17 ms·

The Left-NIMBY Canon

• majormajor 6y ago
  The induced demand aspect is one I've found interesting for a long time. The linked studies are interesting, but they seem to be looking at just short-term impacts, which I don't think would reveal anything of a potential "high demand -> new housing -> new commercial/business development to serve and take advantage of higher density -> even higher demand -> higher prices" cycle. In developed countries, prices seem to be highest in the most developed, densest cities, which is why I suspect this loop exists. (The counter-argument, which you could make based on SF, would probably be something like "a business cycle of growth like that can happen even without new residential construction, and then you just have even higher prices and more displacement as a result than if you'd built residential to match the business growth." But I wonder if this is ideal for the long-term health of the city or state/country at large, in cases of a bubble or compared to some of that business growth being spread out in more regions.)
  • closeparen 6y ago
    Many usages of "induced demand" in this debate are really talking about increase in quantity demanded, i.e. more people will buy housing at a lower price. The YIMBY response is "of course, that's the point" but for many left-NIMBYs the point was to reduce pressure on the budgets of existing households; accommodating these new buyers is not helpful (and might be harmful).
    • maxthegeek1 6y ago
      "New buyers" == immigrants.
      • closeparen 6y ago
        Or people who were stuck with roommates/family and now able to form their own households.
      • andromeduck 6y ago
        Living in SF made me realize just how close the west coast progressive rhetoric is to Trumpism. It's a strongly malthusian, always striking a tone of collective loss/victimization - helplessness in the defense of a birthright against some all invasive, malignant out-group based around a yearning for some rose tinted idea of the past.
        • sudosysgen 6y ago
          Housing in a given neighborhood is actually malthusian. You can not produce land. Also, defending the in-group is good, actually, when the in-group is 99% of people of lower income. The problem with Trumpism is the defense of a xenophobic/racist ingroup and economic malthusianism in the production of commodities. There is no issue in and of itself in having a ingroup, especially one that is rabidly inclusive, and no issue recognizing that you cannot endlessly produce more housing on finite land area cities.
          • closeparen 6y ago
            The whole argument is about getting more people onto the same land via taller buildings. "Endlessly" seems disingenuous in this context; we are nowhere near the technological limits on scaling cities. We are choosing not to pick up trivial wins.
            • sudosysgen 6y ago
              Actually, no, we are really not that far away. When you start building taller, you do start having four important issues. First, you start having issues destroying existing housing and replacing it with taller buildings, which in the period in between leads to less supply, and then the rent on the taller buildings often is barely lower than it was before. You also start having issues with traffic, obviously, and air quality, which can easily get so bad that no improvement is possible any more, especially when you cannot force people to use very high performance public transit The third issue is that as you are already at taller structures, it gets more and more expensive to make things taller still - not only are the existing structures already incredibly expensive to build and thus really expensive to replace, but the structures you replace them with are also more and more expensive. Which leads to the result that simply increasing density is not a solution to the problem but instead a temporary fix, as you rapidly brush up against the density limits of your economics and infrastructure, such that even the very densest places such as Hong Kong have hugely unaffordable housing. And as you arrive to your limit, the 6-7% rent increase clock keeps ticking and ticking, sometimes even faster than you can reduce it via increased supply while you're doing a massive building, let alone when you're not anymore. So yes, there is simply no way to fix skyrocketing rent by simply scaling cities vertically. The truth is that in the end there is a hard limit to how cheap you can make housing in a free market. And you're just stuck there. The root cause is that you can't build more land. So the only solutions that work long-term require at least partial decomodification.
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but this is incredibly disconnected from real life. In the real world, recent immigrants don't get to own property, much less own property to rent it out at increasing prices. New buyers are absolutely not immigrants. Most immigrants are new renters, and cost sensitive ones at that.
    • majormajor 6y ago
      > Many usages of "induced demand" in this debate are really talking about increase in quantity demanded, i.e. more people will buy housing at a lower price. Pretty much every market of interest for this debate is supply limited, so more people CAN'T buy housing if all that changes is price. It just becomes more of a lottery. That's not what I nor the linked article are talking about - more an idea that continual growth may not necessarily ever lead to long-term downward price movement.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    In the US, "spread out" == suburbanization which is a huge failure failure on so many levels. (Bad for environment, causes loneliness and isolation, and plain less ROI because proximity creates the dynamic economy). Unless we have a fully "post-growth" economy, we need more Urban core.
