“We Need a ‘Yes’ Culture When It Comes to Housing to Overcome the Shortage” by Francesc Martí

What can we learn from how New York and California are addressing the housing crisis?

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's housing program has successfully combined tenant protection with a pro-construction and pro-supply approach.

As in Barcelona, the housing crisis in New York and California is one of the main problems and is considered a serious threat to economic vitality, social cohesion, and people’s life plans. In New York, the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has explicitly recognized the structural housing shortage as a key factor in the crisis and has clearly committed to increasing the housing supply and facilitating its construction. His housing agenda has successfully combined tenant protection with a pro-development and supply-side approach. For example, he has backed a package of statutory reforms, “City of Yes,” to streamline planning procedures and increase density.

Mamdani embraces this philosophy of the YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) movement, which originated in California as a reaction to systemic obstacles to the construction of more housing. Driven by the YIMBY movement, California has undergone a seismic shift since 2017 and enacted some of the most ambitious pro-housing reforms in the country, allowing housing development on many commercial lots and increasing density in areas near public transit throughout the state.

How do you think we could apply the lessons of the YIMBY movement in Barcelona?

It is possible to implement clearly left-wing policies while at the same time taking an unambiguously pro-market stance.

As Mamdani demonstrates in New York, it is possible to implement clearly left-wing policies while simultaneously adopting an unambiguously pro-supply stance. Here, we remain deeply traumatized by the last housing crisis, and that fuels polarization and prevents us from addressing the structural causes of the housing shortage. There is a widespread belief that restrictive policies alone will solve the problem, when the evidence points to exactly the opposite: without a significant increase in supply, we will be doomed to continue managing the shortage as if it were a rationing line.

In Catalonia, urban planning changes and building permits take too long, especially in municipalities where rigid regulations and a lack of legal certainty extend the response times established by law. We must pay closer attention to improving these processes and identifying the bottlenecks that hinder housing production, but above all, what is needed is a shift in discourse: moving from a culture of “no” and fear of change to one of “yes to housing” and comprehensive solutions. Only in this way will we make the right to housing a reality and ensure that future generations can access decent housing.

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