Pro-Housing, Not Pro-Development

In California's housing arguments, two words get used as if they were interchangeable. A politician who wants more homes calls themselves pro-housing, and one who wants to permit more projects of every kind calls themselves the same thing. Opponents of a particular project get called anti-housing whether the project is apartments or an office park. The working assumption is that housing and development are one cause: build more of anything, and the housing crisis eases.

They're not one cause, and the difference matters to anyone who cares about liberty. Being pro-housing is a social goal. It asks whether people can afford a place to live near their work, their family, and their community, and whether the next generation can stay in the place that raised it. It's judged by outcomes: rents measured against incomes, people without homes, households doubled up in apartments built for one, commutes, who gets pushed out. Being pro-development is an ideology. It holds that building more is good in itself, that growth is the measure of a healthy place, and that whatever slows construction is the enemy. It's judged by inputs: permits issued, square feet approved, cranes on the skyline.

Most of the time the two point the same way. More homes, built where people want to live, lower what homes cost. That's the core of the case for building, and it's right. But they part company more often than their advocates admit, and when they do, a movement that has confused them will end up on the wrong side.

Use value and exchange value

Two sociologists, John Logan and Harvey Molotch, gave the difference its sharpest form. In Urban Fortunes (1987), building on Molotch's earlier essay "The City as a Growth Machine," they observed that a place has two kinds of value. To the people who live there it has use value: it's where they sleep, raise children, walk to the store, know their neighbors. To the people who trade in it, it has exchange value: rent, resale price, the return on what's built. Most of local politics, they argued, is run by a coalition organized around exchange value. Landowners, developers, lenders, the local newspaper, the building trades, and the politicians they fund all gain when land values rise and building accelerates. They called it the growth machine.

That's the distinction under "pro-housing" and "pro-development." Housing is the use value of a place made available to more people. Development, as an ideology, is the growth machine's interest in exchange value, dressed as a public good. The growth machine builds housing when housing pays the best return. It builds office towers, logistics warehouses, and data centers when those pay better, and it calls all of them progress.

The opposite camp is no better. The neighborhood that blocks every new apartment to protect its own property values isn't defending use value either. It's defending exchange value, its own, against anyone who'd add to the supply. That's the same ideology pointed the other way. A pro-housing position stands apart from both: from the growth machine that wants to build anything that pays, and from the incumbents who want nothing built that might lower what they hold.

Three claims that seem to collide

Put the problem as three claims, the way this collection of essays often does.

We want housing. People should be able to afford to live where their lives are, and the shortage of homes is a real harm to real people, most of them young or poor.

Housing requires building. There's no way to house more people without more homes, and no way to get more homes without construction, density, and change.

We don't want development imposed. Communities shouldn't be remade by whoever has the most capital or by state mandates that override the people who live there.

The first two seem to demand that the third give way. If housing requires building and communities resist building, then the community has to be overridden, which is roughly the logic of California's recent housing laws.

But the first two were never in conflict with the third. The collision only appears if "building" means development in general. Separate the building of homes for people to live in from the growth machine's interest in building whatever pays, and the conflict shrinks to something workable. A community can welcome the duplex, the backyard cottage, and the apartment over the shop while still refusing the subsidized office park, the tax-break data center, and the redevelopment district. The problem was never that communities have a say. It's that the say gets used to protect exchange value instead of use value.

Where the two part company

The cases where pro-housing and pro-development diverge are the ones that matter.

Development that isn't housing. An office campus, a logistics hub, or a data center counts as development, and the pro-development camp counts it as a win. To a pro-housing position it can be a loss. Commercial building that adds jobs without homes makes the shortage worse, pulling more people into a market that can't hold them. The Santa Clara Valley has spent decades adding jobs far faster than homes, and Memory Farms in the Valley of Heart's Delight looks at the newest round of it. Jobs aren't bad. But a place that permits every office building and fights every apartment isn't pro-development in any neutral sense. It's pro-exchange-value, and the housing shortage is one of the costs it's passing to others.

Housing that isn't for living. A unit built to be held as an asset, left empty or rented by the night, adds to the permit count without adding to the places people can live. Development counts units. Housing counts homes lived in.

