The Supply Debate Splitting Progressive Housing Advocates

In the spring of 2023, a legislature that few progressives would describe as an ally did something many blue states had not managed. Montana's Republican majority, working with Governor Greg Gianforte, passed a package of bills that required larger cities to allow duplexes on lots zoned for single houses, legalized accessory dwelling units, allowed apartments in many commercial zones, and rewrote the way cities plan for growth. Reporters and housing wonks started calling it the Montana Miracle, half joking. The reforms came out of a task force Gianforte had convened, and their supporters spoke the language of property rights and affordability for young families leaving the state. The bills drew a lawsuit from residents who argued the changes would damage their neighborhoods. On the left, the reaction was split in a way that tells you a lot about where progressive housing politics stands.

In short: Progressive housing advocates broadly agree that housing costs too much, but divide over how much new market-rate building helps and how much tenant protection and public housing must come first. Both camps have evidence; the debate is mostly over sequence and trust, and the most promising path combines them.

The scene in Helena, and why it scrambled the sides

The Montana package was a useful shock because it broke the usual sorting. For years, zoning reform had been coded as a cause of urban progressives and their YIMBY allies, the "yes in my backyard" movement that grew out of San Francisco renters' frustration in the 2010s. Opposition came from homeowners of every party who wanted to keep their neighborhoods as they were.

Montana showed that a conservative argument for the same reforms existed and could win. Zoning, in that telling, is government telling property owners what they can build on their own land. Remove some of those rules and the market will produce more homes, and prices will ease. Utah, Idaho and other Republican-led states have pursued related ideas. Meanwhile some progressive groups were warning that upzoning without tenant protections would accelerate displacement in working-class neighborhoods.

So a progressive reader watching Montana faced an uncomfortable question. If Republicans can pass the reforms that urbanist Democrats have been pushing, does the left have anything distinct to say about housing, or is the argument just about whose backyard?

Camp one: build more, everywhere

Call the first camp the abundance side, though its members use various names. Its argument runs like this.

Housing costs are high mainly because there are not enough homes where people want to live. Decades of restrictive zoning, slow permitting and local vetoes have choked supply in the most productive metros. Every serious estimate of the national housing shortage puts it in the millions of homes, though the estimates vary widely depending on method.

New homes of any kind help. A new luxury apartment houses someone who would otherwise compete for an older unit; that older unit's rent stays lower; and the chain continues down the market. Studies in several cities have found that new market-rate buildings tend to reduce, not raise, nearby rents. Places that build a lot, like many Sun Belt metros in the 2010s and early 2020s, saw rents level off or fall when large waves of new apartments arrived.

Tenant protections, in this view, are fine as far as they go but treat a symptom. Rent caps cannot make housing cheaper if there is not enough of it, and strong regulation can discourage the building that would actually help. The abundance camp often points out that progressives control the cities with the worst shortages, which makes the shortage a progressive problem to fix.

Camp two: protect tenants first

The second camp is rooted in tenant organizing, housing justice groups and community land trusts. It is not against building. Its argument is about who benefits and in what order.

The market will not build housing for the lowest-income renters at prices they can afford, no matter how much land is upzoned. The math of land, construction and financing makes new private housing expensive. Filtering exists, but it works over decades, and older housing in strong markets does not necessarily become cheap; it often gets renovated and repriced instead.

Upzoning a neighborhood raises the value of its land, which can increase the pressure to sell, evict and redevelop. In neighborhoods with long histories of displacement, many of them Black and Latino communities that lived through urban renewal and redlining, residents have seen what happens when a place becomes desirable and they hold no ownership stake.

What renters need right now is stability: limits on extreme rent increases, just-cause eviction rules, a right to counsel in housing court, and a large expansion of social housing, meaning public or nonprofit housing that is permanently affordable and not subject to the market. The protect-tenants camp is suspicious of coalitions with developers and real estate money, and it notes that "abundance" can become a slogan that lets the market off the hook for what only public action can provide.

Where each side is right

Lay the two cases side by side and it becomes clear they are not answering the same question.

The abundance camp is answering: why are rents so high across a region over a decade? Its answer, too few homes, is mostly right, and the evidence has been accumulating for years.

The tenant camp is answering: what happens to this family, in this building, in the next two years? Its answer, that without protection they may be forced out before supply helps, is also mostly right.

Each camp has a blind spot. Abundance advocates sometimes talk as if the transition does not matter, as though the people displaced in the decade before prices fall are acceptable losses. Tenant advocates sometimes oppose projects, including ones on parking lots and empty lots, in ways that reduce supply without protecting anyone, and some have opposed reforms that would have legalized the very apartment buildings their members live in.

The places that have made the most progress mostly stopped choosing. Minneapolis ended single-family-only zoning citywide in its 2040 plan, allowed more apartments along transit corridors, and also spent public money on affordable housing and adopted tenant protections. Its rents grew more slowly than in many comparable cities in the years that followed. That is not proof that any one policy worked, but it is evidence that doing several things at once does not break anything.

Three neighborhoods, three outcomes

Abstractions make this debate easier to win and harder to settle, so consider three kinds of places where the argument actually happens.

