Reihan Salam wrote a piece for The Atlantic in which he said, hey, maybe YIMBYs would get more of what they want if they tried to engage in the compromise and coalition-building that are the core of politics. It went about as well as you can expect - online YIMBYs were too enraged by the perceived slight to their weird little social culture to ask themselves whether it’s useful to have a
Allowing (encouraging?) millions of illegal immigrants has the dual effect of depressing working class wages because of the increase in people who will work for next to nothing just to be here and making housing more expensive by dramatically increasing demand. The Biden administration is culpable.
There is no challenge we face that can’t be blamed on the illegal alien invasion. If we didn’t have so many illegal aliens, we wouldn’t need as much food, so we would have fewer cows farting methane into our atmosphere and causing climate change.
Presumably because if those terrible-horrible-no good illegals just stayed in their home countries, they would starve-be killed-etc. and decrease the surplus population?
If you are correct then why not throw our borders completely open and bring in the two or three billion people who would choose to live here? What would happen to our already inadequate social support systems? Are you really okay with that?
There is a strange logic that lives in the word where the only two options are "ban illegulz, they're taking our jorbs" and "open tha bordurz and let billionz in".
Canada essentially doesn't have illegals. We let in a whole lot of rich and educated immigrants. And when they aren't rich and educated we encourage them to stay in less populated areas for a while.
Why didn't you say that in the first place instead of going on a rant about how illegals automatically get blamed everything the price of sushi goes up?
Let me ask you this - how would a significant decrease in our migrant population affect construction costs? My sense from all the complaining from contractors in Florida is that costs would increase.
Pretty sure those illegal aliens would need just as much food if they stay in their home countries as they do in the US. Mexican (and Brazilian and Venezuelan ...) cows also fart methane. You are just shifting the location of the farting cow. And, of course, since edible cow parts are shipped world-wide, the exact location of the farting cow is not so meaningful. It will still exist and fart.
The rise in housing prices is fundamentally due to a mismatch between the number of people seeking housing and the number of houses available. You're correct that if we just stop admitting immigrants that housing prices will eventually go down, as we have a negative birth rate, but this problem can also be solved by just building a lot more housing. Your path leads to economic stagnation as the population slowly grows older, and the economy sags under the weight of it's elderly. I prefer the "build more houses" path.
That's kind of the problem but building more houses is obviously cheaper in rural and exurban areas. Immigration in general tends to be concentrated in already built up urban cores.
Farmland is expensive. How are they going to afford it and the tools to farm. Very few small farmers anymore. We have some go into it in our area, usually to quit when they realize how much work it is.
That's not really the whole story at all though is it?
Lot's of recent market influences have made basic house construction more expensive in the first place (land prices, supply shortages, inflation, labor, etc.). So many developers are simply going bigger and swankier to sell to the demographic that can still afford them: upper-middle class, all upper class, and corporations. New house construction is actually booming right now, but very little of it is affordable to any lower-middle and middle class buyers - which happen to be both the largest buyer demographic, and the ones who need it the most.
It's not nearly as simple as you would suggest it is.
No, of course, like everything it is actually extremely complicated. But in the realm of "too many immigrants causing too much demand" I'm simply stating that there are two ways to solve that issue, fewer immigrants or to meet the demand.
What you're talking about is part of the reason it's difficult to meet the demand, to build enough houses, and is difficult. There's a lot of factors that get in the way of us building enough houses, and everything you mentioned is part of that problem. I'm not saying "just build more houses, it's easy", I guess I'm just trying to say the solution to "we can't build enough houses right now to meet demand" is not to say "then we should limit immigration". There's a lot of other steps you can take in the other direction before you find yourself having to blame it on the immigrants.
Considering the metric crap-ton of apps and features on a smart phone that are becoming more and more ubiquitous to employment and just doing business in general...no.
'Dumb' phones are certainly cheaper, but they are also becoming rather obsolete as time goes by. And I say that as a pseudo-dumb phone owner myself (a few essential apps and no linked accounts). I had to get issued a special Duo token (any replacements at my own expense) just to sign in to everything under the sun at my work...simply because I don't own my own smartphone. Tons of little transactional things that businesses used to cover are now being 'outsourced' to personal smart phones.
So no, I do not think cell phones (in a practical modern sense) are way cheaper than they used to be. The average price of a smart phone in America is ~$800 now, how is in the world is that cheaper than 10 years ago?
Construction costs have increased so dramatically recently that even in a lot of non-blighted (but cheap-land) areas, existing houses sell below replacement cost.
Your path leads to less habitat for everything but humans, more traffic, more smog, less birdsong, more noise, more light pollution, more crowds of people all staring at their phone. I'll take the greying population (a one-time shift and then it's over, once the baby boomers are all gone), over unsustainable attempts at constant growth.
Closing the border for 3 years is ALREADY the one thing that happened in 40 years that actually raised wages at the bottom. Close it another 7 and the wage and housing problem would be solved. At that point, feel free to open it back up, slowly. But it would take at least 7 years of low birth rate, curtailed immigration, and old people dying to just course correct back to a sane supply/demand ratio.
I love how YIMBYs believe in supply and demand and market dynamics for literally everything except the supply of humans. Looking at the chart at the top, it's perfectly clear we have a gross over-supply of people, or asset owners and employers would never be able to get away with raising prices and lowering wages like that.
I don't think I've seen anyone making the argument before that the reason wages are rising now is because of lower immigration. Has immigration really declined so much? I guess I expected it would in 2020 because of COVID, but I'd be interested in seeing the figures.
And I'm fully acknowledging that lowering the population is an option to fix the housing crisis. I'm not denying that at all like you're implying. I'm just saying that the solution has 2 sides, and I think that one is worse for the economy, not better.
As a counter-point, immigration reached a steep low in the 70s-80s without it fixing our wages/housing issues. Why would we expect that to change now? Especially with just 7 years of a pause? Seems wildly optimistic to me, and that's granting it would have any effect at all.
You are very wrong on that -- 1970 was literally the absolute low point of immigration in the US, on both an absolute and relative measure, since the 1800s. Immigrants were 20% of the labor force in the beginning of the 1900s. Then Congress implemented the National Origins Formula, which basically shut down immigration for everyone but western Europeans from 1921-1965. Immigration plummeted so that at the low point, in 1970, only 5% of the labor force were immigrants. This changed because of Lyndon Johnson's sweeping reform opening immigration to everyone, so that after the 70s, it's been steadily growing each year back to almost 1920 levels -- until the Covid shut down.
Do you really think it's a coincidence that it was PRECISELY during that period that the US achieved the only time in its entire history when wages grew and inequality shrank? When labor was at its most powerful? Of course it's not a coincidence -- everything is supply and demand. Less impoverished workers with no bargaining power and limited language skills, more leverage for workers = higher wages.
People don't like to talk about this because it seems mean to immigrants. It isn't their fault. They're great. But they absolutely depress wages and increase inequality, it is unavoidable. The larger the masses of laborers, the less leverage they have and more profit the employers can take from their labor. It has always and everywhere been the case.
So, if you haven't seen anyone make the argument about Covid immigration and the labor shortage, it's because it's now completely taboo to say anything about immigration/population size without being called racist. One would think that tactic to shut down debate might've been something the capitalist class came up with, yet here we have all these young progressives spouting off about it. Bit it doesn't matter what the immigrants look like, all that matters is how many of them there are and how hard they're willing to work at wages below what naturalized citizens would accept.
Anyway, immigration was basically shut down for two years because of Covid. It reduced the working age immigrant population by 2 million. That wasn't the ONLY thing that reduced the size of the labor force, because baby boomers *finally* retiring also did that. But it was a significant factor.
And the reduction in the labor force is the only reason wages actually went up at the bottom, for literally the first time in 40 years.
I understand that you value "the economy" more than the items I mentioned, when deciding whether you come down on the side of demand or supply. That's a legitimate perspective. For me, I will always choose quality of life over GDP, which I believe is a majority opinion, even though you rarely hear it from the governing class.
Well this is certainly compelling! I'm fairly convinced on the wage issue, at least enough to dig in more, but I'm still not sure what the magnitude of the effect on housing would be. I'm sure there's something to the math of "fewer people, fewer buyers, lower prices" but is it going to fix this crazy housing mess we're in or is it going to lower prices by 3% or something?
That's funny because from the Left I always hear that the Biden Administration more-or-less maintained Trump's immigration policies unchanged, which makes a bit of sense to me since I constantly hear about labor shortages in immigrant-dependent sectors.
Eli: “Labor shortages” are what drive up wages. They are a good thing for working people. It’s called supply and demand and it’s Econ 101. Unlimited immigration (the Biden approach) depresses wages, greatly enriches the 1% and increases income inequality.
I quite understand that labor shortages are what drive up wages. That's why I'm happy to hear that unchanged immigration policies from the Trump administration have led to labor shortages. On the other hand, if Biden is letting in all these immigrants, who's finding them to hire?
The biggest issue that YIMBYs have: their "social culture" is twitter. That's it. They will always remain losers as long as this is the case, because twitter turns all of its users into pathetic losers over time.
Yep. Speaking of structural forces, the structural forces of Twitter relentlessly push every discourse community toward smugger, meaner, dumber takes. It doesn't matter what the subject is -- could be anything from rollercoaster fans to Reformed theologians -- Twitter makes the conversation worse.
It's not that there aren't any good, thoughtful comments and comment threads on Twitter. There are! It's just a lot harder and more time consuming to write something like that vs. something mean and snarky, and you get the same amount of engagement anyway
Absolutely! You *can* have good conversations and good political debates on Twitter. Just like humans *can* survive in the frozen wastes of central Antarctica. But in both cases the environment is not working in your favor.
There's only one good Twitter and that's Science Twitter because our literal business is to never actually agree on anything so it's hard to actually get smug.
I live in a city with a serious housing shortage, and the YIMBYs are making serious political progress here under our new mayor. They are a political force in real life, not just twitter.
Madison, Wisconsin. The most prominent issue in last year's mayoral race was housing, with the current mayor running on a fairly aggressive YIMBY platform including some re-zoning and went on to win re-election. The city council is less YIMBY than the mayor, so progress is not as swift as she would like, but even the council just walked back their rejection of a new high-rise building on campus after political pressure from YIMBY activists and went back and approved the building at their next meeting.
I'm not saying the city is a YIMBY haven exactly, but things are definitely trending in that direction. More has been done in the last 4 years under our new mayor for housing than in the couple decades before she was elected.
Thank you for elaborating. I know little about Madison WI, other than it is a deep blue college town. A "new high-rise building on campus" ... so housing for college students (and/or employees) located on the campus grounds is political progress? Or is the building going to house non-university related residents I would think this would be up to the state, since they control the campus, not the city, but I must be wrong, since the city counsel needed to approve.
Well anyone could theoretically live there. It's not a university building, just part of the wider "campus" area I suppose. Not really using it as a technical term. But there is a lot of student objection to this sort of thing, and the council bowed down to it, and then reversed course specifically because of the pro-housing coalition in the city. That's what the YIMBY movement can do on a building-by-building level, and electing YIMBYs to city council seats and a YIMBY mayor.
The new mayor was elected in 2019. Prior to 2020, average new housing units in the city sat at about 2,000 per year for over a decade. In 2021 Madison added 3,500, added around the same in 2022, and is projected to add over 4,000 a year very soon. That's huge progress that is due to some zoning reforms and permitting reforms, and is a major point of the mayor's agenda.
YIMBY-supported legislation in California has been increasingly successful in passing through state government, and the YIMBY movement in general plays a pretty large role in the discourse around housing shortages here in the state.
Again, exactly what I'm critiquing: getting certain legislation or regulatory changes you like is meaningless until the actual cost of housing goes down.
It will take some decades to bring the cost of housing down in the problematic areas because even if all YIMBY policies were passed today to remove policy as the bottleneck, it simply takes time to build housing after a generation or three of being behind the curve.
In fact, that's a common argument by NIMBYs: "all this construction and yet prices don't drop." It worked for eggs and it will work for housing, but the latter takes more time.
The problem with Japan (and Asia in general) is that people want to live in cities. How does that not lead to massive problems with demand outpacing supply?
The movement as a whole may score some victories, and that is a good thing. The individuals themselves will always remain losers until they stop using twitter. That video game is uniquely good at causing people to lose sight of life.
