Do the YIMBYs Want to Do Politics or Not?

with his YIMBY cap on, Matt Yglesias acts just like the DSA types he abhors

I invite you to imagine Matt Yglesias’s reaction if David Sirota or someone said “It’s crazy we don’t have Medicare for All, the underlying problem is the voters. Who cares about their preexisting private health insurance???”

preorder All In Your Head now

It’s worth clicking through to see the thread Yglesias is reacting to and the various whining YIMBYs responding to it. It’s a YIMBY British guy (or, at least, a British guy who’s sympathetic to YIMBYism) pointing out some strategic failures on the part of the UK YIMBY movement. He argues in particular that a) by explicitly demonizing local environmentalists, the YIMBYs created enemies unnecessarily, b) local YIMBYs did not strategically define areas of greatest need for more building, wasting political capital and resources, and c) YIMBYs were too cozy with local developers, for-profit entities who don’t care at all about the principles YIMBYs claim to hold and would just like to make more money, thanks. (And, indeed, if developers could both increase supply and keep prices high, they would happily do so.) These all seem like valid takes - indeed, they reflect generic problems that YIMBYs would do well to take seriously - but of course rather than giving nuanced rebuttals or fair criticisms, almost all of the YIMBY response is dismissive, snide, and hectoring. A fair number insist that he’s no YIMBY at all, which is a classic sign of a healthy political movement, the insistence on ejecting anyone who makes internal criticism. Here’s Substack’s own “Jeremiah Johnson” with a typical response:

Ah, the gentle art of persuasion. You’ll note that the last part of this is (again) a rhetorical tactic that the Yglesian School typically derides, the assertion that the other side doesn’t actually believe what they say they believe. Yglesias is constantly lecturing others that cultural and social conservatives aren’t getting onboard with the left’s project because they have sincerely-held policy and moral views that are incompatible with that project. Assigning conspiracist motives (such as calling conservative beliefs a “dog whistle” or saying that it’s all just about protecting the wealthy) is just lefty kabuki! Politics is the slow boring of hard boards! You gotta do the work to persuade people! You have to do politics. Well, here, “Johnson” engages in that exact way of thinking, insisting that the only reason someone might purport to disagree with him is because they’re hiding another motive, a selfish one. He can’t countenance the possibility that other people have sincerely-held beliefs that are incompatible with his project. This is all, I would contend, useless and non-falsifiable and toxic. I mean, what’s the intent of that tweet? What political project does it advance?

I’m going to venture a different theory: in fact, there are many influential British voters and political leaders who have a sincerely-held belief that we as human beings are the stewards of the natural world, including when it comes to protecting threatened species. Environmentalism has been permanently cast as some sort of crazy hippie interest in American politics, but we live in the environment, so I find that kind of odd. More to the point here, the evidence suggests that the original Tweeter is correct that an effort to protect threatened species and the wetlands they live in is at play in UK development politics right now. So here’s the kind of “art of the possible” talk that Yglesias usually loves: whether the YIMBYs like it or not, an interest in defending threatened newt species is clearly a political priority among some British voters. More broadly, environmental concerns and a desire to live near undeveloped land are very common political commitments, in part because the environmentalist movement has worked very hard to secure their interests - which is to say, they’ve done politics. They reach a lot of voters; the have effectively navigated the worlds of fundraising and moralizing. Those are relevant political facts.

So: what do you want to do about those political facts? You could try to persuade those British voters that it is indeed absurd to value newts and other vulnerable species at all. Or you could try to rally enough support that you can outnumber the newt-lovers and win without them. What conspicuously does not accomplish anything is sitting on Twitter, playing to the already-converted by saying “NEWTS?!? What kind of a fucking idiot cares about newts?!?” But there are dozens of Twitter YIMBYs expressing precisely that sentiment, not making careful or reasoned arguments about the appropriate weighting of environmental issues. That’s not politics; it is, in fact, anti-politics, in-group signaling nihilism of the worst kind… very similar to the way Darializa Avila Chevalier operated on that same social network, behavior which Yglesias has explicitly mocked. I’m sure that some Twitter YIMBYs would say that Twitter isn’t real life, that what happens there isn’t actually politics, just blowing off steam, having fun - which is precisely what the DSA Twitter types say in their own defense too. What’s good for the goose, guys.

In general, YIMBYs have a terrible track record of refusing to grapple with the fact that many people deeply disagree with them on core issues. So much of the YIMBY social culture depends on treating things that many people value as inherently and obviously worthless. YIMBYs put scare quotes around the words neighborhood character, they dismiss any talk of the value of open or undeveloped land, they blithely insist that a desire for beautiful buildings is just a way to defend property values, on and on. As such, a typical YIMBY debate involves defining the worth of these things at literally zero and then acting agog that anyone could object to their calculus. But this is, again, exactly what Yglesias constantly complains about in online leftists, their supposed tendency to ignore the sincerely-held beliefs of conservative voters and assume they can be brought onboard a campaign of economic justice. Yes, I understand that since Twitter took over YIMBY culture professing theatrical derision towards the idea of neighborhood character has been a key in-group signifier. But ordinary people just do value neighborhood character. Ordinary people just do love open space and undeveloped green areas. Ordinary people just do want to live in and around beautiful houses. If you want to argue that our system places too much value on those things, cool, and in many instances I’ll agree with you. But placing zero value on them because that’s what gets you the most likes on Twitter is stupid and destructive. If you want to change the rules, you need to do politics, and to do politics you have to index on what your opponents think too.

