YIMBYs Are Killing off the Family Home
Forcing everyone to live in high rise apartments isn’t solving the housing crisis. Quite the opposite.
Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability. California has recently passed legislation to reform environmental regulations that have hindered home-building. The power of the so-called Yimby (“Yes in my backyard”) movement seems only to have been reinforced.
Yet the great irony is that where the Yimby agenda has advanced furthest – notably my home state of California – housing affordability has remained consistently the worst.
Yimbys have got something right – the central problem behind the housing affordability crisis is the failure to build enough homes. Homebuilders built hundreds of thousands fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate has put the US housing market short by approximately 4.5 million homes.
Pursuit of Happiness
National Poll from Civitas Institute: Americans Concerned About AI, Economic Issues
The Civitas Institute Poll, conducted from March 11-20, 2025, asked 1,200 Americans an array of questions about how things are going in the country.
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The French Origins of Urban Renewal
Paris’s drastic transformation, often termed “Haussmannization,” was unprecedented in scope and set the stage for future traumatic episodes of urban renewal in other countries, including America.
Diversity, Real and Imposed
Diversity imposed drowns human spontaneity and the shades and gradations of man’s mysterious existence into heartless uniformity, bearing no pulses or imaginations.