"I don’t understand why that perspective is so often treated as antagonistic to the call for social housing that’s built at taxpayer expense, governed by the state, and distributed on the basis of need rather than through the market mechanism."
You could argue that's the government screwing around in the private sector but of course zoning laws, permitting, etc. is already the government screwing around in the private sector to an extent that reaches far beyond simple regulation.
My concern is always that the government has an unfortunate habit of trying to fix bad regulations by applying even complexity with even more regulations and the results are often suboptimal.
The government did go into building public housing decades ago. I think there should be more public housing, but it should be dispersed and not concentrated in big projects. They used to be synonymous with crime and entrenched poverty. Whatever became of HUD?
It’s interesting that critics of the rising cost and low availability of housing always think that the problem is “not enough housing”, and not “too many people”. Perhaps the problem of too many people is politically intractable, but excessive demand is in fact the problem. Perhaps we should at least stop adding to it. I realize this would impact profits in the construction industry. Oh well…
No, but they are dying on the streets now because our country has no use for them. Is that OK with you? It's supply and demand, and there's no demand for the the oversupply of unwanted children with no skills.
The population density of the US as whole is among the lowest in the world, on par with Kyrgyzstan and less than half the level of Ireland and less than a third of the UK. Even some of the most densely populated states like Connecticut are well below countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Not New Jersey, though. That place is full.
Well, you have to take into account that vast parts of the western U.S. are more or less uninhabitable due to lack of water, topography, and other issues. Average density is not really representative of resource constraints. Major aquifers in these regions are under immense strain and will one day be depleted. We should begin the transition to a sustainable future now, when we can still attain a pleasant future balance with our environment.
I'm not sure I take your point. Is it that Connecticut needs more people? You know they still have to be fed, and I'm not sure Connecticut could do it on their own. I would like to see some of the natural world left. There's not much of it in the Netherlands, which is pretty carefully curated. To be sure this is not just a U.S. problem.
I don't think that's really a relevant constraint. The Great Lakes region as a whole has enough water for the entire US population and then some I would think. We could just build mega-density cities around them and I think it would be fine, but our cities, outside of a few like New York/Miami/Chicago, are not particularly dense compared to modern standards. There's plenty of room for more people if we just build upward, and I don't think resource constraints are an issue in the US at this point.
Sure, but I just don't think America is anywhere near it's limits in any of these things. We produce tons of food, way more than we need, we're a net exporter, and I don't think we're running out of space to dispose of waste either. I don't see a single relevant resource constraint for America. Maybe some regions like water in the Southwest, but nothing on a national scale.
Please specify what exactly is going to happen to the people you consider excess. I’m pretty sure that’s the issue here, not the construction industry.
Maybe if you view the US as a "closed system", then sure less people = less housing demand. But if 1 million or two people move from, say Central America to the US, then the housing demand in Central America just drops as much as the US demand increases. This presumably decreases housing costs in Central America, which in turn will decrease the amount of people fleeing Central America. Yes, I know, there is more to it than housing costs. Poor governance, leftist political ideology, corruption, etc., but since the topic of the article is housing ....
I don't think Central American refugees are in an economic position to bid up the price of homeownership. If they are, that's a pretty impressive immigrant success story.
In the micro/individual perspective, you are of course correct. But in the collective/macro perspective, they have to live somewhere, and thereby increase the overall demand for housing.
I'm not sure **anything** in particular is going to happen to them. What I am suggesting is merely that we stop thinking we are doing something magical by "growing" the economy by adding more people. It's a Ponzi scheme. The U.S. and other developed e.g. Eurozone countries (and Japan and now China) have already begun reducing their populations simply by having fewer children. These are rational decisions by individuals, not a government mandate. The developing countries could radically improve their standards of living -- and reduce conflict -- by the same process. The people that are whining about this are levered investors, who need ever more growth - however detrimental to the general population's quality of life. Also, labor is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as other commodities. Once the population stops growing, and perhaps even declines a bit, housing availability and costs will gradually come into balance with the needs of the population, but "developers" will have to find a better business model than plopping crappy houses on good farmland -- or in inhospitable deserts.
I am suggesting no such thing. I'm simply saying stop population growth and let housing catch up. Then perhaps we can let the population decline a bit, tear down the crappy shacks and decrepit apartments, upgrade living standards, and improve (rather than continuing to pollute and destroy) the environment. We are not an endangered species, but our population is hardly in optimal condition.
Or you could let people who want to live in cities live there, by building enough high-quality ("luxury") apartments and condos for them in existing neighborhoods, and stop pushing them out onto the exurban and wild fringes where they don't even want to be.
The issue is that admitting less people into your country while it is simultaneously getting older is going to put quite a strain on your economy (See Japan). You need working age people to pay taxes for your welfare state for the elderly.
It wouldn't be a catastrophe, but a slowing of economic growth, for certain.
A slowing of economic growth, sure, if quantity rather than quality is the criterion. I invite you to read some of the work of Herman Daly, in particular "Beyond Growth" for an examination of economics in a "no growth" world. To be sure the transition will be fraught for the financial sector and the highly indebted, but debt is borrowing from the future -- and the future is now arriving. The highly financialized economy we now take for granted is a relatively new creature. Anyhow, Japan is managing to cope and after a few decades of stagnation is finding a new path -- and it involves neither population growth nor immigration. Also, real estate, especially in the countryside, is readily available at modest prices.
You may be right that this transition is the future, but I think the countries that can put it off as long as possible are going to be the strongest in this new world. It's clearly survivable, and perfectly fine to live a life in such an economy, I don't think everyone in Japan or Italy is in misery because of it, but I don't know that it would benefit anyone to try to actively encourage this transition any earlier than necessary. Overall I guess I think it's just better to be in a growing, dynamic country with high housing costs than a stagnant country with more affordable housing, but maybe Herman Daly can convince me otherwise.
I think you conflate a stable population with stagnation. Not the same at all. It is true that many of our social and economic systems will need a rather painful period of adjustment, but putting it off will make it both more painful and less manageable.
Maybe it doesn't have to lead to stagnation, but it seems like for the countries experiencing this transition now that stagnation seems part of it. Is there a counter example of a country with stable/declining population while still experience decent economic growth?
People can get richer (have a higher quality of life) without there being more of them. To be sure, given the debt loads of our current society, the transition period will be a problem as we work off the borrowing. I hope that one day our descendants will look back on today's economic slavery as a weird anomaly. In answer to your question, I think that Japan is now beginning to emerge from its transition period. The Netherlands seem to be doing OK. We should pay attention, because we will indeed have to deal with the same issues -- or worse.
I find it annoying how addicted progressives, broadly defined, are to making moral arguments. Obviously we all have our moral beliefs, and most people involved in politics are doing so at least in part to reshape the world in a way we see as moral. But every argument boils down to, "you're a bad person if you don't support my political position." It can never be, "it's in your self-interest to support this," because if you're prioritizing your self-interest that makes you a bad person.
I place a lot of the blame on the NGO complex. Most professional progressive activists work for NGOs, which exist to make donors feel warm and fuzzy about donating. So NGOs will always prioritize self-righteous moral arguments that make supporters feel morally superior. Contrast that to unions, which exist to win money and benefits for their members. A left that is powered by unions instead of NGOs will be less reliant on moral grandstanding, and I would wager a lot more effective at winning.
What % of Americans would you define as "comfortable"? I find it hard to believe you cannot assemble a majority coalition out of people who would benefit from your policies. As just 1 example, I work in tech and make a very comfortable living, but I have been laid off and gone without health care, and would have much more peace of mind if my health care wasn't tied to my employment. On top of that, I have friends and family members who are not doing as well financially and would very much benefit from guaranteed health care.
I'd also add there's a common good. I pay taxes and they fund parks and pools I get to use. Maybe if I had lower taxes and bought a private pool membership I'd come out slightly ahead financially, but I'm happy to fund pools that I get to use and everyone in my neighborhood gets to use. They make my neighborhood a nicer, happier place. So I think you can talk about a common good that even relatively well-off people can benefit from.
Yeah no argument on housing. I sometimes think we won't see national housing reform until we're a majority renter nation. I would push back that there are a lot of majority-renter cities where you can organize a majority coalition, and a lot of tax-burdened homeowners who don't necessarily benefit in the short-term from spiraling prices who we can find common cause with.
I also would make a common good argument. I would venture there are plenty of SF and LA homeowners who have seen massive price appreciation, but ALSO seen such negative externalities from housing unaffordability their quality of life has declined.
Agreed. If you can’t figure out SOME argument for why your policy preference will ultimately be good for the person you’re trying to convince, even if it’s somewhat attenuated, you don’t deserve their vote and can’t really blame them for withholding it.
There is yet another argument: housing scarcity will make your town or city suck. If the rich are the only people that can live there, it's going to skew ever older, become boring, and collapse under its own weight. Most of your children won't be able to live near you, no one will be able to afford to take a chance on any interesting ventures, and it will become ever-more homogenous.
All those trends are present and accelerating in my NE college town over the last twenty years. I realize they sound great to some, but it's the core of my YIMBY pitch, locally. We'll see if it has a constituency
If you are truly asking people to vote against their own interests, then I think shaming-as-advocacy is an even worse idea. The only way a person will vote against their interests is if you can appeal to their goodwill and make them feel that their sacrifice is valued. A person will never feel motivated to make a personal sacrifice at the behest of activists who are openly contemptuous of them.
I'm simply addressing points made by the commenter?
I am also annoyed at how progressives employ (poor) moral reasoning but I'll use their own arguments against them to 1. talk to them on their level in case that actually works, and 2. point out their blatant hypocrisy for others to see.
I should have been clear that I think unions often do act like NGOs and I think that's a large reason they have been losing members for decades. But I do think unions are structurally oriented to win for their members and you've seen certain unions like the Teamsters get back to their mission.
Yes, it comes down to politics being a vehicle for personal moral validation in the mind of liberals more than any actual policy change. Reminds me of any discussion of healthcare that involves someone saying "healthcare is a human right." It takes any nuanced discussion about the path forward for healthcare in this country and makes it "if you disagree with my personal vision you are evil."
What's interesting about the self-interest angle is that whether it's viewed as moral or not depends on whether or not that self-interest also represents a group the political actor wants to help.
In the case you've described, those prioritizing their self-interest -- the NIMBYs -- are bad because they're not of the group the progressives want to help. Their self-interest is therefore selfish and bad.
But in the left narratives I've encountered, anyone who is of a favored class and doesn't vote in their self-interest is considered a rube. Turning down more government money to help with food, education, childcare? You're an idiot.
"You're a bad person if you don't support my politics" is the default position among the most strident progressives. Why? Because they can't conceive that anyone would view an issue with moral implications any differently than they would.
It's like thinking everyone has access to the same perspective -- here's what's happening, here's why, here's how to address it -- but they're intentionally making the anti-moral decision to oppose the obvious solution.
As Freddie wrote in a previous article on this topic, social capture explains why this is happening. The moral impetus at the heart of the issue is subsumed by the battle for social ranking that results from the attendant crusading.
It's like when he wrote "Woke is not what you do, it's who you are."
Same thing with a certain class of YIMBYs. It's not an action anymore to reach a goal. it's an identity.
I've often wondered if this is partly the result of the civil rights movement and today's progressives desire to have a similar cause. The civil rights movement was a great, just, and moral cause and I sometimes get the sense that younger progressives feel like they missed out by not getting to participate in such a historic and meaningful cause. To make up for it, the civil rights template has been grafted on to just about every progressive cause. It's not merely well meaning people with differences in policy preferences. It has to be good versus evil.
Obviously a complex historical question, and it's not like unions were ever perfect - they were corrupt, violent, racist, supported the Vietnam War, big backers of the White Australia policy, etc.
But in general it seems like the shift from trade unions to NGOs as the core of the organised left has been massively detrimental to society, for pretty much the reasons you said - collective self-interest is a more reliable motivator for constructive action than some vague idea of the common good, which always just ends up being distorted into a much more insidious and dishonest form of self-interest.
The core of the NIMBY position is that people moving somewhere are obliged to seek the existing community’s permission, and abide by its decision to accept your membership or not. It’s true that this permission is more likely to be granted if you ask nicely and make an effort to appear like you’ll fit in / not rock the boat. But the YIMBY project is fundamentally animated by rejecting the structure in which communities have this kind of authority over prospective neighbors.