    • majormajor 6y ago
      Spread out here would really more refer to separate cities (with varying levels of urbanness) e.g. Austin, Denver, etc, since the densest cities don't really have room for more suburbanization. Is there a point where proximity a la SF turns into too much of a monoculture to still be as long-term beneficial? (Those other cities, though, do have room to grow outward still, and so far keep going out; it will be interesting to see how long they can sustain that.)
      • zip1234 6y ago
        The inner suburbs should stop subsidizing it by not widening freeways. Right now outward expansion is highly subsidized by everyone paying for those roads and not just the people living 1hr away from the city center that are commuting.
      • Ericson2314 6y ago
        No cities in 2021 should be growing outward. Tracy, CA is an abomination, but so is the Sunset in SF. Broadway Junction in Brooklyn should be a second midtown. Building up Austin proper or building those up is equally good in my mind.
    • andromeduck 6y ago
      It also makes for inefficient infrastructure expenditures or poor quality of service.
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    Geography is important for those cities too. Nobody "builds up" in the US unless there's no place for the sprawl to go. Compare Atlanta and Houston to New York and San Francisco.
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• mdoms 6y ago
  In New Zealand no one is more conservative than the progressive left. They demand the preservation of architecture at all costs. They demand the preservation of a single decades-old tree over housing. They demand more deference be given to traditional tribespeople over and above the progression of cities and housing the homeless. No one stands in the way of housing more than the left in this country.
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    In the US, at least, I've experienced that the well-meaning progressive left pursues these laws in the legislature, but then they are (ab)used by those who don't actually care about the left causes, they are just looking for any means to obstruct construction that they don't want. I sometimes joke that the right is "NIMBY" but the left is "NIYBY" (not in your backyard).
    • erik_seaberg 6y ago
      It’s also been caricatured as “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.”
  • gamegoblin 6y ago
    Didn't Judith Collins (centre-right National party) and Jacinda Ardern (centre-left Labour party) both say they would not seek to reduce housing prices during one of the recent leaders debates?
    • potatochup 6y ago
      Yup! I mean you can see why, it would be political suicide. But it also means that if you want real solutions, none of the centralist parties have the guts to do anything about it.
    • mdoms 6y ago
      Yes, but only one of them campaigned on the opposite position 3 years ago.
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• cassepipe 6y ago
  This is a recurring conversation topic in the you call them leftist circles my leftist self and I happen to frequent. The emphasis is generally not so much on the new construction rate but rather on the level of investment in public goods. While some of them cling to a so called authenticity of the neighborhood, and seems to like when garbage is not collected and cars everywhere prevent to enjoy public space a its fullest, there is still a good point to be made that when there's public investment in public goods, rents rise and people move away. (Lucky me I leave in a weird house nobody wants to live in, so I get to stay on my cheap island in a now unaffordable neighbourhood and get to enjoy the beautiful new square garden). Another good point to be made is that a lot of cities are actively campaigning for gentrification and it is not always the result of the so called free hand of the market.
• orange_tee 6y ago
  >Allowing private developers to build market-rate housing results in the construction of “luxury” housing instead of “affordable” housing. Don't know about the rest, but this one seems to have some truth to it. No developer wants their brand spanking new condo to be occupied by paupers. It gives the place a bad image and brings the value down. Plus because you cannot simply kick out tenants in most places, you are stuck getting a low income for a very long time. So they prefer to market them as studios for expats and young professionals and keep half of them empty accumulating dust. There's certainly something to fix there although I cannot tell you how.
  • erentz 6y ago
    It’s not clear there is anything to fix here. I think the article explains pretty well that, yes newer units will be preferable to wealthier residents, but this results in older units being cheaper, and results in fewer existing/non-wealthy residents in the area being displaced. Often luxury is also a misnomer. At least here in Seattle most of what gets labeled as “luxury” is merely new. There’s nothing that special about the complexes or units aside from newness. The materials etc, aren’t luxury grade.
