- Ned Resnikoff
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- The Homevoters Hypothesis, Revisited
The Homevoters Hypothesis, Revisited
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Material Analysis
Ned Resnikoff
April 28, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
I have a new piece out in The Nation that attempts to outline a sort of left-YIMBY structural analysis of American housing politics. The piece is a rejoinder to those who say YIMBYs have no theory of power. On the contrary, I find intra-YIMBY conversations about class and power to be highly sophisticated; the key difference between YIMBYs and the anti-YIMBYs of the left is that the YIMBY power analysis builds off of observed behavior, instead of disfiguring the empirical evidence to fit an a priori theoretical construct. Or as I write in the piece:
Madden, Marcuse, and many of their anti-YIMBY compatriots are operating in a self-consciously Marxian frame of reference. But ironically, their biggest intellectual failing when it comes to the politics of housing is their inability to think dialectically. "Capital" and "the community" emerge from their analysis as homogeneous, inert blobs. They would have come closer to the mark if they had instead followed the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson's dictum not to "see class as a 'structure,' nor even as a 'category,' but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships." Following Thompson's example teaches us to derive our class analysis from real-world, observable dynamics instead of trying to compress the evidence to fit a prefabricated class analysis.
In the piece, I touch briefly on William Fischel’s The Homevoter Hypothesis. Here’s my gloss on his argument, along with my qualified endorsement:
Some of this opposition stems from an understandable resistance to change: Many of us like our neighborhoods the way they are, and we want to keep them that way. Similarly, some homeowners have ideological reasons for opposing new development in their neighborhoods. But many affluent homeowners also have more concrete reasons for wanting to keep new homes out of their backyards.
NIMBYs will often cite property values as a reason for opposing multifamily development: The presence of apartment buildings, they argue, blights single-family neighborhoods and makes their homes less valuable. The actual effects of upzoning and multifamily construction on home values are a bit more nuanced—in some cases, building affordable housing has been found to enhance the value of nearby single-family homes—but no matter. As the economist William Fischel argued in The Homevoter Hypothesis, any sort of change to a neighborhood's built environment introduces a certain amount of financial risk for homeowners: "NIMBYism makes perfectly good sense if you think about the variance in expected outcomes, and the fact that there is no way to insure against neighborhood or community-wide decline." Restrictive zoning, and the creation of local homeowners' cartels like neighborhood associations to enforce an effective ban on construction, serve as ad hoc insurance policies.
The paragraph where I cite Fischel was the single hardest one to write. My view on his argument changes from year to year, if not month to month. When I first encountered it in my Baby YIMBY era, I pretty much swallowed it whole. Then I thought about it some more, consumed some more literature, talked to other YIMBYs, and slowly came to reject most of the homevoter hypothesis. But recently—and writing my latest Nation piece really crystallized this—I’ve once again become more sympathetic to Fischel. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a big part of it.