Simply put, of all the things that could give you authority over my life, your incumbency on or hereditary connection to the best land is a uniquely illegitimate one (feudalism! in America!), and it is morally important that we loudly reject your claim. Are we to be a nation of immigrants, hard work, enterprise, striving? Or a nation of which acres your daddy owned?
And yet, many of those in the YIMBY community would not balk at the concept of "stolen land". I understand complex throughts are complex, but one cannot discount one hereditary connection to land while encouraging others without suffering from some severe cognitive dissonance and chronic ahistoricity.
"The core of the NIMBY position is that people moving somewhere are obliged to seek the existing community’s permission,"
See this is just factually, objectively incorrect - they don't care about that at all. They care about where they live, period. This is precisely what I'm critiquing here, inventing motivations for NIMBYs in order to deepen moral judgments of them in a way that creates no political utility.
Freddie, if all the NIMBYs care about new people coming to where they live, then you kind of end up in a situation where it's a default problem "everywhere" people are trying to move to.
NIMBY motivations are very similar to anti-immigration motivations because the underlying commonality is preserving the status quo for incumbents.
I think NIMBYs care about their neighborhoods staying the same and their housing values not being reduced by increased local supply. Those desires are contrary to the public good so I want to see them defeated, but I don't think they're secretly scared of "the Other" showing up at their door. More to the point, I don't understand what value there is (analytically or politically) in positing those secret motives. How does that help?
The motives aren't secret! NIMBYs are on the record saying these things! (Of course, left-NIMBYs say different things than right-NIMBYs; the former are more important in our most urban areas though.)
The fun thing is that upzoning--the only real solution where there's no more available land--increases property prices for landowners. In expensive places, we'd be luck to see housing prices stabilize consistently, let alone drop meaningfully.
Many homeowners are explicitly motivated by "the Other" scaring them. My own parents protested apartments in their neighborhood more than a decade ago (before property prices really took off). A lot of it's simply "I don't want more cars driving and parking in my neighborhood" and isn't specifically targeted against any category of "those people."
In earlier iterations of housing discourse it was considered conspiratorial to center financial motivations vs. taking NIMBYs at face value about their crowding, demographic, and aesthetic concerns.
Specifically, the complaints expressed at community meetings are:
a) Too many people are going to live where I live if this project is approved
b) The people who will live where I live if this project is approved are the wrong type for our community (too rich, too poor, too loud, too boring, too many families, too many singles, too transient, etc)
c) My opinions and concerns about this change to the number and characteristics of my neighbors hasn't been sufficiently sought, listened to, or reflected in updates to the design.
To me, that adds up to "I should get to decide who lives in my community." Do you disagree?
This is an oversimplification. More development means more people and more people means more noise, more traffic, more pollution, more strain on community resources. Doesn’t matter what “type” of people they are.
Communities with strained resources usually try to encourage development of high-value land uses so they will get more property tax. Traffic and pollution come from auto-centric layout comes from trying to push everyone else out of sight.
When I was the NIMBY it was because of severe degradation of infrastructure. I've seem massive subdivisions built off of two lane country roads designed for a few farmers. A ten minute drive became an hour. I fought that. At that time schools, sewer and water were also big concerns. The real estate speculators paid off the country commissioners and walked away with huge profits.
I wonder how that axillary dwelling units that can now be added, are going to effect prices and housing availability. It does have the potential to spread the wealth around and provide low income housing.
It's certainly possible for specific municipalities to manage growth incompetently but this is not, like, a structural problem with housing development. Productive land uses pay for the infrastructure upgrades that accommodate them. It's a well-oiled machine and very likely the one that created your house also.
Obviously incumbents should have certain rights. All but the most fanatical YIMBYS presumably support the kind of zoning laws that prevent, say, a tannery from opening in their backyard (the kind of thing zoning was created to prevent in the first place).
I think invoking the above objections is a rather cynical way of depicting opponents as the sort of people who opposed school integration, etc.
Taken as the subjective thoughts of the NIMBYs, it is obviously incorrect. Taken as the power structure instituted by their actually-existing policies in place, it's correct. The NIMBYs don't *care* about where *you* live, but you are nonetheless obliged to seek their permission via either financial buy-in or a planning board meeting.
Interesting. I'm surprised you're getting push-back here, because I find this part of your argument very compelling:
The core of the NIMBY position is that people moving somewhere are obliged to seek the existing community’s permission, and abide by its decision to accept your membership or not. It’s true that this permission is more likely to be granted if you ask nicely and make an effort to appear like you’ll fit in / not rock the boat. But the YIMBY project is fundamentally animated by rejecting the structure in which communities have this kind of authority over prospective neighbors.
If that's the NIMBY premise, I'm a NIMBY. There is almost no level of societal organization from the family to business partnerships to community associations to...hell, even Substacks or Facebook groups...where anyone is allowed to join and incumbents/owners don't have the right to kick them out if they don't abide by existing member standards.
I don't see what's wrong with this. I also have a hard time believing that even YIMBYs think it's perfectly okay for rich white Americans to just push their way in and demand entrance and acceptance into any type of community, whether they're wanted or not (like say, demanding acceptance to an indigenous tribe, or the right to purchase property on reservation land).
And I don't at all see how the first premise relates to the second one, regarding incumbency or hereditary connection to land. Hell, I would be 100% in favor of abolishing all inheritance or rights to property that are received from parents/ancestors. The very idea of the first part is one of freedom of association, which must inherently include the right NOT to associate. You get to decide who you let into your club and who you don't, and you get to try to get into the clubs you want and aren't forced to join any you don't want. That's the opposite of rights that follow birth, which aren't free associations at all. Of all relationships in life, no one chooses their parents and no one chooses their children. Legal transfers of rights to descendants from dead people is the most illiberal possible position of all.
So I guess I'm a socialist NIMBY. I think people who just want to push their way in anywhere and ruin things for everyone else are obnoxious and I don't care about their interests. Advocating for that right doesn't seem progressive to me at all, it seems libertarian and anarchic. But granting rights to land, property, lordship titles, country club membership, college admission, or anything else via inheritance, rather than one's own efforts and choices, is also bad. I don't really understand how this even gets ascribed to "progressive" and not. YIMBYs are mostly young people and capitalists, they're only aligned by their interest in aggregating people and density, not any larger coherent ideology that I can make out.
"But granting rights to land, property, lordship titles, country club membership, college admission, or anything else via inheritance, rather than one's own efforts and choices, is also bad."
I rather sympathize with your position, which (much like my own) is a kind of "none of the above but maybe some of each, but more nuanced". I do think though that your list of proposed "non-heritable" things is kind of a mixed bag and rather needs to be addressed in a (more nuanced?) item by item way. For example, country clubs are private clubs, they get to decide -- as you say. Legacy admissions to colleges? They're private too, and can make their own rules -- but they could lose their tax advantages and access to other grants; there's no reason for the public-at-large to subsidize them in any way. You makes your choices and you takes your consequences. I rather favor an allowance for inheritances, we all would like to help our children, but agree there should be some limit. This used to be accomplished via substantial inheritance and gift taxes, which also had the virtue of making money available for redistribution (gasp!) to the less advantaged. That's been gutted recently, and should be brought back . That might take care of the country club problem, too ...
Okay, fine, people can pass on some memorabilia and a little nest egg. I'll live with that. But we have a rather grotesque situation where billionaires can create trusts and generation-skipping legacy blah blah blah structures which basically allow them to not only not pay taxes but to transfer enormous wealth to grandkids in a way that's actually shocking that it's legal in this country. As close as you can get to lordship and feudal titles, even if the legal basis is slightly different.
There's a country club in my town that charges $180k a year for basically a pool and golf course. Now obviously, the real benefit that people pay for is the social network and business generation opportunities. But you cannot even submit an application, let alone get in, without a written personal recommendation from several existing owners, which then gets you an invitation that allows you to apply. I'm totally happy for that country club to carry on as it does, and I will enjoy laughing at the people who belong to it. But even that place has the sense not to allow transfer of membership upon death!
The additional driver of this is the connection of geography and thereby real estate to public schools. When my wife and I were last looking for a home we saw this in its crudest form, where houses on one side of the street were at a roughly $200k premium to houses on the other side of the street, for no reason other than that street is the demarcation line between the 'good' and the 'not as good' high school districts. Now as a liberal person I find this situation more than a little absurd, but one can easily understand how it results in NIMBYism, and really more broadly an incentive against anything changing ever. Getting the house on the good side of the street was not only a major investment on a long term asset, it also, assuming school districts don't change, locks you into a good situation on one of the other three big cost disease items, that being education. I am increasingly convinced that virtually all local politics, at least in suburbia where most people live, revolve around this connection. It sucks but it's completely rational that it ends up that way and any solution needs to account for it, and to have a way that protects the people bought in under the old system from totally losing out. Without that there probably cannot be successful reform.
This entire argument could be applied to just about every progressive belief.
1) Think people should be shamed for fighting against higher taxes to fund a stronger welfare state? Most people's take-home income is even more important to them then the value of their house. Why shouldn't the argument against shaming tax conservatives apply here to?
2) "An irony that YIMBYs frequently admit to is that 'the righteous throngs who need homes' have a habit of becoming “selfish NIMBYs” in exactly the time it takes for them to close on a house." If you replace "homes" with "wealth" it's the same phenomenon - the people we fight for become unsympathetic once they achieve their goal of joining the successful class. This is true even though we *want* them to join the successful class. Like, it's good if a poor person learns to code and makes good $, right? Is this the SF tech class that everyone hates the new version of the Detroit autoworkers of the 50s?
3) The argument that poor people are NIMBYs because of wage dynamics doesn't hold up. Rich people are just as NIMBY'y! You'll hear the same arguments in Nantucket that you do everywhere else. Regardless of income, few people want higher taxes and few people want their suburb to turn into Manhattan.
The shaming is a recognition that we're asking people to do something that's not in their direct interest, for the greater good. This might be a bad tactic, but it seems pretty similar to the project of this blog, which is to get people to care about people other than themselves for unselfish reasons.
I feel like I'm going to be castigated as some kind of YIMBY weirdo. I'm not - I don't participate in any subcultures, online or otherwise. This comment is as close as I'll get. And I don't *want* a big apartment building going up next to my house (let alone a homeless shelter), I just recognize that it's shitty of me not to support it. I don't want to have higher taxes, but...same thing. Either way, everyone's banking, to some extent, on my sense of shame getting me to make unselfish politic choices.
Completely true. Progressives need to make arguments about the common good - and how it ultimately creates a more prosperous, safe, and well-ordered society for ALL of us, with fewer social problems that eventually hit the affluent as well as the working class.
Shame is a bad tactic for convening majorities. This has long been known and it long confounded me that progressives rely so heavily on it. But I ultimately realized they do it because they enjoy it. They have contempt for a lot of their fellow citizens and get a kick out of self-righteousness.
Agree, but conservatives have a similar contempt for their fellow citizens. They just express it more often as anger - which is just as fun to express.
Probably more of a human thing than a progressive thing.
I'm so desperate for the Left to make the common good central to their pitch. While I'm sympathetic to a lot of identity politics, I always feel they're missing the second half of the pitch, where these efforts are building a world where all those categories can flourish together. I know it's "cringe" but I can't abandon the project of a rainbow coalition that even includes straight white people, and doesn't just foster allies, but builds actual fucking friendships.
I don’t think home prices are a big part of NIMBYism. A far bigger factor is a deep seated objection to any changes to their current comfortable and familiar environment. This tends to get more intense as one gets older and I think our aging population is another reason for increasing NIMBYism.
As proof of my theory there is a ton of objection to development that will increase property values.
"As proof of my theory there is a ton of objection to development that will increase property values."
Absolutely. In our Wydaho area, a ski resort on the Wyoming side of the border wants to expand. The only access to the ski resort is through Idaho. If the ski resort get's its way, then local property values on the Idaho side will increase, and simultaneously, the quality of life will decrease. The "No" folks are focused on quality of life, not property values. The "yes" folks may exist (IDK?) but they are silent.
Ah yes, the glorious human right to... unfettered access to a ski resort. This is just a perfect example of generalizing the concept of NIMBYism to the point moral meaninglessness!
“generalizing the concept of NIMBYism to the point moral meaninglessness”
I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say. Our point, I think, is that this isn’t generally about money. It’s about an overall dislike of change for any reason - good or bad.
As an example there are tons of homeowners who are opposed to developments that might trigger gentrification. A giant condo building that contains a Whole Foods? Hell no!