    • Kalium 6y ago
      If all the housing you're accustomed to was shoddily built more than seven decades ago and indifferently maintained since, then quartz countertops and generic Whirlpool dishwashers probably seem like an unfathomable level of luxury. As you say, though, it's generally a misnomer. Often it seems like a thin euphemism for "New and not for you".
      • nitrogen 6y ago
        "Luxury" rarely even includes adequate soundproofing. You'd find more people willing to pay more money for less space if they got some of the same privacy and noise pollution benefits they get in standalone houses.
  • zip1234 6y ago
    I think this may be caused by zoning. If people were allowed to gradually grow an area rather than wait until things got 'rezoned' before a place can built up, we might see less of the 'big developer' type construction and rather smaller developers adding a duplex or a four plex and over time the city grows up rather than what happens right now.
• aaron695 6y ago
  Does the general public actually think NIMBY is Right/Conservative? It's considered a Left/Liberal idea, isn't this conventional opinion? It would never occur to me people consider it predominantly the other way.
  • majormajor 6y ago
    I appreciated that the article brought this up become in HN discussion it is usually presented as a liberal idea, but that was never my experience before moving to California. It's incredibly easy to find anti-development movements and policies across the country. Look at public transit in red states, for instance. In somewhere like Georgia, denser housing, public transit, and walkable neighborhoods are the domain of the interior parts of Atlanta, inside the freeway loop. That area is FAR more liberal than the rest of the state. Texas (Austin, Dallas, etc), too.
  • blululu 6y ago
    This issue spans across the standard Anglo-American political spectrum. There are people who are pro/anti urban-development on both sides of the aisle and framing the issue as Right/Left or Liberal/Conservative is probably not helpful in understanding the various factions and their interests. Zoning Laws typically match the textbook definition of conservative (literally trying to conserve and maintain an old system and prevent anyone from changing it with new developments). This aspect of conservatism is shared by both right wing and left wing interests.
    • zip1234 6y ago
      I mean, a political conservative is generally thought to be fiscally conservative and for free markets and private ownership while also being socially conservative. Zoning would definitely be against free markets and private ownership. That said, zoning seems to be embraced by conservatives!
      • sokoloff 6y ago
        I think zoning is against anarchy, but it seems to be supportive of a functioning market. No one wants to build a house next to what could become an aluminum smelting operation or a pig farm. Zoning supports functioning real estate markets.
• draw_down 6y ago
  People, people! It doesn't matter if you're a "lefty" or a "conservative". What matters is that you don't interfere with the operation of the market as developers would prefer it. Those who do are obviously wrong and bad, and politically motivated (which is just another phrase for "bad").
• majormajor 6y ago
  Another thought this article caused me to have: is anti-gentrification NIMBY-ism ever a "first order" thing? How much gentrification happens only because NIMBYism in other areas pushes new residents into previously poorer areas that are less politically able to keep newcomers out? YIMBYism-but-only-for-the-poor-neighborhoods does sound like a distinctly inequal policy, so I can understand people's concerns there. Upzone Beverly Hills!
  • newacct583 6y ago
    Arguably gentrification requires a NIMBY-style regulation regime to begin with. Cities that build out new housing according to demand don't "gentrify", they just grow. Gentrification presupposes a restricted supply of pre-existing housing.
    • jdminhbg 6y ago
      I don't think this is true. Imagine a low-rent neighborhood that's close to a desirable location (for offices, or nightlife, or parks, or whatever). As the city grows, people will prefer to live in a renovated version of that neighborhood to living in newly-planted housing farther away.
      • newacct583 6y ago
        Low rent neighborhoods next to a desirable location don't exist, though. What happens with gentrification is that locations become desirable, and because of inability for them to grow people "spill out" into adjoining areas. If you could build housing right there (i.e. taller buildings, denser neighborhoods, subdivisions, etc...) the problem wouldn't have happened in the first place. But NIMBY rules prevent that to protect existing owners.
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• vlucas 6y ago
  This article opens with a bold statement that I don't think is true: > We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. These are still the most common kind, given that Republicans tend to value low-density communities while Democrats tend to value denser, more walkable places. The link offered to support this is based on personal choices of conservatives vs. liberals on where to live, NOT conservatives using government policy to block development. If you look at data in areas where building codes are most restrictive and home prices are increasing the most, it is almost all exclusively in progressive deep blue cities, states, and areas. Most "deep red" large cities (like Houston, TX - famous for having almost no zoning laws) are still very affordable with lots more construction happening everywhere. This would lead me to believe that NIMBY behavior is most often associated with progressives, not conservatives.