Development that destroys homes. The clearest case is the one the country already ran. Urban renewal, launched by the Housing Act of 1949, cleared neighborhoods across the country in the name of progress. By most estimates it demolished far more homes than it built and displaced on the order of a million people, disproportionately Black. James Baldwin's line about it, that urban renewal meant "Negro removal," stuck because it was accurate. It was development at its most ideological, and it was among the most anti-housing programs in American history. The habit didn't end with it. In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the Supreme Court let a city take homes for a private development plan. The plan fell through, and the land sat empty for years. Every home taken was a home lost to an idea of growth.

Development decided from above. The growth machine prefers decisions made where its influence is concentrated, which increasingly means the state capitol and not the city council. By Right followed one California law built to cut through local vetoes. It turned out to have no way of telling a neighborhood protecting its property values from a community protecting a watershed. Preemption in the name of housing can be a tool for housing or a tool for the growth machine, and the law usually can't tell which.

Development that crowds out every other way of housing people. People have always found many ways to make more room for each other. They rent out a spare room, take in a boarder, move a parent into the back house, split a big house into flats, add a story or a garage apartment, share a house among friends, form a cooperative, or build a little at a time as money allows. Boarding houses and single-room hotels once housed millions of working people in American cities. None of these needs a developer, a subsidy, or a plan. When government decides that development is how housing gets made, it pours its money, its permitting attention, and its political capital into large projects, and these older ways stall. Most of them stay illegal or nearly so, under occupancy limits, rules against unrelated people sharing a house, parking minimums, and codes written for new construction, because the reform energy goes to the next big project instead. Subsidized projects bid up land, labor, and materials, which squeezes out the small owner adding one unit. Landowners who expect a rezoning or a redevelopment deal hold parcels idle and wait for it. The state ends up with a single approved channel for housing, and that channel runs through the growth machine. The ordinary, organic ways a place has of housing more people, the ones that used to absorb most of its growth, go quiet.

A test for telling them apart

That last point suggests the test a pro-housing position needs: does a policy or project return a right to people, or does it take one from a community and hand it to capital?

Some state housing laws pass that test. California's laws on backyard cottages and accessory units are the best example. Over the last decade they took away cities' power to forbid a homeowner from adding a small second home on their own lot, and accessory-unit permits went from a trickle to tens of thousands a year. That's preemption, but of an unusual kind. It restores a property owner's right to build a home on their own land, a right zoning took away. It doesn't override a community to install something no one there chose. It hands a decision back to the person who lives on the land.

Other laws fail the test. A mandate that lets a state agency set each town's quota of units and threatens penalties if the market doesn't deliver them doesn't return a right to anyone. It moves a decision from the people who live with it to people who don't. A redevelopment district that uses eminent domain and public money to assemble land for a developer fails it outright.

The same test works for projects. A fourplex on a corner lot, built by its owner, adds homes and takes nothing from anyone but a view. A subsidized campus with no housing attached takes grid capacity, road capacity, and land, and gives the region a bigger housing deficit. One is housing. The other is development that calls itself progress.

What a pro-housing position looks like

If housing is the goal and development isn't, a few positions follow.

Measure homes lived in, not units permitted. The scorecard should count how many more people can afford to live in a place, not how many permits it issued or how much was built.

Be permissive about homes specifically. The most useful reforms let people build homes on land they own, by right, without a hearing: the duplex, the fourplex, the backyard cottage, the apartment over the shop, the "missing middle" that zoning outlawed across most of the country. Control of Human Actions Through Land traced how those categories were invented in 1916 and never revisited. Undoing them is pro-housing. It isn't a blank check for anything that pays.

Tax land, not buildings. This is the Georgist center of the position, and it's what lets a pro-housing movement avoid becoming a growth machine. A tax on land value makes it expensive to hold land idle or underused, which pushes it toward homes, and leaves buildings untaxed, so building a home isn't penalized. It doesn't subsidize development or override anyone. It takes away the reward for sitting on land while the neighborhood around it creates the value, and returns that value to the people who created it. Parcel Duality showed what California's opposite policy, Proposition 13, does to cities: it pays owners to hold land and taxes newcomers to make up the difference.