Agreed. As Freddie stated in the article, buying a home is often the biggest financial decision of a person's life. As such, it is generally not made on a whim. When one finally settles on a particular home, it shouldn't be surprising that they want to hang on to what made them want to buy that home in the first place.
It's not about access or human rights. There is a perfectly suitable road right now. It is about Expansion. As in developing a lot of new terrain, more lifts/runs that can handle a much bugger crowd. Of, and a lot of new (mostly expensive) housing. This will increase demand and prices in the surrounding community. (more 2nd homes, Air BnB, etc). More traffic, congestion when there never was any before. More in-fill in the valley.
I was merely pointing this out as an example of people who are protesting development despite the fact it would increase their property values. There is no morality angle.
There is something immoral about denying me the right to ski Grand Targhee while staying in a 5BR ski in ski out place. I've been stuck staying at that Super8 and it's tragic.
Try the Teepee. Is much closer to the hill. Sure, it was built without regard to building codes, and looks like a giant fire waiting to happen, but way better than the Super 8. Teton Cabins also better then Super 8, as long as you don't mind sharing the conversations of the people in the rooms next to you.
This is correct. Most residential development - even multi-family in a predominantly SFH area - will ultimately increase the value of surrounding property prices because dense housing increases the uses that can be made of the property. But it also decreases the neighboring property owner's present and near term enjoyment of the house they call home. These are perfectly understandable and natural reactions to have.
My neighbourhood demonstrates this really well. It has been a YIMBY/affordable housing wet dream and my house price is probably up an additional 50% due to it.
But 6 years so far of constant construction. Roads blocked. Waking up to dump trunk horns and demolition. Huge increase in assaults, burglaries, car thefts. The park where our kid used to play is filled with junkies. The elementary school is using the cafeteria as classrooms. Packages stolen from doorsteps within minutes. Can't get on a bus during peak times. Two condo projects has turned into something like 16 now. And the estimated completion times have been off by many years for every single one.
Never thought I'd be the old rich white guy complaining about this stuff.
Really shitty subsidized builds that are falling apart before they are completed.
Not sure about the direct causation. Seems like higher population density in general has brought good and bad with it. There just wasn't a market for fentanyl in the neighbourhood 5 years ago. The bleachers at the school used to be where high school kids fucked. Now it's just a minefield of needles. A bunch of this was likely covid effects as well.
I remember constant rapid construction in CA. Subdivisions stretching over thousands of acres. The housing speculators made huge profits and all infrastructure was left in shambles. We need both YIMBYs and NIMBYs to hash out good policy.
Living in NIMBY land I think it is very much both. The thing you have to realize about "developments that will increase property value" is that there is a lot of skepticism and a lot or risk aversion. I suspect a lot of people would object to a proposal with an expected outcome of increasing their property value by 20% if there was a downside risk of cutting it by half, since having you nest egg cut in half is a crisis, while having it increase a bit is just icing.
I live in an inner ring suburb of Philadelphia. Old infrastructure that can't support new development keeps our taxes high. Of course new development would mean a wider tax base but I don't think has thought that one through yet.
A good example is we have two literal gilded era mansions in the township that were abandoned. There was a huge fight when a developer wanted to buy one and turn it into a boutique hotel/wedding venue/farm because of storm water zoning. People preferred a vacant property to something that might have extra toilets flushing. They won though and its going to be a huge benefit to the township and hopefully will spur on even more development. The second, large estate was recently purchased by rich people from outside the area to historically preserve.
This. Opposition to development (at least where I am) is not driven by fear of property value loss, but by concerns of lack of access to scarce amenities like walkability, yards, sunlight, views, schools etc). These all correlate with property values but I'm not sure an offer to keep property values growing at the current rate through government subsidy (to present an absurd idea) would lead to support for more housing. What's happening where I am is a housing crisis so terrible that NIMBYs don't really have a leg to stand on, but even with generous zoning,there are not enough actual places go develop the amount of housing we need, and the value of single family homes is so high that it almost never makes sense to demolish one and build something with more units. Materials and labor costs cannot be ignored either.
As for an expanded investment in publichousing, there's not a YIMBY I know that doesn't support thahat, but the amount of money needed to fund such a program is so immense that one could be forgiven for thinking that presenting the idea as an alternative to more expansive zoning is a poison pill argument made in bad faith.
Just to be clear,YIMBYs can be self righteous and I agree more coalition work would've nice.but YIMBYs are not opposed to the state,per se. Indeed in California, all the progress has been made at the State level through bills limiting local control of land use.
“ One of their core failings, as a group, is to forever make NIMBYism a failure of personal morals. The word “selfish” is constantly invoked by YIMBYs against NIMBYs, for example, under the theory that they’re putting their own self-interest above those of people who need homes. But in fact NIMBYism is simply a naturally emergent behavior that stems from the 21st-century macroeconomic situation.”
While I get the point here, I think it is mostly off. And please note the tone and intent shaming of YIMBYs for being shaming of NIMBYs. Come on man, really?
I live in a liberal college city of 65,000 plus another 20,000 extra when school is in session. The city is 5 square miles. The campus is a state school and sits on land not part of the city, but is within the city and surround in on one side. The university has been building more student housing, but it is a very popular school and has been growing by 2000 student per year for many years.
The voters in the city are very liberal. They passed an ordinance that requires a majority resident citizen vote to approve any peripheral development. This was after a large housing development was approved through the normal building commission and city council process… in the 1980s. They also passed another ordinance for a property tax supplement to fund the acquisition of peripheral land to then lock into permanent ag or natural land status… in some cases using the USDA programs to preserve farmland (which is a crock of NIMBY propaganda in my state as land is not in short supply for farming, it is water). The residents also demanded an agreement with the county to not encroach on their fair land and elected-moated city. In the case where there is a peripheral development, the city would share the tax revenue with the county in excess in what the county would otherwise expect.
One development within the city limits got so tied up in environmental legal challenges that the developer pulled out. The local NIMBYs claim that they support densification, but then use every bit of influence and power they can muster to block infill development too.
The result has been a mess. Not enough commercial activity and tax revenue from the lost development and the resulting increase in the tax base. Roads in disrepair because there is not enough in the general fund. Increase in local sales tax did not help. Housing costs through the roof. Average $2200/mth for an apartment. And it has also driven housing costs higher in all the surrounding communities. Parking problems in the small down town. Congestion. Lots of bike and auto collisions from the student and resident congestion. City programs for children and seniors canceled due to budget shortfalls… even with several supplemental property taxes. Not enough jobs in the city, and housing too expensive for the university employees and students, so massive commuting takes place and clogs the local freeway at rush hours.
I have lived in the city for over 40 years. I have fought the NIMBYs. And what I know about them is that the labels given by the YIMBYs are largely accurate. They are selfish. But it isn’t just the value of their real estate they are protecting, it is more that they are preventing change… preventing others from joining their party. And here is what really frosts me. They are generally fucking liberals advocating open borders and sanctuary states and cities. They are claimed advocates for the poor. They demand affordable housing. The city is older retired university employees and young poor students. Very few young families and young working professionals. The public schools are seeing declining enrollment. As these two demographics tend to spend the most on entertainment and retail, the lack of them also kills the tax base.
I was just reading that in mega-liberal S.F. Residents of an area next to the Tenderloin are fighting against the building of a 90-unit affordable housing unit.
Here is what I know… go to Texas where many cities have limited zoning rules and people are resigned to the concept of owner rights to build what he wants to build on his land.
In the places that liberals dominate the zoning rules are suffocating and the roadblocks for development are much higher.
My assessment of this is that NIMBYism is just another bit of evidence of the flaw in the psychology of people that identify as politically liberal. Blocking development is frankly evil at this point when so many cannot afford housing, yet my liberal friends and neighbors vote to block it and claim their virtue saving the environment. They suck. They are selfish. I can no longer work as an advocate to get new developments approved because I have zero respect for them. I call them what they are and they hate me for showing the rest of the community what they really are.
What does "they're selfish" actually add to your analysis? What, conceptually or philosophically or economically, does it do for you beyond adding a certain emotional kick?
They shroud themselves in a cloak of virtue for caring about the environment. This influences some young voters to vote against their own economic interests. I have already attempted to work them for compromise, but they accept nothing except blocking the development. Painting them as greedy selfish people helps destroy the fake virtue identity and gets more voters to turn against them.
Negative branding for the benefits of politics is their game. I just turn it back on them.
The developments they defeated had every environmental and social enhancement agreed to by the developers. Highly progressive with public transportation links, zero carbon, affordable housing, road enhancements, green space, Smart development designs... and they still blocked it.
Theirs is a zero sum game. There is no room for compromise. They can only be defeated by a PR war.
An analysis of Left NIMBYism as the pursuit of economic interest rather than a personal hypocrisy to be corrected by pointing out the logical contradiction? Strongly affects what political coalitions you have to build: you need to specifically mobilize the working class *against* the coalition of the upper-middle class and the charity beneficiaries.
Eliminating zoning increases property value by increasing option value. If a big developer wants to build a high rise where your house is, but can't because of zoning, ending that zoning will increase the demand for the house, and thus its price. Even if you don't sell, the increased market value gives you more to borrow against.
Here in CT zoning and development are often the most important and hotly contested issues. Where I live (Stamford) major factions in the local government have formed around these issues, and the savvy players are also waging the battle at the state level with much success but also harsh criticism. The YIMBY / NIMBY online stuff plays almost no role. The real action happens at local meetings and behind the scenes. It would be nice if there was more broad-based participation in these debates, especially from renters that make up a larger and larger share of the population. These issues will dominate elections for years to come. They don't even break down cleanly along party lines, as currently it is an intra-Democrat fight given a lack of Republicans and no organized movements among independents.
It's hard to know in detail what is going on in neighboring towns full of economic elites, where they fight tooth and nail to stop any apartment buildings, enrollment of schoolchildren from neighboring less-wealthy districts, etc. I imagine that the state will intervene in the coming years.
This is going to shock you, but messaging matters in politics
Allowing (encouraging?) millions of illegal immigrants has the dual effect of depressing working class wages because of the increase in people who will work for next to nothing just to be here and making housing more expensive by dramatically increasing demand. The Biden administration is culpable.
There is no challenge we face that can’t be blamed on the illegal alien invasion. If we didn’t have so many illegal aliens, we wouldn’t need as much food, so we would have fewer cows farting methane into our atmosphere and causing climate change.
Presumably because if those terrible-horrible-no good illegals just stayed in their home countries, they would starve-be killed-etc. and decrease the surplus population?
That's a Humbug take if I ever heard it.
If you are correct then why not throw our borders completely open and bring in the two or three billion people who would choose to live here? What would happen to our already inadequate social support systems? Are you really okay with that?
There is a strange logic that lives in the word where the only two options are "ban illegulz, they're taking our jorbs" and "open tha bordurz and let billionz in".
Isn't releasing "asylum seekers" into the country on their own recognizance de facto open borders?
What is your approach to dealing with illegal immigration? You do understand the meaning of the word “illegal”?
This doesn't address the point being made in the least. It's essentially a cheap ad hominem attack that runs away from the issues.
Show me some real numbers on how “illegals making next to nothing” are playing a significant role in our housing shortage.
Canada essentially doesn't have illegals. We let in a whole lot of rich and educated immigrants. And when they aren't rich and educated we encourage them to stay in less populated areas for a while.
Yeah so that's a problem with white-collar immigration who make a lot more than nothing and immediately become competitors for upscale housing.
Oh, so now you want to have a substantive debate?
Sure. If you can make a substantive argument that illegals are a significant cause of our housing shortage, I’d be interested in reading it.
Why didn't you say that in the first place instead of going on a rant about how illegals automatically get blamed everything the price of sushi goes up?
Let me ask you this - how would a significant decrease in our migrant population affect construction costs? My sense from all the complaining from contractors in Florida is that costs would increase.
Pretty sure those illegal aliens would need just as much food if they stay in their home countries as they do in the US. Mexican (and Brazilian and Venezuelan ...) cows also fart methane. You are just shifting the location of the farting cow. And, of course, since edible cow parts are shipped world-wide, the exact location of the farting cow is not so meaningful. It will still exist and fart.
