YIMBY Social Culture Prevents Progress, Again

they're too busy sneering to win over potential allies in the activist class

this must be that affluent all-white NIMBY movement YIMBYs always talk about via my tenant movement group, Met Council on Housing

I’ve said it before, here and in the Daily Beast, and I’ll say it again: YIMBYism is the right general impulse married to a ruinous online social culture that cares far far more about insider status than about building a coalition and is far far more dedicated to dunking on people than to listening and building common cause. Lately they’ve been really doubling down on their endless refrain of “Just Build!,” with the emphasis on just - they don’t want to talk about social housing and they don’t want to talk about Section 8 reform and they don’t want to talk about displacement and they don’t want to talk about why so many community activists find them untrustworthy and aggravating. They just want to mock.

Look at New York magazine’s Eric Levitz, usually a thoughtful liberal who turns into a sneering “IT’S ECON 101” shithead when the subject of housing comes up. Matt Yglesias will write a 5,000-word explainer about his latest bowel movement but is dismissive of left critiques of YIMBYism. It’s just maddening. As someone who’s been doing lefty housing activism in New York City for over half a decade, I’ve been trying and trying to convince my fellow travelers that YIMBY principles about new construction are essential and that we have to arrive at a shared vision of more building plus various tenant protections and social housing projects in order to create housing abundance. It’s hard work because of (justifiable-if-frustrating) activist mistrust, but I have had some success. But I’m getting zero support from the YIMBY side because so many people in that movement are haughty shithead white dudes who think the purpose of politics is to dunk on people and show everyone how clever you are. And it makes me particular frustrated given that there are thoughtful YIMBYs out there who don’t strut and sneer, like Darrell Owens, who just published a very useful explainer about the various IMBYs. But the social pressure to mock rather than to persuade is so powerful in that culture. It’s always hippie-punching time.

Consider the following scenario. You’re a semi-retired Black woman of Caribbean descent in her early 60s who lives in Crown Heights. You have a fixed income and very little room for wiggle on your rent. Your apartment was deregulated decades ago through one of the many loopholes and dirty tricks that landlords have carved out over the years. You’ve lived there for over 40 years, most of which were spent with your children and late husband. In the past ten or fifteen years you’ve watched as Crown Heights has been utterly transformed by a sudden influx of affluent white people and developer cash. Beloved local businesses have closed in favor of boutique coffee houses and artisanal shops, neither of which you could afford to frequent even if you felt comfortable doing so. Many of your friends and neighbors have already been priced out of the neighborhood. Making this all worse is the fact that your neighborhood went from decades of neglect and a failure of the city to provide effective services to a sudden influx of attention and money that, cruelest of all, you will now not get to enjoy because you’re going to get priced out. You’re on the brink of eviction. What can YIMBYs offer you?

If your inclination is to say that this isn’t a likely scenario, don’t bother, as this is literally a specific person that I met through housing activism, and I know many more in similar circumstances in Inwood and Harlem and Ridgewood and Prospect Lefferts Gardens and the South Bronx and elsewhere.

Here’s what “just build”ing gets that elderly tenant: nothing! Yes, we must increase supply, and over a long enough period and in general, more building will slow rental increases. (It’s hard to imagine already-jacked rents going down but, sure, it’s possible.) But if you’re our elderly decades-long resident facing eviction in the next year or two, what does putting up a couple of new buildings near you do for you? Let’s say that we could magically just eliminate construction time and have new luxury towers going up immediately. Yes, eventually, those towers will help moderate housing prices for some residents. But you don’t have time to wait for eventually! YIMBYs talk as if a new building opens down the block and suddenly the landlord is calling you in a panic offering to shave $500 a month off your rent. That’s not it works. New building does slow rental hikes but the process is slow, diffuse, and uncertain in the face of other pressures pushing rents higher. The people who are likely to benefit aren’t the working class long-term residents of the neighborhood but simply the next wave of upwardly-mobile white transplants. So if you’re this woman in Crown Heights I know or one of hundreds of thousands in New York like her, what can YIMBYs offer you besides a haughty attitude and snark? “Move to the suburbs”?

I’ve already pointed out that, at least in NYC, it’s simply untrue to say that resistance to development comes only from affluent white people. (Spend 15 minutes in the tenant movement and you’ll see that the heart of that movement, and probably a majority in pure numerical terms, is Hispanic activists.) The insistence on repeating that lie does enough to alienate potential allies among the left activist class. The total disregard for the immediate conditions of actually-existing residents seals the deal. I don’t think these YIMBYs understand that people can see them and how they interact with others, that their self-aggrandizing social culture is a direct impediment to progress and cuts against the effectiveness of their messaging. Like so many online, they seem to think that they can pick and choose when their tweets and posts and essays are visible and when they aren’t, like they can sequester the nasty self-impressed stuff that they write for purposes of rising in the YIMBY social culture away from the public. It don’t work that way. Why would the activists who you mock as economically-illiterate rubes ever feel compelled to consider your philosophy on the merits?

If YIMBYs can’t bring themselves to attach any other conditions to just building, if they genuinely refuse to consider social housing or rent regulation or other ventures designed to keep people in their homes, can they at least just stop being such arrogant sneering shitheads for five minutes? The housing emergency is too important and the need for more construction too acute to risk on people who think the YIMBY movement should function like 4Chan. It’s time to grow up.