re footnote #1, I'm curious what specific respect transplants must show longtime residents and whether or not this should apply to new immigrants to a country (or if it's just new migrants to a neighborhood or city). What are the first principles here?
like, I get the idea that an affluent white gentrifier not being sufficiently respectful for the longtime residents and character of a mostly Black and Carribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn feels icky.
But replace "affluent white gentrifier" with "Somali immigrant" and replace "Black and Carribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn" with "lily white suburb of Minneapolis" -- wouldn't we feel weird if the objection was that they're not adequately respectful of the longtime residents, or something?
Developers don't force out people who have been in their apartments for 40 years to attract Somali immigrants. They do to attract wealthy white people. The power disparity is real and meaningful.
I guess that makes sense. But it feels very similar to the arguments in favor of Prop 13 in California -- that we can't raise property taxes on homes now worth well over $1 million because it might force people out of the homes they've been living in for 40 years.
A lot of things sound and feel similar to each other, especially when I am off my meds.
That is not an insult directly to you but an attempt to make the point that "this argument seems similar" is no more valid of an argument than "in my imagination, my argument is correct." The internet is full of people using "sounds similar to this bad arg" as an arg, but it is not an arg anymore than "I hallucinated this once" is an arg.
Okay I'll ask more directly: what is the principle that says that raising rents on people who've been living in the same apartment in Brooklyn for years is unethical but raising property taxes on people living in the same house in California for years isn't?
(This is assuming you're opposed to prop 13. If you support it, then I retract my question)
I'm not sure which side of the particular california culture war I'd be on if I opted into it. I also haven't really opted into the subculture where you translate policy decisions into as theoretical and universal a principle as possible and then debate that principle. So I think we might not have enough subcultural background in common to really communicate about this.
Oh man. I took a whole day to sit down with my ballot, I did my research on each and every initiative, I spent two hours on the phone with my best friend, and I even remember saying that prop 13 was one of the more challenging things on the ballot...
But I can't actually remember which box I checked!
You're comparing apples to oranges. Rent is not analogous to property taxes. Rising home values, which lead to rising property taxes, typically entail an increase in wealth for those who own a home. Rising rents.just means that tenants have to pay more money each month with no gain at the end. But rising rents can be a win all around for landlords (more $$ every month, more money if they sell the property). Personal example: I live in NY, not California, but I live in a place where home values have jumped to the point where I couldn't afford to buy the house I've been living in (and paying a mortgage on) for 20+ years. I am divorced and my property taxes have jumped to the point where I struggle to pay them. If this continues, I may have to sell my house. I'll make decent money on the sale. But if I were renting and hadn't built up equity over 20 years? Nothing.
Developers do force long time residents out in order to gain wealthy international students near college towns. Many of those are not white, although they are competitively wealthy, and definitely dont share the local culture.
Infill development doesn't force anyone out of their apartments, at least not if it done right. Infill development reduces displacement it does not increase it. All things being equal, new higher density housing is overwhelmingly a good thing for existing residents.
...I am not really sure if one can reasonably claim to be 'YIMBY' if all the backyards one agrees with developing are other people's and one still opposes(*) development in ones own backyard. (*) for good reasons! Of course for good reasons, one isn't bad people.
I pretty explicitly said that I am not a YIMBY, and I further have attended protests with local activists working against developments that are far, far away from my neighborhood.
This doesn't really get at the real reason why people are NIMBYs--the sense that this country can't build anything decent and can't be relied upon to improve/increase infrastructure in line with increased density. Also that development disproportionally falls on the shoulders of communities/neighborhoods that aren't rich.
I'm not a NIMBY, but I sympathize with them, because dismissing out-of-hand residents' valid concerns about parking, noise, etc. are not a good strategy for engendering long-term mutual respect.
Like yes, poor people need housing too. But when someone is shot in my area, I know they came from one of two apartment buildings without needing to be told. I can hear the sirens going to those buildings night and day. The roads surrounding them are always filled with trash. When my garage was broken into, it turned out to be someone from those buildings who did it.
I don't think the solution is to never build low-income housing, by any means. But people worried about homeless shelters or low-income housing aren't worried about nothing, and YIMBYers like to pretend that concerns over crime is just racism (which yeah, sometimes it is), that there's no crime in impoverished communities, and something something white-collar crime (as if I should be equally concerned about my neighbor who commits tax fraud and my neighbor who commits violent assault!) This is a resolvable conflict: concerns over security can certainly be addressed in a manner that satisfies both parties. But I've only seen YIMBYers act like there isn't anything to be concerned about. Pretending the concern isn't legitimate makes them look nefarious.
I think the idea that NIMBYs oppose new housing because of crime (whether that fear is legitimate or not, who knows) rings true in many suburbs across the country but is definitely not true on the gentrification frontier in Brooklyn and other city centers. Gentrification brings less crime to a neighborhood.
Yeah but it's true of the middle class black people in Crown Heights fighting against the homeless shelter and honestly I don't blame them. The way we treat the homeless in this country is despicable but at the same time it's hard to argue that a homeless shelter is a positive addition to a working or middle class community, given the current state of homeless services in America and the prevalence of mental illness and addiction among the homeless. I used to live down the street from a halfway house in an otherwise middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn and it was pretty unpleasant. I got harassed a lot when walking around by myself and there was always trash, vomit, needles and other gross things all over the sidewalk on that block (even more than usual for NYC). There are probably a lot of people who have a level of compassion for the homeless but also don't want their children walking around a neighborhood with a large number of homeless people who are likely mentally ill and/or addicts. What can anyone do in that situation, when structural change feels impossible, besides prioritize their own families?
Also for the record I don't mean to denigrate people with mental illnesses. I just mean that homeless people are far more likely than average to suffer from severe mental illness, e.g. schizophrenia, and for it to be untreated such that their behavior is erratic and frankly downright scary to bystanders.
I have done six years in Manhattan, six months in the Valley (SF and San Mateo), six months in Dallas/Plano, two years in SLC, 18 months in Toronto and Kitchener/Waterloo, six months in Socal (SD and LA), three months in Boston and assorted short stints in Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, and probably a few other places I am forgetting. In terms of mental illness among the homeless NYC was by far the worst.
