YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and Freddies

Over at his SubStack, Freddie de Boer argues “NIMBYism is the product of structures, not personal choice.”

YIMBYs just about never ask core questions about why NIMBYs are so protective of their house as an investment.

For the vast majority of homeowners, their home will be the most expensive and consequential thing they buy. Nothing they buy will have a more direct impact on their day-to-day quality of life. And the way that they determine if a given house is the right one for them is to say “Do I like this place? Is this a good area? Do I want to live here?” Then YIMBYs come in and say “Hey we’d like to totally transform most of those things that drove your choice about where you want to live, and by the way in doing so we’re going to seriously degrade the price of the single most valuable asset you will ever own.” And then YIMBYs are perpetually shocked and aggrieved that those NIMBYs aren’t on board! Again, yes, the social costs of our current housing crisis are more than large enough to overwhelm most NIMBY claims, though such questions can only ever be answered contextually. I’m definitely in favor of eliminating most of the current zoning hurdles to new buildings. I would love to do a lot of building in desirable places that would upset a lot of NIMBYs. But I would do so sympathetically because I would understand that NIMBYs are only responding rationally to a system they didn’t create under the economic conditions we’ve already discussed. But YIMBYs don’t want to do anything sympathetically. They don’t want to understand that we’re balancing conflicting legitimate interests. They don’t want to do anything but dunk and mock because that’s what’s rewarded in the social culture that is YIMBYism.

YIMBYs constantly confuse second-order tools for first-order goals. I don’t particularly care about zoning reform or new construction as such, I only care about cheaper and more accessible housing. Because these things don’t reflect directly on the zoning reform they’re obsessed with, YIMBYs are dismissive of the impact of Airbnb (less than a hundred Airbnbs in Porto, Portugal in 2011, more than 11,000 now) or large corporate landlords (a third of all house sales in the Atlanta metro now going to corporate buyers) on housing costs. They’re not wrong that these are small effects on the overall price of housing, but the sum of small effects is a big effect, and there’s no reason not to talk about small parts of big problems. And to be frank I think most YIMBYs are guilty of getting fixated on the third-order effect of pissing NIMBYs off, again because it’s that third-order effect that’s actually rewarded by their social culture. Also, the YIMBY assumption is always that markets are the proper and inevitable way that housing will be delivered, but there’s no reason that has to be true, which is the basic point Ross Barkan made recently and the point left advocates for housing abundance always make. This points to the lurking issue that there are still really basic divides within the broad left-of-center about the role of markets vs the role of government in solving social problems, and we tend to paper over those divides because our coalition isn’t big enough to splinter and still make change.

Right now, we do need zoning reform; we need to end parking minimums and height caps, to sensibly reform historic district zoning and environmental reviews, and to enact a bunch of other potential beneficial changes. I don’t understand why that perspective is so often treated as antagonistic to the call for social housing that’s built at taxpayer expense, governed by the state, and distributed on the basis of need rather than through the market mechanism. I do understand that some people are just antagonistic to that kind of public venture into markets, but that’s the kind of debate that should be had rather than elided. Either way, to get the good zoning stuff you have to generate the political will to do so, and in order to generate the political will to do so, you have to moderate and build coalitions and all of that other stuff. Too many advocates for zoning and regulatory reform are antagonistic to the idea that there other people can disagree with their proposed reforms without being greedy, evil, selfish dream hoarders. I know that there are YIMBYs who are thoughtful and constructive about this stuff, but I also know that the online culture has only gotten more and more toxic over time. And I think people should ask themselves, can I keep doing this kind of advocacy if I have to stop pretending that NIMBYs are motivated by bad moral character? Would I even want to?