The rise in housing prices is fundamentally due to a mismatch between the number of people seeking housing and the number of houses available. You're correct that if we just stop admitting immigrants that housing prices will eventually go down, as we have a negative birth rate, but this problem can also be solved by just building a lot more housing. Your path leads to economic stagnation as the population slowly grows older, and the economy sags under the weight of it's elderly. I prefer the "build more houses" path.
That's kind of the problem but building more houses is obviously cheaper in rural and exurban areas. Immigration in general tends to be concentrated in already built up urban cores.
Farmland is expensive. How are they going to afford it and the tools to farm. Very few small farmers anymore. We have some go into it in our area, usually to quit when they realize how much work it is.
That's not really the whole story at all though is it?
Lot's of recent market influences have made basic house construction more expensive in the first place (land prices, supply shortages, inflation, labor, etc.). So many developers are simply going bigger and swankier to sell to the demographic that can still afford them: upper-middle class, all upper class, and corporations. New house construction is actually booming right now, but very little of it is affordable to any lower-middle and middle class buyers - which happen to be both the largest buyer demographic, and the ones who need it the most.
It's not nearly as simple as you would suggest it is.
No, of course, like everything it is actually extremely complicated. But in the realm of "too many immigrants causing too much demand" I'm simply stating that there are two ways to solve that issue, fewer immigrants or to meet the demand.
What you're talking about is part of the reason it's difficult to meet the demand, to build enough houses, and is difficult. There's a lot of factors that get in the way of us building enough houses, and everything you mentioned is part of that problem. I'm not saying "just build more houses, it's easy", I guess I'm just trying to say the solution to "we can't build enough houses right now to meet demand" is not to say "then we should limit immigration". There's a lot of other steps you can take in the other direction before you find yourself having to blame it on the immigrants.
It really is as simple as supply and demand.
You build more of it and things will get more affordable. Just like eggs.
Right. Just like cell phones.
You don’t think cell phones are way cheaper than they used to be?
Are you really ignoring how much tech has advanced in the last few decades?
You can get really cheap phones that still do computing miracles compared to 10 years ago.
Considering the metric crap-ton of apps and features on a smart phone that are becoming more and more ubiquitous to employment and just doing business in general...no.
'Dumb' phones are certainly cheaper, but they are also becoming rather obsolete as time goes by. And I say that as a pseudo-dumb phone owner myself (a few essential apps and no linked accounts). I had to get issued a special Duo token (any replacements at my own expense) just to sign in to everything under the sun at my work...simply because I don't own my own smartphone. Tons of little transactional things that businesses used to cover are now being 'outsourced' to personal smart phones.
So no, I do not think cell phones (in a practical modern sense) are way cheaper than they used to be. The average price of a smart phone in America is ~$800 now, how is in the world is that cheaper than 10 years ago?
Construction costs have increased so dramatically recently that even in a lot of non-blighted (but cheap-land) areas, existing houses sell below replacement cost.
I've heard contractors say that building materials have come down lately.
Your path leads to less habitat for everything but humans, more traffic, more smog, less birdsong, more noise, more light pollution, more crowds of people all staring at their phone. I'll take the greying population (a one-time shift and then it's over, once the baby boomers are all gone), over unsustainable attempts at constant growth.
Closing the border for 3 years is ALREADY the one thing that happened in 40 years that actually raised wages at the bottom. Close it another 7 and the wage and housing problem would be solved. At that point, feel free to open it back up, slowly. But it would take at least 7 years of low birth rate, curtailed immigration, and old people dying to just course correct back to a sane supply/demand ratio.
I love how YIMBYs believe in supply and demand and market dynamics for literally everything except the supply of humans. Looking at the chart at the top, it's perfectly clear we have a gross over-supply of people, or asset owners and employers would never be able to get away with raising prices and lowering wages like that.
I don't think I've seen anyone making the argument before that the reason wages are rising now is because of lower immigration. Has immigration really declined so much? I guess I expected it would in 2020 because of COVID, but I'd be interested in seeing the figures.
And I'm fully acknowledging that lowering the population is an option to fix the housing crisis. I'm not denying that at all like you're implying. I'm just saying that the solution has 2 sides, and I think that one is worse for the economy, not better.
As a counter-point, immigration reached a steep low in the 70s-80s without it fixing our wages/housing issues. Why would we expect that to change now? Especially with just 7 years of a pause? Seems wildly optimistic to me, and that's granting it would have any effect at all.
You are very wrong on that -- 1970 was literally the absolute low point of immigration in the US, on both an absolute and relative measure, since the 1800s. Immigrants were 20% of the labor force in the beginning of the 1900s. Then Congress implemented the National Origins Formula, which basically shut down immigration for everyone but western Europeans from 1921-1965. Immigration plummeted so that at the low point, in 1970, only 5% of the labor force were immigrants. This changed because of Lyndon Johnson's sweeping reform opening immigration to everyone, so that after the 70s, it's been steadily growing each year back to almost 1920 levels -- until the Covid shut down.
Please see the chart here, which shows the enormous dip in immigrant population from the 40s-70s: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
Do you really think it's a coincidence that it was PRECISELY during that period that the US achieved the only time in its entire history when wages grew and inequality shrank? When labor was at its most powerful? Of course it's not a coincidence -- everything is supply and demand. Less impoverished workers with no bargaining power and limited language skills, more leverage for workers = higher wages.
People don't like to talk about this because it seems mean to immigrants. It isn't their fault. They're great. But they absolutely depress wages and increase inequality, it is unavoidable. The larger the masses of laborers, the less leverage they have and more profit the employers can take from their labor. It has always and everywhere been the case.
So, if you haven't seen anyone make the argument about Covid immigration and the labor shortage, it's because it's now completely taboo to say anything about immigration/population size without being called racist. One would think that tactic to shut down debate might've been something the capitalist class came up with, yet here we have all these young progressives spouting off about it. Bit it doesn't matter what the immigrants look like, all that matters is how many of them there are and how hard they're willing to work at wages below what naturalized citizens would accept.
Anyway, immigration was basically shut down for two years because of Covid. It reduced the working age immigrant population by 2 million. That wasn't the ONLY thing that reduced the size of the labor force, because baby boomers *finally* retiring also did that. But it was a significant factor.
And the reduction in the labor force is the only reason wages actually went up at the bottom, for literally the first time in 40 years.
Here are some links, if you're interested:
https://econofact.org/labor-shortages-and-the-immigration-shortfall
https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/blog/what-correlation-between-us-labor-shortages-and-immigration-shortfall
https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-labor-shortage
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/15/immigration-reform-congress-worker-shortage/
I understand that you value "the economy" more than the items I mentioned, when deciding whether you come down on the side of demand or supply. That's a legitimate perspective. For me, I will always choose quality of life over GDP, which I believe is a majority opinion, even though you rarely hear it from the governing class.
Well this is certainly compelling! I'm fairly convinced on the wage issue, at least enough to dig in more, but I'm still not sure what the magnitude of the effect on housing would be. I'm sure there's something to the math of "fewer people, fewer buyers, lower prices" but is it going to fix this crazy housing mess we're in or is it going to lower prices by 3% or something?
That's funny because from the Left I always hear that the Biden Administration more-or-less maintained Trump's immigration policies unchanged, which makes a bit of sense to me since I constantly hear about labor shortages in immigrant-dependent sectors.
Eli: “Labor shortages” are what drive up wages. They are a good thing for working people. It’s called supply and demand and it’s Econ 101. Unlimited immigration (the Biden approach) depresses wages, greatly enriches the 1% and increases income inequality.
I quite understand that labor shortages are what drive up wages. That's why I'm happy to hear that unchanged immigration policies from the Trump administration have led to labor shortages. On the other hand, if Biden is letting in all these immigrants, who's finding them to hire?
What does coalition building matter when you can lecture people on how they don't need bananas?
Yes, I created a Twitter account and it is a fascinating place.
Very insightful analysis! Makes a lot of sense... though unfortunately making sense isn't always rewarded these days.
The biggest issue that YIMBYs have: their "social culture" is twitter. That's it. They will always remain losers as long as this is the case, because twitter turns all of its users into pathetic losers over time.
Also, fuck Airbnb and the like.
Yep. Speaking of structural forces, the structural forces of Twitter relentlessly push every discourse community toward smugger, meaner, dumber takes. It doesn't matter what the subject is -- could be anything from rollercoaster fans to Reformed theologians -- Twitter makes the conversation worse.
It's not that there aren't any good, thoughtful comments and comment threads on Twitter. There are! It's just a lot harder and more time consuming to write something like that vs. something mean and snarky, and you get the same amount of engagement anyway
Absolutely! You *can* have good conversations and good political debates on Twitter. Just like humans *can* survive in the frozen wastes of central Antarctica. But in both cases the environment is not working in your favor.
There's only one good Twitter and that's Science Twitter because our literal business is to never actually agree on anything so it's hard to actually get smug.
I live in a city with a serious housing shortage, and the YIMBYs are making serious political progress here under our new mayor. They are a political force in real life, not just twitter.
Which city? What serious political progress? Don't be coy.
Madison, Wisconsin. The most prominent issue in last year's mayoral race was housing, with the current mayor running on a fairly aggressive YIMBY platform including some re-zoning and went on to win re-election. The city council is less YIMBY than the mayor, so progress is not as swift as she would like, but even the council just walked back their rejection of a new high-rise building on campus after political pressure from YIMBY activists and went back and approved the building at their next meeting.
I'm not saying the city is a YIMBY haven exactly, but things are definitely trending in that direction. More has been done in the last 4 years under our new mayor for housing than in the couple decades before she was elected.
Thank you for elaborating. I know little about Madison WI, other than it is a deep blue college town. A "new high-rise building on campus" ... so housing for college students (and/or employees) located on the campus grounds is political progress? Or is the building going to house non-university related residents I would think this would be up to the state, since they control the campus, not the city, but I must be wrong, since the city counsel needed to approve.
Well anyone could theoretically live there. It's not a university building, just part of the wider "campus" area I suppose. Not really using it as a technical term. But there is a lot of student objection to this sort of thing, and the council bowed down to it, and then reversed course specifically because of the pro-housing coalition in the city. That's what the YIMBY movement can do on a building-by-building level, and electing YIMBYs to city council seats and a YIMBY mayor.
The new mayor was elected in 2019. Prior to 2020, average new housing units in the city sat at about 2,000 per year for over a decade. In 2021 Madison added 3,500, added around the same in 2022, and is projected to add over 4,000 a year very soon. That's huge progress that is due to some zoning reforms and permitting reforms, and is a major point of the mayor's agenda.
YIMBY-supported legislation in California has been increasingly successful in passing through state government, and the YIMBY movement in general plays a pretty large role in the discourse around housing shortages here in the state.
Ahahaha at "always remain losers"
https://www.google.com/search?q=YIMBY+examples+of+success&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS928US928&oq=YIMBY+examples+of+success&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDQyMzFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Again, exactly what I'm critiquing: getting certain legislation or regulatory changes you like is meaningless until the actual cost of housing goes down.
It will take some decades to bring the cost of housing down in the problematic areas because even if all YIMBY policies were passed today to remove policy as the bottleneck, it simply takes time to build housing after a generation or three of being behind the curve.
In fact, that's a common argument by NIMBYs: "all this construction and yet prices don't drop." It worked for eggs and it will work for housing, but the latter takes more time.
It only works if demand doesn't also increase.
It always works if supply can rise to meet demand.
“We built more houses and now even more people want to live here; what could we possibly do?”
Build more!
Demand ain’t infinite here. Look at housing prices in Tokyo.
The problem with Japan (and Asia in general) is that people want to live in cities. How does that not lead to massive problems with demand outpacing supply?
It took decades to get us into this crisis, it will take decades to get out.
The movement as a whole may score some victories, and that is a good thing. The individuals themselves will always remain losers until they stop using twitter. That video game is uniquely good at causing people to lose sight of life.
I mean I'm doing pretty well for myself and most YIMBYs I know personally are too.
Not sure why you think YIMBYs are some kind of particular brand of losers relative to the average twitter user but ok.
They're not. All twitter users are losers. The more you use twitter, the more of a loser you become. There's no getting around that.
No more acronym people for me, please.
"I don’t understand why that perspective is so often treated as antagonistic to the call for social housing that’s built at taxpayer expense, governed by the state, and distributed on the basis of need rather than through the market mechanism."
You could argue that's the government screwing around in the private sector but of course zoning laws, permitting, etc. is already the government screwing around in the private sector to an extent that reaches far beyond simple regulation.
