Decades of epidemiological research reveals that one-third, at most, have a serious mental illness. De-institutionalization or closure of mental hospitals was initially believed to be a prime cause of homelessness, but this occurred well before the sharp increase in the 1980s.
Two-thirds of all homeless are single adults, while the remaining third are made up of families and unaccompanied youths. Most “self-resolve,” or exit homelessness within a few days or weeks—in fact, only about 16 percent are chronically homeless.
How do all these mentally ill people self-resolve their homeless problem? Most them get jobs and become productive members of society. How do they do what almost all them are mentally ill?
Overwhelmingly homeless is caused by a lack of affordable housing and the evidence supports this claim. A few people like Shellenberger have made a living out of spreading a fable that supports peoples bias, but it should be pretty obvious that a housing shortage causes people to not have homes.
I'm sorry, but this is nuts. Homelessness (or at least beggardom) was recorded throughout the history of civilization. The bible contains numerous references to it, along with specifying (in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) that a righteous man provided for the welfare of beggars, not turning a blind eye to them. They existed during time periods there was no social safety net to speak of. Hell, they ignore the social safety net, for the most part, losing out on numerous free benefits available to them. Their lives are already about as tough as could be imagined - it's hard to see how "tough love" is going to solve anything, short of being involuntarily committed (which would actually cost considerably more money).
No, Dave K's position isn't nuts. The issue of being a working person who would be able to support themselves and pull their own weight if housing weren't so unaffordable has to be disentangled from the phenomenon of recent waves of dysfunctional homelessness driven by addiction to immigrate to "drug oases" enabled by drug decriminalization and/or non-enforcement. And I say that as an advocate not only of decriminalization, but of an array of wider harm reduction efforts, including addiction maintenance programs using legal supplies.
The problem isn't as simple as "drug addicts need help" of some questionable sort, like giving them free paraphernalia and impunity for their petty (and sometimes not so petty) criminal violations, vs. "drug users need to be jailed, to teach them a lesson", which is a policy that's been shown to yield a net increase- nay, an explosion- in the number of dysfunctional addicts nationwide.
We need to begin by saying that no one gets to excuse their shoplifting, trespassing, appropriation of public parks to deal and use drugs, discarding used needles wherever they feel like it, etc. on account of their own drug abuse. Those are authentic 'malum in se' offenses. I've known all sorts of drug users, including hard drug addicts; only a minority of addicts have habits so out of control that they sleep in doorways and shit in the street. Some of them clean up their acts once they get a good close-up look at that fate at the end of the fork that they're about to eat. Entitling addicts to wallow in their own degradation as a public health menace and crime threat because of the "sickness" they volunteered to acquire sends a terrible message. Any municipality whose policies send that message should not feign surprise at the logical result of addicts flocking to an oasis for dysfunctional street addicts and a booming illicit street market. But most of the bien pensant Luxury Belief city administrations are still too busy denying the existence of the problem to get to the "feigning surprise" part.
For the umpteenth time, the Drug Thing is what neither mainstream liberals or mainstream conservatives know how to address; almost no one appears prepared to involve themselves in an honest, open-ended discussion of the issue. For liberals, that discussion needs to acknowledge that criminally dysfunctional social behaviors related to illicit drug abuse are a real problem, and one most effectively addressed by law enforcement first, in conjunction with long term inpatient treatment; conservatives need to stop pretending that the solution is to simply return to the intensified crackdown policies of the Reagan years (or worse.) The cat was out of the bag in that regard before Reagan even got elected. And both sides need to acknowledge that policies that are only directed at the "user problem" are bound to fail as long as the market and the sources of supply remain a de facto monopoly controlled by criminals.
Just claiming the issue of homelessness (even the "problem" homeless visible on the streets) equals the issue of drug addition is a pretty gross oversimplification. A substantial number of these homeless have untreated mental illness, and people with opiate additions are not found on the streets in West Virginia, showing that low housing prices do indeed keep these people off the streets (even if they don't address other social pathologies).
As I've noted in the past, there are way, way less unsheltered homeless in NYC than on the West Coast. This is predominantly a factor of shelters being much better funded in NYC. This also shows that while there are of course those who will refuse any sort of shelter bed, it's possible to mitigate many of the worst issues involving the homeless by actually addressing housing. Not all of the issues, but some of them.
First of all, I'm not claiming that "the issue of homelessness (even the "problem" homeless visible on the streets) equals the issue of drug addiction." I'm saying that it's a part of the problem that needs to be disentangled from the other parts. And that can get complicated, because sometimes the "solutions" have turned into being some of the worst aspects of the problem. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/my-years-in-the-florida-shuffle-of-drug-addiction
"people with opiate additions are not found on the streets in West Virginia, showing that low housing prices do indeed keep these people off the streets"
No, it implies that many of the most hopeless addicts have emigrated to West Coast cities, or to Dope Market Neighborhoods that are so large that they're impenetrable to law enforcement efforts, like Kensington in north Philadelphia.
I take your point on "untreated mental illness", which might rightfully be considered a third population, after productive citizens faced with unaffordable housing, and the dysfunctional addict population. That is not, however, a problem to be remedied simply by giving severely mentally ill people rent-free or low-cost housing, with no other support network.
There's also a fourth population, on the West Coast: a large fraction of unhoused people are casual users of hard drugs who aren't addicts, but who simply prefer a life of being unemployed freeloaders. Most of them are young males. Some are predators (and the mentally ill and the weakest in the addict population are their main prey.) They take more than they give, and when offered material assistance, they take some more.
I mean, really, don't snow me. I drove a cab in Sacramento between 1986 and 2005, and I know what's out there. And that was before things really slid.
While I'm not aware of surveys in the case of Kensington, in the case of California a significant majority of those homeless were last housed somewhere in the state (IIRC in LA it's something like 2/3rds, with over 10 years in the city, and only 18% moving from another state). It shouldn't be surprising that the homeless have little mobility - if you can't afford rent (or are too messed up to plan ahead) you're not going to save up for a Greyhound ticket either).
My observation is prompted by personal conversations (I was also told how to game the system to become eligible for general assistance checks, or even SSDI.) The conversations sometimes resulted because not only had my passenger(s) received a motel voucher, they'd also received a voucher for the cab transportation to take them there. That was also where I learned that the State of California doesn't require a recipient or payee residential address in order to receive public assistance checks. They can be sent to a post office box. [NOTE: this method appears to have been replaced by the general-purpose EBT card.]
It's an abuse of statistics to make it seem as if all of those folks were formerly paying rent, or in some long-term housing program that was shut down and left them on the street. Furthermore, some of those subsidized housing programs had restrictions like curfews and prohibitions on alcohol or drug use on the premises, and a substantial number of the unhoused either declined, or bailed or were bounced for noncompliance.
I've also met immigrants to California who found themselves having a tough time obtaining gainful employment or making ends meet, so they enrolled in one of those residential support programs. They played by the rules, got job training and job leads, and eventually worked their way up to a better circumstance. They weren't forced to become Mormons, okay? Some of them might have liked a smoke or a drink or even a snort now and then, I don't know. But they abided by their contract. They understood the rules, and didn't whine about them or try to game the system. They didn't delude themselves that they deserved subsidized housing in the most expensive cities in the country, either. Even if there's a strong argument to be made that there's something badly wrong going on there, with real estate speculation and unaffordable housing (paging the Henry George hotline.)
But the graph depicting the annual counts clearly indicates that almost all of that 31% increase took place since 2016; prior to that, those numbers had been flat, and even indicated a slight decline.
The number of "unsheltered homeless" went up even more steeply between 2016 and 2020: it appears to me that the increase was over 40%. (the article states a 57% rise between 2010 and 2020; most of it plainly occurred 2016-2020.)