And on a related note I think homeless shelters are the worst. Infested with bed bugs, shit on the floor of the showers, crime ridden and filled with literal screaming lunatics. It shouldn't be surprising that many, many homeless feel better off sleeping outside. The problem is that the better solution, of simply providing free housing to the chronically homeless, is not easily achievable in large urban cores because gentrification has increased real estate costs. That partially contributes to the drive to warehouse people.
Really? That's very interesting. I wonder why. What exactly did you notice was unique about the behavior of the homeless in NYC, if you don't mind my asking? All I know is I've had some pretty scary encounters in the streets with homeless New Yorkers, though I'm a small and non-threatening woman who looks like an easy target so my experience might not be the norm. I do recall it feeling like there were more homeless people in Portland, SF and Seattle than in NYC.
I think it also doesn't get at the real reason why people are YIMBYs: we live in a capitalist system with private property, and making a half-exception for real-estate doesn't get us halfway to classless communism in the real-estate sector. It creates a vetocratic hellscape. There needs to be *some* uses of private property that are simply by-right, *or* there needs to be a planning authority that can mandate or permit things as easily as it can forbid them.
'I'm not a YIMBY myself, but I want these people to continue doing this' is a bizarre concept to me. I think sometimes you show a resistance to having associations with things that code moderate leftist because you self-identify as a hard leftist. But YIMBYism isn't a formal political identity. Nobody gets a YIMBY badge or takes the YIMBY oath. 'People who believe we should build more houses' is finally becoming enough of a thing that it's occasionally useful to have a word to use to reference those people. But they aren't a fixed group with fixed beliefs and even on things like rent regulation you won't have to look very hard to find people who think we should build a ton of houses and also rent control is fine. If you can call yourself a socialist you can call yourself a YIMBY, both identities mean nothing in practice and just lightly hint at your political views.
As with all form of leftism, it's really not that hard to find annoying activists here. But I think it's too easy to blame their failures on them being annoying. The social justice movement is also filled with very annoying people, and it's doing great. That doesn't mean both issues wouldn't be better off if their promoters had a better touch, but I think it's too easy to point their losses on the thing you don't like (them being annoying) and not the more substantial blockers that exist.
In this case the biggest blocker is that people are naturally pretty conservative on this issue. People who don't want to see their neighborhoods change are expressing a form of conservativism, whether they're anti-neighborhood-character-changing or anti-gentrification or anti-immigrant. That doesn't mean doesn't mean they're always wrong, it's not hard to think of some reasons why there should be greater than 0 limits to construction or immigration. Change doesn't always work out for the best. But fighting against the world changing is conservative, even when it's being done by people who self-identify as progressive, even when it's being done by communities of color.
I think you should stop presuming to tell me my motives and the genesis of my beliefs and how I state them. Because you don't know what you're talking about.
Look, I said 'I think sometimes'. I obviously don't know what's going on in your head. But I think that if you think they're doing good and important work then there needs to be a stronger argument for rejecting the YIMBY label than the one you've presented here.
You touched on this a little bit, but having had it happen in my own community (well, I assume, I'm not sure exactly what happened): sometimes those stupid little regulations are there for a reason! A few years ago, flooding became an issue in my area. The local lake/wetlands would routinely flood several feet (destroying the boardwalk and docks), and to the north of me there was issues with homes flooding, sewer pipes bursting, and sinkholes appearing in roads.
Part of it was just increased rains from, probably, climate change. But part of it was also over-development: too much ground had been paved or built upon and whatever water that ground would have absorbed was rerouted to the creeks and wetlands, which were quickly overwhelmed. The local lake had to triple its pumping capacity to dump more water into the Mississippi. A needed highway project was nearly torpedoed because there was nowhere to put the water. I don't know whether regulations were flouted or maybe they didn't exist in the first place, but every time I hear "we need to build more!" I think about this. Nobody thinks about stupid little things like "where does the water go?", but the results of not caring are expensive as hell.
I more and more think that it's just impossible to build an actual political movement that doesn't both attract dicks and empower dickish behavior. I'm very much YIMBY, but I also definitely agree that the more extreme behavior is bad and counterproductive. But at the end of the day, idk man. There's just not that much you can do to stop the dicks from coming in. And I feel like it only takes one or two dicks for that to become your entire group's reputation.
And of course, basically every activist community has a reputation for being dicks - DSA, Bernie supporters, libertarians, evangelical christians, they have all earned reputations for being extremely unpleasant groups to be around. And this reputation is deserved IMO - dickish behavior really does run rampant. But it might just be that the types of people willing to devote their time and energy to a mostly abstract ideological cause are also naturally inclined to be massive dicks to people who aren't on the same page.
The problem with housing is that, as the YIMBYs constantly complain, there are so many choke points and so many people with veto power that offending the wrong person is a real concern.
Look into *why* people sought and flexed that veto power. Why that developed. To me it is quite clear that if it wasn't for these many choke points and the gained veto powers all these communities and areas would've been flattened and turned into some dystopian Corbusier nightmare plots. Everywhere that's been recklessly no-brakes YIMBY has turned into garbage.
I wouldn't want to live in Houston but to its great credit, it has welcomed a diverse working-class and poor community with its commitment to building housing.
"Community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are "rational values"?? I realize that you may simply be reporting how YIMBYs perceive those values without subscribing to the perception yourself, but I still find the phrase jarring.
Indeed, the very phrase "rational values" here makes me suspicious. Describing these values (notice: "values," not "facts" or "reasoning") as "rational" reminds me of the way certain "rationalists" (new atheists, effective altruists, LessWrong, you know the type) tend to assume that utilitarianism is the "rational" approach to ethics.