My concern is always that the government has an unfortunate habit of trying to fix bad regulations by applying even complexity with even more regulations and the results are often suboptimal.
The government did go into building public housing decades ago. I think there should be more public housing, but it should be dispersed and not concentrated in big projects. They used to be synonymous with crime and entrenched poverty. Whatever became of HUD?
It’s interesting that critics of the rising cost and low availability of housing always think that the problem is “not enough housing”, and not “too many people”. Perhaps the problem of too many people is politically intractable, but excessive demand is in fact the problem. Perhaps we should at least stop adding to it. I realize this would impact profits in the construction industry. Oh well…
No, but they are dying on the streets now because our country has no use for them. Is that OK with you? It's supply and demand, and there's no demand for the the oversupply of unwanted children with no skills.
The population density of the US as whole is among the lowest in the world, on par with Kyrgyzstan and less than half the level of Ireland and less than a third of the UK. Even some of the most densely populated states like Connecticut are well below countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Not New Jersey, though. That place is full.
Well, you have to take into account that vast parts of the western U.S. are more or less uninhabitable due to lack of water, topography, and other issues. Average density is not really representative of resource constraints. Major aquifers in these regions are under immense strain and will one day be depleted. We should begin the transition to a sustainable future now, when we can still attain a pleasant future balance with our environment.
You realize that I anticipated this response and sought to head it off by including info. for Connecticut, right?
I'm not sure I take your point. Is it that Connecticut needs more people? You know they still have to be fed, and I'm not sure Connecticut could do it on their own. I would like to see some of the natural world left. There's not much of it in the Netherlands, which is pretty carefully curated. To be sure this is not just a U.S. problem.
I don't think that's really a relevant constraint. The Great Lakes region as a whole has enough water for the entire US population and then some I would think. We could just build mega-density cities around them and I think it would be fine, but our cities, outside of a few like New York/Miami/Chicago, are not particularly dense compared to modern standards. There's plenty of room for more people if we just build upward, and I don't think resource constraints are an issue in the US at this point.
I think you neglect that all of these people must be fed and generate waste. It’s not just the space people physically occupy.
Sure, but I just don't think America is anywhere near it's limits in any of these things. We produce tons of food, way more than we need, we're a net exporter, and I don't think we're running out of space to dispose of waste either. I don't see a single relevant resource constraint for America. Maybe some regions like water in the Southwest, but nothing on a national scale.
Why would you want to get to the limit?
Please specify what exactly is going to happen to the people you consider excess. I’m pretty sure that’s the issue here, not the construction industry.
Maybe if you view the US as a "closed system", then sure less people = less housing demand. But if 1 million or two people move from, say Central America to the US, then the housing demand in Central America just drops as much as the US demand increases. This presumably decreases housing costs in Central America, which in turn will decrease the amount of people fleeing Central America. Yes, I know, there is more to it than housing costs. Poor governance, leftist political ideology, corruption, etc., but since the topic of the article is housing ....
I don't think Central American refugees are in an economic position to bid up the price of homeownership. If they are, that's a pretty impressive immigrant success story.
In the micro/individual perspective, you are of course correct. But in the collective/macro perspective, they have to live somewhere, and thereby increase the overall demand for housing.
How about they move from the Bay Area, for example, to Oklahoma?
Then we will have Oklahoman incumbents making the same arguments, just like we already did with Idaho and Texas.
But the people who move will be able to buy homes for cheaper. They benefit.
I'm not sure **anything** in particular is going to happen to them. What I am suggesting is merely that we stop thinking we are doing something magical by "growing" the economy by adding more people. It's a Ponzi scheme. The U.S. and other developed e.g. Eurozone countries (and Japan and now China) have already begun reducing their populations simply by having fewer children. These are rational decisions by individuals, not a government mandate. The developing countries could radically improve their standards of living -- and reduce conflict -- by the same process. The people that are whining about this are levered investors, who need ever more growth - however detrimental to the general population's quality of life. Also, labor is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as other commodities. Once the population stops growing, and perhaps even declines a bit, housing availability and costs will gradually come into balance with the needs of the population, but "developers" will have to find a better business model than plopping crappy houses on good farmland -- or in inhospitable deserts.
The people who need homes already exist, declining to house them because you'd rather they had not been born is just pointlessly cruel.
I am suggesting no such thing. I'm simply saying stop population growth and let housing catch up. Then perhaps we can let the population decline a bit, tear down the crappy shacks and decrepit apartments, upgrade living standards, and improve (rather than continuing to pollute and destroy) the environment. We are not an endangered species, but our population is hardly in optimal condition.
Or you could let people who want to live in cities live there, by building enough high-quality ("luxury") apartments and condos for them in existing neighborhoods, and stop pushing them out onto the exurban and wild fringes where they don't even want to be.
The issue is that admitting less people into your country while it is simultaneously getting older is going to put quite a strain on your economy (See Japan). You need working age people to pay taxes for your welfare state for the elderly.
It wouldn't be a catastrophe, but a slowing of economic growth, for certain.
A slowing of economic growth, sure, if quantity rather than quality is the criterion. I invite you to read some of the work of Herman Daly, in particular "Beyond Growth" for an examination of economics in a "no growth" world. To be sure the transition will be fraught for the financial sector and the highly indebted, but debt is borrowing from the future -- and the future is now arriving. The highly financialized economy we now take for granted is a relatively new creature. Anyhow, Japan is managing to cope and after a few decades of stagnation is finding a new path -- and it involves neither population growth nor immigration. Also, real estate, especially in the countryside, is readily available at modest prices.
You may be right that this transition is the future, but I think the countries that can put it off as long as possible are going to be the strongest in this new world. It's clearly survivable, and perfectly fine to live a life in such an economy, I don't think everyone in Japan or Italy is in misery because of it, but I don't know that it would benefit anyone to try to actively encourage this transition any earlier than necessary. Overall I guess I think it's just better to be in a growing, dynamic country with high housing costs than a stagnant country with more affordable housing, but maybe Herman Daly can convince me otherwise.
I think you conflate a stable population with stagnation. Not the same at all. It is true that many of our social and economic systems will need a rather painful period of adjustment, but putting it off will make it both more painful and less manageable.
Maybe it doesn't have to lead to stagnation, but it seems like for the countries experiencing this transition now that stagnation seems part of it. Is there a counter example of a country with stable/declining population while still experience decent economic growth?
People can get richer (have a higher quality of life) without there being more of them. To be sure, given the debt loads of our current society, the transition period will be a problem as we work off the borrowing. I hope that one day our descendants will look back on today's economic slavery as a weird anomaly. In answer to your question, I think that Japan is now beginning to emerge from its transition period. The Netherlands seem to be doing OK. We should pay attention, because we will indeed have to deal with the same issues -- or worse.
The utility of cheap rural real estate in Japan is mostly lost, since all the young workers are trying to move to Tokyo.
That may change. It has in San Francisco. Technology. A Kiss and a Kick.
I find it annoying how addicted progressives, broadly defined, are to making moral arguments. Obviously we all have our moral beliefs, and most people involved in politics are doing so at least in part to reshape the world in a way we see as moral. But every argument boils down to, "you're a bad person if you don't support my political position." It can never be, "it's in your self-interest to support this," because if you're prioritizing your self-interest that makes you a bad person.
I place a lot of the blame on the NGO complex. Most professional progressive activists work for NGOs, which exist to make donors feel warm and fuzzy about donating. So NGOs will always prioritize self-righteous moral arguments that make supporters feel morally superior. Contrast that to unions, which exist to win money and benefits for their members. A left that is powered by unions instead of NGOs will be less reliant on moral grandstanding, and I would wager a lot more effective at winning.
What % of Americans would you define as "comfortable"? I find it hard to believe you cannot assemble a majority coalition out of people who would benefit from your policies. As just 1 example, I work in tech and make a very comfortable living, but I have been laid off and gone without health care, and would have much more peace of mind if my health care wasn't tied to my employment. On top of that, I have friends and family members who are not doing as well financially and would very much benefit from guaranteed health care.
I'd also add there's a common good. I pay taxes and they fund parks and pools I get to use. Maybe if I had lower taxes and bought a private pool membership I'd come out slightly ahead financially, but I'm happy to fund pools that I get to use and everyone in my neighborhood gets to use. They make my neighborhood a nicer, happier place. So I think you can talk about a common good that even relatively well-off people can benefit from.
Yeah no argument on housing. I sometimes think we won't see national housing reform until we're a majority renter nation. I would push back that there are a lot of majority-renter cities where you can organize a majority coalition, and a lot of tax-burdened homeowners who don't necessarily benefit in the short-term from spiraling prices who we can find common cause with.
I also would make a common good argument. I would venture there are plenty of SF and LA homeowners who have seen massive price appreciation, but ALSO seen such negative externalities from housing unaffordability their quality of life has declined.
Agreed. If you can’t figure out SOME argument for why your policy preference will ultimately be good for the person you’re trying to convince, even if it’s somewhat attenuated, you don’t deserve their vote and can’t really blame them for withholding it.
God forbid you can even talk to people and ask them what they want and compromise your position to accommodate their goals.
The people who make the rules could not care less about the vast majority of Americans.
The people who make the rules could not care less about the vast majority of Americans.
There is yet another argument: housing scarcity will make your town or city suck. If the rich are the only people that can live there, it's going to skew ever older, become boring, and collapse under its own weight. Most of your children won't be able to live near you, no one will be able to afford to take a chance on any interesting ventures, and it will become ever-more homogenous.
All those trends are present and accelerating in my NE college town over the last twenty years. I realize they sound great to some, but it's the core of my YIMBY pitch, locally. We'll see if it has a constituency
If you are truly asking people to vote against their own interests, then I think shaming-as-advocacy is an even worse idea. The only way a person will vote against their interests is if you can appeal to their goodwill and make them feel that their sacrifice is valued. A person will never feel motivated to make a personal sacrifice at the behest of activists who are openly contemptuous of them.
Many YIMBYs engage in progressive-style moral arguments because the NIMBY opposition are progressives acting hypocritically.
It's really fucking funny you don't think unions act like NGOs. Go watch the NEA videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhbNCMTRj5k
But cares? Why is that relevant?
I'm simply addressing points made by the commenter?
I am also annoyed at how progressives employ (poor) moral reasoning but I'll use their own arguments against them to 1. talk to them on their level in case that actually works, and 2. point out their blatant hypocrisy for others to see.
I should have been clear that I think unions often do act like NGOs and I think that's a large reason they have been losing members for decades. But I do think unions are structurally oriented to win for their members and you've seen certain unions like the Teamsters get back to their mission.
Unions tend to start acting like NGOs when their staff and their members get too comfortable. That's a problem.
Yes, it comes down to politics being a vehicle for personal moral validation in the mind of liberals more than any actual policy change. Reminds me of any discussion of healthcare that involves someone saying "healthcare is a human right." It takes any nuanced discussion about the path forward for healthcare in this country and makes it "if you disagree with my personal vision you are evil."
"Though he may have won all the battles, we had all the good songs."
What's interesting about the self-interest angle is that whether it's viewed as moral or not depends on whether or not that self-interest also represents a group the political actor wants to help.
In the case you've described, those prioritizing their self-interest -- the NIMBYs -- are bad because they're not of the group the progressives want to help. Their self-interest is therefore selfish and bad.
But in the left narratives I've encountered, anyone who is of a favored class and doesn't vote in their self-interest is considered a rube. Turning down more government money to help with food, education, childcare? You're an idiot.
"You're a bad person if you don't support my politics" is the default position among the most strident progressives. Why? Because they can't conceive that anyone would view an issue with moral implications any differently than they would.
It's like thinking everyone has access to the same perspective -- here's what's happening, here's why, here's how to address it -- but they're intentionally making the anti-moral decision to oppose the obvious solution.
As Freddie wrote in a previous article on this topic, social capture explains why this is happening. The moral impetus at the heart of the issue is subsumed by the battle for social ranking that results from the attendant crusading.
It's like when he wrote "Woke is not what you do, it's who you are."
Same thing with a certain class of YIMBYs. It's not an action anymore to reach a goal. it's an identity.
I've often wondered if this is partly the result of the civil rights movement and today's progressives desire to have a similar cause. The civil rights movement was a great, just, and moral cause and I sometimes get the sense that younger progressives feel like they missed out by not getting to participate in such a historic and meaningful cause. To make up for it, the civil rights template has been grafted on to just about every progressive cause. It's not merely well meaning people with differences in policy preferences. It has to be good versus evil.
