The Line Must Be Drawn Here
They’re coming for poor people’s windows.
To begin, a qualifier: This post will not debate the merits of YIMBY vs. anti-YIMBY, nor the various shades within. Nor does it attempt to paint all self-identified YIMBYs as “anti window,” since many oppose the idea of getting rid of them, and one wants to be fair. This post will be, instead, a narrow critique of a basic line of reasoning that I feel has creeped more and more into Liberal-Left discourse and needs pointing out. And yes, it’s my second post in as many weeks to focus on Matt Yglesias, so apologies for that up front.
For some time now, Yglesias has been arguing for permitting developers to make apartments without bedroom windows to address what he says is a broader housing shortage. And, more importantly, he insists that those who oppose such a measure are pro-homelessness—blinded by their own precious, outdated sensibilities of housing standards. Such a standard makes it more expensive and difficult for developers to convert abandoned office space in downtowns, he argues, thus reducing supply and housing, and increasing the total number of unhoused people.
Let’s set aside how manipulative and cheap this syllogism is. The issue of homelessness is important to me personally: Those who follow my work know the media narratives around the unhoused and how they’re dehumanized and criminalized is something I think and write a lot about. So, needless to say, my alarm bells went off when I read his argument that believing tenants should have the basic right to a bedroom window is tantamount to wanting to have more people live on the streets.
Architecture and cultural critic Kate Wager already wrote a brilliant takedown of Yglesias’s position in The Nation this week, so I won’t rehash her arguments. I, instead, wish to discuss how grim the situation is that the Democratic mayor of the largest city in the country is now endorsing Yglesias’ dystopian logic, and examine what this portends.
Something warped is going on in The Discourse, more broadly. In just a few years, calls for gutting regulations—from union requirements for new construction to environmental protections—are not only mainstream, they’re elite conventional wisdom in Democratic-aligned media circles. A broader wave of anti-regulatory dogma has effectively overtaken all popular liberal housing discourse, optimizing oversight of capital using CATO Institute talking points about “regulatory capture” and “stream-lining.” It’s not even that these gripes are wrong on their individual merits (libertarians sometimes make a good point here and there!)—it’s that this ethos is now sucking up the vast majority of policy and media oxygen.
This isn’t a new frame, of course. Real estate interests have said regulations stand in the wage of housing supply, and kept rents artificially high, since the dawn of government regulation. “Most of the opposition to the [1901 New York tenement law] came from the owners and builders of the tenement houses, who predicted the most disastrous results from it, not only to themselves but the tenants, and made sure that the enactment would raise the cost of living to the dwellers in tenement houses,” a July 1901 New York Times editorial states. In response to landlords shuttering homes rather than complying with a Depression-era multiple-dwelling law, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia sided with developers, asking city officials for a moratorium on enforcing the requirements. “Law Guardia Urges Action to Prevent Housing Shortage,” a December 1936 Times headline reads. The article would go on, “With the city confronted by a shortage of low cost housing resulting from the enforcement of the Multiple Dwelling Law, Mayor La Guardia declared yesterday at a City Hall conference on housing that immediate steps must be taken to meet the emergency situation.” Those steps? Basically, stop enforcing the law.
The idea of lowering costs of aggregate housing by appeasing those who build housing with gutted regulation is neither novel nor a law of nature. It’s one approach, and one with, at best, mixed results.
This brings us to the latest, more cartoonish extreme of this line of reasoning: Yglesias’ argument that bedrooms with sunlight and fresh air are a pointless decadence.
More than being cynical, this argument is extremely familiar. When criticizing Yglesias, I hesitate to bring up his now infamous “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” article from 2013, because it can feel cheap and non sequitur. But here it’s entirely relevant, because, as Wagner notes in her own piece, it’s the exact same reasoning. Eighty-seven people died in a factory collapse and Yglesias doesn’t see this as a moral outrage—he sees it as the vaguely unfortunate but inevitable endpoint of inequities inherent in the natural law of global capitalism. Ho hum, it’s just The Way It Is.
Read both of these pieces side by side—the general argument is identical. Obviously, those forced to sleep in windowless rooms are not suffering nearly as much as those in sweatshops. But the reasoning, the sophistry, the ham-fisted assertion of austerity logic and its attendant false dichotomy, is more or less the same.
Like much of the housing discourse, one is baffled by how quickly the discussion goes from the perfectly sensible—albeit generic—axiom of “we need more housing” to the idea that maintaining standards for windows in bedrooms is a pro-homelessness policy.
The whole thing feels like a hostage situation, and in many ways it is. Taken to its logical end point, this reasoning means any housing standard that is a notch above homelessness would therefore be acceptable so long as it drove down development cost for real estate interests. And anyone opposed to such standards—whether they be “tiny houses,” new laws permitting basement and garage living spaces, living in cargo containers, homes without kitchens or private toilets—is said to want more homelessness. These options, we are told, are not just okay, but morally ideal, because the free market has spoken and this is the Realistic Alternative. And if you object to these “solutions” you hate the poor.