Make non-housing development carry its housing cost. If an office campus or a data center adds thousands of jobs and no homes, the housing it doesn't provide is a cost it imposes on the region. A pro-housing position doesn't ban the campus. It asks that it pay full price for the land, power, and road capacity it uses, and it doesn't hand it tax breaks the duplex down the street never gets.

Don't take homes for growth. No eminent domain for private development, and no redevelopment plans that demolish existing homes for an idea of a better neighborhood. Urban renewal and Kelo are the record of what that produces.

Decide close to the people who live with it, and make the default yes for homes. The answer to local vetoes isn't to move every decision to the capitol, where the growth machine's lobbyists are. It's to change what local governments are allowed to forbid. Give every owner a by-right path to build homes, and keep everything else, including the large commercial projects that reshape a place, subject to the community's judgment in public.

Beyond build or block

California's housing debate has been reduced to one question: should this project be approved or not? A pro-housing position doesn't have to accept that framing. Once the goal is people housed and not units permitted, a much wider range of possibilities opens up, many of them stranger than anything on a planning commission agenda, and several already working somewhere.

Take the land out of the market without giving it to the state. A community land trust owns the ground and sells only the house on it, under a long lease with a resale formula. The home stays affordable from one family to the next without a new subsidy each time, because the land's rising value stays with the land and isn't cashed out by each seller. A city that owns surplus parcels could put them in trust instead of selling them to the highest bidder or building public housing on them. A church, a family, or a retiring landowner could do the same.

Let residents own the whole place together. Limited-equity cooperatives, where residents own shares in the building and resell them at a set price, have housed working families in New York for generations. In mobile-home parks, residents organized through networks like ROC USA have bought their parks from owners who would otherwise have sold them to investors and raised the lot rents. Cohousing groups design and build their own small neighborhoods, with private homes around shared kitchens and gardens. None of these needs a developer.

Build half a house. The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena's firm, Elemental, built social housing in Iquique in 2004 as half-finished homes: a solid structure with the expensive parts done, and an empty bay next door that families filled in themselves as they could afford to. Most of the world's housing has always been built this way, a room at a time by the people who live in it. American codes make it almost impossible. A code that allowed a sound core to be finished incrementally would let people build equity with their own hands.

Use the land institutions already hold. Churches, school districts, and colleges own large amounts of underused land in California. A 2023 state law now lets religious institutions and nonprofit colleges build affordable housing on their land by right. That's a pro-housing preemption of the kind this essay supports: it returns a right to the owner and doesn't impose a project on anyone.

Bring back the room. Boarding houses, residential hotels, and single-room-occupancy buildings were the bottom rung of the American housing ladder for a century, and most cities zoned them out of existence. Legalizing them again, with basic safety standards, would house people who now have nothing between a shared couch and the street.

These aren't a program. They're a reminder that housing has always come from many sources, most of them small, local, and owned by the people living there. A pro-housing position should be open to all of them, including the ones no growth machine would think of, because they don't depend on the growth machine at all.

A social goal, not an ideology

The difference between a social goal and an ideology is what each does when the facts change. A social goal stays fixed and changes its means: if building towers raises rents in a particular place, a pro-housing position notices and looks for another way to house people. An ideology stays fixed on its means: if building raises rents, the pro-development position builds more and calls the critics anti-housing.

Housing is a goal worth attending, and in most of California it requires building a great deal more than the state has. But the attention belongs to the people who need homes, not for the growth machine that would build them only when they pay best and would build something else when it pays better. A social libertarian can be unreservedly pro-housing: for the owner's right to build homes, for taxing land and not buildings, for counting people housed and not permits issued. That position is neither the growth machine's nor the neighborhood veto's. It's for the use value of a place, and for the people who live in it.

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A note on how this piece was written: the subject, the questions it asks, and the positions it takes are ours. Much of the research, the examples, and the sentences were drafted by an AI model working from that direction, and then edited by hand. We'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.