The first is a wealthy suburb near a job center: big lots, good schools, almost no apartments, and a zoning code that allows nothing but single houses. Here, the two camps should have no quarrel at all. There are few renters to displace, the land is valuable, and the zoning effectively keeps out working families and, historically, Black families. Allowing duplexes, townhomes and apartments in a place like this opens opportunity without pushing anyone out. Much of the most important zoning reform in the country targets exactly these places, and it is where opposition from homeowners is usually strongest.

The second is a working-class neighborhood near a downtown that is starting to attract investment: older buildings, many renters, and rising interest from buyers. This is where the tenant camp's fears are sharpest, and where they are most justified. Upzoning here without protections can speed the sale of older rent-regulated or naturally affordable buildings to buyers who plan to replace them. The fair approach here is to pair new capacity with strong anti-demolition rules for occupied buildings, tenant rights to buy or return, and public acquisition of buildings before speculators get them.

The third is a parking lot, a strip mall or an empty office park. No one lives there. Every new home on such a site adds supply without displacing a single household. Opposition to these projects, from either camp, is the hardest to defend, and in many cities a large share of the potential new housing sits on exactly this kind of land.

Seen this way, most of the conflict is over the second kind of neighborhood, which is a real but bounded fight. The first and third kinds of places account for an enormous amount of land where the two camps should be working together, and where the main opponent is neither of them.

What social housing adds

There is a third tradition that both camps sometimes forget and that may be the best bridge between them. It is social housing in the European sense: homes built and owned by public agencies, nonprofits or cooperatives, often with residents of mixed incomes, kept affordable permanently because they are removed from the speculative market.

Vienna is the example everyone cites, and with reason. A large share of the city's residents live in municipal or limited-profit housing, built steadily over a century, and the city's rents are moderate by the standards of rich European capitals. The point is not that American cities can copy Vienna in a decade. It is that the choice between "let the market build" and "protect existing tenants" leaves out the option of the public building homes itself.

Several American places have started moving in this direction. Montgomery County, Maryland, created a revolving fund that lets its housing agency finance mixed-income buildings it owns. Voters in some cities and states have debated ballot measures to fund social housing developers. The model appeals to the tenant camp because the homes are permanently protected, and to the abundance camp because it adds supply, often on public land, without waiting for market conditions to cooperate.

The question underneath: who do you trust?

Much of the bitterness in this debate is not about economics at all. It is about trust.

Tenant organizers have spent years watching developers promise community benefits and then fail to deliver, and watching city halls approve luxury towers while public housing waits for repairs. When an abundance advocate says "just build," they hear a request to trust the same institutions that failed them before.

Abundance advocates, for their part, have watched progressive coalitions block homeless shelters, student housing and affordable buildings in the name of protecting communities. When a tenant advocate says "not this project," they hear the old homeowner veto in new language.

A coalition that works will have to deal with the trust problem directly. That means building in guarantees: affordable units that are actually built, anti-displacement funds paid for out of the value that upzoning creates, rights of first refusal for tenants when buildings are sold, and public housing that does not depend on any developer's promise. It also means tenant groups accepting that some new market-rate buildings will go up in their neighborhoods, and that this is better than the alternative.

What this means for the party

The housing debate is a preview of a larger argument about what the Democratic Party stands for. One version of the party measures success by what it prevents: harmful projects, unfair evictions, corporate excesses. Another measures success by what it builds: homes, transit, clean power, public services that people can see and use.

The case for blending them is that voters judge parties by results. A young family that cannot afford rent anywhere near work does not care which camp was technically correct. They care whether, in the cities and states Democrats run, rent becomes affordable and homes appear. If Republican Montana legalizes duplexes before Democratic suburbs do, voters will notice.

There is also a political opening that both camps should notice. Housing reform is one of the few areas where Democrats can find Republican partners in statehouses, as Montana showed, and where the arguments for change can be made in the language of freedom, family and fairness at once. A builder in Bozeman and a tenant organizer in Brooklyn want different things from the same reform, but they both want the reform. A coalition does not require agreement on why.

That suggests a progressive housing agenda with three parts that are not negotiable against each other. Make it legal and fast to build many more homes. Protect the people who live in the homes that already exist. And build a large stock of social housing that stays affordable forever, financed publicly, as cities like Vienna have done for a century. Each part makes the others possible. Each part alone fails.

What you can do

The supply fight is decided in local and state votes that are often close.

• Ask your legislators both questions. Contact your state representatives and ask where they stand on legalizing more housing types and on tenant protections like just-cause eviction. Ask them not to make you choose.
• Learn the local fights. The housing topic page gathers news on zoning reform, rent rules and homelessness, and the party's future page follows the wider argument among Democrats about building versus blocking.
• Join a group that bridges the camps. Many cities have tenant unions, YIMBY chapters and community land trusts. Search housing organizations in your state and look for coalitions that include more than one of these.
• Talk to the neighbor who disagrees. Most opposition to new homes comes from people worried about their own block, not from villains. A conversation about where their kids or grandkids will live often does more than a hearing.