Utilitarianism may be the correct approach to ethics, but it isn't any more inherently "rational" than other approaches. Rationality means understanding what conclusions logically follow from what premises. So if you start with the premises that the purpose of ethics is to maximize overall wellbeing and that the ends justify the means, then yes, it is rational to be a utilitarian. But if you don't start with those premises, then it isn't rational to be a utilitarian. As far as I can tell, utilitarianism feels more "rational" to "rationalist" types because (a) people mentally associate math with rationality and (b) utilitarianism is sort of math-y, since it involves adding up units of wellbeing. In other words, "rationalists" like utilitarianism not because it's actually more rational but because it fits their aesthetic of rationality.
It seems like the same thing is going on with YIMBYs who assume that "community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are "rational values." The YIMBYs have some sort of aesthetic of rationality, and development fits that aesthetic (maybe because they associate development with science and technology, and science and technology with rationality).
I guess from an initial premise that housing costs should be generally low, then it is *rational* to be in favor of development and to oppose development restrictions. If the initial premise is that we need to maintain community character, keep people in the houses they've lived in for decades, etc., then yimbyism is not rational.
Possibly unsurprisingly, "rationalists" have some very complicated (or nuanced/sophisticated) views and ideas about 'utilitarianism'. The core attraction is simply the commitment to navigating the tradeoffs among the _consequences_ to doing anything, or not doing anything – and, ideally, _all_ of the consequences, weighted by their likelihood. Sadly (and somewhat obviously), that's practically impossible. But even just _thinking_ in terms of consequences, at all, seems pretty important compared to 'purely' deontological or virtue-ethics (meta-)ethical and moral thinking.
Given all of that, I think it's unfair to write [emphasis mine]:
> YIMBYs who **assume** that "community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are "rational values."
At least _some_ of those same YIMBYs aren't _assuming_ any of that. They've thought about the tradeoffs and _concluded_ that "community control over zoning and development is bad" _because_ "community control", overall, works as a veto on (most) new construction, and that has long-term (and bad) consequences.
"community control over zoning and development is bad, any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good…. Sometimes I agree with these claims, sometimes I don’t. But it was classic YIMBYism in that these rational values..."
The more I think about it, the more this phrasing irritates me. The folks who throw around the term "rational values" tend to identify those values with "Enlightenment values." Now, from a historical perspective, deciding what values should be ascribed to "the Enlightenment" is difficult. But one thing's for certain: people usually assume that Enlightenment values include democracy and accountability for elites. "Community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are the very antithesis of democracy and accountability for elites.
I get that you do. I was just questioning your wording. Given your political commitments, it seems odd that you would describe those values as "rational," unless you're doing so sarcastically.
Great post. I completely agree about the grocery store. You only have to spend an hour watching elderly people slowly wheel their folding carts to and from the market to realize more distance means they won’t be able to go.
We had a lot of clashes over retail development in my old neighborhood. For example, should a Target move in? It never broke down neatly into “privileged” vs. not. The Latino owners of small stores obviously didn’t want Target to take their business. Many low-income residents of all races wanted access to the lower prices and promised jobs (big box stores always claimed they’d hire people from the neighborhood). Plus, Target has more selection and doesn’t give you shit for using a credit card. But the lefty activists had many correct points about the negative consequences of big-box stores moving in, and they found allies in affluent residents who feared more traffic. Both sides were accused of being hostile to people of color.
Anyway, I like the approach that it needs to be case-by-case. Development can be good or bad depending on conditions in the neighborhood and the specifics of the plan. Target is bad for a lot of neighborhoods, but in a high poverty neighborhood that has nothing--no small business community, staggering unemployment, a lot of boarded-up buildings and liquor stores--you can't blame residents for being pissed at the activists saying no.
Isn't a big part of this also that all of the additional building goes to areas where the people have the least resources to fight it? There are huge, Manhattan scale buildings being built in Flatbush and Crown Heights, but obviously that would never happen in Park Slope. The developers would not even bother to try because the legal battles would be too costly. So there is a problem that yeah, we need more housing and increased density is good, but since people mostly don't want big new construction in their neighborhood there needs to be more fairness in how this is distributed.
This is so fraught! { Development / new construction / gentrification } are all neither obviously very good or very terrible and there just doesn't seem to be any principled way – that's also practical – to determine what's 'best' in any specific case, or even overall.
I used to live in your neighborhood (PLG) for several years, and had lived in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) for several years before that, and I'm still fascinated by all of the diverse forms that development/gentrification, and all of the various 'housing' issues related to them, take in different places. (Even Williamsburg by itself has a big range of different kinds of 'housing issues'!)
The problem is not being YIMBY enough. Just give the developers 40 extra stories so there are not 1 but 2 side-by-side competing grocery stores.
Freddie, the WHOLE IDEA of YIMBY is to force the people who WANT A GROCERY STORE to demand even more building to get it.
If you want to play King Solomon: you need to tell us how each side responded when you asked them: why not build 10x More?
Are the developers going to fight more development, bc they got theirs?
Are the supermarket fans going to suddenly insist it's not about access to fresh vegetables? Is it really about not having an 80 story building loom over you? Or that your place will get hoovered up eventually too?
The really high towers are not particularly efficient from a maintenance and engineering standpoint and the 40+ story buildings you see end up being almost entirely extremely high-end cash stuffing condos to defray the high maintenance cost from such structures.
It's not about one building. When you create a new "downtown" the adjacent areas build to greater heights as well. The larger idea is by simply ALLOWING whatever developers want to build, you get Houston = flat rents as population soars.
This is what I was saying: Freddie's take and now yours, it's all built inside a NIBMY worldview where each new project is up for discussion.
I'm not sure there are real YIMBYs in Brooklyn, you can't really know until EVERYONE'S Ox can get gored.
EVERYONE has smallish side arguments like you or Freddie.
But, if the world of Brooklyn was actually like Texas, where approval is a fait accompli and nobody needs bribed and nobody gets in the way... then you see who is really NIMBY and YIMBY.
YES, lefty weirdo in TX in your weird world everything is a bribe. We have the TPPF that is paid for TX biz and it writes most legislation that gets passed (it writes hundreds of proposed laws and legislators look thru them and pass what they like, bc our govt ONLY MEETS for 90 days every 2 years)
THIS IS PART OF BEING REAL YIMBY.
You arent going to have a Texas style YES BUILD WHATEVER WHEREVER YOU WANT policy while your state legislators are full time law makers.
