I consider myself a super-YIMBY. In fact, I’m such a YIMBY that I wrote a whole book advocating for zoning reform and urban density before the term “YIMBY” existed and before the entire era of modern housing supply advocacy arose. I believe in this cause in principle, and I also believe in it in practice for Washington, DC where I have lived for the past 23 years and plan to continue living.
I think it’s a great achievement in life that these days even hard-core leftist Democratic Socialists of America members like Janeese Lewis George acknowledge the need for cities to update their land use policies and allow denser construction. This is an important change in political alignments, and I hope that when Kenyan McDuffie is mayor and is pushing for a more ambitious Comprehensive Plan than the one put forward by the current Office of Planning that she will be a leading voice on the DC Council in favor of ambition.
That said, I’ve been disappointed to see the city’s main YIMBY organizations endorse Lewis George for mayor.
Their basic analysis of the situation misses the practical significance of non-zoning regulations for housing supply. People who care about boosting housing in the District should take seriously the reality that everyone who builds, operates, finances, and sells housing in this city is backing McDuffie. The YIMBY community, I know, has always been sensitive to the accusation that it is merely a screen for developers and other real estate interests. But the posture of completely ignoring the business perspective on the mayor’s race does not make a lot of logical sense. It also plays into a different myth that YIMBY advocates have traditionally tried to rebut, that our advocacy just stands for the interests of younger white newcomers who are indifferent to the concerns of older, more working class residents. It’s indisputably true that Lewis George’s electoral base contains more “urbanists” than McDuffie’s and that she is more enthusiastic about bicycle lanes. But McDuffie’s platform and interest group coalition represent a realistic vision for reviving the city’s currently flagging construction sector, while George’s ideas are economically illiterate and unworkable.
Recent elections in New York City and Seattle and the ongoing election in Los Angeles all put progressive YIMBYs against “moderate” Democrats who are ardent defenders of exclusionary zoning. The DC race is simply not like that. McDuffie and Lewis George are both championing visionary changes to the city’s land use policies, but Lewis George has never reconciled herself to the realities of privately financed housing development. We have two candidates in this race who favor zoning changes, but only one candidate who will deliver new housing and a win-win strategy for economic growth.
Lewis George’s one step forward two steps back
Under a string of pro-growth mayors, Washington DC has seen extensive housing growth over the past twenty-five years. This has occurred primarily in greenfield or quasi-greenfield neighborhoods like Navy Yard, the Wharf, and NOMA or else on vacant parcels of land left empty as a legacy of the 1968 riots and the subsequent 20 years of massive disinvestment from cities throughout the country. This has been a basically successful strategy for economic growth, but it is running out of space to function and further growth is going to require changes to land use policy that will facilitate more infill.
Lewis George, as her DSA questionnaire makes clear, simply does not see the sprouting of these new neighborhoods as a success. Instead, she complains that she has had to watch Mayor Bowser “prioritize big business, well-connected insiders, and the one percent.”
The District does not have a secret class of billionaire tech entrepreneurs or lords of finance. Our biggest business, by far, is simply real estate. If the mayor does not prioritize the growth of this sector, it will not have housing growth. This basic disconnect between the reality that our DOGE-ravaged city needs a thriving private sector economy and Lewis George’s highly ideological worldview is why the restaurant industry is also supporting McDuffie. For housing to be built, two things have to be true. One, it needs to be legal under land use rules. Two, it needs to “pencil out” in terms of dollars and cents to attract investment. Unfortunately, almost all of Lewis George’s ideas point at making it less likely that new projects will pencil out. In her DSA questionnaire, Lewis George cites as signature positions two separate instances in which she sought to make it impossible to evict tenants for failing to pay their rent. She says that she supports “protecting and expanding rent control” and that she wants to reverse the recent RENTAL Act which was passed to address a critical impediment to financing new real estate development in the city. In the labor section of her questionnaire, she makes it clear that in addition to making it harder to finance and operate housing in the city she also wants to make it more expensive to build.