The number of deaths in the unhoused population of California went up even more steeply over the same 5-year period, as shown by a different chart in the story: it more than doubled. (The Guardian graph shows the annual increase in the number of deaths between 2016 and 2021: including the one additional year, it went up 160%.)
So even if the number of recent arrivals from out of state is only 15% of the total count c.2020, it's likely that they account for the bulk of the recent rise in those figures, which are all quite dramatic increases. (i.e., if the total homeless population was 125,000 in 2016, and 162,000 in 2020, it's possible that as much as 2/3 of that 37,000 increase is accounted for by the 15% who are newcomers (~24,000). And they might be an even larger fraction of the unsheltered homeless. The major confounding factor unknown would be the percentage of newcomers who were initially counted as unhoused/unsheltered soon after arrival, and then succeeded in finding housing.)
Also, from Washington state, an anecdotal account: a friend of mine lives in an affluent lakeside area of Seattle, and he says that he has to watch his step nowadays in order to avoid the hazard of needle sticks, because the sidewalks are strewn with used needles, particularly in the public parks. This is a brand new report of a situation that he hadn't mentioned before, as a steep degradation of local conditions just within the past few months.
You are simply wrong on the facts here. Perhaps you will reconsider when shown the evidence but it doesn't seem you go there by examining the facts. West Virginia is the state with the number one number of drug overdoses.
Most of the people who are homeless in a given year solve the problem themselves. They sleep in their car or on a friends house, make or borrow some money and get themselves a place to live. 70% of the homeless are temporary homeless and only a small percentage of them experience homelessness again. I was one of those people once.
There is the other 30%, some of which are the hardcore homeless, much hard to reach and include mentally ill, drug addicts and many that are both. There is no particular geography where they cluster except they are far more likely in cities with high rents.
To repeat, I did not say that everyone who is unhoused is a drug addict. I said that the two situations need to be disentangled. And you apparently acknowledge the difference:
"...the hardcore homeless, much hard to reach and include mentally ill, drug addicts and many that are both."
The array of negative consequences to public health and civic order brought on by that population is impeding efforts to solve the problems of working people who simply find themselves priced out of the housing market.*
"West Virginia is the state with the number one number of drug overdoses."
Yes, but that says nothing about what's been happening in California.
I've tracked the growth over time in the number of overdoses in California, which has always had a very strict, no-nonsense policy on Schedule II prescriptions (it's practically impossible to fill one from out of state.) The pharmacy regs are set by the states, and some have always been looser than others- at least until very, very recently. Florida, for example, was notoriously laggard. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-dukes-of-oxy-how-a-band-of-teen-wrestlers-built-a-smuggling-empire-226940/
California used to be near the bottom of the state rankings for overdose statistics- in 2014, it was 43rd of 51 (age-adjusted per capita 11.1/100000). https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/2014.html
California registered a one-year increase of 45.3% in overdoses between 2019 and 2020, making it #8 of 51 in that ranking. ( New York was 10/51, with a 39.6% increase; Arkansas #9, Virginia #7, Tennessee #6, Louisiana #5, Kentucky #4, South Carolina #3, West Virginia, #2, and Mississippi at #1, with a 55.1% increase.)
"There is no particular geography where they cluster except they are far more likely in cities with high rents"
They're also much more likely to be in cities with sunny climates- which includes that recently discovered oasis for drug addict refugees, Denver, with 300 days of sunshine. Although Phoenix, AZ (with >330 days of sunshine, at least 100 of them broiling hot) has been hit much worse- the homeless population has quadrupled since 2014, to 3100 people! And that's not counting the adjoining cities of Glendale and Mesa. https://www.azfamily.com/2022/03/11/phoenix-area-sees-35-rise-homelessness-new-numbers-broken-down-by-neighborhood/
"Most of the people who are homeless in a given year solve the problem themselves. They sleep in their car or on a friends house, make or borrow some money and get themselves a place to live. 70% of the homeless are temporary homeless and only a small percentage of them experience homelessness again. I was one of those people once."
I've been there before, too. In California. But since you haven't provided link support, I can't be sure how your "70%" statistic was arrived at, because I'm not sure how a survey counts people who are couch-surfing, or who are homeless for only a few months. Especially given the fact that, as you've said, "Most of the people who are homeless in a given year solve the problem themselves." By and large, the people pitching camp underneath the freeway in San Francisco are not in that population.
I hope I haven't done all this legwork just have you tune out the facts I've presented. I'm not getting paid to do it.
[ *The cities in California I know the best actually have pretty good housing programs and publicly subsidized living facilities for low-income senior citizens, for what it's worth. Or at least they did as of a few years ago...you know, pressures from the number of aging Boomers- and competing priorities- might have changed the situation. But I'd be very surprised to find anyone over the age of 66 in a California tent encampment unless they were dealing with a life situation much more complicated than ordinary age-related disability.]
Yup. This is where FL shines. This is the exact attitude people have here. And results are obvious. Miami had great weather so if you want to be homeless somewhere warm, FL is the place to go to. But since focus here is not appeasing the homeless druggies but making sure they are not a nuisance to normies. Don't think that goes unnoticed and don't think this is not one of the many many many reason people leave places like SF for places like MIA.
Homelessness is first and foremost a housing problem. Everywhere.
Homelessness strongly correlates with high rents, not drug use. West Virginia is the state with the highest number of drug addicts but one of the least numbers of homeless. Why is that? Mississippi has the highest poverty rate and is one of the worst for providing mental health. It is the state with the lowest number of homeless. None of the things you have stated as true is supported by the evidence.
The point is not that any specific aesthetic vision is correct. The point is that YIMBYs have adopted this in-group tendency to dismiss aesthetics at all, which is both substantively bad and politically bad. People care about aesthetics. If YIMBYs succeed in associating their movement with ugliness, their job will only get harder. It's the prioritization of in-group signaling over substance.
Mocking obvious cases of bad faith and misplaced priorities are a rounding error on the actual political challenges YIMBYs face by default.
“I was prepared to vote against my narrow self interests but then the YIMBYs were mean” is probably not much of a real thing. The normies don’t tend to know about the online stuff.
That was my initial reaction to this piece as well. The problem, as ever, is that it’s really difficult to tell what effect, if any, the character and substance of online discourse has on actual policy-making. Maybe a lot! Maybe almost none! That’s the inherent problem with writing mostly about discourse-as-discourse. Presumably it has some effect but without reference to “the real world” it’s hard to say.
I think Freddie's point is that to the socially captured YIMBY.....EVERY counterargument or request to balance social priorities is -- or there is at least an incentive to frame such counterarguments online as -- an "obvious case[] of bad faith and misplaced priorities." And that such a response as an easy, feel good alternative to digging in and doing the blocking and tackling necessary to make progress.
As to your second point kinda touches on that. I think it's more that trusting those whose instinct bends toward straw-manning and being "mean" (to use your word) to be honest brokers becomes tough. What it more likely does is cause people who think of themselves as decent people who might even be convincible to your side -- or at least willing to meet you halfway -- to throw up their hands and tune out. Which just, again, slows down progress.
I think maybe you're not as much of a resentful little bitch as I am. If I've managed to force myself to vote against my narrow self-interest, and then someone is snotty to me about it, I very well might change my vote.
Object-level agreement with a policy isn’t the only factor in voting for it. Victory and defeat have effects on whole movements, and there’s some logic in voting to deny a coalition a victory if ithat victory will cause the balance of power to shift unfavorably to one’s interests.
Most advertising and political industries are based on people engaging in wanton decision making rather than rational engagement with policy. El Trench recognizing that reality suggests they are not as dumb as you claim.