Obviously a complex historical question, and it's not like unions were ever perfect - they were corrupt, violent, racist, supported the Vietnam War, big backers of the White Australia policy, etc.
But in general it seems like the shift from trade unions to NGOs as the core of the organised left has been massively detrimental to society, for pretty much the reasons you said - collective self-interest is a more reliable motivator for constructive action than some vague idea of the common good, which always just ends up being distorted into a much more insidious and dishonest form of self-interest.
The core of the NIMBY position is that people moving somewhere are obliged to seek the existing community’s permission, and abide by its decision to accept your membership or not. It’s true that this permission is more likely to be granted if you ask nicely and make an effort to appear like you’ll fit in / not rock the boat. But the YIMBY project is fundamentally animated by rejecting the structure in which communities have this kind of authority over prospective neighbors.
Simply put, of all the things that could give you authority over my life, your incumbency on or hereditary connection to the best land is a uniquely illegitimate one (feudalism! in America!), and it is morally important that we loudly reject your claim. Are we to be a nation of immigrants, hard work, enterprise, striving? Or a nation of which acres your daddy owned?
"Or a nation of which acres your daddy owned?"
And yet, many of those in the YIMBY community would not balk at the concept of "stolen land". I understand complex throughts are complex, but one cannot discount one hereditary connection to land while encouraging others without suffering from some severe cognitive dissonance and chronic ahistoricity.
The only project I'm familiar with where "stolen land" was a big argument, it was deployed on the side of preserving a parking lot.
Besides telling you I like your avi, I've never actually heard YIMBYs use the "no-one is illegal on stolen land" line. Sounds insufferable.
"The core of the NIMBY position is that people moving somewhere are obliged to seek the existing community’s permission,"
See this is just factually, objectively incorrect - they don't care about that at all. They care about where they live, period. This is precisely what I'm critiquing here, inventing motivations for NIMBYs in order to deepen moral judgments of them in a way that creates no political utility.
Freddie, if all the NIMBYs care about new people coming to where they live, then you kind of end up in a situation where it's a default problem "everywhere" people are trying to move to.
NIMBY motivations are very similar to anti-immigration motivations because the underlying commonality is preserving the status quo for incumbents.
I think NIMBYs care about their neighborhoods staying the same and their housing values not being reduced by increased local supply. Those desires are contrary to the public good so I want to see them defeated, but I don't think they're secretly scared of "the Other" showing up at their door. More to the point, I don't understand what value there is (analytically or politically) in positing those secret motives. How does that help?
The motives aren't secret! NIMBYs are on the record saying these things! (Of course, left-NIMBYs say different things than right-NIMBYs; the former are more important in our most urban areas though.)
The fun thing is that upzoning--the only real solution where there's no more available land--increases property prices for landowners. In expensive places, we'd be luck to see housing prices stabilize consistently, let alone drop meaningfully.
Many homeowners are explicitly motivated by "the Other" scaring them. My own parents protested apartments in their neighborhood more than a decade ago (before property prices really took off). A lot of it's simply "I don't want more cars driving and parking in my neighborhood" and isn't specifically targeted against any category of "those people."
In earlier iterations of housing discourse it was considered conspiratorial to center financial motivations vs. taking NIMBYs at face value about their crowding, demographic, and aesthetic concerns.
>They care about where they live
Specifically, the complaints expressed at community meetings are:
a) Too many people are going to live where I live if this project is approved
b) The people who will live where I live if this project is approved are the wrong type for our community (too rich, too poor, too loud, too boring, too many families, too many singles, too transient, etc)
c) My opinions and concerns about this change to the number and characteristics of my neighbors hasn't been sufficiently sought, listened to, or reflected in updates to the design.
To me, that adds up to "I should get to decide who lives in my community." Do you disagree?
This is an oversimplification. More development means more people and more people means more noise, more traffic, more pollution, more strain on community resources. Doesn’t matter what “type” of people they are.
Communities with strained resources usually try to encourage development of high-value land uses so they will get more property tax. Traffic and pollution come from auto-centric layout comes from trying to push everyone else out of sight.
When I was the NIMBY it was because of severe degradation of infrastructure. I've seem massive subdivisions built off of two lane country roads designed for a few farmers. A ten minute drive became an hour. I fought that. At that time schools, sewer and water were also big concerns. The real estate speculators paid off the country commissioners and walked away with huge profits.
I wonder how that axillary dwelling units that can now be added, are going to effect prices and housing availability. It does have the potential to spread the wealth around and provide low income housing.
It's certainly possible for specific municipalities to manage growth incompetently but this is not, like, a structural problem with housing development. Productive land uses pay for the infrastructure upgrades that accommodate them. It's a well-oiled machine and very likely the one that created your house also.
Obviously incumbents should have certain rights. All but the most fanatical YIMBYS presumably support the kind of zoning laws that prevent, say, a tannery from opening in their backyard (the kind of thing zoning was created to prevent in the first place).
I think invoking the above objections is a rather cynical way of depicting opponents as the sort of people who opposed school integration, etc.
I don't think people living in smaller homes than you counts as pollution.
Well, good thing that's not what I said!
I think the notion that incumbents in a community have zero moral right to any say on who or what is brought in is a very radical one. Simple as.
Taken as the subjective thoughts of the NIMBYs, it is obviously incorrect. Taken as the power structure instituted by their actually-existing policies in place, it's correct. The NIMBYs don't *care* about where *you* live, but you are nonetheless obliged to seek their permission via either financial buy-in or a planning board meeting.
Interesting. I'm surprised you're getting push-back here, because I find this part of your argument very compelling:
The core of the NIMBY position is that people moving somewhere are obliged to seek the existing community’s permission, and abide by its decision to accept your membership or not. It’s true that this permission is more likely to be granted if you ask nicely and make an effort to appear like you’ll fit in / not rock the boat. But the YIMBY project is fundamentally animated by rejecting the structure in which communities have this kind of authority over prospective neighbors.
If that's the NIMBY premise, I'm a NIMBY. There is almost no level of societal organization from the family to business partnerships to community associations to...hell, even Substacks or Facebook groups...where anyone is allowed to join and incumbents/owners don't have the right to kick them out if they don't abide by existing member standards.
I don't see what's wrong with this. I also have a hard time believing that even YIMBYs think it's perfectly okay for rich white Americans to just push their way in and demand entrance and acceptance into any type of community, whether they're wanted or not (like say, demanding acceptance to an indigenous tribe, or the right to purchase property on reservation land).
And I don't at all see how the first premise relates to the second one, regarding incumbency or hereditary connection to land. Hell, I would be 100% in favor of abolishing all inheritance or rights to property that are received from parents/ancestors. The very idea of the first part is one of freedom of association, which must inherently include the right NOT to associate. You get to decide who you let into your club and who you don't, and you get to try to get into the clubs you want and aren't forced to join any you don't want. That's the opposite of rights that follow birth, which aren't free associations at all. Of all relationships in life, no one chooses their parents and no one chooses their children. Legal transfers of rights to descendants from dead people is the most illiberal possible position of all.
So I guess I'm a socialist NIMBY. I think people who just want to push their way in anywhere and ruin things for everyone else are obnoxious and I don't care about their interests. Advocating for that right doesn't seem progressive to me at all, it seems libertarian and anarchic. But granting rights to land, property, lordship titles, country club membership, college admission, or anything else via inheritance, rather than one's own efforts and choices, is also bad. I don't really understand how this even gets ascribed to "progressive" and not. YIMBYs are mostly young people and capitalists, they're only aligned by their interest in aggregating people and density, not any larger coherent ideology that I can make out.
"But granting rights to land, property, lordship titles, country club membership, college admission, or anything else via inheritance, rather than one's own efforts and choices, is also bad."
I rather sympathize with your position, which (much like my own) is a kind of "none of the above but maybe some of each, but more nuanced". I do think though that your list of proposed "non-heritable" things is kind of a mixed bag and rather needs to be addressed in a (more nuanced?) item by item way. For example, country clubs are private clubs, they get to decide -- as you say. Legacy admissions to colleges? They're private too, and can make their own rules -- but they could lose their tax advantages and access to other grants; there's no reason for the public-at-large to subsidize them in any way. You makes your choices and you takes your consequences. I rather favor an allowance for inheritances, we all would like to help our children, but agree there should be some limit. This used to be accomplished via substantial inheritance and gift taxes, which also had the virtue of making money available for redistribution (gasp!) to the less advantaged. That's been gutted recently, and should be brought back . That might take care of the country club problem, too ...
Okay, fine, people can pass on some memorabilia and a little nest egg. I'll live with that. But we have a rather grotesque situation where billionaires can create trusts and generation-skipping legacy blah blah blah structures which basically allow them to not only not pay taxes but to transfer enormous wealth to grandkids in a way that's actually shocking that it's legal in this country. As close as you can get to lordship and feudal titles, even if the legal basis is slightly different.
There's a country club in my town that charges $180k a year for basically a pool and golf course. Now obviously, the real benefit that people pay for is the social network and business generation opportunities. But you cannot even submit an application, let alone get in, without a written personal recommendation from several existing owners, which then gets you an invitation that allows you to apply. I'm totally happy for that country club to carry on as it does, and I will enjoy laughing at the people who belong to it. But even that place has the sense not to allow transfer of membership upon death!
It sounds as though we are in violent agreement.
The additional driver of this is the connection of geography and thereby real estate to public schools. When my wife and I were last looking for a home we saw this in its crudest form, where houses on one side of the street were at a roughly $200k premium to houses on the other side of the street, for no reason other than that street is the demarcation line between the 'good' and the 'not as good' high school districts. Now as a liberal person I find this situation more than a little absurd, but one can easily understand how it results in NIMBYism, and really more broadly an incentive against anything changing ever. Getting the house on the good side of the street was not only a major investment on a long term asset, it also, assuming school districts don't change, locks you into a good situation on one of the other three big cost disease items, that being education. I am increasingly convinced that virtually all local politics, at least in suburbia where most people live, revolve around this connection. It sucks but it's completely rational that it ends up that way and any solution needs to account for it, and to have a way that protects the people bought in under the old system from totally losing out. Without that there probably cannot be successful reform.
This entire argument could be applied to just about every progressive belief.
1) Think people should be shamed for fighting against higher taxes to fund a stronger welfare state? Most people's take-home income is even more important to them then the value of their house. Why shouldn't the argument against shaming tax conservatives apply here to?
2) "An irony that YIMBYs frequently admit to is that 'the righteous throngs who need homes' have a habit of becoming “selfish NIMBYs” in exactly the time it takes for them to close on a house." If you replace "homes" with "wealth" it's the same phenomenon - the people we fight for become unsympathetic once they achieve their goal of joining the successful class. This is true even though we *want* them to join the successful class. Like, it's good if a poor person learns to code and makes good $, right? Is this the SF tech class that everyone hates the new version of the Detroit autoworkers of the 50s?
3) The argument that poor people are NIMBYs because of wage dynamics doesn't hold up. Rich people are just as NIMBY'y! You'll hear the same arguments in Nantucket that you do everywhere else. Regardless of income, few people want higher taxes and few people want their suburb to turn into Manhattan.
The shaming is a recognition that we're asking people to do something that's not in their direct interest, for the greater good. This might be a bad tactic, but it seems pretty similar to the project of this blog, which is to get people to care about people other than themselves for unselfish reasons.
I feel like I'm going to be castigated as some kind of YIMBY weirdo. I'm not - I don't participate in any subcultures, online or otherwise. This comment is as close as I'll get. And I don't *want* a big apartment building going up next to my house (let alone a homeless shelter), I just recognize that it's shitty of me not to support it. I don't want to have higher taxes, but...same thing. Either way, everyone's banking, to some extent, on my sense of shame getting me to make unselfish politic choices.
Completely true. Progressives need to make arguments about the common good - and how it ultimately creates a more prosperous, safe, and well-ordered society for ALL of us, with fewer social problems that eventually hit the affluent as well as the working class.
Shame is a bad tactic for convening majorities. This has long been known and it long confounded me that progressives rely so heavily on it. But I ultimately realized they do it because they enjoy it. They have contempt for a lot of their fellow citizens and get a kick out of self-righteousness.
Agree, but conservatives have a similar contempt for their fellow citizens. They just express it more often as anger - which is just as fun to express.
