All you have to do is look at maps of single-family-home zoning versus, well, every other type of land use to surmise that homevoters are largely getting their way in North American cities—even Vancouver. Those who want their neighborhoods to remain exclusive, low-rise, and apartment-free seem to be mostly winning the war against those who might like to build new buildings in their neighborhoods. A BuildZoom study of where new development is and is not happening reveals that essentially all metro areas are dominated by "no-build zones" in which there is little to no development.

Is this really the world the growth machine has wrought? Actually, maybe yes. The largest developers in particular benefit from many of the policies—such as downzoning neighborhoods to freeze them in regulatory amber—that "homevoters" have pushed for and gotten enacted and hold sacred.

Growth machine-style developers (deep-pocketed, politically connected) can find it extremely profitable when most of a city's land is relatively or completely off limits to development. This drives scarcity, and with it the ability to command "luxury" rents. When the local government manipulates the market by allowing dramatic leaps in development intensity in select areas only, it also becomes possible to reap windfall gains simply by owning property in the right place over the right span of time.

But if more neighborhoods allowed building, couldn't developers build in more neighborhoods and reap even more windfall gains? Not really, because the total amount you can build in a given city in a given year has a ceiling on it. That ceiling is determined by how much demand is out there to meet new supply ("absorption rate" in real estate speak), and by the availability of construction labor, among other factors. Given those limits, the deepest-pocketed developers are the best positioned to thrive in an environment of scarce opportunities. And the stuff they'll build is predictably luxury, in the same way that if you limited Toyota to only 10,000 cars a year, they would all be Lexuses, not Camrys.

There's another reason the growth machine might not actually object to "homevoter"-favored policies which aim to make development more difficult. That is that complicated regulations, as a rule, benefit well-connected insiders who have learned the game and play it expertly. I've written about this before, but don't take my word for it. Take Multifamily Executive's word: a growing number of apartment firms and REITs are deliberately seeking out "high barrier to entry" markets:

The reasons behind the flight to the coasts today aren't hard to understand. Although the cost—and struggle—of getting into high-barrier markets is great, so are the rewards. “There is the very obvious element of restricted supply yielding bigger returns and better rent growth in these markets over the long term,” says Alan George, chief investment officer at Equity. “That's the simple answer.” Those advantages are bolstered by the fact that once you're in, it's harder for your competitors to build next door. After all, the definition of a high barrier-to-entry market is that it's hard to get your foot in the door, so you don't have to worry about a deluge of new properties popping up and putting downward pressure on rents. In fact, once you're in, observers say rent growth tends to be more consistent, and comes in bigger chunks, than so-called commodity markets.

Downtown Vancouver is one of the most complicated, difficult places to build in North America, with its elaborate rules around things like sunlight and sight lines. And its entrenched growth machine probably likes it that way. Bureaucracy will always favor the well-connected.

Next Increment Everywhere: A Growth Policy the Growth Machine Hates

The "growth machine" vision of the city is a fundamentally extractive one: the function of urban development is to produce profit for investors. This tends to be the dominant paradigm in North America's high rise downtowns. Elsewhere, exclusive single-family zoning and little to no development—”protecting neighborhoods”—is the dominant paradigm in many residential areas, especially in the suburbs. This is no accident: the two policy frameworks are compatible and even complementary, even though many activist homeowners will tell you they hate developers and growth boosters.

Why are they compatible? Because both involve granting a set of insiders privileged access to the value created within a city. It's outsiders to the power structure—renters, the poor, would-be smaller entrepreneurs—who lose.

So what kind of policy would run counter to that vision? How about a policy to make sure that increases in land value are incremental, steady but slow, distributed fairly evenly across the city, and not subject to huge booms and busts? To allow every neighborhood to change, evolve, and intensify over time, so that no neighborhood experiences a flood of cataclysmic money.

To stop the boom and bust cycle, allow the next increment of development everywhere. In practice, since most land in most cities is reserved for single-family homes and nothing else, this amounts to an increase in allowable density across a huge area—a policy that Ley seems to believe is cover for growth machine priorities in cities like Vancouver. But if it is that, then what do card-carrying Growth Machine™ members have to say about it? Oddly, turns out they don't like it very much.

In late 2018, Minneapolis passed a comprehensive plan update that, among other things, legalized triplexes (and in an earlier draft, fourplexes) on single-family residential lots citywide—effectively tripling the allowed density in some neighborhoods. You'd expect the growth machine to be all in for this, right? In reality, big developers and the city's powerful Downtown Council ranged from shrugging at the proposal to being outright critical of it. As Wedge Live put it, their take was, "Basically: Fourplexes aren’t for us. We don’t build them. We don’t live in them. We don’t sell them. We can’t make money from them. Why bother?"

Housing activists in Portland had similar experiences to report after Oregon legalized fourplexes across much of the state the following summer. The constituency backing these policies is astoundingly diverse, but the old-school growth machine is not really part of it.

Policies that shift our cities back toward incremental, broad-based growth would be far from a boon to those cities’ current power brokers.

Who Favors Growth Itself?

There's a different element, to be fair, to many activists' opposition to "growth machine" politics: an opposition to growth itself. That is, I might simply not want more people living in my city, even if they're in condos downtown rather than my own single-family neighborhood. I might not believe that their presence will improve the quality of life, or our fiscal or environmental sustainability, or racial or socioeconomic equity.

And there is, truly, plenty of reason to doubt that population growth is good for places as a general rule.