I thought they were fine as well. I don't understand the argument that prewar building ornamentation is somehow superior to the more spare linear designs that took over in midcentury. I vastly prefer my 1963 one story rancher to the cramped multistory pseudo-Victorian houses that were widely built in our community prior to 1920. They are cute if they are maintained, but living in them is bloody inconvenient. Stairs are a pain. Small rooms and small windows, which had a purpose at the time (heat conservation) don't work as well today.
Tastes and preferences vary, and there were some butt-ugly buildings put up in the 1920's, when it was popular to mash up different historic themes.
Yeah, I'll be honest, even though I 100% agree with this article, when I saw the picture of the buildings that "look like shit", I thought 'Hunh, maybe I just don't have a very developed sense of architectural aesthetics, because those look fine to me?" I wouldn't want *everywhere* to look like that, but it's a hell of a lot better than Soviet-style block housing, which I guess I implicitly assumed was the issue at hand.
This is much less important than the point that the active rejection of aesthetics and preference for ugly buildings with YIMBYism is a perfect example of social capture that cuts against the broader good of the movement
No, his point is that aesthetic objections are shifting and undefined. There’s nothing to build a coalition with. Once you get into aesthetics, there’s always one more demand, one more person who needs to be consulted.
I think they're ugly. But your point here is a very good one: a big problem with advocacy particularly when it comes to a specific development is that there's no logical end to who gets to have a say. Endless meetings consulting the neighbors' opinions are themselves an added cost (in a time = money sort of way, if nothing else) that ironically end up constraining the possible outcomes of the final product.
Yeah I came here to say that. I honestly find it perfectly nice. Not as attractive as like a row of brick townhouses or something, but fine and not nearly as ugly as the Tripalink images in the linked blogger from "RIP Los Angeles." Feels like the Ikea of buildings, but I find Ikea stuff perfectly attractive.
One obvious problem with modern architecture is that even if you are inclined to like the aesthetics when built, you won't (no one does!) in 50 years. Degrading brick is charming. Degrading concrete is dystopian. These are disposable buildings.
That I knew this immediately and could think of a half dozen other examples in many weird social contexts is causing me to reevaluate how I spend my time.
2. You’re over-indexing on online behavior and not how the political organizations are acting. Shitposting and being Very Online is part of the origins of the movement but it’s not like actual politics hasn’t been happening (and successfully).
3. Yglesias is typically hated by lefties for being a lame pragmatist on any given issue. I don’t know how much of his serious writing you read on these issues, but I promise you nothing you wrote here would be news to him. He just presumably wouldn’t agree that his online behavior is really very important here on a nationwide issue that has to be fought location by location.
4. I promise you nothing you wrote here is news to any YIMBY mildly educated on the basics of economics, politics, and public choice.
5. Your real complaint here seems to boil down “I don’t like the aesthetics of the buildings or the people here.” Well, that’s too bad but given the recent YIMBY success stories and your history of supporting doomed causes on what grounds should YIMBYs take your concerns here seriously?
6. What we may have to do with the chronically homeless remaining after housing abundance is achieved is not an issue that is easily resolved (and is politically controversial). It’s not central to the YIMBY movement to figure out how to deal with serious mental health and substance abuse issues. Some large percentage of the problem is simply housing is very expensive, but cheap housing won’t fix everything.
Your defensiveness is, itself, a vestige of the social capture I'm describing. And, no, my complaint is exactly what I said it was. I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings by criticizing your internet friends but you have to grow up sometime.
It’s amusing you think my feelings are hurt and that anything you’ve written here is news to a moderately informed YIMBY.
It’s also amusing and perhaps telling that you have a trend now of responding to me in particular (and others who directly push back on you) with a tone that seems to betray the fact it is actually you are the one with hurt feelings.
Normally, deflecting by accusing someone of being defensive/emotional instead of engaging with the actual counterpoints made is not a sign that the OP had a good argument.
Freddie is talking out of his ass about a movement he only seems to know from the outside and generalizing it to the formal organizations engaging in (successful!) actions.
The funny thing is that his analysis does seem to apply to the leftist organizations he’s been involved in (and that he’s experienced the dysfunction of firsthand), so he’s probably pattern matching. However, he’s not actually in the YIMBY movement and I suspect if he were he’d know the social dynamics are fundamentally different.
I’ve never seen you interact with Freddie and I’m not that familiar with Yimby-ism but responding with “I know you are but what am I?” makes me pretty sure he has the right of it.
He literally accused me of having hurt feelings and worrying about my internet friends instead of dealing with any actual counterpoint I made and you’re telling me I’m the one that looks bad here?
I may be pissy but that’s a separate emotional stance than having hurt feelings.
My feelings aren’t going to be hurt by someone describing problems that mostly don’t exist! (There’s another comment by someone else describing how Freddie just had no idea about how things are inside the YIMBY movement).
"Well, that’s too bad but given the recent YIMBY success stories and your history of supporting doomed causes on what grounds should YIMBYs take your concerns here seriously?"
I'm lukewarm on the going-for-the-feelings jugular but do taste a little sauce here.
Talk about bad faith comments. Seems like he raised a bunch of points about your article and you responded with "u mad bro". If you feel like he's being the just-asking-questions guy, you could just ignore the comment.
"He just presumably wouldn’t agree that his online behavior is really very important here on a nationwide issue that has to be fought location by location."
That's the problem with Yglesias though - he doesn't recognize his own influence and uses Twitter as his personal fuckoff space.
I largely agree with the piece, though I think you're painting with a bit of a broad brush; I feel like plenty of YIMBYs understand they need to work with politics and take what they can get, and have been doing that quite well in California. But there are plenty of annoying ones on the Internet who aren't helping.
"The guy who says “you know, actively rejecting the aesthetic values of most normies doesn’t seem like a good political move” is just spoiling the fun.“
Odd that Yglesias is the example target given the name of his blog literally refers to making slow, unsexy, incremental steps, and that he often chastises the left for not placing sufficient weight on normie opinions.
This captures a lot of the thoughts I've had in my online encounters with YIMBYs, who seem to come out of the woodwork on any city-related subreddits and brigade housing related threads with their sanctimony and lack of good faith. I distinctly remember being accused of not wanting homeless people to have housing, directly after making a set of points very similar to the list about NIMBYS in the middle of this piece. To these people, it is unconscionable that someone might not want to live in an ugly piece of shit called "the Josh." To them, being annoying online about housing without any nuance or ability to listen is an unalloyed good, and I think you've nailed some of the reasons why.
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've been getting more and more involved with the YIMBY movement and I have to say a lot of this just doesn't ring true as a representation of what the movement emphasizes.
First, on aesthetics - I haven't seen anyone in YIMBY land talk about aesthetics at all in. I read Yglesias's tweet less as as "you must love this ugly building or less you're a NIMBY" and more "do you oppose apartment buildings in general, yes or no". NIMBYs often really do just hate dense housing, regardless of how it looks. And yes, those buildings are ugly and I agree that we should be advocating for a positive vision of urbanism that includes great architecture.
Second, on the list Freddie lays out - I'm a bit like... what?
1. This is just flatly wrong. The _entire premise_ of the movement is that NIMBYs are rational actors who use disproportionate control of local governments to hoard resources at the expense of everyone. NIMBYs are no different from someone buying all the sources of water in a region and then selling it at high prices - economically rational, maybe, but abusive and in need of correction. NIMBY capture of local government bodies is why YIMBY political strategy has emphasized working at the state government level - see CA and NY - to significant success.
There are some people who are simply misguided about what good land use policy should be - the Sierra Club and other old school environmental groups come to mind - but the main political opponents of housing abundance are people who just want to protect what's theirs.
