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.
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.
Feb 27, 2023·edited Feb 27, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer
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.
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.
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.
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."
What’s wrong with the building it Matt’s tweet? What would you prefer it look like?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Is there a better social commentator at the moment than Freddie deBoer? Spoilers: no.