Is Donald Trump a NIMBY or a YIMBY? Given that the housing crisis is a front-and-center issue throughout the country, whether or not the president-elect reflexively favors housing development is an important question.
But Trump is all over the place on the housing issue, as he is on so many others. It’s hard to know where he really stands.
The idea of undoing zoning restrictions to produce more housing has enjoyed support in both parties at the federal level for decades. In a 1991 report titled “Not in My Backyard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing,” a bipartisan commission appointed by then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp noted that “across the country, local governments employ zoning and subdivision ordinances, building codes, and permitting procedures to prevent development of affordable housing.” But the feds don’t control local zoning, so their influence is limited.
As a former real estate developer — and an advocate of deregulation in general — Trump ought to be a YIMBY, the yes-in-my-backyard, pro-housing opposite of a NIMBY. In fact, in an interview last summer with Bloomberg, he railed against zoning, calling it a “killer” and promising to bring housing costs down.
Except, apparently, when doing so threatens suburban neighborhoods with single-family zoning, the most sweeping restraint on development in California and beyond. Trump has consistently said that the idea of high-density housing in the suburbs threatens the American way of life. “The suburb destruction will end with us,” he vowed during his first term.
NIMBYism crosses traditional political lines, suppressing housing in some of California’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, but it also overlaps plenty with Trump’s coalition. MAGA activists who like their suburban homes and neighborhoods are increasingly at war with the YIMBY movement, as the staunch resistance to more housing in places such as Huntington Beach has shown.
Lately Trump and company have taken to blaming the housing crisis on illegal immigration, suggesting the real estate market will be just fine once they deport 10 million or so immigrants. But unauthorized immigrants tend to occupy the low end of the housing stock, often in crowded conditions. So even if mass deportation occurs, it’s not likely to help millions of native-born Americans locked out of the market suddenly realize the dream of suburban homeownership.
One of the few specific ideas Trump has proposed for increasing the housing supply is opening up federal land for residential development. Last year, he floated the idea of using federal land to build “freedom cities,” a kind of unregulated enterprise zone for housing, business and flying cars.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s choice for Interior secretary, could be crucial to any administration housing strategy. Burgum would control the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, which have vast land holdings in California, nearly half of which is federally owned, and throughout the West. (The U.S. Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, also claims much of the state and region.) While much of the news coverage of Burgum’s appointment has concerned the prospect of more fossil fuel extraction from federal land, Burgum could also be key to plans to build housing on U.S. property.
But developing federal land is legally difficult, as is transferring such land to local governments that may want to build on it. The Bureau of Land Management, for instance, does constant battle with Clark County, Nev., over whether more land should be made available for development in the Las Vegas area. Moreover, much of the federal government’s land is mountainous, remote or both.
Burgum has been a strong advocate not only of zoning reform and housing development in general but also of building more high-density housing in cities and suburbs, which seems to be at odds with the MAGA agenda in some respects. A wealthy tech entrepreneur, Burgum has poured millions of dollars of his own money into revitalizing the downtown area in his hometown, Fargo.
Of course, the federal government also owns lots of land in urban and suburban locations. But that land would be beyond Burgum’s control, and federal agencies with other missions have proven extremely resistant to yielding their property for housing, as the recent battle over the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A. revealed.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt also promoted the idea of building a lot of housing on federal land, in both suburban and rural locations. Although the effort generated some innovative ideas, only a few subdivisions were ultimately built.
Trump’s freedom cities are likely to meet the same fate. It’s just hard for the federal government to bring about local zoning reform and housing development. It’s even harder when the president can’t decide where he stands on the issue.
William Fulton is the editor and publisher of “California Planning & Development Report.” He is a former mayor of Ventura and a former San Diego planning director.
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