For example, Elon literally showed up in south TX and started buying up town and yep it pissed off birders but Starbase is overnight real.
This is YIMBY.
This is the RAWLSIAN, behind the veil way, you'd establish land use, youd would always assume you are poor and own no land... you'd want your govt allow as much density as physically possible.
I'd go further and say we should still do 40 acres and mule by giving Federal land, bc YIMBY purity.
If you are WANTING to go spend 20 years farming and living in middle of nowhere because modern life or the situation you are born into sucks, we SHOULD use this to encourage land use where there is no land use and use LVT gain piece of action for state if 40 acre areas begin to take off...
I think you are wildly understating the degree to which anti-development types want literally zero neighborhood change. It’s really easy to take a grocery store example and say “see, not all development is good!” but US cities generally have little mixed-use zoning so a store being replaced with pure residential is a genuine rarity. Hell YIMBYs biggest complaints all center on exclusively residential zoning, and there’s simply no justification for “save this single-family home” other than “change bad”. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden case is interesting, but again it’s arguments over three theoretical potential hours of shade and the MUCH bigger issue is that the proposal to shrink the tower to minimize shade was basically laughed at by the people who opposed the tower. YIMBYs are human, and the issue with jumping in mid-debate and saying “why aren’t you being more reasonable” is that you are almost always jumping into debates where anti-development activists have been comically unreasonable, so of course YIMBYS aren’t going to take their concerns seriously.
And since you asked: the argument against 100% “affordable” is that affordable is a made-up term. It’s almost exclusively based on median family/household income and thus encourages developers to build slums in poor neighborhoods and luxury palaces in rich ones. My relatively high-end apartment in Phoenix costs less per square foot than designated low-income housing in Seattle, and that’s indicative of a term that lacks any meaning.
Yes, "affordable" is not meaningful in practice. But I do think people need a shorthand way to describe whether there's any chance that local residents can actually afford to live in the new developments that are controversial.
I mean the other issue is who gets to live in a specific unit is completely and totally irrelevant. Who cares if only rich people can live in a development? They are already living in/going to live in the city! If they move into the nice new development than the one they would live in absent development is now available. The notion of "well only rich people can consume this" only matters if propensity to consume housing is infinite, and in reality it's super low. Thinking of housing as a set of independent assets and not as a large collective asset really distorts the discussion in a profoundly negative way.
I think this comment is a perfect encapsulation of not understanding how these longtime residents feel: they can't afford to relocate, they don't have the familial support and social support where they might relocate, and they don't WANT to relocate. It's shitty to just say "hey just move."
I’ve yet to see evidence that this hypothetical person exists though. We have VERY strong empirical evidence that suggests probability of moving in a given year is significantly negatively correlated with income, so the longer you live at an address the less likely you are to be low income. And that includes the elderly, which is a predominantly low-income group with a lot of wealth that moves very infrequently. Moving is shitty, but low-income people are already doing it damn near yearly AND moving from rental to rental (which is the real issue here, if it’s owned property then income is totally irrelevant) is way less of an issue. I would bet a pretty nice sum of money on there being no meaningful relationship between number of housing units permitted per capita and the number of moves per decade among those below AMI.
There is a substantial body of evidence that poor people are *less* likely to be displaced in areas where there is more new development. But you can't really argue with Progressives based on facts, they see the neighborhood changing and blame new development when it is really rising incomes that are the root cause.
The YIMBYs are, as foretold by prophecy, acting like this is a terribly negative attack on them, when it's a mostly very positive piece that reflects broad agreement on their positions and makes very gentle and I think fair requests about how the go about achieving their agenda. But so it goes.
Of note and relevance: '“We have a very wealthy population and most of them are very supportive of affordable housing although, you know, always wanting something else that’s maybe not quite in their backyard,” Bradshaw said.'
Why exactly do these "nurses, teachers, and service workers" think Ketchum, Idaho, is entitled to hospitals, schools and restaurants?
I am 100% serious. I once met a school teacher from Vail who lived in an apartment building owned by the school district. At a certain point, the property owners faced a choice between raising taxes to build housing for school staff or bussing their kids to the next county every day.
I’ve noticed 2 factors that might explain why the YIMBY ethos often attracts the type of person who is highly defensive and perceives most criticisms (like your friendly article) as serious attacks.
1) with the invocation of YIMBY/NIMBY, it has a lot in common with culture wars, in that it’s a rivalry that can’t really be won because you have to believe the other side is lurking behind every corner and ready to be owned by you in an arg (like conservatives who have to believe everyone hates their pickup truck or liberals who have to believe everyone not wearing a facemask outside voted for trump)
2) a lot of YIMBY folk come out of online libertarianism, which means they likely have a habit of abstracting specific policy questions into highly theoretical debates about concepts such as “non-aggression”
I think a lot of people arrive at YIMBY ideas from a more specific background in urban planning but also I think a lot of people arrive at it from those two places, which sets them up for getting stuck in cyclical arguments.
This article has gotten something strange to click for me, which is that the YIMBY identity is an attempt to graft the type of ideological/cultural rivalry that you get with the rest of politics onto housing. With electoral politics, foreign policy, the supreme court, etc., the ideological debates are always a bit removed from their real and dynamic context and taken into the realm of theory.
With housing, though, it's even more of a stretch to make it into a broader culture war and idea war, because it's one of the most contextual and localized things in the world. It's wild to see it.
re footnote #1, I'm curious what specific respect transplants must show longtime residents and whether or not this should apply to new immigrants to a country (or if it's just new migrants to a neighborhood or city). What are the first principles here?
like, I get the idea that an affluent white gentrifier not being sufficiently respectful for the longtime residents and character of a mostly Black and Carribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn feels icky.
But replace "affluent white gentrifier" with "Somali immigrant" and replace "Black and Carribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn" with "lily white suburb of Minneapolis" -- wouldn't we feel weird if the objection was that they're not adequately respectful of the longtime residents, or something?
Developers don't force out people who have been in their apartments for 40 years to attract Somali immigrants. They do to attract wealthy white people. The power disparity is real and meaningful.