  • gaspard234 6y ago
    Houston is not deep red.
    • vlucas 6y ago
      Maybe not now.
• 99_00 6y ago
  People move to a neighbourhood because of the way it is. Outside forces want to change the way the neighbourhood is. People in the neighbourhood resist the change. Why does this situation invite pejorative terms and scorn from people who have no skin in the game?
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  • tqi 6y ago
    What outside force - the people who want to move in?
  • Kalium 6y ago
    My neighborhood did not stop changing when I moved in. I don't see why it should stop because someone else moved in. A neighborhood is not a fixed, static thing. I understand that this is an unusual, uncommon, and perhaps even uniquely privileged perspective. When my neighbors resist change in a way that forces change elsewhere or affects our entire city, those effects are real. These outcomes affect other people's real lives in real ways. It's very much their skin in the game. Or maybe the people downwind of a coal-burning plant have no skin in the game.
    • munificent 6y ago
      > My neighborhood did not stop changing when I moved in. I don't see why it should stop because someone else moved in. This is true, but that doesn't strictly imply that you have no participation in how it changes. The way a neighborhood changes is the sum of all of the people exerting forces upon it. This is an iterative system that you are embedded in as well.
      • Kalium 6y ago
        Oh, I'm well aware that I participate in how it changes. My neighborhood also changes due to forces around it, around the city, the county, and so on. My point is merely that change in a neighborhood is a natural and normal thing. A great many of the forces involved will be external, as it is rare that a neighborhood is in fact completely isolated from the world in every way. I am attempting to set this up in opposition to the idea that we were presented with: that people have a right to hold their neighborhoods static against all things and we are obligated to honor that. In my opinion, neither is true.
• omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  For every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease 1% and sales prices also decrease within 500 feet. This seems weird to me. So if an area has nothing but single story homes, and we raze every single one and replace it with two story homes that have twice the occupancy, it would only reduce rents by 10%? I'm also somewhat annoyed that NIMBYs everywhere, regardless of political preference, seem to ignore the elephant in the room of giant employee/education campuses. High home values need demand to support them, and that comes from lotsa people. Controlling campus size to me seems like the most straightforward way to control home prices, but then you lose out on that juicy, juicy revenue/spending.
  • zip1234 6y ago
    I think you just thought up a new experiment. Should be tried in an area with high demand and nothing but single story homes.
    • paxys 6y ago
      So.. most of San Francisco
  • epistasis 6y ago
    Price elasticity is difficulty to measure, and usually only done for very small changes. It's likely that any linear approximation falls apart far before a 30% change, and is also highly dependent on the particulars of an area. Rent typically doesn't fall below the cost of providing and maintaining existing housing, or the cost of building new housing.
  • dublinben 6y ago
    Restricting job growth would certainly be the most straightforward way to harm the economy of a city. A little too obvious for the NIMBY types who still want to benefit from a growing economy, but don't want the growing number of neighbors that come with it.
    • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
• api 6y ago
  My cynical take for a while has been that NIMBYism is how superficial leftists and liberals implement red-lining on the basis of class with plausible deniability. They don't want to say they don't want poor people in their neighborhood, but they can block all construction for other reasons and get that result. I've become fond of using this quote to illustrate the hypocrisy: "Texas is more liberal than California because in Texas a working class person can afford a place to live." It's really hypocritical to claim to be "woke" while supporting policies that create massive divides between rich and poor and lock vast numbers of people out of housing.
• ridaj 6y ago
  Tangentially related... I like that data is presented, but I find it rather short term oriented. I have lived in market rate neighborhoods and have known the angst of lease renewal, each year wondering whether I was going to be able to afford to stay. And I was effectively kicked out a couple of times, forced to pack up and move for economical reasons. I have also lived in rent controlled areas where, even as a renter, these worries go away. Unsurprisingly to me, the character of the neighborhood changes quite a bit when everyone is not constantly worried about being kicked out. People can build for the long term, engage with their neighborhood organizations, form a stable community. You frequently see people staying in the same apartments for decades. The nature of the changes induced by market rate housing vs rent controlled housing is much more long-term than what is considered there. Long-term turnover needs to be understood, not just rent rates.
