Is YIMBYism About Sex?

Sexual mores and housing demand, and the meaning of "pro-family housing"

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Following my piece on roommates and the housing crisis, bouncing off Andrew Berg’s nice essay on abundant housing, loneliness, and co-living, I’m still thinking about this cluster of issues. Specifically, the question of the kind of housing that young people seem to want or expect today.

A sort of laterally related issue to this is the question of family formation, marriage, kids, and whether or not urbanism is “good for families,” and I’m thinking about all of those threads in this piece.

I remember a blog post from around 2015, I think, which I really wish I could dig up, but was not able to find. It was by a conservative Evangelical writer—my recollection is that it was Alan Jacobs, but I may be wrong—who wondered whether housing demand seemed so insatiable in part because young people viewed the privacy to have people over for sex (or having a regular partner over regularly) as more or less an essential aspect of living on your own. Had the liberalization of mores around courtship, dating, and sex rendered living with your parents or with roommates obsolete?

I don’t think he was arguing that the housing crisis is a made-up issue. He was wondering, however, to what extent it is a raw reality versus a culturally determined and shaped one.

I think about this question a lot, not because I think conservative attitudes about sex should be quietly reflected in housing policy, but because I think it possibly explains part of the generational and attitudinal conflict over housing and the broad question of deservingness/entitlement.

I suppose some more hardline folks would put it this way: the private space to fornicate is not something you are entitled to. And I further suspect that the expectation of or desire for sexually-tinged privacy—to the extent that it is something young people today expect—may be part of the “entitlement” that older, more buttoned-up folks detect in YIMBY arguments.

At the same time, it may actually be true that as sexual mores have liberalized, it is more important to have your own space to do these things the way they’re done today; at least, it takes a distinct effort to opt out of it.

Rush Limbaugh once made an argument adjacent to this “you’re not entitled to casual sex” idea. During the national debate over contraceptive mandates in 2012, he infamously called lawyer and advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” arguing that receiving insurance coverage for contraception that had in some way been touched by taxpayer-funded subsidies was tantamount to being paid to have sex. (He did apologize for those remarks.)

My point, though, has nothing to do with Rush Limbaugh, or conservatism, or sex per se. This is the point I’m trying to articulate: what exactly we imagine to be, or perceive as, “asking for a handout” or “a sense of entitlement” is dependent on what we consider the moral status of the thing in question to be. Is it or isn’t it a thing to which people really are entitled? Is it or isn’t it a thing which society should in some sense provision for people?

On some level, even if they rarely articulate it as such, I have definitely gotten the sense that some conservatives see YIMBY/abundant housing/etc. as a kind of “subsidy” for immoral sexual behavior. They see marriage as a moral good, if not an imperative, and feel that a housing market which easily facilitates other possibilities is a “handout” that makes it to easy to wriggle out of your adult responsibilities.

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A higher form of this vein of argument is often made by pro-family/pronatalist advocates, like Lyman Stone here, a conservative pronatalist demographer who often writes critically of high-rise buildings and urban density—the idea being that this mode of living is less conducive to family life.

Stone writes, in a critique of a recent housing bill considered by Congress:

…the Act [ROAD to Housing] does a lot of fine work to encourage more housing, but—like other in-vogue housing policies—it inadvertently continues the trend towards replacing family-friendly housing with studio apartments….

The first thing to ask in any housing conversation is: What kind of housing do people actually need and want? We’ve studied this extensively at IFS [Institute for Family Studies]. What Americans want, where demand vastly outstrips supply, are modestly-sized single-family houses on modestly-sized lots.

And this:

The “ROAD to Housing Act’s” family blind spot affects other components as well. For example, the “Build More Housing Near Transit Act” has the same deficiencies in imagining family-friendly housing as the Innovation Fund. That act’s inclusion alongside a few other provisions aimed at urban infill and urban renovations—without including one word about urban growth boundaries—is just another sign this act will add more studio apartments, not family houses. The bill drafters probably do not even entirely intend for this; however, if barriers are removed to building small apartments but not for building family neighborhoods, the result is the bulldozing of family homes for apartments and falling fertility, which is what we’ve seen nationwide.