2. Yes, I agree, but the downstream political result of this is that opponents of new housing try to position themselves as having the best interests of BIPOC or economically disadvantaged people at heart. This is how you get ghouls like Dean Preston, who has spent decades shooting down as much housing as possible as a SF councilman, positioning himself as a noble crusader against the greed of developers.
3. Agreed with the point about perceptions, but to always tie housing construction back to gentrification is profoundly wrong. The biggest NIMBY offenders are not poor neighborhoods trying to stave off ravenous developers, they're rich neighborhoods that use their political power to always push construction elsewhere.
That's why the state housing policies in CA are so remarkable. They're forcing places like Palo Alto, Atherton and Santa Monica to build new housing alongside everyone else. Yet you never see left skeptics of YIMBYism acknowledge this.
4. I can't comment on this from personal experience.
5. Yes, this is a fair critique of some online rhetoric. I saw a useful idea the other day, that there is a spectrum of preferences between spacial stability and spacial efficiency, with most YIMBYs further on the 'efficiency' end of the scale.
Overall - Freddie I think you're making the mistake of only looking at the Twitter side of a political movement, seeing that it's extremely online and annoying, and concluding that the entire movement is therefore extremely online and annoying. (I'm not denying that some YIMBYs are indeed very annoying online, in a similar way to DSA types or whatever.) Look at the actual political accomplishments and results they're getting and I think you'd like them more.
there's a link here between post wwii architectural high-mindedness and today's yimby's mindset.
"In this telling, we stopped building beautiful structures because we thought that the money would be better spent on making the buildings bigger to accommodate more stuff and people."
this is a real thing. once glass and steel became cheaper than stone and wood after the industrial war boom ... there was a progressive push to use those cheaper materials to make larger buildings with less aesthetic quality. (labor also became more expensive and glass and steel buildings require less labor per foot because you more of it is mass-manufactured rather than stick built).
this is the basis for the "tartarian empire" conspiracy theory ... buildings from the turn of the century that are absolutely gorgeous edifices of stone covered with stunning carvings ... which is because that was a time when stone masons were readily available and cheap to employ, and besides wood (which eventually, burns) stone was the only alternative building material (as metallurgy, other fields had not sufficiently evolved).
The NYT had an interesting article related to this topic in January, I think, raising the issue of cookie-cutter type of apartment housing. I'm not an architect or urban designer but there is a beauty in having some degree of a coherent style in a neighborhood that you see in places (Baltimore rowhomes, Boston Triple Deckers). You see a lot of these new apartment complexes (like the one in Y'glesias tweet) in Atlanta, where each developer basically builds the same 4-6 story 1-2 bedroom complexes but there is no coherent style or structural continuity between the developments. Yes, more housing is good but they are a bit dull to look at, in my opinion anyway.
Yeah I'm not involved in these aesthetic arguments so apologies if this is well trod territory, but to me what's attractive in a neighborhood is primarily stylistic homogeneity. I think Gehry buildings would look pretty cool in an entire neighborhood of Gehry buildings, but when they're among normal buildings they're ugly as sin. Those Yglesias Tweet buildings look fine to me in a neighborhood of those, but are probably ugly in a neighborhood of townhouses.
i won't call this "pushback" per se, since i don't frequent yimby forums, but i feel like i've seen the opposite of "is there a building so ugly even a yimby wouldn't praise it". instead i feel like i keep seeing the opposite on twitter, like "is there a building so beautiful even a yimby wouldn't demand it be torn down and replaced with an obelisk that blots out the sun".
How much of this is a product of the perverse incentives of social media? I know some IRL urbanists doing all the things you say they should do, pragmatically building coalitions for increased housing by addressing people's real concerns. But you don't know about them because they don't tweet, or when they do, it's about a specific local action and it probably gets 10 likes. Social media elevates the most nuclear takes, so any social movement ends up represented on social media (where we all live now) by its dumbest and most nakedly attention-seeking members.
Social capture may be amplified by social media, but it is definitely a real problem. I've seen it well before social media existed and it does cause people to do stupid things. And now that we live in the social media driven world I agree with Freddie that its existence and perniciousness should be examined. Seeing as how it seems to be a deep rooted human behavior (probably for some good reasons) we probably all fall into the trap and should try to avoid it, or at least see it for what it is.
We (SF YIMBY) actually have an internal slack channel dedicate to shitposting on things on Twitter and other media that we think is stupid but don't want to engage with and make ourselves look excessively argumentative in public. The movement is wisening up.
I'm not going to comment on the buildings - but I am going thank you for pointing out that we seem to have lost any sense of nuance when it comes to any issue of substance. I think that's what I like about your posts.
Making prettier buildings is not much more expensive, but it is a little more expensive, and like you say this sort of polarization exacerbates it. My town recently finished building some housing, including subsidized housing, on an old brownfield site. A number of us, including a friend of mine on the city council, were able to put some pressure on the developers to do some simple things to break up the monotony of the development - literally things like alternating four different basic styles of roofline, instead of just doing the exact same one over and over again. The resulting development doesn't have the same diversity of architecture that an organically developed neighborhood would build over a hundred years, but it looks a lot more interesting than just a cookie cutter block of towers, for not a lot of cost in building efficiency. But you can't have that kind of negotiation with the developers when the argument is just "build it" or "don't."
That makes sense to me, but aesthetics is going to involve some inherent fashion tendencies. I think if every new development has an alternating set of four rooftops that may quickly be rejected as basic.
This isn't to say that there aren't real trade offs and low hanging fruit here. But Baumol's cost disease is surely part of the story here. As labor becomes relatively more expensive, individualistic touches are just going to cost more.
I think this is a harder problem than Freddie treats it as, though it's a real problem and one that is worth acknowledging and talking about. I'm just not that much use on solving this problems as I've got a basic set of aesthetics that thinks most modern apartment developments / town houses look neat, so long as we aren't talking uninspired versions of brutalism.
The mean prevalence of any current mental disorder was estimated at 76.2% (95% CI 64.0% to 86.6%).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34424908/
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/september/HomelessQandA.html
1. Most are mentally ill.
Decades of epidemiological research reveals that one-third, at most, have a serious mental illness. De-institutionalization or closure of mental hospitals was initially believed to be a prime cause of homelessness, but this occurred well before the sharp increase in the 1980s.
Two-thirds of all homeless are single adults, while the remaining third are made up of families and unaccompanied youths. Most “self-resolve,” or exit homelessness within a few days or weeks—in fact, only about 16 percent are chronically homeless.
How do all these mentally ill people self-resolve their homeless problem? Most them get jobs and become productive members of society. How do they do what almost all them are mentally ill?
He is in fact full of shit.
https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
Overwhelmingly homeless is caused by a lack of affordable housing and the evidence supports this claim. A few people like Shellenberger have made a living out of spreading a fable that supports peoples bias, but it should be pretty obvious that a housing shortage causes people to not have homes.
I'm sorry, but this is nuts. Homelessness (or at least beggardom) was recorded throughout the history of civilization. The bible contains numerous references to it, along with specifying (in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) that a righteous man provided for the welfare of beggars, not turning a blind eye to them. They existed during time periods there was no social safety net to speak of. Hell, they ignore the social safety net, for the most part, losing out on numerous free benefits available to them. Their lives are already about as tough as could be imagined - it's hard to see how "tough love" is going to solve anything, short of being involuntarily committed (which would actually cost considerably more money).
No, Dave K's position isn't nuts. The issue of being a working person who would be able to support themselves and pull their own weight if housing weren't so unaffordable has to be disentangled from the phenomenon of recent waves of dysfunctional homelessness driven by addiction to immigrate to "drug oases" enabled by drug decriminalization and/or non-enforcement. And I say that as an advocate not only of decriminalization, but of an array of wider harm reduction efforts, including addiction maintenance programs using legal supplies.
