Homes for Hipsters
More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.
Mamdani’s ‘cost of living’ campaign – offering rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets – seems to some leftist pundits a potential road back to power, under the guise of the burgeoning YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) movement that seeks to lower rental prices through massive housing construction.
Although Mamdani claims his focus on affordability appeals to working-class voters who shifted to Donald Trump, his core constituency lies elsewhere – with relatively affluent, young, single and childless professionals. For them, rent control is a true blessing, although they may not need free buses or want city-financed grocery stores, unless they resemble Whole Foods.
Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. It also has a particular resonance for younger Americans. A Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds this year ranked housing as the third-most-important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. The educated hipster class – Mamdani’s base – understandably worries about the fact that in New York, you need a $135,000-a-year salary to afford a decent place, without it eating up most of your paycheque.
On a national basis, Mamdani’s win could prove a critical boost to the YIMBYs. From their origins in California, they have always been an odd agglomeration, originally financed by Bay Area tech and real-estate elites, while also embraced by more predictable leftist advocates of rent control, heavy subsidies and public housing. As YIMBY policies – like rezoning and densification – have either failed to solve the problem, or failed to gain traction with the public, more draconian socialist approaches seem to be gaining currency.
The YIMBYs are at least right about one thing: the lack of new housing is a profound national failure. Homebuilders constructed a million fewer homes – including units – in 2024 than in 1972, when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by an estimated 4.5 million homes.
But if YIMBYs have diagnosed a key problem, their solutions – wherever imposed – have tended to make things worse. High-density development, often seen as the alternative to urban sprawl, does not solve the problem of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo credit: Affordable housing construction (2015) in Prospect Height, NYC, by Billie Grace Ward, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
