I'm with you on this. I'm very sympathetic to YIMBYism, but it does become cultish at times. In particular, they tend to waive away costs of their proposals. You touch on this with the "neighborhood character" thing. People legitimately like living in certain types of areas, and having to move every so often to continue to do so is …
I'm with you on this. I'm very sympathetic to YIMBYism, but it does become cultish at times. In particular, they tend to waive away costs of their proposals. You touch on this with the "neighborhood character" thing. People legitimately like living in certain types of areas, and having to move every so often to continue to do so is a cost.
There's also this idea, often pushed by Yglesias (of who I am generally a big fan) that upzoning actually increases property values because it let's you use your property for higher value things. Maybe this is true, but its certainly not a priori true. Sure my property value will go up if I all the sudden can all of the sudden redevelop my property in an apartment building, but maybe not if several of my neighbors have already done so by the time I get around to it.
Now it may be that we are in a place where it's worth making people bear these costs (I think we are to a certain extent, which is why I am sympathetic to YIMBYism), but you have to convince people of this. Movements often try to dismiss the other sides objections as meritless, but they almost never are truely meritless. When you do this, all you do is alienate potential converts, because they can see that you are bullshitting them on this one point, and assume you must be bullshitting them on everything else as well.
As an aside, another good example of this was the left's response to the anti-CRT movement. There is a lot of merit to the ideas that racism is continues to be a big problem in this country and that it should be discussed in schools, but the left didn't make this argument, they basically just said "nothing has changed and if you think it has, you're a racist." Since things pretty clearly had changed, and since most of the people concerned about this knew (or at least beleived) they were not racists, this line of argument did nothing but convince a lot of people raising good faith (even if potentially misguided) concern, to think that that the left was lying to them and maybe they should listen to Chris Rufo after all.
"Movements often try to dismiss the other sides objections as meritless, but they almost never are truely meritless."
Yes, yes YES. This dismissal is like the way Americans seem to imagine the federal budget: a pie chart in which a third of the pie is labeled, "Useless crap" that we could simply cut without anyone noticing. Everything on which government spends money has a constituency, whether or not one thinks that expenditure is worth it. Getting that constituency to let go requires either A) electorally overpowering them, or B) persuading/negotiating with them. Given how many people own homes, and the power those people wield, in terms of housing Option A is just a dead end.
2. You can in fact win political battles at the state level that overcome local control issues. Sometimes, you can even win at the local level it’s just many more battles.
Here in San Francisco we are winning the hearts and minds of San Franciscans. We just got two more pro-housing members elected to the Board of Supervisors and probably most famously we have elected and re-elected Sen Scott Wiener to the State Senate, where he has passed effective pro-housing legislation.
We often do dismiss the extremists on the other side as meritless. Some of them are. Some are unpersuadable and have a strong financial interest in supporting their class interests. More are not. San Francisco has a majority of renters, it is much easier to build a coalition that gets to 50% +1 in such a city.
William H Fischel writes about the Homevoter Hypothesis, but I suspect the motives of NIMBYs may not always be as financial as that. They just want their neighborhood
S preserved just as they are. They might actually make MORE money if they sold out for condos or apartments. But “property values” has an appeal to a city government dependent on property taxes (which, by the way, are a wealth tax, at least for residential)
I'm with you on this. I'm very sympathetic to YIMBYism, but it does become cultish at times. In particular, they tend to waive away costs of their proposals. You touch on this with the "neighborhood character" thing. People legitimately like living in certain types of areas, and having to move every so often to continue to do so is a cost.
There's also this idea, often pushed by Yglesias (of who I am generally a big fan) that upzoning actually increases property values because it let's you use your property for higher value things. Maybe this is true, but its certainly not a priori true. Sure my property value will go up if I all the sudden can all of the sudden redevelop my property in an apartment building, but maybe not if several of my neighbors have already done so by the time I get around to it.
Now it may be that we are in a place where it's worth making people bear these costs (I think we are to a certain extent, which is why I am sympathetic to YIMBYism), but you have to convince people of this. Movements often try to dismiss the other sides objections as meritless, but they almost never are truely meritless. When you do this, all you do is alienate potential converts, because they can see that you are bullshitting them on this one point, and assume you must be bullshitting them on everything else as well.
As an aside, another good example of this was the left's response to the anti-CRT movement. There is a lot of merit to the ideas that racism is continues to be a big problem in this country and that it should be discussed in schools, but the left didn't make this argument, they basically just said "nothing has changed and if you think it has, you're a racist." Since things pretty clearly had changed, and since most of the people concerned about this knew (or at least beleived) they were not racists, this line of argument did nothing but convince a lot of people raising good faith (even if potentially misguided) concern, to think that that the left was lying to them and maybe they should listen to Chris Rufo after all.
"Movements often try to dismiss the other sides objections as meritless, but they almost never are truely meritless."
Yes, yes YES. This dismissal is like the way Americans seem to imagine the federal budget: a pie chart in which a third of the pie is labeled, "Useless crap" that we could simply cut without anyone noticing. Everything on which government spends money has a constituency, whether or not one thinks that expenditure is worth it. Getting that constituency to let go requires either A) electorally overpowering them, or B) persuading/negotiating with them. Given how many people own homes, and the power those people wield, in terms of housing Option A is just a dead end.
1. YIMBYs understand the politics at hand.
2. You can in fact win political battles at the state level that overcome local control issues. Sometimes, you can even win at the local level it’s just many more battles.
Here in San Francisco we are winning the hearts and minds of San Franciscans. We just got two more pro-housing members elected to the Board of Supervisors and probably most famously we have elected and re-elected Sen Scott Wiener to the State Senate, where he has passed effective pro-housing legislation.
We often do dismiss the extremists on the other side as meritless. Some of them are. Some are unpersuadable and have a strong financial interest in supporting their class interests. More are not. San Francisco has a majority of renters, it is much easier to build a coalition that gets to 50% +1 in such a city.
William H Fischel writes about the Homevoter Hypothesis, but I suspect the motives of NIMBYs may not always be as financial as that. They just want their neighborhood
S preserved just as they are. They might actually make MORE money if they sold out for condos or apartments. But “property values” has an appeal to a city government dependent on property taxes (which, by the way, are a wealth tax, at least for residential)