Longer description of your proposed project

YIMBYism is a key moral issue of our time. Incumbent homeowners are able to block new housing, making supply unable to respond to increases in demand. This preserves luxury lifestyles for homeowners, but at the expense of skyrocketing housing costs everyone else.

At the same time, the housing discourse is filled with economically illiterate arguments. I often hear the claim that “we have so much construction going on, but prices keep going up, so more supply isn’t helping”. But this is exactly what you’d expect when demand shifts right and the supply curve is fixed. Or take the claim that upzoning won’t improve affordability, because it raises land prices. But higher land prices are from upzoning making land more valuable (since you can build apartments), and giving apartment-developers more options reduces land costs.

I think there are easy gains from levelling up YIMBY activists in their supply and demand arguments. Current NIMBY rhetoric can be easily rebutted with economically informed reasoning, to show that NIMBY homeowners are selfishly protecting their interests and not promoting the public good. This will improve the effectiveness of YIMBY activism and get more pro-housing reforms passed.

I propose to write a series of blog posts and tweet-threads explaining the housing market and the housing crisis. I will write accessible and technical versions of the same idea, to make it understandable to laypeople while giving advanced readers the rigorous foundation. I will also explore making youtube/tiktok versions through my collaboration with About Here (see below). Topics include:
- introduction to supply and demand models
- demand cascade: how the housing crisis happened
- yuppie fishtanks: how new housing protects old housing
- vacancy chains: how new housing frees up old housing
- how does upzoning affect land prices?
- single-family zoning is a giveaway to rich homeowners
- thinking through gentrification

I believe I can substantially improve the quality of YIMBY intellectual ammunition, debunk common NIMBY claims, and show that NIMBYism dramatically skews public policy to favor the interests of wealthy homeowners.

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

I have a PhD in economics and have been thinking for many years about supply and demand modelling of housing markets and the housing crisis. Living in Vancouver, I have seen first-hand the dramatic increase in housing prices, friends moving away to cheaper suburbs to start families, and the NIMBY homeowners who show up at public hearings to oppose new housing. I have developed a conceptual framework based on a two-sector supply and demand model that can explain many features of the housing market (eg. the effect of upzoning on: the price of houses and apartments, the price of single-family and multi-family land, and central vs peripheral land prices; vacancy chains; yuppie fishtanks; induced demand), and I can translate the technical economics into intuitive reasoning to make the arguments accessible to laypeople.

I got funding from the 2022 ACX Grants++ to make an explainer video on housing economics with About Here, which will be published in mid-2024. The video will explain the benefits of expensive new “luxury” housing: even though it is not affordable to most people, new housing helps affordability indirectly by (1) becoming cheaper over time (filtering), (2) absorbing demand from rich in-migrants (yuppie fishtanks), and (3) freeing up cheap old homes (vacancy chains).

Other ways I can learn about you

https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/

How much money do you need?

$10000, to cover two months of blogging.

Links to any supporting documents or information

No response.

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

97% - write at least three articles
50% - be cited by a main YIMBY organization
10% - collaborate with YIMBY Action to train activists (https://new.yimbyaction.org/)