I guess that makes sense. But it feels very similar to the arguments in favor of Prop 13 in California -- that we can't raise property taxes on homes now worth well over $1 million because it might force people out of the homes they've been living in for 40 years.
A lot of things sound and feel similar to each other, especially when I am off my meds.
That is not an insult directly to you but an attempt to make the point that "this argument seems similar" is no more valid of an argument than "in my imagination, my argument is correct." The internet is full of people using "sounds similar to this bad arg" as an arg, but it is not an arg anymore than "I hallucinated this once" is an arg.
Okay I'll ask more directly: what is the principle that says that raising rents on people who've been living in the same apartment in Brooklyn for years is unethical but raising property taxes on people living in the same house in California for years isn't?
(This is assuming you're opposed to prop 13. If you support it, then I retract my question)
I'm not sure which side of the particular california culture war I'd be on if I opted into it. I also haven't really opted into the subculture where you translate policy decisions into as theoretical and universal a principle as possible and then debate that principle. So I think we might not have enough subcultural background in common to really communicate about this.
Oh man. I took a whole day to sit down with my ballot, I did my research on each and every initiative, I spent two hours on the phone with my best friend, and I even remember saying that prop 13 was one of the more challenging things on the ballot...
But I can't actually remember which box I checked!
You're comparing apples to oranges. Rent is not analogous to property taxes. Rising home values, which lead to rising property taxes, typically entail an increase in wealth for those who own a home. Rising rents.just means that tenants have to pay more money each month with no gain at the end. But rising rents can be a win all around for landlords (more $$ every month, more money if they sell the property). Personal example: I live in NY, not California, but I live in a place where home values have jumped to the point where I couldn't afford to buy the house I've been living in (and paying a mortgage on) for 20+ years. I am divorced and my property taxes have jumped to the point where I struggle to pay them. If this continues, I may have to sell my house. I'll make decent money on the sale. But if I were renting and hadn't built up equity over 20 years? Nothing.
Developers do force long time residents out in order to gain wealthy international students near college towns. Many of those are not white, although they are competitively wealthy, and definitely dont share the local culture.
Infill development doesn't force anyone out of their apartments, at least not if it done right. Infill development reduces displacement it does not increase it. All things being equal, new higher density housing is overwhelmingly a good thing for existing residents.
...I am not really sure if one can reasonably claim to be 'YIMBY' if all the backyards one agrees with developing are other people's and one still opposes(*) development in ones own backyard. (*) for good reasons! Of course for good reasons, one isn't bad people.
I pretty explicitly said that I am not a YIMBY, and I further have attended protests with local activists working against developments that are far, far away from my neighborhood.
Typo: what looks like a missed word at the tail end of "...landlords, who as a class are a malign political."
thanks
I'll stick this here, too, then: "responsibility is defused throughout many actors"
Did you mean "diffused?"
damn I changed it and then reverted some changes and forgot to do it again
Another typo: Real State Board of New York -> Real Estate Board of New York
The typo is more accurate.
This doesn't really get at the real reason why people are NIMBYs--the sense that this country can't build anything decent and can't be relied upon to improve/increase infrastructure in line with increased density. Also that development disproportionally falls on the shoulders of communities/neighborhoods that aren't rich.
I'm not a NIMBY, but I sympathize with them, because dismissing out-of-hand residents' valid concerns about parking, noise, etc. are not a good strategy for engendering long-term mutual respect.
Also...crime.
Like yes, poor people need housing too. But when someone is shot in my area, I know they came from one of two apartment buildings without needing to be told. I can hear the sirens going to those buildings night and day. The roads surrounding them are always filled with trash. When my garage was broken into, it turned out to be someone from those buildings who did it.
I don't think the solution is to never build low-income housing, by any means. But people worried about homeless shelters or low-income housing aren't worried about nothing, and YIMBYers like to pretend that concerns over crime is just racism (which yeah, sometimes it is), that there's no crime in impoverished communities, and something something white-collar crime (as if I should be equally concerned about my neighbor who commits tax fraud and my neighbor who commits violent assault!) This is a resolvable conflict: concerns over security can certainly be addressed in a manner that satisfies both parties. But I've only seen YIMBYers act like there isn't anything to be concerned about. Pretending the concern isn't legitimate makes them look nefarious.
I think the idea that NIMBYs oppose new housing because of crime (whether that fear is legitimate or not, who knows) rings true in many suburbs across the country but is definitely not true on the gentrification frontier in Brooklyn and other city centers. Gentrification brings less crime to a neighborhood.
Yeah but it's true of the middle class black people in Crown Heights fighting against the homeless shelter and honestly I don't blame them. The way we treat the homeless in this country is despicable but at the same time it's hard to argue that a homeless shelter is a positive addition to a working or middle class community, given the current state of homeless services in America and the prevalence of mental illness and addiction among the homeless. I used to live down the street from a halfway house in an otherwise middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn and it was pretty unpleasant. I got harassed a lot when walking around by myself and there was always trash, vomit, needles and other gross things all over the sidewalk on that block (even more than usual for NYC). There are probably a lot of people who have a level of compassion for the homeless but also don't want their children walking around a neighborhood with a large number of homeless people who are likely mentally ill and/or addicts. What can anyone do in that situation, when structural change feels impossible, besides prioritize their own families?
Also for the record I don't mean to denigrate people with mental illnesses. I just mean that homeless people are far more likely than average to suffer from severe mental illness, e.g. schizophrenia, and for it to be untreated such that their behavior is erratic and frankly downright scary to bystanders.
I have done six years in Manhattan, six months in the Valley (SF and San Mateo), six months in Dallas/Plano, two years in SLC, 18 months in Toronto and Kitchener/Waterloo, six months in Socal (SD and LA), three months in Boston and assorted short stints in Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, and probably a few other places I am forgetting. In terms of mental illness among the homeless NYC was by far the worst.