The issue is that while Lewis George backs changes to land use rules, she does not actually believe in privately financed construction of market rate apartments. Her entire vision for housing is that it should be “social housing.” This is an interesting idea in principle, but her only stated formula for this — projects that are split equally between units reserved for extremely low-income residents, units reserved for very low-income units, and market rate units — is wildly infeasible. Don’t take my word for it, Paul Williams of the Center for Public Enterprise and a leading expert on and advocate for mixed-income social housing projects not only says this won’t work but says he has repeatedly told Lewis George’s team it won’t work only to be met with silence.
Last but not least, it is worth underscoring that Lewis George’s position on evictions is truly extreme. As Ashley Schapitl wrote last week, Lewis George was the sole no on a 12-1 council vote to allow landlords to evict tenants for committing acts of violence against their neighbors. Not only will this kind of attitude obviously chill private construction, even if you did get social housing units built who would want to live in them under those conditions? The city needs to make provision for residents who cannot afford market rents, but it is a disservice to the vast majority of low-income people to strictly prioritize the needs of violent criminals over the needs of people who simply need some help with their rent.
McDuffie is proposing visionary land use reform
The YIMBY endorsements of Lewis George not only paper over the fatal flaws in her housing agenda, they have obscured the incredibly ambitious housing proposals McDuffie has endorsed. He says he wants to legalize missing middle housing citywide and repeal or modify the Height of Buildings Act to allow for taller developments near Metro stations. His platform calls for “modernizing zoning rules to eliminate lengthy discretionary review, parking and other requirements that are not necessary particularly in transit-rich neighborhoods.”
Notably, McDuffie’s platform also discusses a number of ideas to curb the unfortunate tendency in the city for even projects that are fully approved to face costly years-long delays due to frivolous litigation.
This kind of emphasis on the practical problems of the industry underscores the reality that while it’s fun to paint one’s opponent as a tool of nefarious monied interests, in the real world it is actually useful to work with housing practitioners and not just urbanist take-slingers. A 2025 study by Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found that the election of candidates to municipal office who are backed by real estate industry interests “lead to increases in permitting of multi-family housing.”
At the end of the day, this is a pretty commonsensical result. I would worry about electing a politician with close ties to the tobacco or industry because smoking is harmful. A candidate in hock to coal interests might generate too much air pollution. A candidate beholden to gun manufacturers might be too soft on illegal handguns. But a candidate aligned with the real estate and restaurant industries is going to deliver more apartment buildings with ground floor retail. For many years, urban leftists were extremely hostile to housing as part of a comprehensive tendency toward anti-business politics. In recent years, a newer breed has emerged that wants to say “yes” to housing. That’s a great trend, but it fundamentally does not make sense to say yes to housing without saying yes to the people who build, finance, and operate the units.
The YIMBY case for Lewis George rests heavily on McDuffie’s greater enthusiasm for historic preservation (where frankly I think he’s wrong) and on the fact that George picked a higher number as her basically fake “target” figure for additional housing units. The reality, though, is that targets do not create housing — real estate developers create housing. Lewis George wants to make it impossible for them to do so, and then replace private housing development with a social housing vision that does not work mathematically. If I didn’t actually live in this city, I would find this to be a fascinating development in urban sociology and would look forward to four years of a futile mayorality as a learning experience for the local YIMBY organizations. But as an actual resident of the District, I would prefer we get the choice right the first time and avoid the learning experience. We are privileged to have two candidates who want to update the city’s zoning, but housing supply advocates should pick the candidate with a feasible plan to increase the supply of housing not the one with an aspirational target and no plan to make it work.
This is perfectly put. The whole deal here with all of this is structural changes by themselves don’t build housing. Building housing builds housing, and for that to become reality, it’s fundamentally a matter of dollars and cents.
This piece pretty blatantly ignores JLG's platform. Here's a good thread describing how!
https://x.com/andrewdefrank/status/2061444314723471702?s=20