The problem isn't as simple as "drug addicts need help" of some questionable sort, like giving them free paraphernalia and impunity for their petty (and sometimes not so petty) criminal violations, vs. "drug users need to be jailed, to teach them a lesson", which is a policy that's been shown to yield a net increase- nay, an explosion- in the number of dysfunctional addicts nationwide.
We need to begin by saying that no one gets to excuse their shoplifting, trespassing, appropriation of public parks to deal and use drugs, discarding used needles wherever they feel like it, etc. on account of their own drug abuse. Those are authentic 'malum in se' offenses. I've known all sorts of drug users, including hard drug addicts; only a minority of addicts have habits so out of control that they sleep in doorways and shit in the street. Some of them clean up their acts once they get a good close-up look at that fate at the end of the fork that they're about to eat. Entitling addicts to wallow in their own degradation as a public health menace and crime threat because of the "sickness" they volunteered to acquire sends a terrible message. Any municipality whose policies send that message should not feign surprise at the logical result of addicts flocking to an oasis for dysfunctional street addicts and a booming illicit street market. But most of the bien pensant Luxury Belief city administrations are still too busy denying the existence of the problem to get to the "feigning surprise" part.
For the umpteenth time, the Drug Thing is what neither mainstream liberals or mainstream conservatives know how to address; almost no one appears prepared to involve themselves in an honest, open-ended discussion of the issue. For liberals, that discussion needs to acknowledge that criminally dysfunctional social behaviors related to illicit drug abuse are a real problem, and one most effectively addressed by law enforcement first, in conjunction with long term inpatient treatment; conservatives need to stop pretending that the solution is to simply return to the intensified crackdown policies of the Reagan years (or worse.) The cat was out of the bag in that regard before Reagan even got elected. And both sides need to acknowledge that policies that are only directed at the "user problem" are bound to fail as long as the market and the sources of supply remain a de facto monopoly controlled by criminals.
Just claiming the issue of homelessness (even the "problem" homeless visible on the streets) equals the issue of drug addition is a pretty gross oversimplification. A substantial number of these homeless have untreated mental illness, and people with opiate additions are not found on the streets in West Virginia, showing that low housing prices do indeed keep these people off the streets (even if they don't address other social pathologies).
As I've noted in the past, there are way, way less unsheltered homeless in NYC than on the West Coast. This is predominantly a factor of shelters being much better funded in NYC. This also shows that while there are of course those who will refuse any sort of shelter bed, it's possible to mitigate many of the worst issues involving the homeless by actually addressing housing. Not all of the issues, but some of them.
First of all, I'm not claiming that "the issue of homelessness (even the "problem" homeless visible on the streets) equals the issue of drug addiction." I'm saying that it's a part of the problem that needs to be disentangled from the other parts. And that can get complicated, because sometimes the "solutions" have turned into being some of the worst aspects of the problem. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/my-years-in-the-florida-shuffle-of-drug-addiction
"people with opiate additions are not found on the streets in West Virginia, showing that low housing prices do indeed keep these people off the streets"
No, it implies that many of the most hopeless addicts have emigrated to West Coast cities, or to Dope Market Neighborhoods that are so large that they're impenetrable to law enforcement efforts, like Kensington in north Philadelphia.
I take your point on "untreated mental illness", which might rightfully be considered a third population, after productive citizens faced with unaffordable housing, and the dysfunctional addict population. That is not, however, a problem to be remedied simply by giving severely mentally ill people rent-free or low-cost housing, with no other support network.
There's also a fourth population, on the West Coast: a large fraction of unhoused people are casual users of hard drugs who aren't addicts, but who simply prefer a life of being unemployed freeloaders. Most of them are young males. Some are predators (and the mentally ill and the weakest in the addict population are their main prey.) They take more than they give, and when offered material assistance, they take some more.
I mean, really, don't snow me. I drove a cab in Sacramento between 1986 and 2005, and I know what's out there. And that was before things really slid.
While I'm not aware of surveys in the case of Kensington, in the case of California a significant majority of those homeless were last housed somewhere in the state (IIRC in LA it's something like 2/3rds, with over 10 years in the city, and only 18% moving from another state). It shouldn't be surprising that the homeless have little mobility - if you can't afford rent (or are too messed up to plan ahead) you're not going to save up for a Greyhound ticket either).
You're speaking from conjecture. I'm talking from experience.
Understand, many cities in California have temporary housing voucher programs of some sort. I'd have to look up the exact requirements, but my impression is that it was often quite simple for unhoused people to obtain some temporary free lodging in a motel over the course of a year. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sacramento+housing+voucher+program+temporary+free+motel+stay&t=newext&atb=v336-1&ia=web
My observation is prompted by personal conversations (I was also told how to game the system to become eligible for general assistance checks, or even SSDI.) The conversations sometimes resulted because not only had my passenger(s) received a motel voucher, they'd also received a voucher for the cab transportation to take them there. That was also where I learned that the State of California doesn't require a recipient or payee residential address in order to receive public assistance checks. They can be sent to a post office box. [NOTE: this method appears to have been replaced by the general-purpose EBT card.]
It's an abuse of statistics to make it seem as if all of those folks were formerly paying rent, or in some long-term housing program that was shut down and left them on the street. Furthermore, some of those subsidized housing programs had restrictions like curfews and prohibitions on alcohol or drug use on the premises, and a substantial number of the unhoused either declined, or bailed or were bounced for noncompliance.
I've also met immigrants to California who found themselves having a tough time obtaining gainful employment or making ends meet, so they enrolled in one of those residential support programs. They played by the rules, got job training and job leads, and eventually worked their way up to a better circumstance. They weren't forced to become Mormons, okay? Some of them might have liked a smoke or a drink or even a snort now and then, I don't know. But they abided by their contract. They understood the rules, and didn't whine about them or try to game the system. They didn't delude themselves that they deserved subsidized housing in the most expensive cities in the country, either. Even if there's a strong argument to be made that there's something badly wrong going on there, with real estate speculation and unaffordable housing (paging the Henry George hotline.)
The statistics need to be assessed for what they can and cannot tell us. According to this March 2022 Guardian article, homelessness in California has "increased by 31% since 2010 [through 2020]". https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/22/california-homelessness-crisis-unhoused-and-unequal
But the graph depicting the annual counts clearly indicates that almost all of that 31% increase took place since 2016; prior to that, those numbers had been flat, and even indicated a slight decline.
The number of "unsheltered homeless" went up even more steeply between 2016 and 2020: it appears to me that the increase was over 40%. (the article states a 57% rise between 2010 and 2020; most of it plainly occurred 2016-2020.)
The number of deaths in the unhoused population of California went up even more steeply over the same 5-year period, as shown by a different chart in the story: it more than doubled. (The Guardian graph shows the annual increase in the number of deaths between 2016 and 2021: including the one additional year, it went up 160%.)
So even if the number of recent arrivals from out of state is only 15% of the total count c.2020, it's likely that they account for the bulk of the recent rise in those figures, which are all quite dramatic increases. (i.e., if the total homeless population was 125,000 in 2016, and 162,000 in 2020, it's possible that as much as 2/3 of that 37,000 increase is accounted for by the 15% who are newcomers (~24,000). And they might be an even larger fraction of the unsheltered homeless. The major confounding factor unknown would be the percentage of newcomers who were initially counted as unhoused/unsheltered soon after arrival, and then succeeded in finding housing.)
