A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage
The Atlantic · LC · trust 34/100
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: DNY59 / Getty; Nastco / Getty. July 17, 2026, 7 AM ET Share Save Sign up for Work in Progress , a newsletter where Rogé Karma investigates the mysteries of a complicated economy.
Just about every effort to solve America’s housing shortage runs into the iron law of NIMBY: “not in my backyard.” Whenever a development is proposed in a place where people already live, existing residents erupt in opposition, claiming the new homes will alter “neighborhood character,” increase traffic, and hurt property values. Those who would benefit the most from new housing, meanwhile, don’t yet live in the community and thus have no say in the political process. This creates an asymmetry that’s hard to overcome. Even reforms passed at the state level to override local building restrictions keep failing, because NIMBYs find clever ways to work around them.
But a new approach might finally offer a way out of the impasse: If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay them.
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.
“It makes sense if you just think about it intuitively,” Michael Hankinson, a political scientist at George Washington University who co-authored the paper, told me. “Suburbanites surrounded by nothing but single-family homes are probably going to be more sensitive to new development than an urbanite who already lives near lots of high-rises.” In low-density suburbs where the average income is above $150,000, not even the maximum amount the researchers offered, $9,000, was enough to persuade the median resident to support a new project. (Hankinson cautioned that though these figures are directionally correct, the exact dollar amounts are still preliminary, as he and his co-authors have not yet finalized and published their analysis.)
The upshot is that the same policy will have very different results depending on where it’s implemented. For instance, a proposal from the Center for American Progress would offer a flat $1,000 to residents of places that hit certain housing-production targets. Only in dense urban areas would that likely be enough to tip the scales. Another version , from the Searchlight Institute, would reward residents with a check equivalent to the average annual rent increase in their city the year prior. For Los Angeles in 2025, for example, that would have been about $3,900. Such amounts might not move the needle in the wealthiest suburbs, but they could inspire housing production in a range of places beyond just urban cores. “The message to voters is: Support new housing and we’ll essentially freeze your rent,” Aaron Shroyer, one of the co-authors of the Searchlight proposal, told me. “I think something like that is the best chance we have at getting more communities to a ‘yes’ on new development.”
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…
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