And on a related note I think homeless shelters are the worst. Infested with bed bugs, shit on the floor of the showers, crime ridden and filled with literal screaming lunatics. It shouldn't be surprising that many, many homeless feel better off sleeping outside. The problem is that the better solution, of simply providing free housing to the chronically homeless, is not easily achievable in large urban cores because gentrification has increased real estate costs. That partially contributes to the drive to warehouse people.
Really? That's very interesting. I wonder why. What exactly did you notice was unique about the behavior of the homeless in NYC, if you don't mind my asking? All I know is I've had some pretty scary encounters in the streets with homeless New Yorkers, though I'm a small and non-threatening woman who looks like an easy target so my experience might not be the norm. I do recall it feeling like there were more homeless people in Portland, SF and Seattle than in NYC.
People who care about parking are the worst. Literally.
I think it also doesn't get at the real reason why people are YIMBYs: we live in a capitalist system with private property, and making a half-exception for real-estate doesn't get us halfway to classless communism in the real-estate sector. It creates a vetocratic hellscape. There needs to be *some* uses of private property that are simply by-right, *or* there needs to be a planning authority that can mandate or permit things as easily as it can forbid them.
'I'm not a YIMBY myself, but I want these people to continue doing this' is a bizarre concept to me. I think sometimes you show a resistance to having associations with things that code moderate leftist because you self-identify as a hard leftist. But YIMBYism isn't a formal political identity. Nobody gets a YIMBY badge or takes the YIMBY oath. 'People who believe we should build more houses' is finally becoming enough of a thing that it's occasionally useful to have a word to use to reference those people. But they aren't a fixed group with fixed beliefs and even on things like rent regulation you won't have to look very hard to find people who think we should build a ton of houses and also rent control is fine. If you can call yourself a socialist you can call yourself a YIMBY, both identities mean nothing in practice and just lightly hint at your political views.
As with all form of leftism, it's really not that hard to find annoying activists here. But I think it's too easy to blame their failures on them being annoying. The social justice movement is also filled with very annoying people, and it's doing great. That doesn't mean both issues wouldn't be better off if their promoters had a better touch, but I think it's too easy to point their losses on the thing you don't like (them being annoying) and not the more substantial blockers that exist.
In this case the biggest blocker is that people are naturally pretty conservative on this issue. People who don't want to see their neighborhoods change are expressing a form of conservativism, whether they're anti-neighborhood-character-changing or anti-gentrification or anti-immigrant. That doesn't mean doesn't mean they're always wrong, it's not hard to think of some reasons why there should be greater than 0 limits to construction or immigration. Change doesn't always work out for the best. But fighting against the world changing is conservative, even when it's being done by people who self-identify as progressive, even when it's being done by communities of color.
I think you should stop presuming to tell me my motives and the genesis of my beliefs and how I state them. Because you don't know what you're talking about.
Look, I said 'I think sometimes'. I obviously don't know what's going on in your head. But I think that if you think they're doing good and important work then there needs to be a stronger argument for rejecting the YIMBY label than the one you've presented here.
You touched on this a little bit, but having had it happen in my own community (well, I assume, I'm not sure exactly what happened): sometimes those stupid little regulations are there for a reason! A few years ago, flooding became an issue in my area. The local lake/wetlands would routinely flood several feet (destroying the boardwalk and docks), and to the north of me there was issues with homes flooding, sewer pipes bursting, and sinkholes appearing in roads.
Part of it was just increased rains from, probably, climate change. But part of it was also over-development: too much ground had been paved or built upon and whatever water that ground would have absorbed was rerouted to the creeks and wetlands, which were quickly overwhelmed. The local lake had to triple its pumping capacity to dump more water into the Mississippi. A needed highway project was nearly torpedoed because there was nowhere to put the water. I don't know whether regulations were flouted or maybe they didn't exist in the first place, but every time I hear "we need to build more!" I think about this. Nobody thinks about stupid little things like "where does the water go?", but the results of not caring are expensive as hell.
ending federally subsidized flood insurance is a good idea that few people support
I more and more think that it's just impossible to build an actual political movement that doesn't both attract dicks and empower dickish behavior. I'm very much YIMBY, but I also definitely agree that the more extreme behavior is bad and counterproductive. But at the end of the day, idk man. There's just not that much you can do to stop the dicks from coming in. And I feel like it only takes one or two dicks for that to become your entire group's reputation.
And of course, basically every activist community has a reputation for being dicks - DSA, Bernie supporters, libertarians, evangelical christians, they have all earned reputations for being extremely unpleasant groups to be around. And this reputation is deserved IMO - dickish behavior really does run rampant. But it might just be that the types of people willing to devote their time and energy to a mostly abstract ideological cause are also naturally inclined to be massive dicks to people who aren't on the same page.
The problem with housing is that, as the YIMBYs constantly complain, there are so many choke points and so many people with veto power that offending the wrong person is a real concern.
Look into *why* people sought and flexed that veto power. Why that developed. To me it is quite clear that if it wasn't for these many choke points and the gained veto powers all these communities and areas would've been flattened and turned into some dystopian Corbusier nightmare plots. Everywhere that's been recklessly no-brakes YIMBY has turned into garbage.
I wouldn't want to live in Houston but to its great credit, it has welcomed a diverse working-class and poor community with its commitment to building housing.
And yet the city is terrible and it’s working class not particularly thriving
Yeah it sucks.
"Community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are "rational values"?? I realize that you may simply be reporting how YIMBYs perceive those values without subscribing to the perception yourself, but I still find the phrase jarring.
Indeed, the very phrase "rational values" here makes me suspicious. Describing these values (notice: "values," not "facts" or "reasoning") as "rational" reminds me of the way certain "rationalists" (new atheists, effective altruists, LessWrong, you know the type) tend to assume that utilitarianism is the "rational" approach to ethics.
Utilitarianism may be the correct approach to ethics, but it isn't any more inherently "rational" than other approaches. Rationality means understanding what conclusions logically follow from what premises. So if you start with the premises that the purpose of ethics is to maximize overall wellbeing and that the ends justify the means, then yes, it is rational to be a utilitarian. But if you don't start with those premises, then it isn't rational to be a utilitarian. As far as I can tell, utilitarianism feels more "rational" to "rationalist" types because (a) people mentally associate math with rationality and (b) utilitarianism is sort of math-y, since it involves adding up units of wellbeing. In other words, "rationalists" like utilitarianism not because it's actually more rational but because it fits their aesthetic of rationality.
