Homes for hipsters – spiked

More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.

Mamdani’s ‘cost of living’ campaign – offering rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets – seems to some leftist pundits a potential road back to power, under the guise of the burgeoning YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) movement that seeks to lower rental prices through massive housing construction.

Although Mamdani claims his focus on affordability appeals to working-class voters who shifted to Donald Trump, his core constituency lies elsewhere – with relatively affluent, young, single and childless professionals. For them, rent control is a true blessing, although they may not need free buses or want city-financed grocery stores, unless they resemble Whole Foods.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. It also has a particular resonance for younger Americans. A Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds this year ranked housing as the third-most-important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. The educated hipster class – Mamdani’s base – understandably worries about the fact that in New York, you need a $135,000-a-year salary to afford a decent place, without it eating up most of your paycheque.

On a national basis, Mamdani’s win could prove a critical boost to the YIMBYs. From their origins in California, they have always been an odd agglomeration, originally financed by Bay Area tech and real-estate elites, while also embraced by more predictable leftist advocates of rent control, heavy subsidies and public housing. As YIMBY policies – like rezoning and densification – have either failed to solve the problem, or failed to gain traction with the public, more draconian socialist approaches seem to be gaining currency.

The YIMBYs are at least right about one thing: the lack of new housing is a profound national failure. Homebuilders constructed a million fewer homes – including units – in 2024 than in 1972, when there were 130million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by an estimated 4.5 million homes.

But if YIMBYs have diagnosed a key problem, their solutions – wherever imposed – have tended to make things worse. High-density development, often seen as the alternative to urban sprawl, does not solve the problem of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees.

Throughout the English-speaking world, the most expensive housing tends to be found in places embracing the urbanist YIMBY script: Sydney, Vancouver, Adelaide, Honolulu, Melbourne and Brisbane. But nowhere is this connection clearer than in California, where the YIMBY movement was born.

This is not simply a case of high property prices creating converts to YIMBYism. Over the past several years, YIMBYs and their California allies have passed hundreds of supposedly pro-development housing laws. But housing production has nevertheless declined. Since 2020, California has consistently lagged in construction not just of single-family housing, but multi-family housing, too. Not one California metropolitan area was among the top 50 in housing growth last year; Texas had six areas on that list, Florida 11. Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, didn’t crack the top 200.

The result has been ruinously high housing prices that have diminished opportunities for ownership. One study found the median family in San Jose or San Francisco would need 125 years (150 in Los Angeles) to save enough for a down payment on a median-priced home. In Atlanta or Houston, the figure is 12 years. Not surprisingly, California has the second-lowest homeownership rate in the nation, at 56 per cent, while New York has the lowest, at 55 per cent.

Of course, this might not bother leftist YIMBYs who have minimal interest in such bourgeois aspirations as home ownership. They seem fine with the notion of lifelong renting – particularly if there’s sufficient rent control. To them, notes Christopher LeGras, a perceptive analyst of NIMBYism in Los Angeles, ‘housing is housing’, and they ignore the preferences of different groups. They expect renting, and similar types of home, to appeal to single hipsters, seniors, people with children or migrants from other countries.

People change with time. As they grow older, most – although not necessarily the pro-Mamdani urban types – seek more family-friendly housing. Today, almost two-thirds of US millennials (those aged 25 to 44) aspire to be owners. To accomplish this, they now tend to move to smaller cities or further-out suburbs. They have good reasons: homeowners are not only more affluent than renters – they are also physically and mentally healthier, vote more often and their children achieve higher levels of education.

YIMBYism, even its more moderate version laid out in Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, largely ignores the suburbs and exurbs where most Americans live, and mostly steers clear of questions of ownership. As attorney Jennifer Hernandez suggests, there is ‘an ugly elitist underbelly’ to the abundance agenda, reflecting the values of hipster professionals while eschewing ‘even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centres, who want to be able to buy a detached, single-family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odours with their neighbours’.

Yet rather than appeal to people’s preferences, the Mamdani vision is less an AI-era Levittown than a revival of Soviet-style urbanism. The priorities of older generations of social democrat – better-performing schools, basic infrastructure, affordable housing and the promotion of blue-collar jobs – appealed to the basic ambitions of most people. In contrast, most YIMBYs follow a more ideological notion – a sort of idealised ‘Communist City’, as promoted in the 1960s, that rejected the very idea of single-family homes and ownership. Instead, it sought to have the state develop an urban form featuring blocks of dense housing, with shopping, amenities and recreation planned for communal houses. They detested backyards as they were seen as detrimental to the ‘socialist’ spirit.

Of course, in the US we have our own sad public-housing history. Massive state-backed housing projects like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green or St Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe turned into crime-infested dystopias and have now been torn down. New York City’s public-housing agency has been a disaster for decades – with buildings having no heat or hot water, broken elevators, vermin infestations and plumbing that sometimes takes months, even years, to be fixed.

So, why does Mamdani’s message resonate so well, particularly with younger, mostly white New Yorkers? Gothamites – even the highly educated – can no longer reasonably aspire to afford rent for a nice market-rate apartment, let alone something they could own. As privileged as they are, these young people face a job market growing tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are those professionals on the ‘soft’ side of the economy, who have historically been concentrated in New York. Jobs in finance, accounting, law and coding are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Also on the chopping block are many working in ‘creative’ professions. These tend to be recent graduates. Even if they get a job, it’s likely they won’t be paid well.

So how does a struggling artist or analyst live in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco? They could move to less expensive cities or further out on the periphery – but today, even those places, such as Austin, have become more costly. Many are too wedded to ultra-urban cultural values – such as transgenderism, open borders and racial quotas – that won’t sell in most of the country. To achieve their locational preference, then, they ask taxpayers – notably the oft-detested rich – to make up the difference with subsidies and rent control.

The danger here is that by defining itself through cultural preference and socialist ‘values’, New York risks losing the commercial, grasping spirit that has been its essence since Dutch times. Reinvented as primarily a playpen for the college crowd and the nepo babies, New York is in danger of surrendering its mix of lower-density middle-class neighbourhoods and working-class enclaves. If the money can be found to fund his dreams, Mamdani may leave a congested city looking more like Moscow’s urban rings – places with all the charm of a stalag. This is not the vision Mamdani’s fans may expect, but it is a likely one given the sad history of socialist-run cities.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.