Also, from Washington state, an anecdotal account: a friend of mine lives in an affluent lakeside area of Seattle, and he says that he has to watch his step nowadays in order to avoid the hazard of needle sticks, because the sidewalks are strewn with used needles, particularly in the public parks. This is a brand new report of a situation that he hadn't mentioned before, as a steep degradation of local conditions just within the past few months.
You are simply wrong on the facts here. Perhaps you will reconsider when shown the evidence but it doesn't seem you go there by examining the facts. West Virginia is the state with the number one number of drug overdoses.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm
Most of the people who are homeless in a given year solve the problem themselves. They sleep in their car or on a friends house, make or borrow some money and get themselves a place to live. 70% of the homeless are temporary homeless and only a small percentage of them experience homelessness again. I was one of those people once.
There is the other 30%, some of which are the hardcore homeless, much hard to reach and include mentally ill, drug addicts and many that are both. There is no particular geography where they cluster except they are far more likely in cities with high rents.
To repeat, I did not say that everyone who is unhoused is a drug addict. I said that the two situations need to be disentangled. And you apparently acknowledge the difference:
"...the hardcore homeless, much hard to reach and include mentally ill, drug addicts and many that are both."
The array of negative consequences to public health and civic order brought on by that population is impeding efforts to solve the problems of working people who simply find themselves priced out of the housing market.*
"West Virginia is the state with the number one number of drug overdoses."
Yes, but that says nothing about what's been happening in California.
I've tracked the growth over time in the number of overdoses in California, which has always had a very strict, no-nonsense policy on Schedule II prescriptions (it's practically impossible to fill one from out of state.) The pharmacy regs are set by the states, and some have always been looser than others- at least until very, very recently. Florida, for example, was notoriously laggard. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-dukes-of-oxy-how-a-band-of-teen-wrestlers-built-a-smuggling-empire-226940/
California used to be near the bottom of the state rankings for overdose statistics- in 2014, it was 43rd of 51 (age-adjusted per capita 11.1/100000). https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/2014.html
The OD rate of California doubled in 6 years, to 21.8/100000, in 2020. Now it's 33rd. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/2020.html
California registered a one-year increase of 45.3% in overdoses between 2019 and 2020, making it #8 of 51 in that ranking. ( New York was 10/51, with a 39.6% increase; Arkansas #9, Virginia #7, Tennessee #6, Louisiana #5, Kentucky #4, South Carolina #3, West Virginia, #2, and Mississippi at #1, with a 55.1% increase.)
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/2019-2020-increase.html
"There is no particular geography where they cluster except they are far more likely in cities with high rents"
They're also much more likely to be in cities with sunny climates- which includes that recently discovered oasis for drug addict refugees, Denver, with 300 days of sunshine. Although Phoenix, AZ (with >330 days of sunshine, at least 100 of them broiling hot) has been hit much worse- the homeless population has quadrupled since 2014, to 3100 people! And that's not counting the adjoining cities of Glendale and Mesa. https://www.azfamily.com/2022/03/11/phoenix-area-sees-35-rise-homelessness-new-numbers-broken-down-by-neighborhood/
California pays host to 47% of the nation's unsheltered unhoused population. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-state-is-home-to-nearly-half-of-all-people-living-on-the-streets-in-the-us-2019-09-18
"Most of the people who are homeless in a given year solve the problem themselves. They sleep in their car or on a friends house, make or borrow some money and get themselves a place to live. 70% of the homeless are temporary homeless and only a small percentage of them experience homelessness again. I was one of those people once."
I've been there before, too. In California. But since you haven't provided link support, I can't be sure how your "70%" statistic was arrived at, because I'm not sure how a survey counts people who are couch-surfing, or who are homeless for only a few months. Especially given the fact that, as you've said, "Most of the people who are homeless in a given year solve the problem themselves." By and large, the people pitching camp underneath the freeway in San Francisco are not in that population.
I hope I haven't done all this legwork just have you tune out the facts I've presented. I'm not getting paid to do it.
[ *The cities in California I know the best actually have pretty good housing programs and publicly subsidized living facilities for low-income senior citizens, for what it's worth. Or at least they did as of a few years ago...you know, pressures from the number of aging Boomers- and competing priorities- might have changed the situation. But I'd be very surprised to find anyone over the age of 66 in a California tent encampment unless they were dealing with a life situation much more complicated than ordinary age-related disability.]
We found one!
Yup. This is where FL shines. This is the exact attitude people have here. And results are obvious. Miami had great weather so if you want to be homeless somewhere warm, FL is the place to go to. But since focus here is not appeasing the homeless druggies but making sure they are not a nuisance to normies. Don't think that goes unnoticed and don't think this is not one of the many many many reason people leave places like SF for places like MIA.
Homelessness is first and foremost a housing problem. Everywhere.
Homelessness strongly correlates with high rents, not drug use. West Virginia is the state with the highest number of drug addicts but one of the least numbers of homeless. Why is that? Mississippi has the highest poverty rate and is one of the worst for providing mental health. It is the state with the lowest number of homeless. None of the things you have stated as true is supported by the evidence.
https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
The point is not that any specific aesthetic vision is correct. The point is that YIMBYs have adopted this in-group tendency to dismiss aesthetics at all, which is both substantively bad and politically bad. People care about aesthetics. If YIMBYs succeed in associating their movement with ugliness, their job will only get harder. It's the prioritization of in-group signaling over substance.
Mocking obvious cases of bad faith and misplaced priorities are a rounding error on the actual political challenges YIMBYs face by default.
“I was prepared to vote against my narrow self interests but then the YIMBYs were mean” is probably not much of a real thing. The normies don’t tend to know about the online stuff.
That was my initial reaction to this piece as well. The problem, as ever, is that it’s really difficult to tell what effect, if any, the character and substance of online discourse has on actual policy-making. Maybe a lot! Maybe almost none! That’s the inherent problem with writing mostly about discourse-as-discourse. Presumably it has some effect but without reference to “the real world” it’s hard to say.
I think Freddie's point is that to the socially captured YIMBY.....EVERY counterargument or request to balance social priorities is -- or there is at least an incentive to frame such counterarguments online as -- an "obvious case[] of bad faith and misplaced priorities." And that such a response as an easy, feel good alternative to digging in and doing the blocking and tackling necessary to make progress.
As to your second point kinda touches on that. I think it's more that trusting those whose instinct bends toward straw-manning and being "mean" (to use your word) to be honest brokers becomes tough. What it more likely does is cause people who think of themselves as decent people who might even be convincible to your side -- or at least willing to meet you halfway -- to throw up their hands and tune out. Which just, again, slows down progress.
I think maybe you're not as much of a resentful little bitch as I am. If I've managed to force myself to vote against my narrow self-interest, and then someone is snotty to me about it, I very well might change my vote.
Object-level agreement with a policy isn’t the only factor in voting for it. Victory and defeat have effects on whole movements, and there’s some logic in voting to deny a coalition a victory if ithat victory will cause the balance of power to shift unfavorably to one’s interests.
Most advertising and political industries are based on people engaging in wanton decision making rather than rational engagement with policy. El Trench recognizing that reality suggests they are not as dumb as you claim.
YIMBYs also care about aesthetics. They just don't agree with you about them.
I thought they were fine as well. I don't understand the argument that prewar building ornamentation is somehow superior to the more spare linear designs that took over in midcentury. I vastly prefer my 1963 one story rancher to the cramped multistory pseudo-Victorian houses that were widely built in our community prior to 1920. They are cute if they are maintained, but living in them is bloody inconvenient. Stairs are a pain. Small rooms and small windows, which had a purpose at the time (heat conservation) don't work as well today.
Tastes and preferences vary, and there were some butt-ugly buildings put up in the 1920's, when it was popular to mash up different historic themes.