It seems like the same thing is going on with YIMBYs who assume that "community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are "rational values." The YIMBYs have some sort of aesthetic of rationality, and development fits that aesthetic (maybe because they associate development with science and technology, and science and technology with rationality).
I guess from an initial premise that housing costs should be generally low, then it is *rational* to be in favor of development and to oppose development restrictions. If the initial premise is that we need to maintain community character, keep people in the houses they've lived in for decades, etc., then yimbyism is not rational.
Possibly unsurprisingly, "rationalists" have some very complicated (or nuanced/sophisticated) views and ideas about 'utilitarianism'. The core attraction is simply the commitment to navigating the tradeoffs among the _consequences_ to doing anything, or not doing anything – and, ideally, _all_ of the consequences, weighted by their likelihood. Sadly (and somewhat obviously), that's practically impossible. But even just _thinking_ in terms of consequences, at all, seems pretty important compared to 'purely' deontological or virtue-ethics (meta-)ethical and moral thinking.
Given all of that, I think it's unfair to write [emphasis mine]:
> YIMBYs who **assume** that "community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are "rational values."
At least _some_ of those same YIMBYs aren't _assuming_ any of that. They've thought about the tradeoffs and _concluded_ that "community control over zoning and development is bad" _because_ "community control", overall, works as a veto on (most) new construction, and that has long-term (and bad) consequences.
"community control over zoning and development is bad, any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good…. Sometimes I agree with these claims, sometimes I don’t. But it was classic YIMBYism in that these rational values..."
The more I think about it, the more this phrasing irritates me. The folks who throw around the term "rational values" tend to identify those values with "Enlightenment values." Now, from a historical perspective, deciding what values should be ascribed to "the Enlightenment" is difficult. But one thing's for certain: people usually assume that Enlightenment values include democracy and accountability for elites. "Community control over zoning and development is bad" and "any reform that makes it easier for developer to build and harder for ordinary people to oppose them is good" are the very antithesis of democracy and accountability for elites.
you get that I do a lot of criticizing of these people in the post you're reacting to right
I get that you do. I was just questioning your wording. Given your political commitments, it seems odd that you would describe those values as "rational," unless you're doing so sarcastically.
Great post. I completely agree about the grocery store. You only have to spend an hour watching elderly people slowly wheel their folding carts to and from the market to realize more distance means they won’t be able to go.
We had a lot of clashes over retail development in my old neighborhood. For example, should a Target move in? It never broke down neatly into “privileged” vs. not. The Latino owners of small stores obviously didn’t want Target to take their business. Many low-income residents of all races wanted access to the lower prices and promised jobs (big box stores always claimed they’d hire people from the neighborhood). Plus, Target has more selection and doesn’t give you shit for using a credit card. But the lefty activists had many correct points about the negative consequences of big-box stores moving in, and they found allies in affluent residents who feared more traffic. Both sides were accused of being hostile to people of color.
Anyway, I like the approach that it needs to be case-by-case. Development can be good or bad depending on conditions in the neighborhood and the specifics of the plan. Target is bad for a lot of neighborhoods, but in a high poverty neighborhood that has nothing--no small business community, staggering unemployment, a lot of boarded-up buildings and liquor stores--you can't blame residents for being pissed at the activists saying no.
Isn't a big part of this also that all of the additional building goes to areas where the people have the least resources to fight it? There are huge, Manhattan scale buildings being built in Flatbush and Crown Heights, but obviously that would never happen in Park Slope. The developers would not even bother to try because the legal battles would be too costly. So there is a problem that yeah, we need more housing and increased density is good, but since people mostly don't want big new construction in their neighborhood there needs to be more fairness in how this is distributed.
This is so fraught! { Development / new construction / gentrification } are all neither obviously very good or very terrible and there just doesn't seem to be any principled way – that's also practical – to determine what's 'best' in any specific case, or even overall.
"Fraught" is a good word.
I used to live in your neighborhood (PLG) for several years, and had lived in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) for several years before that, and I'm still fascinated by all of the diverse forms that development/gentrification, and all of the various 'housing' issues related to them, take in different places. (Even Williamsburg by itself has a big range of different kinds of 'housing issues'!)
The problem is not being YIMBY enough. Just give the developers 40 extra stories so there are not 1 but 2 side-by-side competing grocery stores.
Freddie, the WHOLE IDEA of YIMBY is to force the people who WANT A GROCERY STORE to demand even more building to get it.
If you want to play King Solomon: you need to tell us how each side responded when you asked them: why not build 10x More?
Are the developers going to fight more development, bc they got theirs?
Are the supermarket fans going to suddenly insist it's not about access to fresh vegetables? Is it really about not having an 80 story building loom over you? Or that your place will get hoovered up eventually too?
The really high towers are not particularly efficient from a maintenance and engineering standpoint and the 40+ story buildings you see end up being almost entirely extremely high-end cash stuffing condos to defray the high maintenance cost from such structures.
It's not about one building. When you create a new "downtown" the adjacent areas build to greater heights as well. The larger idea is by simply ALLOWING whatever developers want to build, you get Houston = flat rents as population soars.
This is what I was saying: Freddie's take and now yours, it's all built inside a NIBMY worldview where each new project is up for discussion.
I'm not sure there are real YIMBYs in Brooklyn, you can't really know until EVERYONE'S Ox can get gored.
EVERYONE has smallish side arguments like you or Freddie.
But, if the world of Brooklyn was actually like Texas, where approval is a fait accompli and nobody needs bribed and nobody gets in the way... then you see who is really NIMBY and YIMBY.
Last sentence unclear. Did you seriously mean to say there are no bribes in Texas?
God I hate non-reponsive shit like this.
YES, lefty weirdo in TX in your weird world everything is a bribe. We have the TPPF that is paid for TX biz and it writes most legislation that gets passed (it writes hundreds of proposed laws and legislators look thru them and pass what they like, bc our govt ONLY MEETS for 90 days every 2 years)
THIS IS PART OF BEING REAL YIMBY.
