L.A. Mayor Karen Bass Says You Can Defeat NIMBYism by Building Less

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week’s stories include:

• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ persistent cowardice on housing.
• The Department of Justice’s antitrust settlement with RealPage.
• The ROAD to Housing Act’s frosty receptions in the House.

Enjoy!

My colleague Matt Welch has recorded an interview with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass for his Fifth Column podcast, which is well worth a listen for lots of reasons. Most relevant for this newsletter is the discussion of housing construction and NIMBYism in Los Angeles.

I’d direct readers to one point about 35 minutes into the conversation, where Welch pushes Bass on why she came out against allowing people in the Palisades area to build duplexes on lands ravaged by this year’s fires.

Bass’ response is telling.

“Because the people in the Palisades didn’t want that,” says Bass. “When it comes to building is that…I think you need to build with communities…I think that if you impose it on a neighborhood, then you will have  hardcore NIMBYs.”

“You’re saying you’re doing this to prevent NIMBYism, but doesn’t that on some level just entrench it?” responds Welch.

The two have a number of similar back-and-forths throughout the conversation. Bass continues to stick to this general worldview that the way to keep NIMBYism in check is to give a lot of ground to their opposition to new housing.

Welch continually raises the (reasonable, in my opinion) counterpoint that you don’t defeat NIMBYism by giving in to it.

During her tenure as mayor, Bass has long expressed the view that new housing (and particularly subsidized affordable housing) is good, so long as City Hall doesn’t allow too much of it.

She stood up a program called ED1 to streamline new housing production, and then worked to roll it back once the development applications flooded in.

She opposed S.B. 79, a state bill allowing more apartments near transit stops, for the similar reason that the city was losing its ability to more minutely control where new units should go and how many of them should be allowed.

Today I signed a City Council resolution opposing SB79 unless it is amended to exempt cities with a state-approved and compliant Housing Element.

While I support the intent to accelerate housing development statewide, as written, this bill risks unintended consequences for LA.

— Mayor Karen Bass (@MayorOfLA) August 20, 2025

It’s true that if you allow fewer homes in fewer places, fewer NIMBYs will express fewer objections to projects that aren’t happening. The obvious takeaway, as Welch says repeatedly, is that you’re defeating anti-development attitudes by defeating development.

That might be a sensible, middle-of-the-road position to take for a mayor looking to reduce headaches generated by land-use battles. But it also means housing-starved Los Angeles will see a lot fewer homes built.

Sometimes conflict is a necessary part of change. A mayor who wants to see her city become affordable would lean into those conflicts instead of shrinking from them.

A bipartisan housing bill that sailed through the Senate is now facing an uncertain future in the House of Representatives.

The ROAD to Housing Act—an amalgam of mostly small housing policy tweaks to federal grant programs and financial regulations aimed at increasing housing production—passed the Senate as part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) back in October.

As Politico reports today, however, House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill (R–Ark.) is holding up consideration of the NDAA until the housing provisions are stripped from it. Hill has been saying for the last week that he supports the ROAD to Housing Act, but some Republicans object to particular provisions. Therefore, he wants it considered as a standalone proposal.

Per Politico, deals offered by Sens. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.)—the Senate Banking Committee chair and ranking member who shepherded the bill through the Senate—to keep the ROAD to Housing Act in the NDAA have been rejected.

Housing advocates who support the bill are already attempting to manage expectations should it not pass before Congress adjourns for its December recess.

“We’re optimistic that Congress may still advance ROAD to Housing provisions this year, but even if it doesn’t, bipartisan momentum for housing reform remains strong,” said the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Dennis Shea in an emailed statement last week. “With the House planning a December hearing on roadblocks to housing supply and a subsequent mark-up, prospects for meaningful action in 2026 are encouraging.”

You can read Rent Free‘s coverage of the specifics of the ROAD to Housing Act here.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has reached a provisional settlement in a major antitrust lawsuit it brought against real estate software company RealPage that alleged the company’s products enabled landlords to illegally collude on price increases.

RealPage’s software, using a mix of public and nonpublic data on leases, rents, and vacancy rates, would recommend profit-maximizing rent and vacancy levels to the company’s landlord clients. Critics charged that this software effectively created a cartel among landlords, who were told by the company’s algorithm to hold rents at above-market rates.

The legal case against RealPage’s software rested on the fact that its algorithm relied on proprietary data from competing landlords to recommend marketwide rent levels.

“Competing companies must make independent pricing decisions, and with the rise of algorithmic and artificial intelligence tools, we will remain at the forefront of vigorous antitrust enforcement,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.

The settlement agreement, which will still have to be accepted by the court, will limit RealPage’s ability to use real-time leasing data to train its models. Its models would not be allowed to consider geographic effects narrower than the state level.

“RealPage’s historical use of aggregated and anonymized nonpublic data, which include rents that are typically lower than advertised rents, has led to lower rents, less vacancies, and more procompetitive effects,” said Stephen Weissman, a lawyer representing RealPage.

Weissman said that RealPage has already been in the process of implementing changes required by the proposed settlement. As part of the agreement with the DOJ, the company does not concede any wrongdoing.

In recent years, RealPage has become the latest boogeyman blamed for high housing prices. Private litigants and state attorneys general accused the company in their own lawsuits of driving up vacancy rates and prices by encouraging landlords to hold units off the market.

The Biden administration first sued the company in August 2024.

As I’ve written before, whatever the legal merits of the DOJ case, the economic attack against RealPage never made much sense.

The limited research on rent-recommendation software has generally found that it leads to more efficient pricing. In down markets, it encourages landlords to cut prices faster. In hot markets, it encourages them to raise prices faster.

We can see evidence for this argument in rough comparisons between different cities’ housing markets. Austin landlords’ use of RealPage software hasn’t stopped rents from plummeting in response to a glut of new supply. San Francisco’s ban on the use of rent-recommendation software hasn’t stopped rents in that supply-constrained city from rising.

Update: pic.twitter.com/fx6kCW2iKY

— Max Dubler ????️‍???? (@maxdubler) November 23, 2025

While the federal case against RealPage is now over, the lawsuits brought by state attorneys general will continue.

• A new investigation from The Washington Post finds that developers with political connections to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser are earning outsize returns on a city-subsidized affordable housing development.
• Some helpful visual evidence of San Francisco’s inability to build.

When you wonder why housing is so expensive in San Francisco, the Bay Area, California, America pic.twitter.com/CzSX6Fc5wb

— Jeremy Levine, PhD of city council meetings (@JeremyELevine) November 21, 2025

• New York City Mayor–elect Zohran Mamdani mentions in a recent interview that he spoke with President Donald Trump about the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, the city’s laborious process for approving zoning changes that enable new housing. One can imagine that the developer president and the socialist mayor both have reasons not to like that particular process.
• Speaking of Mamdani, the mayor-elect has released the names of people on his housing transition team. The list notably includes a few YIMBYs. It notably excludes owners of rent-stabilized housing being forced into bankruptcy by the city’s rent control policies.

Zohran Mamdani is in Central Park announcing hundreds of appointees to his transition committee.

Among those here: @annemariegray, head of YIMBY group @OpenNYForAll pic.twitter.com/qdwCYn2zAk

— Nick Garber (@nick_garber) November 24, 2025

• The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein highlights the decades-long falling rate of new housing construction per capita in his latest column.