The problem with this—no matter what Stone’s or others’ data shows, and no matter what people report “wanting” in public opinion surveys—is that urban density is not ideological; it is simply how construction and living patterns respond to high land prices.

It may be true that, all things being equal, many people would prefer their own detached house. Why not? All things being equal, many people would prefer to eat lobster or drive a Mercedes. But all things are not equal, and in any case there are only so many single-family homes you can site near public transit. Or, for that matter, near anything. The fundamental geometry of detached houses on a parcel of land—like the fundamental geometry of cars—spreads things out and apart.

What Stone characterizes as a “family blind spot” is simply recognizing this geometric reality. Taken to an extreme, what this allegedly pronatalist viewpoint would lead to is not abundant family-friendly housing for everyone, but rather marriage, family, and children as an upper-class benefit gated behind the ability to afford a detached house in expensive urban markets.

Housing-skeptical pronatalism is essentially a correlation/causation fallacy: “I see families with kids in single-family homes, so if we build more single-family homes, we’ll get more families with kids.” It evinces no curiosity as to how those families accumulated the capital to end up in their eventual homes; or how we might enable more people and families to climb that ladder; or, for that matter, whether that ladder even exists for most people in America today.

In my pro-family urbanist view, the construction of dense, urban homes—whether family-sized floorplans or small units for single people—is conducive to family life, because, if nothing else, it is conducive to people starting out on their own and having somewhere decent to live while saving money for the future.

The question is, Where are the young people who are leaving their parents’ houses/starting their first jobs/graduating college supposed to live until they get married? And I suspect the answer from the housing-skeptical pronatalists, rarely stated outright, is that they view a long period of singlehood and a later age of marriage as social problems to attack and not as social realities to work with.

And I suspect that, further, on some level they view the squeeze on housing properly sized and priced for single adults as a kind of “pro-family” policy in and of itself. What they are really doing, however, is helping to ensure that the young people who will birth the next generation struggle to find reasonably priced housing—“family-friendly” or otherwise.

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Of course, on some level, my Catholic faith points in the same direction as the ideas of the housing-skeptical pronatalists. Marriage is not a moral requirement, but it is good. Families and babies are good. Chastity outside of marriage is expected. (Though there is, of course, a reason we have the sacrament of reconciliation.) And even that would be too much for many people nowadays. It feels not merely unrealistic, but laughable. But what it isn’t is a sort of Disneyfied American Christianity that cannot distinguish the suburban ideal from the moral life or the Christian life.

The conflation of single-family suburbia with families is not exactly wrong, but it misses a great deal of what is going on in housing and family formation, and it begs the question by more or less ignoring the question of what is supposed to happen when jobs concentrate in certain places, people move towards economic opportunity, land prices increase, and the economics of the middle-class detached home are no longer workable.

That is the objective, neutral, non-ideological reality in America’s growing cities and metro areas. Perhaps liberal sexual mores and the rising age of marriage have increased housing demand. We do know that even with a fixed population, more people living alone creates more households. But even if it were possible, a return to the social mores of the 1950s will not bring back the housing market of the 1950s or the middle class of the 1950s.

It is worth remembering that the explosion of suburban growth in the postwar era was not about detached houses or yards or conservative morality, really; it was about building a lot of housing quickly and at scale.

The postwar suburban project was the YIMBY movement of its day and context.

In those days, with cities in rough shape after 20 years of neglect, intense housing demand among young people, and a great deal of cheap and easily buildable land adjacent to the old cities, the easiest way to solve the housing crisis and build homes for young families was to build suburbia. The fact that this was the physical context of the postwar baby boom probably says very little about the relation between childbearing and the kind of housing in which it took place.

So the answer is yes: after all, YIMBYism is about sex. And not just sex; it is about building the homes in which the next generation will be conceived and born and raised; about filling in and thickening up the neighborhoods in which they might one day be able to live. It is about building a world for the future, rather than vainly attempting to wish one into existence.

The spirit of that endeavor will necessarily take a different physical form than it did many decades ago. The old things pass away. But that is how, in so many ways, they remain, and continue.

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Related Reading:

Housing and Deservingness

Can a Catholic Be a NIMBY?

More on Pro-Family Urbanism

YIMBYs Want Their Problem Solved

Apartments, Ownership, And Responsibility

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