See how convenient this line of reasoning is?
All this is just warmed over BURDENSOME RED TAPE rhetoric long popular in libertarian circles. It’s a John Stossel 20/20 segment on market subservience rebranded for guys who went to grad school at NYU and ride fixies. This is the same race-to-the-bottom cultish fervor that animated the WTO cheerleading of the 1990s and 2000s that climaxed with Yglesias’ And That’s Ok article. All the savvy smart people decided we needed to jettison already minor safety, health, environmental, labor, and comfort standards designed to protect poor people or Other Poor People Would Suffer.
You want a baseline standard for the poor? See, it’s you who really hates the poor, because the only two options, presumably ordained by god, are sex trade or sweatshop labor, homelessness or closets with beds.
When there’s understandable pushback, many of the Savvy Housing People keep insisting that they personally don’t need windows as if this is a relevant data point.
To be clear: What you personally prefer doesn’t matter. You will not be the one living in windowless apartments—very poor people will. There is no choice; “choosing” lower standards isn’t a thing.
Just as none of these Savvy Pundits will ever have to work in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, there is zero percent chance, despite their supposed fondness for darkness, any of them will choose to live in a home with a windowless room. It cannot be stressed enough: This will literally never happen. Literally zero non-poor people will ever have a bedroom without a window as their primary residence. For any health and safety standards the Savvy Pundits are lobbying to repeal, add on “for poor people” to the end, just so we’re clear. As Wagner notes:
Windowless bedrooms are a solution made up by people who certainly won’t be living in them. The idea that we need to do away with such basic human necessities as light is based on an inherently Darwinian view of the city and who gets to inhabit it. It’s an austerity mindset that urban space is so limited that we should all make sacrifices in order to live where we want, when in reality we should be fighting like hell to secure our place and our dignity in the commons.
The market isn’t an endless supply of Rational Urbanists with beards and grad degrees from Stanford sagely deciding where to live. It, invariably, is going to be poor and desperate people simply accepting lower baseline standards because the alternative is destitution. The shit, as always, will roll down hill.
People don’t “choose” to live in a home without bedroom windows anymore than they “choose” to work in sweatshops in Bangladesh. These concepts mean nothing; they are libertarian buzzwords meant to obscure who will actually be impacted by these lowering standards. Hint: It’s not writers for New York magazine.
Again, I do not wish to wade into the merits of bigger discussions of housing discourse—it’s a far more nuanced debate outside of the scope of the specific critique. And I know many “more housing” proponents don’t think these types of extremes are helpful to their political cause of building coalitions for land use reform. I only wish to use the Window Discourse as a modest warning, a flashpoint that can perhaps merit larger political introspection because the Yglesiases of the world are very much about pushing the envelope of acceptable cruelty on behalf of political and economic forces who absolutely do not give a shit about basic safety and health standards. If these forces had their will we would all absolutely still live in slums. Because it’s not just about the window—it’s about the thing after the window, and the thing after that and the thing after that.
When we’ve gotten to a place where we cannot remotely envision democratic control over large and important economic systems that do not bend to the will and alleged P & L of the ultra wealthy to set standards, and simply throw our hands up and say this is the best of two bad options. When the debate is limited to rich single family homeowners vs. newer, even wealthier multi-family housing developers, when we totally foreclose on a third option, when we simply do not act like economic democracy is possible, much less matters anymore, something is seriously lost in our politics. The same acquiescence, the same inevitable submission to the market was ascendant post-Cold War in many liberal circles. In the wake of the failed Sanders campaigns, the snuffing out of the George Floyd movement, the inflationary disciplining of Covid-era social welfare, I fear on many major issues, not just housing, this same acquiescence has become all too common. To an extent, it’s understandable: Many people of good faith are simply trying to work within the system as it exists, and make capitalism more palatable for people. I’m sensitive to this, and understand the job of a media critic is different from those trying to make the best out of a bad situation, in the complex reality of local politics. But I think sometimes it’s useful to pause and see how blinkered our vision has become. To take ideological inventory of the current state of things.
It’s a truly dark and defeated place to be that The Nation has to publish a defense of windows for bedrooms for the poor in 2023—144 years after the regulation first passed—and people with influence, up to and including the mayor of New York, take those arguing otherwise seriously. It just is, and we need to recognize that. So many decision makers and media influencers don’t even pretend to do politics anymore: There is no grand moral vision or movement, and there is little parallel effort by glossy magazines and The New York Times to boost the very real, but relatively obscure, efforts by tenant unions and rent control activists to temper capital’s power. All the smart, serious people have mostly moved on—they now just debate the best way to appease the capricious and all powerful gods of real estate. And I think this sucks.