You arent going to have a Texas style YES BUILD WHATEVER WHEREVER YOU WANT policy while your state legislators are full time law makers.
For example, Elon literally showed up in south TX and started buying up town and yep it pissed off birders but Starbase is overnight real.
This is YIMBY.
This is the RAWLSIAN, behind the veil way, you'd establish land use, youd would always assume you are poor and own no land... you'd want your govt allow as much density as physically possible.
I'd go further and say we should still do 40 acres and mule by giving Federal land, bc YIMBY purity.
If you are WANTING to go spend 20 years farming and living in middle of nowhere because modern life or the situation you are born into sucks, we SHOULD use this to encourage land use where there is no land use and use LVT gain piece of action for state if 40 acre areas begin to take off...
Be polite. I won't ask twice.
Its your thing.
Houston is garbage and nobody should aspire to build another Houston. The current Houston should be dismantled. Terrible city.
Where should poor people live then?
In mixed-density mixed-zoning walkable neighborhoods
We can’t build those at a cost that anyone working class can afford. So you are basically telling them to get stuffed.
I think you are wildly understating the degree to which anti-development types want literally zero neighborhood change. It’s really easy to take a grocery store example and say “see, not all development is good!” but US cities generally have little mixed-use zoning so a store being replaced with pure residential is a genuine rarity. Hell YIMBYs biggest complaints all center on exclusively residential zoning, and there’s simply no justification for “save this single-family home” other than “change bad”. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden case is interesting, but again it’s arguments over three theoretical potential hours of shade and the MUCH bigger issue is that the proposal to shrink the tower to minimize shade was basically laughed at by the people who opposed the tower. YIMBYs are human, and the issue with jumping in mid-debate and saying “why aren’t you being more reasonable” is that you are almost always jumping into debates where anti-development activists have been comically unreasonable, so of course YIMBYS aren’t going to take their concerns seriously.
And since you asked: the argument against 100% “affordable” is that affordable is a made-up term. It’s almost exclusively based on median family/household income and thus encourages developers to build slums in poor neighborhoods and luxury palaces in rich ones. My relatively high-end apartment in Phoenix costs less per square foot than designated low-income housing in Seattle, and that’s indicative of a term that lacks any meaning.
Yes, "affordable" is not meaningful in practice. But I do think people need a shorthand way to describe whether there's any chance that local residents can actually afford to live in the new developments that are controversial.
I mean the other issue is who gets to live in a specific unit is completely and totally irrelevant. Who cares if only rich people can live in a development? They are already living in/going to live in the city! If they move into the nice new development than the one they would live in absent development is now available. The notion of "well only rich people can consume this" only matters if propensity to consume housing is infinite, and in reality it's super low. Thinking of housing as a set of independent assets and not as a large collective asset really distorts the discussion in a profoundly negative way.
I think this comment is a perfect encapsulation of not understanding how these longtime residents feel: they can't afford to relocate, they don't have the familial support and social support where they might relocate, and they don't WANT to relocate. It's shitty to just say "hey just move."
I’ve yet to see evidence that this hypothetical person exists though. We have VERY strong empirical evidence that suggests probability of moving in a given year is significantly negatively correlated with income, so the longer you live at an address the less likely you are to be low income. And that includes the elderly, which is a predominantly low-income group with a lot of wealth that moves very infrequently. Moving is shitty, but low-income people are already doing it damn near yearly AND moving from rental to rental (which is the real issue here, if it’s owned property then income is totally irrelevant) is way less of an issue. I would bet a pretty nice sum of money on there being no meaningful relationship between number of housing units permitted per capita and the number of moves per decade among those below AMI.
There is a substantial body of evidence that poor people are *less* likely to be displaced in areas where there is more new development. But you can't really argue with Progressives based on facts, they see the neighborhood changing and blame new development when it is really rising incomes that are the root cause.
The YIMBYs are, as foretold by prophecy, acting like this is a terribly negative attack on them, when it's a mostly very positive piece that reflects broad agreement on their positions and makes very gentle and I think fair requests about how the go about achieving their agenda. But so it goes.
After reading your piece this morning I found this article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-superrich-bought-up-ketchum-idaho-and-now-regular-folks-may-have-to-live-in-tent-housing
Of note and relevance: '“We have a very wealthy population and most of them are very supportive of affordable housing although, you know, always wanting something else that’s maybe not quite in their backyard,” Bradshaw said.'
Why exactly do these "nurses, teachers, and service workers" think Ketchum, Idaho, is entitled to hospitals, schools and restaurants?
I am 100% serious. I once met a school teacher from Vail who lived in an apartment building owned by the school district. At a certain point, the property owners faced a choice between raising taxes to build housing for school staff or bussing their kids to the next county every day.
I’ve noticed 2 factors that might explain why the YIMBY ethos often attracts the type of person who is highly defensive and perceives most criticisms (like your friendly article) as serious attacks.
1) with the invocation of YIMBY/NIMBY, it has a lot in common with culture wars, in that it’s a rivalry that can’t really be won because you have to believe the other side is lurking behind every corner and ready to be owned by you in an arg (like conservatives who have to believe everyone hates their pickup truck or liberals who have to believe everyone not wearing a facemask outside voted for trump)
2) a lot of YIMBY folk come out of online libertarianism, which means they likely have a habit of abstracting specific policy questions into highly theoretical debates about concepts such as “non-aggression”
I think a lot of people arrive at YIMBY ideas from a more specific background in urban planning but also I think a lot of people arrive at it from those two places, which sets them up for getting stuck in cyclical arguments.
This article has gotten something strange to click for me, which is that the YIMBY identity is an attempt to graft the type of ideological/cultural rivalry that you get with the rest of politics onto housing. With electoral politics, foreign policy, the supreme court, etc., the ideological debates are always a bit removed from their real and dynamic context and taken into the realm of theory.
With housing, though, it's even more of a stretch to make it into a broader culture war and idea war, because it's one of the most contextual and localized things in the world. It's wild to see it.