I mean, have you ever been to Litchfield County in Connecticut? It’s got character! It’s got lots of undeveloped green space! Most of the houses are absolutely lovely! There’s newts! And it’s ludicrously expensive to buy up there. That’s what the neoliberal types are always telling us to do, right? To define human desire by the economic value that’s placed on something? Well, go on Zillow and click around and you’ll see the market telling us that the attributes found in Litchfield county are very prized indeed. This despite the fact that, unlike much of Connecticut, most of the county is not very close or convenient to either New York City or Boston. There’s also practically no major employers up there, making it a true bedroom community. And it’s not even a situation like that in Vermont, where tourism is the most important industry; tourists come to Vermont for the Green Mountains and the quaint villages and the lack of billboards or garish development, so there’s an inherent economic incentive to restrict building. There’s some tourism in Litchfield County, but nothing like that in Vermont, and I imagine a majority of my readers have never even heard of it. No, it’s a place people want to live despite the fact that it’s far from major urban amenities, passenger rail, jobs, the ocean, an airport, any universities…. I guess maybe the market is telling you that it’s foolish to just dismiss out of hand the very common desire to live with neighborhood character, open undeveloped spaces, and beautiful buildings, huh? Perhaps people actually sincerely believe in the value of protecting environmental resources, huh? They’ll pay an awful lot for that sort of thing. Scare quotes aren’t an argument, guys. You have to get past the in-group signaling. People highly value the attributes you keep performatively dismissing. Adjust.

As I’ve said before, in the past decade or so the YIMBY movement has shed what I always saw as its most valuable attribute, which was a refusal to moralize. The YIMBYs I knew way back when always deliberately avoided explicitly moral language when talking about NIMBYs. The point was not about the inherent wickedness of those dastardly homeowners who were trying to protect their quality of life and their home values, but instead to emphasize that NIMBYs were acting rationally inside of a system built on bad incentives and so we had to change the incentives. This attitude had several advantages, most obviously being that the fundamental contention is correct: in the vast majority of cases, NIMBYs really are acting in a perfectly rational way given the underlying incentives. Your house is the most consequential purchase you’ll ever make in your life. If someone puts up a high rise across the street, that’s going to change the experience of living in it, and if you like that experience, you naturally don’t want it to change. Meanwhile, the entire American system and its overpowering socioeconomic inequality have created a scenario where ordinary people have almost no way to build wealth other than through having a fixed-rate mortgage on an appreciating house. To pick a salient example, Black Americans were uniquely devastated by the financial crisis because their wealth was overwhelmingly tied up in their homes. It’s totally rational for people living under such conditions to fight hard to maintain the status quo where they live, particularly if (like most people) they lack the financial privilege necessary to just go find a new, better place to live.

How should we respond to this situation? First, we need to be firm that there are community needs that must outweigh the needs of individual homeowners if the alternative is a genuinely, meaningfully cheaper housing market. I am someone who’s onboard with like 80% of the actual YIMBY policy agenda, which is a big part of why the movement’s collapse into Twitter social club horseshit is so annoying. (Again, if you want to say that I shouldn’t pay attention to what people on Twitter say, who cares, my response is that you have to have the same stance when it comes to your enemies in the DSA left.) But the other half is just as important too: you have to change the incentives so that potential alterations to a homeowner’s immediate living environment aren’t potentially so personally and financially negative. And this can only come from a broader campaign for economic justice that’s built on fighting inequality, building the wealth of the bottom half of the distribution, and removing the many ways that the rich have undue influence in our political system - including, yes, the ways that they manipulate zoning and environmental review processes to protect their housing values. YIMBYs typically complain that too many Americans see their houses as investments rather than as places to live. But whose fault is that, really? Theirs? Did they design the tax code, invent the mortgage, define the Fed’s inflation target, build an economy that functions as a machine for putting more and more money in the hands of the already wealthy? No. It’s simply more sensible and more productive to treat NIMBYs as rational agents who need better incentives than it is to moralize about them - but of course it’s the moralizing that makes you more popular among the other YIMBYs on Twitter.

As I keep saying, Yglesias understands all of this when it helps his position in the endless factional fights he finds himself in. Consider this:

The complete opposite of these ideas is a strategy that we’ve seen repeatedly over the last decade: showing up in a space that is already ideologically committed to being progressive, and then loudly announcing to everyone in the space that in order to be a good progressive, everyone now needs to do X. That might be something substantive, like abandoning Obama-era education reform and “all of the above” energy policy, or it might be something performative, like land acknowledgments or having everyone put their pronouns in their bio. If you’re really aggressive about this kind of demand, you can get pretty far in intra-progressive fights — or at least you could in the years 2015-2024.

But as a persuasion tactic, it leaves you stuck at a local maximum.

You’re bullying people who are committed to progressive politics into going along with your ideas. But most people are not committed to progressive politics! Maybe land acknowledgments actually are a good idea, but by making them constitutive of progressive politics, you’re ensuring that the majority of the population will see them as cringe and weird.

Substitute “YIMBY” for “progressive” above, and you’ve got a pretty good definition of the problem. Most people are not committed to the YIMBY agenda, and even the ones who say housing should be more affordable and building should be easier will recoil if you tell them that it involves eliminating local control and taking an axe to their property values. So if you want to create change, I suggest that you do politics instead of constantly dunking online in exactly the way you accuse the Bernie left of doing. Stop bitching that people value things that are very natural to value and start making the case for a different way of thinking.