Probably more of a human thing than a progressive thing.
Oh you won’t get any argument from me there. It just bugs me less because I don’t want them to succeed ;)
I'm so desperate for the Left to make the common good central to their pitch. While I'm sympathetic to a lot of identity politics, I always feel they're missing the second half of the pitch, where these efforts are building a world where all those categories can flourish together. I know it's "cringe" but I can't abandon the project of a rainbow coalition that even includes straight white people, and doesn't just foster allies, but builds actual fucking friendships.
I don’t think home prices are a big part of NIMBYism. A far bigger factor is a deep seated objection to any changes to their current comfortable and familiar environment. This tends to get more intense as one gets older and I think our aging population is another reason for increasing NIMBYism.
As proof of my theory there is a ton of objection to development that will increase property values.
"As proof of my theory there is a ton of objection to development that will increase property values."
Absolutely. In our Wydaho area, a ski resort on the Wyoming side of the border wants to expand. The only access to the ski resort is through Idaho. If the ski resort get's its way, then local property values on the Idaho side will increase, and simultaneously, the quality of life will decrease. The "No" folks are focused on quality of life, not property values. The "yes" folks may exist (IDK?) but they are silent.
Ah yes, the glorious human right to... unfettered access to a ski resort. This is just a perfect example of generalizing the concept of NIMBYism to the point moral meaninglessness!
“generalizing the concept of NIMBYism to the point moral meaninglessness”
I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say. Our point, I think, is that this isn’t generally about money. It’s about an overall dislike of change for any reason - good or bad.
As an example there are tons of homeowners who are opposed to developments that might trigger gentrification. A giant condo building that contains a Whole Foods? Hell no!
Agreed. As Freddie stated in the article, buying a home is often the biggest financial decision of a person's life. As such, it is generally not made on a whim. When one finally settles on a particular home, it shouldn't be surprising that they want to hang on to what made them want to buy that home in the first place.
It's not about access or human rights. There is a perfectly suitable road right now. It is about Expansion. As in developing a lot of new terrain, more lifts/runs that can handle a much bugger crowd. Of, and a lot of new (mostly expensive) housing. This will increase demand and prices in the surrounding community. (more 2nd homes, Air BnB, etc). More traffic, congestion when there never was any before. More in-fill in the valley.
I was merely pointing this out as an example of people who are protesting development despite the fact it would increase their property values. There is no morality angle.
There is something immoral about denying me the right to ski Grand Targhee while staying in a 5BR ski in ski out place. I've been stuck staying at that Super8 and it's tragic.
Try the Teepee. Is much closer to the hill. Sure, it was built without regard to building codes, and looks like a giant fire waiting to happen, but way better than the Super 8. Teton Cabins also better then Super 8, as long as you don't mind sharing the conversations of the people in the rooms next to you.
This is correct. Most residential development - even multi-family in a predominantly SFH area - will ultimately increase the value of surrounding property prices because dense housing increases the uses that can be made of the property. But it also decreases the neighboring property owner's present and near term enjoyment of the house they call home. These are perfectly understandable and natural reactions to have.
My neighbourhood demonstrates this really well. It has been a YIMBY/affordable housing wet dream and my house price is probably up an additional 50% due to it.
But 6 years so far of constant construction. Roads blocked. Waking up to dump trunk horns and demolition. Huge increase in assaults, burglaries, car thefts. The park where our kid used to play is filled with junkies. The elementary school is using the cafeteria as classrooms. Packages stolen from doorsteps within minutes. Can't get on a bus during peak times. Two condo projects has turned into something like 16 now. And the estimated completion times have been off by many years for every single one.
Never thought I'd be the old rich white guy complaining about this stuff.
How are the condos driving the rise in assaults, junkies and car theft? Are they weird super cheap condos?
Really shitty subsidized builds that are falling apart before they are completed.
Not sure about the direct causation. Seems like higher population density in general has brought good and bad with it. There just wasn't a market for fentanyl in the neighbourhood 5 years ago. The bleachers at the school used to be where high school kids fucked. Now it's just a minefield of needles. A bunch of this was likely covid effects as well.
Where are they building subsidized condos? I’ve never heard of that being done on anything but a tiny scale.
Midtown Toronto. Quite the mix of new builds.
I remember constant rapid construction in CA. Subdivisions stretching over thousands of acres. The housing speculators made huge profits and all infrastructure was left in shambles. We need both YIMBYs and NIMBYs to hash out good policy.
Living in NIMBY land I think it is very much both. The thing you have to realize about "developments that will increase property value" is that there is a lot of skepticism and a lot or risk aversion. I suspect a lot of people would object to a proposal with an expected outcome of increasing their property value by 20% if there was a downside risk of cutting it by half, since having you nest egg cut in half is a crisis, while having it increase a bit is just icing.
No even if the 20% bump on home prices was guaranteed the 20% more cars driving by their house would have them objecting very strongly.
I live in an inner ring suburb of Philadelphia. Old infrastructure that can't support new development keeps our taxes high. Of course new development would mean a wider tax base but I don't think has thought that one through yet.
A good example is we have two literal gilded era mansions in the township that were abandoned. There was a huge fight when a developer wanted to buy one and turn it into a boutique hotel/wedding venue/farm because of storm water zoning. People preferred a vacant property to something that might have extra toilets flushing. They won though and its going to be a huge benefit to the township and hopefully will spur on even more development. The second, large estate was recently purchased by rich people from outside the area to historically preserve.
https://lynnewoodhallpreservation.org/
This. Opposition to development (at least where I am) is not driven by fear of property value loss, but by concerns of lack of access to scarce amenities like walkability, yards, sunlight, views, schools etc). These all correlate with property values but I'm not sure an offer to keep property values growing at the current rate through government subsidy (to present an absurd idea) would lead to support for more housing. What's happening where I am is a housing crisis so terrible that NIMBYs don't really have a leg to stand on, but even with generous zoning,there are not enough actual places go develop the amount of housing we need, and the value of single family homes is so high that it almost never makes sense to demolish one and build something with more units. Materials and labor costs cannot be ignored either.
As for an expanded investment in publichousing, there's not a YIMBY I know that doesn't support thahat, but the amount of money needed to fund such a program is so immense that one could be forgiven for thinking that presenting the idea as an alternative to more expansive zoning is a poison pill argument made in bad faith.
Just to be clear,YIMBYs can be self righteous and I agree more coalition work would've nice.but YIMBYs are not opposed to the state,per se. Indeed in California, all the progress has been made at the State level through bills limiting local control of land use.
I'm a city planner in Berkeley,FWIW
“ One of their core failings, as a group, is to forever make NIMBYism a failure of personal morals. The word “selfish” is constantly invoked by YIMBYs against NIMBYs, for example, under the theory that they’re putting their own self-interest above those of people who need homes. But in fact NIMBYism is simply a naturally emergent behavior that stems from the 21st-century macroeconomic situation.”
While I get the point here, I think it is mostly off. And please note the tone and intent shaming of YIMBYs for being shaming of NIMBYs. Come on man, really?
I live in a liberal college city of 65,000 plus another 20,000 extra when school is in session. The city is 5 square miles. The campus is a state school and sits on land not part of the city, but is within the city and surround in on one side. The university has been building more student housing, but it is a very popular school and has been growing by 2000 student per year for many years.
The voters in the city are very liberal. They passed an ordinance that requires a majority resident citizen vote to approve any peripheral development. This was after a large housing development was approved through the normal building commission and city council process… in the 1980s. They also passed another ordinance for a property tax supplement to fund the acquisition of peripheral land to then lock into permanent ag or natural land status… in some cases using the USDA programs to preserve farmland (which is a crock of NIMBY propaganda in my state as land is not in short supply for farming, it is water). The residents also demanded an agreement with the county to not encroach on their fair land and elected-moated city. In the case where there is a peripheral development, the city would share the tax revenue with the county in excess in what the county would otherwise expect.
One development within the city limits got so tied up in environmental legal challenges that the developer pulled out. The local NIMBYs claim that they support densification, but then use every bit of influence and power they can muster to block infill development too.
The result has been a mess. Not enough commercial activity and tax revenue from the lost development and the resulting increase in the tax base. Roads in disrepair because there is not enough in the general fund. Increase in local sales tax did not help. Housing costs through the roof. Average $2200/mth for an apartment. And it has also driven housing costs higher in all the surrounding communities. Parking problems in the small down town. Congestion. Lots of bike and auto collisions from the student and resident congestion. City programs for children and seniors canceled due to budget shortfalls… even with several supplemental property taxes. Not enough jobs in the city, and housing too expensive for the university employees and students, so massive commuting takes place and clogs the local freeway at rush hours.
I have lived in the city for over 40 years. I have fought the NIMBYs. And what I know about them is that the labels given by the YIMBYs are largely accurate. They are selfish. But it isn’t just the value of their real estate they are protecting, it is more that they are preventing change… preventing others from joining their party. And here is what really frosts me. They are generally fucking liberals advocating open borders and sanctuary states and cities. They are claimed advocates for the poor. They demand affordable housing. The city is older retired university employees and young poor students. Very few young families and young working professionals. The public schools are seeing declining enrollment. As these two demographics tend to spend the most on entertainment and retail, the lack of them also kills the tax base.
I was just reading that in mega-liberal S.F. Residents of an area next to the Tenderloin are fighting against the building of a 90-unit affordable housing unit.
Here is what I know… go to Texas where many cities have limited zoning rules and people are resigned to the concept of owner rights to build what he wants to build on his land.
In the places that liberals dominate the zoning rules are suffocating and the roadblocks for development are much higher.
My assessment of this is that NIMBYism is just another bit of evidence of the flaw in the psychology of people that identify as politically liberal. Blocking development is frankly evil at this point when so many cannot afford housing, yet my liberal friends and neighbors vote to block it and claim their virtue saving the environment. They suck. They are selfish. I can no longer work as an advocate to get new developments approved because I have zero respect for them. I call them what they are and they hate me for showing the rest of the community what they really are.
What does "they're selfish" actually add to your analysis? What, conceptually or philosophically or economically, does it do for you beyond adding a certain emotional kick?
They shroud themselves in a cloak of virtue for caring about the environment. This influences some young voters to vote against their own economic interests. I have already attempted to work them for compromise, but they accept nothing except blocking the development. Painting them as greedy selfish people helps destroy the fake virtue identity and gets more voters to turn against them.
Negative branding for the benefits of politics is their game. I just turn it back on them.
The developments they defeated had every environmental and social enhancement agreed to by the developers. Highly progressive with public transportation links, zero carbon, affordable housing, road enhancements, green space, Smart development designs... and they still blocked it.
Theirs is a zero sum game. There is no room for compromise. They can only be defeated by a PR war.
An analysis of Left NIMBYism as the pursuit of economic interest rather than a personal hypocrisy to be corrected by pointing out the logical contradiction? Strongly affects what political coalitions you have to build: you need to specifically mobilize the working class *against* the coalition of the upper-middle class and the charity beneficiaries.
Eliminating zoning increases property value by increasing option value. If a big developer wants to build a high rise where your house is, but can't because of zoning, ending that zoning will increase the demand for the house, and thus its price. Even if you don't sell, the increased market value gives you more to borrow against.
Here in CT zoning and development are often the most important and hotly contested issues. Where I live (Stamford) major factions in the local government have formed around these issues, and the savvy players are also waging the battle at the state level with much success but also harsh criticism. The YIMBY / NIMBY online stuff plays almost no role. The real action happens at local meetings and behind the scenes. It would be nice if there was more broad-based participation in these debates, especially from renters that make up a larger and larger share of the population. These issues will dominate elections for years to come. They don't even break down cleanly along party lines, as currently it is an intra-Democrat fight given a lack of Republicans and no organized movements among independents.
It's hard to know in detail what is going on in neighboring towns full of economic elites, where they fight tooth and nail to stop any apartment buildings, enrollment of schoolchildren from neighboring less-wealthy districts, etc. I imagine that the state will intervene in the coming years.
Interesting because Connecticut has a stagnating population and, outside of Fairfield county, a declining one.
I'm only really familiar with what is going on in Fairfield Co., and a little bit in New Haven. Anika Singh Lemar is a good Twitter follow on these issues. She does work in New Haven through a Yale law clinic and gets cited sometimes at local meetings here: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/professor-singh-lemar-affordable-housing-small-business-and-community