Thus the right question isn’t whether YIMBYism would lower the user cost of housing—that’s the whole point of the YIMBY movement and the unanimous upshot of the academic urban economics literature—but whether it would lower the value of land overall. The answer will almost certainly turn out to be no, because higher land prices are substantially severable from, and can coincide with, lower structure prices. And Tokyo, the world’s largest city and the only one that features anything like a realistic best-case version of housing abundance at megacity scale, is the cleanest place to see it.

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By the standards of Anglosphere megacities—New York, London, Toronto, LA—Tokyo housing is famously cheap. Builders can put up small-lot single-family homes, midrises, microapartments, and single room occupancy-style shared housing units with ease and in large volumes. (High-rises are not allowed by-right everywhere, so this isn’t a pure laissez-faire experiment, just the closest real-world example.) If “Tokyo regulation” is what real-world YIMBY victory looks like in a global megacity, it’s the best dataset we have.

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The famous (relative) cheapness of Tokyo housing is not a story about cheap land. A one-acre detached house in central Tokyo would cost more than $100 million in dirt before you broke ground. The land is pricey but the structures are cheap. Admittedly, Tokyo’s rents and prices are not as cheap per square foot as buildings in the US Sunbelt’s midsize cities, but cheap by the standards of any 10-million-plus Anglosphere metro area. Tokyo built its way to relative affordability without ending up with low land values, and the values themselves look reasonable for a productive, agglomerated megacity that simply didn’t artificially restrict its own supply.

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When policymakers upzone widely with by-right permitting across a high-demand metro, two things should happen at once. Measured per-acre (like farmland), land value rises, because the parcel has been granted a valuable option to host more buildable area. Land value measured like NYC-area developable land per buildable square foot falls, because that higher per-acre value is being amortized over much more floor area.

These move in opposite directions, and neither one alone is “the land price” in the sense political conversation usually means. This distinction dissolves a lot of the political-economy panic around housing abundance. Again, land prices quoted the way NYC land brokers quote them, on a “Zoning Square Feet” or “Buildable Square Feet” basis, will fall even as the total value of land is at least stable or rises in the metro area being upzoned.

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If American single-family homeowners in the cores and first-ring suburbs of New York, San Francisco, Boston, or LA were maximizing the dollar-denominated asset values Fischel says they care about, they would be voting to become like Tokyo landowners — to unlock the redevelopment option on their parcels. They are not. Whatever they’re maximizing, it isn’t profit. (See Agenda for Abundant Housing for a full-length argument.)

That’s not a fatal blow to the homevoter framework if we’re willing to relax the “objective function” of voters from strictly defined profit-maximization. As any good undergraduate economics professor will remind a student who discovers people valuing non-pecuniary interests: “Firms maximize profit. People maximize utility.” This is of course the beginning, not the end, of the question: It is the task of the other social sciences and humanities to help economists figure out what it is that people see as utility-maximizing or otherwise in their best all-things-considered interests, when consumers are not behaving in a way that maximizes apparent pocketbook dollars and cents.