I am a YIMBY and I love y’all, but there are an awful lot of dorks who live in big cities in this movement who don’t really understand why people like owning private detached housing. Hint: there are lots of things I want to do that I can’t do in an apt or a condo.

I enjoy working on my own home, I want to have a workshop, I enjoy my private yard. Most Americans agree with me about these things, none of which need be an impediment to building more housing.

I wouldn’t want to live in a country that didn’t have private property. A major reason I agreed to leave NYC was so that I could buy a detached house (it’s actually a duplex). New York is great, but not owning detached housing was a dealbreaker for me, long term.

I understand that my ownership is in many practical ways a legal fiction. I pay property taxes. I am constrained by zoning and other regulations. But I like the fiction. I like owning my property. This country is fucking huge and there’s enough to go around.

You’ll note that I don’t want to force this way of life on anybody, including my most immediate neighbors. If they want to sell their land to developers who will build large apartment buildings, then I think they should have every right to do it.

You’ll note also that my last 5 residences were in large multi-family buildings. They were great apartments! It’s a fine way to live. But it’s not the only way to live.

...and any movement that seeks to eliminate private property in any form or to take away or further limit land rights is not my movement.

What’s great about markets is that you can’t actually figure out what the right number of a thing is a priori or via intuition. You have to let people make decisions with skin in the game. Let people buy and sell and trade — and what people really value will often emerge.

What people tell you they value in a vacuum and what they actually value when they have to pay for it are often pretty far apart. We should give landowners more rights, not fewer, most importantly the rate to sell their land to developers who will add units where there is demand.

The right*

What we don’t need, in other words, are thousands of local housing czars deciding for us how we should live. We should have a free market in housing, one in which people can decide individually what they will pay for.

Presumably the reason you need single-family zoning in the first place is that all things being equal lots of people will prefer to replace the existing single-family homes with larger apartments.

And they should have every right to do that! But that’s an increase in property rights, not a decrease.