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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.

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'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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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founding

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.

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...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.

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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.

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Sorry Freddie, I'm firmly NIMBY on account that you cannot trust Capital (developers) whatsoever and you cannot trust local councils/municipalities to enforce the rules they have on paper. The reason it is impossible to build anything in San Fran is because rampant YIMBYism threatened to destroy and disenfranchise communities like it was doing throughout the modernist construction boom in the 50s-70s. More powerful (white, rich, affluent) communities managed to fight back against the maw of Capital but the principle point is universal: let local affairs be governed by local stakeholders.

YIMBYism lead to the interstate system and its catastrophic destruction of lower-income urban areas. YIMBYism makes money for developers and takes resources away from local stakeholders (ie grocery stores, little shops, etc.). YIMBYism encourages transnational capital flight.

NIMBYism on the other hand raises a big middle finger to this transnational, anti-local agenda and says "No, not here, not ever."

NIMBYs would trust development if developers and local councils were *ever* reliable at their word. So that's where it should start: tell developers to do better and get councils to be better. Once they pick up the slack and involve local stakeholders and guarantee certain things (not promise public features and then quietly redact; as they do) the NIMBY movement will lose steam.

Until then, the only way to fight against the gaping maw of Capital is NIMBYism. Yeah we need housing but we don't need to destroy already extant housing and communities to feed the cash-parking needs of the global rich.

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"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).

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This is great and as a strident YIMBY I am guilty of some of these sins as well. It is important for the long term health of the movement to be inclusive to a wider variety of voices. I am in fact one of the "outsiders" in my group because I am 56 and a parent and a Vet, even though I am a white male!

We need to amplify the voices of people of color especially. Here in SF many of our leaders are women and queer, so we are doing okay but we need to do better.

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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.

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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.

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