I am sure most people have heard the phrase “Not In My Back Yard“(NIMBY).  It signifies the attitude that many homeowners have in response to any proposal for multi-family housing to be built in their area.  People may be sympathetic to the needs of increased housing, but no one wants it where they live. It is partially this NIMBY attitude that is the cause of a major shortage of housing in this country.  The lack of housing is a major factor in the rising rent rates.  Fortunately, there is a growing counter movement to NIMBY: Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY).  This pro-housing movement has encountered bipartisan pushback, but has increasingly been embraced in a bipartisan manner as well.  There have been YIMBY success stories in California, Utah, and countless municipalities around the country.  One recent example of a potential positive YIMBY development is Montana.  My current post in the series “When Politicians Do Good Things” is on what is called the “Montana Miracle ” partially due its G.O.P governor Greg Gianforte.

Governor Gianforte has flaws that  have not been prevalent in other politicians I have highlighted in this series.  When running for Congress in 2017, he infamously body slammed a reporter during the campaign.  But he has taken the initiative when it comes to addressing the housing shortages in his state.  During the pandemic, many people moved to Montana due to the growth of remote work and the need to be socially distant.  As a result, the value of homes started to go up due to the issue of more demand than supply of homes.  This caused people to worry not just about the increasing price of homes, but for the possibility of homes being constructed all over the place in a spread out manner.  In other words, sprawl.  Because of how pristine the Montana landscape is, officials have a big incentive to prevent homes from popping up everywhere.

In response to many people bringing up this concern to him, Governor Gianforte assembled a working group in July 2022.  He invited different stakeholders, like state officials, county officials, housing non-profits, and developers to serve on the commission.  He gave them free rein to debate courses of action and said that his only requirement was that they agree on concrete solutions. Over the next several months, the group came up with a number of recommendations.  They were introduced in the State Legislature as bills and were debated on.  The Legislature voted down some proposals, but passed several of them, which Governor Gianforte signed in May of 2023.

The laws run the gamnut with regards to pro-housing policy. SB 323 requires cities that have more than 5000 residents to allow duplexes in areas which are zoned for single family homes.  That law will make it easier for developers and homeowners to build starter homes. SB-406 prohibits local governments from making building codes that are stricter than state governments.  This will prevent local governments from instituting regulations that will slow the passage of building new homes.  SB-528 makes it easier for homeowners to build Accessible Dwelling Units (ADU’s) on their properties.  ADU’s are small “mini homes” which have accessories such as bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms.  They are either separate buildings on a property, or are in the basement of an existing home. The benefits of an ADU is that it is cheaper than a regular home, and is either a good starter home, or a place where elderly parents can live with a degree of independence¹.

The crown jewel is SB-382, a big omnibus housing bill.  It streamlines the process in which housing permits are approved, cutting red tape which hampers the approval of developments.  It requires cities and towns to establish planning commissions which examine the projected population and change zoning regulations to stimulate house building.  It creates a list of 15 provisions that are meant to advance the construction of housing and mandates that local governments select at least 5 of them.  Some examples include scrapping minimum parking and lot sizes.

What has helped Montana succeed is that the working group was relatively large, there was room for serious debate and disagreements to be worked out, and it had a firm deadline.  It also helped that conservatives promoted the effort by framing it as a win for property rights.  Governor Gianforte has extended the working group through 2025.  In the year since these laws were passed however, there have been some setbacks.  Local homeowners sued and a state district judge temporarily blocked SB 323 and SB-406 with particularly scathing language. Progressives who have lodged objections, saying that the legislature did not do enough to prioritize affordable housing.  Despite these hiccups, it should be noted that housing is an intractable problem with no easy fix, and the fact that Montana has and is taking steps to really tackle this difficult problem that other states of avoided should be commended.

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Elections in other countries:

India:  Indian citizens voted in a national election for MP’s in the Lok Sabha, India’s powerful lower house of parliament.  The vote took place over several weeks from April to May, and the results were tabulated on June 4th.  Narendra Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) along with its allied parties in the NDA alliance went into the election holding 350 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha and were loudly bragging that they were going to win 400 seats.  There have been concerns of democratic backsliding and a rise in religious intolerance against Muslims since Modi came to power in 2014 as an unabashed Hindu Nationalist.  There were fears that he would use his supermajority in the next term to make changes to the Constitution that would wipe out the pluralism between castes and religions that form the backbone of India’s liberal Democracy.  Despite exit polls predicting 350-375 seats for the NDA, they won 292 seats, barely enough to get a majority.  The opposition Congress party, the party of Mahatma Gandhi nearly doubled its seat number from 52 to 102, and combined with its allies in the India National Development Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A) alliance, won 232 seats.  While Modi won another term as Prime Minister, the results were an embarrassment to him, and there will be a real check on his autocratic tendencies by an enlarged opposition.

South Africa:

South Africans voted on May 29th for members of the South African National Assembly.  It was a seminal moment, because for the first time since Apartheid ended, the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela, did not win a majority of the seats.  They finished with 40% of the vote and 159 seats in the National Assembly, less than the 200 seats necessary for a majority.  The centrist main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance finished second with 87 seats, a slight increase of 3 seats from the 2019 elections.  The wild card of the election was uMkhonto weSiwe (MK) led by former South African president Jacob Zuma, which finished in third with 58 seats.  Zuma’s tenure as President was full of controversy and scandal, and he had to resign in 2018.  He was sent to prison in 2021 for contempt of court, which caused his supporters to riot.  He went on a warpath against the ANC during the campaign, especially against the current president and his successor Cyril Rampahosa.  He could reasonably be compared to Donald Trump, because he has a die hard base amongst people of the Zulu tribe, which he is a member of, that sees him as a man of the people despite his wealth and controversies.  Like Trump, he also said that the election results were illegitimate.  Because the South Africa Constitution mandates that a President be elected by the Assembly 14 days after an election, the ANC quickly agreed on a coalition government with the opposition DA and some smaller parties, which elected Ramaphosa to a second full term.

EU Parliament:

Voters in all of the EU member countries voted in European Parliament elections from June 6-9. While voters vote for political parties in their countries, these national political parties either join up with a pan European political party that is based on ideology or they will run as unaligned, or Non-Inscrits. For example, the UK Labour Party was part of the Socialist and Democrats (S&D) political party before Brexit, and the German Christian Democrats are part of the European People’s Party (EPP).  National Parties create or join a pan European Party either during or after the EU parliament elections.  The benefits of joining a Pan-European grouping is that Members of European Parliament (MEP’s) can gain clout and important committee assignments.  

In the election, the EPP finished first with 191 seats, as it has done over the past several EU elections.  The S&D lost a few seats to finish second with 136 seats.  The centrist liberal European Political Party Renew Europe (RE) had a poor election result, finishing with 74 seats and dropping to fourth place for the first time.  The two far right groupings, European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) made solid gains, as they finished with 83 and 58 seats respectively, enough to make ECR the third largest EU party for the first time.  They won the election in a certain number of countries, with Giorgia Meloni’s Brother’s of Italy (ECR) and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (ID) winning in Italy and France.  The EU election was such a humiliation for President Emanuel Macron (RE) that he immediately dissolved the French Parliament for a snap election.²  The Greens also had a poor election night, erasing the gains they made in 2019 to drop to 51 seats, the Left grouping got 37 seats, and Non-Inscrits won 88 seats.  While the main coalition of RE, EPP, and S&D is expected to continue in the next EU parliament, the good performance of the Far Right, alongside wins in national elections will affect EU policy.

1. Which is why they are also called “Granny Pods” ↩︎
2. A decision that risks blowing up in Macron’s Face ↩︎