They look like they could be pleasant places to live, and it’s easy to imagine something much uglier
Yeah, I'll be honest, even though I 100% agree with this article, when I saw the picture of the buildings that "look like shit", I thought 'Hunh, maybe I just don't have a very developed sense of architectural aesthetics, because those look fine to me?" I wouldn't want *everywhere* to look like that, but it's a hell of a lot better than Soviet-style block housing, which I guess I implicitly assumed was the issue at hand.
What’s wrong with the building it Matt’s tweet? What would you prefer it look like?
I would prefer it look good, rather than bad
It looks good to me. Can you give us some examples of what you’d prefer it look like?
This is much less important than the point that the active rejection of aesthetics and preference for ugly buildings with YIMBYism is a perfect example of social capture that cuts against the broader good of the movement
No, his point is that aesthetic objections are shifting and undefined. There’s nothing to build a coalition with. Once you get into aesthetics, there’s always one more demand, one more person who needs to be consulted.
I think they're ugly. But your point here is a very good one: a big problem with advocacy particularly when it comes to a specific development is that there's no logical end to who gets to have a say. Endless meetings consulting the neighbors' opinions are themselves an added cost (in a time = money sort of way, if nothing else) that ironically end up constraining the possible outcomes of the final product.
Yeah I came here to say that. I honestly find it perfectly nice. Not as attractive as like a row of brick townhouses or something, but fine and not nearly as ugly as the Tripalink images in the linked blogger from "RIP Los Angeles." Feels like the Ikea of buildings, but I find Ikea stuff perfectly attractive.
Scroll through this feed: https://twitter.com/Arch_Revival_
Wait for the response: https://archinect.com/news/article/150077882/twitter-account-dedicated-to-traditional-european-architecture-draws-ire-as-an-architecture-themed-dog-whistle
One obvious problem with modern architecture is that even if you are inclined to like the aesthetics when built, you won't (no one does!) in 50 years. Degrading brick is charming. Degrading concrete is dystopian. These are disposable buildings.
I believe Yglesias is using a Twitter meme template here:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-pretty-good-litmus-test-for-politics
That I knew this immediately and could think of a half dozen other examples in many weird social contexts is causing me to reevaluate how I spend my time.
1. Those buildings look perfectly fine to me.
2. You’re over-indexing on online behavior and not how the political organizations are acting. Shitposting and being Very Online is part of the origins of the movement but it’s not like actual politics hasn’t been happening (and successfully).
3. Yglesias is typically hated by lefties for being a lame pragmatist on any given issue. I don’t know how much of his serious writing you read on these issues, but I promise you nothing you wrote here would be news to him. He just presumably wouldn’t agree that his online behavior is really very important here on a nationwide issue that has to be fought location by location.
4. I promise you nothing you wrote here is news to any YIMBY mildly educated on the basics of economics, politics, and public choice.
5. Your real complaint here seems to boil down “I don’t like the aesthetics of the buildings or the people here.” Well, that’s too bad but given the recent YIMBY success stories and your history of supporting doomed causes on what grounds should YIMBYs take your concerns here seriously?
6. What we may have to do with the chronically homeless remaining after housing abundance is achieved is not an issue that is easily resolved (and is politically controversial). It’s not central to the YIMBY movement to figure out how to deal with serious mental health and substance abuse issues. Some large percentage of the problem is simply housing is very expensive, but cheap housing won’t fix everything.
Your defensiveness is, itself, a vestige of the social capture I'm describing. And, no, my complaint is exactly what I said it was. I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings by criticizing your internet friends but you have to grow up sometime.
It’s amusing you think my feelings are hurt and that anything you’ve written here is news to a moderately informed YIMBY.
It’s also amusing and perhaps telling that you have a trend now of responding to me in particular (and others who directly push back on you) with a tone that seems to betray the fact it is actually you are the one with hurt feelings.
Normally, deflecting by accusing someone of being defensive/emotional instead of engaging with the actual counterpoints made is not a sign that the OP had a good argument.
Freddie is talking out of his ass about a movement he only seems to know from the outside and generalizing it to the formal organizations engaging in (successful!) actions.
The funny thing is that his analysis does seem to apply to the leftist organizations he’s been involved in (and that he’s experienced the dysfunction of firsthand), so he’s probably pattern matching. However, he’s not actually in the YIMBY movement and I suspect if he were he’d know the social dynamics are fundamentally different.
Bro I, among others, made actual counterpoints.
Freddie is the one failing to engage on the actual issues.
I’ve never seen you interact with Freddie and I’m not that familiar with Yimby-ism but responding with “I know you are but what am I?” makes me pretty sure he has the right of it.
He literally accused me of having hurt feelings and worrying about my internet friends instead of dealing with any actual counterpoint I made and you’re telling me I’m the one that looks bad here?
Well, the important thing anyway is Freddie continues his path towards the neolibs being actually right.
Yup. You came into his thread and then tried to use playground logic to defend your defensiveness.
You’re D-FENS in this scenario.
Bro he made bad arguments and I, among others, pointed that out in the comment section of the relevant post.
And Freddie, instead of actually engaging on those issues, handwaved them away.
He’s the one using playground logic here.
I don't think you're being entirely honest about your feelings. Your post seems pretty pissy to me.
I may be pissy but that’s a separate emotional stance than having hurt feelings.
My feelings aren’t going to be hurt by someone describing problems that mostly don’t exist! (There’s another comment by someone else describing how Freddie just had no idea about how things are inside the YIMBY movement).
"Well, that’s too bad but given the recent YIMBY success stories and your history of supporting doomed causes on what grounds should YIMBYs take your concerns here seriously?"
I'm lukewarm on the going-for-the-feelings jugular but do taste a little sauce here.
And i cancel my subscription.
I paid 50 bucks in October, I'd like to unsubscribe and get some of that money back if I can.
Curious why you are canceling?
Freddie wrote an article lamenting the state of “The Discourse”, and here he is in his own comments section, lowering the state of the discourse.
He's definitely not perfect.
Talk about bad faith comments. Seems like he raised a bunch of points about your article and you responded with "u mad bro". If you feel like he's being the just-asking-questions guy, you could just ignore the comment.
"He just presumably wouldn’t agree that his online behavior is really very important here on a nationwide issue that has to be fought location by location."
That's the problem with Yglesias though - he doesn't recognize his own influence and uses Twitter as his personal fuckoff space.
I think Yglesias actually is aware and evaluates the cost/benefit differently than you do.
Or he’s just a hopeless addict. Either way I don’t think it’s a lack of awareness. Sometimes people just disagree.
I think it's worth noting that the Yglesias tweet is in reference to this meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-pretty-good-litmus-test-for-politics
I largely agree with the piece, though I think you're painting with a bit of a broad brush; I feel like plenty of YIMBYs understand they need to work with politics and take what they can get, and have been doing that quite well in California. But there are plenty of annoying ones on the Internet who aren't helping.
"The guy who says “you know, actively rejecting the aesthetic values of most normies doesn’t seem like a good political move” is just spoiling the fun.“
Odd that Yglesias is the example target given the name of his blog literally refers to making slow, unsexy, incremental steps, and that he often chastises the left for not placing sufficient weight on normie opinions.
The first draft of this post included a section about how he doesn't practice what he preaches as far as messaging goes
This captures a lot of the thoughts I've had in my online encounters with YIMBYs, who seem to come out of the woodwork on any city-related subreddits and brigade housing related threads with their sanctimony and lack of good faith. I distinctly remember being accused of not wanting homeless people to have housing, directly after making a set of points very similar to the list about NIMBYS in the middle of this piece. To these people, it is unconscionable that someone might not want to live in an ugly piece of shit called "the Josh." To them, being annoying online about housing without any nuance or ability to listen is an unalloyed good, and I think you've nailed some of the reasons why.
