{"id":1414,"date":"2026-07-18T04:15:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T04:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1414"},"modified":"2026-07-18T04:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T04:15:58","slug":"a-perfectly-crude-solution-to-americas-housing-shortage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1414","title":{"rendered":"A Perfectly Crude Solution to America\u2019s Housing Shortage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sign up for Work in Progress, a newsletter where Rog\u00e9 Karma investigates the mysteries of a complicated economy.<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n

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Just about every effort to solve America\u2019s housing shortage runs into the iron law of NIMBY: \u201cnot in my backyard.\u201d Whenever a development is proposed in a place where people already live, existing residents erupt in opposition, claiming the new homes will alter \u201cneighborhood character,\u201d increase traffic, and hurt property values. Those who would benefit the most from new housing, meanwhile, don\u2019t yet live in the community and thus have no say in the political process. This creates an asymmetry that\u2019s hard to overcome. Even reforms passed at the state level to override local building restrictions keep failing, because NIMBYs find clever ways to work around them.<\/p>\n

But a new approach might finally offer a way out of the impasse: If you can\u2019t beat the NIMBYs, pay them.<\/p>\n

In recent months, several Democratic Party\u2013aligned think tanks have released proposals that share the same basic structure: If a local community approves enough new homes for construction, then each resident of that community receives a check from the federal government worth thousands of dollars. The theory is that the allure of a cash payment would soften the position of the most ardent NIMBYs, while inspiring residents who otherwise might not care one way or the other to become advocates for new development. This would give political cover for local officials to propose new pro-housing reforms, while forcing anti-development politicians to explain to residents why they shouldn\u2019t get cash payments. \u201cThe idea is to shake up the local political economy,\u201d Chad Maisel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has co-authored multiple proposals on this subject, told me. \u201cYou are simultaneously trying to weaken some very entrenched interests while creating a new political constituency that doesn\u2019t currently exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paying the NIMBYs has never been tried, so no one can say for sure that it would work. But a forthcoming paper by the political scientist Michael Hankinson and the economists Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis provides some reason to think that it could. The team conducted a survey in which they asked about 1,700 residents of expensive areas, including New York City, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia suburbs, to consider a series of hypothetical proposals to build housing in their neighborhood. Alongside each proposal, the respondents were offered (again, hypothetically) various amounts of cash, from $250 to $9,000, and then asked whether they would vote yes or no on approving the project. By aggregating those answers, the researchers were able to estimate the \u201cwillingness to accept\u201d price: the amount of money needed to persuade the median voter in a community to shift from opposing a project to supporting it.<\/p>\n

The results, which the researchers shared with me, suggest that almost everyone has a price. More than 80 percent of the respondents accepted at least one of the proposals they were offered. But the amount of money they needed to be offered ultimately depended on the density of the neighborhood they lived in. Participants who lived in the most densely populated places (think downtowns full of apartments and high-rises) generally required, at most, only a few hundred dollars to support new development; many were willing to approve housing even with no payment attached. The price went up to the low thousands for moderately dense places (urban neighborhoods with a mix of single-family homes, townhouses, and small apartment buildings) and reached well above $5,000 for the most of the places with low density (suburbs full of detached single-family homes). People in wealthier places also required higher payments than those in poorer places, although the difference was not nearly as stark as the one based on density.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt makes sense if you just think about it intuitively,\u201d Michael Hankinson, a political scientist at George Washington University who co-authored the paper, told me. \u201cSuburbanites surrounded by nothing but single-family homes are probably going to be more sensitive to new development than an urbanite who already lives near lots of high-rises.\u201d In low-density suburbs where the average income is above $150,000, not even the maximum amount the researchers offered, $9,000, was enough to persuade the median resident to support a new project. (Hankinson cautioned that though these figures are directionally correct, the exact dollar amounts are still preliminary, as he and his co-authors have not yet finalized and published their analysis.)<\/p>\n

The upshot is that the same policy will have very different results depending on where it\u2019s implemented. For instance, a proposal from the Center for American Progress would offer a flat $1,000 to residents of places that hit certain housing-production targets. Only in dense urban areas would that likely be enough to tip the scales. Another version, from the Searchlight Institute, would reward residents with a check equivalent to the average annual rent increase in their city the year prior. For Los Angeles in 2025, for example, that would have been about $3,900. Such amounts might not move the needle in the wealthiest suburbs, but they could inspire housing production in a range of places beyond just urban cores. \u201cThe message to voters is: Support new housing and we\u2019ll essentially freeze your rent,\u201d Aaron Shroyer, one of the co-authors of the Searchlight proposal, told me. \u201cI think something like that is the best chance we have at getting more communities to a \u2018yes\u2019 on new development.\u201d<\/p>\n

A second implication of the research is that the type of project being proposed matters a lot. The relatively low dollar amounts cited above represent the payment required for residents to accept a market-rate development at the edge of their existing neighborhood built at a similar scale to the homes around it. When the new project was instead proposed on a plot of land directly next to a respondent\u2019s current home, the necessary payment doubled. When the project was considerably more dense than the surrounding buildings\u2014like a row of townhouses in a single-family neighborhood\u2014it quadrupled. If residents were told that the new development would be reserved exclusively for low-income residents, they demanded five<\/i> times more money. Paying the NIMBYs, in other words, might require working with people\u2019s existing aesthetic and spatial preferences, not trying to overcome them. \u201cSo much of NIMBYism is the product of a deep status-quo bias,\u201d Will Poff-Webster, the director of infrastructure policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank, told me. \u201cThat\u2019s a really hard thing to change, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even with these caveats, paying the NIMBYs still seems like a better strategy than the currently favored policy approach, which is to offer financial incentives to local governments that approve new housing. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that recently became law, for instance, offers federal funding to cities that meet certain housing-production targets, which they can then use to pay for things such as parks, road improvements, and new infrastructure. That is better than nothing, but the evidence suggests that it is far less effective at getting residents to support new housing. Hankinson and his co-authors found that when the compensation package was offered to residents in the form of a parks-and-streets fund, they required 10 time<\/i>s the amount of money they would have required if offered cash.<\/p>\n

For more than a decade, housing advocates have done everything in their power to combat what they see as the selfishness of local NIMBYs. They have tried to convince local homeowners of the economic benefits of new housing. They have filled town-hall meetings with YIMBY activists who support development. They have lobbied for state-level laws that override local authority altogether. None of it has made a significant dent in the housing shortage. Perhaps it\u2019s time to stop fighting the NIMBYs and instead make housing development worth their while.<\/p>\n

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If you can\u2019t beat the NIMBYs, pay \u2019em.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nA Perfectly Crude Solution to America\u2019s Housing Shortage - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1414\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Perfectly Crude Solution to America\u2019s Housing Shortage - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you can\u2019t beat the NIMBYs, pay \u2019em.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1414\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-18T04:15:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"A Perfectly Crude Solution to America\u2019s Housing Shortage\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-18T04:15:58+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414\"},\"wordCount\":1343,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/cc868ddde8f3eae369f92ac447228b88.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1414\",\"name\":\"A Perfectly Crude Solution to America\u2019s Housing Shortage - 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