wrong. The answer, it turns out, was not that YIMBYism failed California, but that California had failed YIMBYism.
— Rogé Karma, staff writer