Yeah the way they engage online is so nasty and cultish, they seem just like the woke
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)
I've been getting more and more involved with the YIMBY movement and I have to say a lot of this just doesn't ring true as a representation of what the movement emphasizes.
First, on aesthetics - I haven't seen anyone in YIMBY land talk about aesthetics at all in. I read Yglesias's tweet less as as "you must love this ugly building or less you're a NIMBY" and more "do you oppose apartment buildings in general, yes or no". NIMBYs often really do just hate dense housing, regardless of how it looks. And yes, those buildings are ugly and I agree that we should be advocating for a positive vision of urbanism that includes great architecture.
Second, on the list Freddie lays out - I'm a bit like... what?
1. This is just flatly wrong. The _entire premise_ of the movement is that NIMBYs are rational actors who use disproportionate control of local governments to hoard resources at the expense of everyone. NIMBYs are no different from someone buying all the sources of water in a region and then selling it at high prices - economically rational, maybe, but abusive and in need of correction. NIMBY capture of local government bodies is why YIMBY political strategy has emphasized working at the state government level - see CA and NY - to significant success.
There are some people who are simply misguided about what good land use policy should be - the Sierra Club and other old school environmental groups come to mind - but the main political opponents of housing abundance are people who just want to protect what's theirs.
2. Yes, I agree, but the downstream political result of this is that opponents of new housing try to position themselves as having the best interests of BIPOC or economically disadvantaged people at heart. This is how you get ghouls like Dean Preston, who has spent decades shooting down as much housing as possible as a SF councilman, positioning himself as a noble crusader against the greed of developers.
3. Agreed with the point about perceptions, but to always tie housing construction back to gentrification is profoundly wrong. The biggest NIMBY offenders are not poor neighborhoods trying to stave off ravenous developers, they're rich neighborhoods that use their political power to always push construction elsewhere.
That's why the state housing policies in CA are so remarkable. They're forcing places like Palo Alto, Atherton and Santa Monica to build new housing alongside everyone else. Yet you never see left skeptics of YIMBYism acknowledge this.
4. I can't comment on this from personal experience.
5. Yes, this is a fair critique of some online rhetoric. I saw a useful idea the other day, that there is a spectrum of preferences between spacial stability and spacial efficiency, with most YIMBYs further on the 'efficiency' end of the scale.
Overall - Freddie I think you're making the mistake of only looking at the Twitter side of a political movement, seeing that it's extremely online and annoying, and concluding that the entire movement is therefore extremely online and annoying. (I'm not denying that some YIMBYs are indeed very annoying online, in a similar way to DSA types or whatever.) Look at the actual political accomplishments and results they're getting and I think you'd like them more.
(edited to be less of a novel)
there's a link here between post wwii architectural high-mindedness and today's yimby's mindset.
"In this telling, we stopped building beautiful structures because we thought that the money would be better spent on making the buildings bigger to accommodate more stuff and people."
this is a real thing. once glass and steel became cheaper than stone and wood after the industrial war boom ... there was a progressive push to use those cheaper materials to make larger buildings with less aesthetic quality. (labor also became more expensive and glass and steel buildings require less labor per foot because you more of it is mass-manufactured rather than stick built).
this is the basis for the "tartarian empire" conspiracy theory ... buildings from the turn of the century that are absolutely gorgeous edifices of stone covered with stunning carvings ... which is because that was a time when stone masons were readily available and cheap to employ, and besides wood (which eventually, burns) stone was the only alternative building material (as metallurgy, other fields had not sufficiently evolved).
The NYT had an interesting article related to this topic in January, I think, raising the issue of cookie-cutter type of apartment housing. I'm not an architect or urban designer but there is a beauty in having some degree of a coherent style in a neighborhood that you see in places (Baltimore rowhomes, Boston Triple Deckers). You see a lot of these new apartment complexes (like the one in Y'glesias tweet) in Atlanta, where each developer basically builds the same 4-6 story 1-2 bedroom complexes but there is no coherent style or structural continuity between the developments. Yes, more housing is good but they are a bit dull to look at, in my opinion anyway.
Yeah I'm not involved in these aesthetic arguments so apologies if this is well trod territory, but to me what's attractive in a neighborhood is primarily stylistic homogeneity. I think Gehry buildings would look pretty cool in an entire neighborhood of Gehry buildings, but when they're among normal buildings they're ugly as sin. Those Yglesias Tweet buildings look fine to me in a neighborhood of those, but are probably ugly in a neighborhood of townhouses.
i won't call this "pushback" per se, since i don't frequent yimby forums, but i feel like i've seen the opposite of "is there a building so ugly even a yimby wouldn't praise it". instead i feel like i keep seeing the opposite on twitter, like "is there a building so beautiful even a yimby wouldn't demand it be torn down and replaced with an obelisk that blots out the sun".
How much of this is a product of the perverse incentives of social media? I know some IRL urbanists doing all the things you say they should do, pragmatically building coalitions for increased housing by addressing people's real concerns. But you don't know about them because they don't tweet, or when they do, it's about a specific local action and it probably gets 10 likes. Social media elevates the most nuclear takes, so any social movement ends up represented on social media (where we all live now) by its dumbest and most nakedly attention-seeking members.
Yes.
And inasmuch as the shitpoasters aren’t actually running the YIMBY movement(s) then the concerns expressed are mostly irrelevant.
Social capture may be amplified by social media, but it is definitely a real problem. I've seen it well before social media existed and it does cause people to do stupid things. And now that we live in the social media driven world I agree with Freddie that its existence and perniciousness should be examined. Seeing as how it seems to be a deep rooted human behavior (probably for some good reasons) we probably all fall into the trap and should try to avoid it, or at least see it for what it is.
I agree it’s definitely a thing. Common in many places!
However, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy typically applies to heavily centralized, formally structured orgs.
Whatever it is, the YIMBY movement isn’t that and the shitposters generally aren’t in charge of what actual organizations do exist.
We (SF YIMBY) actually have an internal slack channel dedicate to shitposting on things on Twitter and other media that we think is stupid but don't want to engage with and make ourselves look excessively argumentative in public. The movement is wisening up.
New Liberals have the same
I'm not going to comment on the buildings - but I am going thank you for pointing out that we seem to have lost any sense of nuance when it comes to any issue of substance. I think that's what I like about your posts.
Making prettier buildings is not much more expensive, but it is a little more expensive, and like you say this sort of polarization exacerbates it. My town recently finished building some housing, including subsidized housing, on an old brownfield site. A number of us, including a friend of mine on the city council, were able to put some pressure on the developers to do some simple things to break up the monotony of the development - literally things like alternating four different basic styles of roofline, instead of just doing the exact same one over and over again. The resulting development doesn't have the same diversity of architecture that an organically developed neighborhood would build over a hundred years, but it looks a lot more interesting than just a cookie cutter block of towers, for not a lot of cost in building efficiency. But you can't have that kind of negotiation with the developers when the argument is just "build it" or "don't."
That makes sense to me, but aesthetics is going to involve some inherent fashion tendencies. I think if every new development has an alternating set of four rooftops that may quickly be rejected as basic.
This isn't to say that there aren't real trade offs and low hanging fruit here. But Baumol's cost disease is surely part of the story here. As labor becomes relatively more expensive, individualistic touches are just going to cost more.
I think this is a harder problem than Freddie treats it as, though it's a real problem and one that is worth acknowledging and talking about. I'm just not that much use on solving this problems as I've got a basic set of aesthetics that thinks most modern apartment developments / town houses look neat, so long as we aren't talking uninspired versions of brutalism.