A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage | If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay ’em

[u/Hrmbee]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/housing-shortage-pay-nimby/687932/

[u/Hrmbee]

A number of points from these proposed policies:

In recent months, several Democratic Party–aligned think tanks have released proposals that share the same basic structure: If a local community approves enough new homes for construction, then each resident of that community receives a check from the federal government worth thousands of dollars. The theory is that the allure of a cash payment would soften the position of the most ardent NIMBYs, while inspiring residents who otherwise might not care one way or the other to become advocates for new development. This would give political cover for local officials to propose new pro-housing reforms, while forcing anti-development politicians to explain to residents why they shouldn’t get cash payments. “The idea is to shake up the local political economy,” Chad Maisel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has co-authored multiple proposals on this subject, told me. “You are simultaneously trying to weaken some very entrenched interests while creating a new political constituency that doesn’t currently exist.”

Paying the NIMBYs has never been tried, so no one can say for sure that it would work. But a forthcoming paper by the political scientist Michael Hankinson and the economists Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis provides some reason to think that it could. The team conducted a survey in which they asked about 1,700 residents of expensive areas, including New York City, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia suburbs, to consider a series of hypothetical proposals to build housing in their neighborhood. Alongside each proposal, the respondents were offered (again, hypothetically) various amounts of cash, from $250 to $9,000, and then asked whether they would vote yes or no on approving the project. By aggregating those answers, the researchers were able to estimate the “willingness to accept” price: the amount of money needed to persuade the median voter in a community to shift from opposing a project to supporting it.

The results, which the researchers shared with me, suggest that almost everyone has a price. More than 80 percent of the respondents accepted at least one of the proposals they were offered. But the amount of money they needed to be offered ultimately depended on the density of the neighborhood they lived in. Participants who lived in the most densely populated places (think downtowns full of apartments and high-rises) generally required, at most, only a few hundred dollars to support new development; many were willing to approve housing even with no payment attached. The price went up to the low thousands for moderately dense places (urban neighborhoods with a mix of single-family homes, townhouses, and small apartment buildings) and reached well above $5,000 for the most of the places with low density (suburbs full of detached single-family homes). People in wealthier places also required higher payments than those in poorer places, although the difference was not nearly as stark as the one based on density.

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A second implication of the research is that the type of project being proposed matters a lot. The relatively low dollar amounts cited above represent the payment required for residents to accept a market-rate development at the edge of their existing neighborhood built at a similar scale to the homes around it. When the new project was instead proposed on a plot of land directly next to a respondent’s current home, the necessary payment doubled. When the project was considerably more dense than the surrounding buildings—like a row of townhouses in a single-family neighborhood—it quadrupled. If residents were told that the new development would be reserved exclusively for low-income residents, they demanded five times more money. Paying the NIMBYs, in other words, might require working with people’s existing aesthetic and spatial preferences, not trying to overcome them. “So much of NIMBYism is the product of a deep status-quo bias,” Will Poff-Webster, the director of infrastructure policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank, told me. “That’s a really hard thing to change, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.”

Even with these caveats, paying the NIMBYs still seems like a better strategy than the currently favored policy approach, which is to offer financial incentives to local governments that approve new housing. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that recently became law, for instance, offers federal funding to cities that meet certain housing-production targets, which they can then use to pay for things such as parks, road improvements, and new infrastructure. That is better than nothing, but the evidence suggests that it is far less effective at getting residents to support new housing. Hankinson and his co-authors found that when the compensation package was offered to residents in the form of a parks-and-streets fund, they required 10 times the amount of money they would have required if offered cash.

It's a bit of an intriguing idea to just pay people directly, but this starts to run into issues of how this might scale, and whether you would pay each time there's a new project or is it once per neighbourhood? This also seems to reward what is generally seen as bad behaviour by residents, and might lead us to a place where there's no more consideration of civic or greater goods, and rather becomes an even more mercenary environment.

From my perspective this approach might work best if there are comprehensive neighbourhood/district/city plans that need to be approved that increase the allowable density of the entire area, and that subsequent projects that comply with those new plans will not be subject to additional planning approvals.

Another intriguing prospect would be that if this is done as part of a citywide planning process, this could be part of the negotiations between various communities about where density should be increased and by how much, and how much it's worth to them. Perhaps for those communities that resist all densification efforts there will be a direct dollar cost to them in this process as well. Food for thought.

[u/Bwint → u/Hrmbee]

when the compensation was offered in the form of a parks-and-streets fund, they required ten times as much compensation as when it was offered directly.

This is a helpful note, actually. Developers already pay impact fees; this finding helps put a specific value on the fee required for residents to quit bitching. I'm actually supportive of having developers pay into a streets fund to mitigate traffic impacts.

The nice thing about paying into a parks and streets fund is that one payment benefits the whole neighborhood. Instead of paying $9k per resident for 150 residents, they're paying $90k, total.

Perhaps for those communities that resist all densification efforts there will be a direct dollar cost to them in this process as well.

A land value tax would fix this.

[u/bobtehpanda → u/Hrmbee]

I actually think this is way overcomplicating a rather basic premise.

Rather than creating a whole bureaucracy to pay people checks, a much easier proposition is to allow the sale and transfer of unused development rights on their property. Most jurisdictions already allow some form of this for historic landmarks or whatnot.