  • Kalium 6y ago
    It's perhaps worth considering these as forces to be balanced, rather than one extreme or the other being maximally desirable. Market rate neighborhoods with ever-increasing rent bring dynamism and are often an entry point into a city for professionals. They're liquid, and enable people to upsize or downsize their living situations with relative ease. Businesses and people come and go and there's an irrepressable energy to it. (There's a strong argument that the kind of risk, stress, and precariousness you rightly and richly describe are an effect of a NIMBY-induced housing crisis. The "market rate" and "rent control" dichotomy suggests that something is seriously hinky in the housing market at hand.) Rent controlled areas are calmer, slower, more stable. They are better for people who are able to find a place exactly to their liking and whose lives are improved by their ability to hold the world at bay. Which obviously never lasts forever. Things always change. As you say, both have long-term consequences. It's perhaps worth considering that perhaps neither set is inherently better than the other. And, above all, it's possible that the divide between the two could be underappreciated long-term consequences of policy.
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• throwawaysea 6y ago
  I find the term "NIMBY" to be an offensive low-effort pejorative. It's a way of using a label to dismiss ideas and policies people have good, legitimate reasons to support. The article opens with a broad caricature of "Right-NIMBYs", which is completely farcical and made in bad faith: > We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. People have reasons to block housing development that don't have anything to do with poor people or minorities. To ascribe this intention as the primary motivation is ridiculous, and completely self-serving. In reality, the main reason for most people to block development is simply that they enjoy their present neighborhood character, lifestyle, sense of space/openness, access to amenities that are not over-subscribed, etc.
• coding123 6y ago
  I would have to say the vast _vast_ majority of YIMBYs on here would not support the phrase "BOMB CONDOS NOT MURALS". That's a whole different person. No, the YIMBYs on here are just programmers that want to pay $2200 RENT instead of $3400 - $4000 so they effectively get more out of their $200K salary.
  • wernercd 6y ago
    Or they are people who work at fast food joints that don't want to drive/bus to work because they can't afford the local area. "programmers trying to save thousands in rent" are a small subset of the population.
    • mattnewton 6y ago
      GP must thinking about the Sf Bay area, where they are a decent % of the activists.
  • jayrot 6y ago
    "BOMB" in this context is slang for graffiti tag, right?
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      I think it is indeed, to lower their market value.
      • almost_usual 6y ago
        Too bad condos can fix / clean it faster than a mural artist. Vandals care more about keeping their name up than what’s under it.
  • _vertigo 6y ago
    I think "BOMB CONDOS NOT MURALS" is being presented as a "Left-NIMBY" phrase, not a YIMBY phrase.
• jtolmar 6y ago
  New development lowers overall housing prices in the surrounding area, but forces the people who live in the affected neighborhood to relocate, either directly or because they're priced out of the neighborhood by gentrification. It's entirely rational that the people affected by this would be against it - they get no benefit and have to pay relocation expenses and uproot their lives. The beneficiaries are the new occupants, the developers, and the landlords. Which means far left NIMBYs have always been strange to me. The far left already rejects landlords and rent. The problem goes away if you remove rent from the equation, because the owner/tenants of a building get to decide whether to sell it for redevelopment, and get to capture the sale value if they do. So if there's already a solution embedded in your ideology, why go out of your way to blame the concept of development itself?
  • yonran 6y ago
    Yes, the redevelopment of owner-occupied housing is a win-win if you believe that more supply reduces rent. Scott Wiener’s SB 50 in 2019 was exactly such a bill; it would have allowed redevelopment of owner-occupied housing into apartments, but it would not have allowed redevelopment of existing rental housing. However, Left-NIMBYs who fundamentally reject the benefits of private development will come up with any excuse (however specious) to oppose it. If you don’t think private housing has any value (or worse, if you think that new housing actively harms people), then you can always come up with excuses to prohibit it (e.g. by demanding that the government “value capture” it so that the developers won’t make any return on their investment on average). Here’s an example of an op-ed opposing SB 50 from San Francisco’s most vocal Left-NIMBYs: https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/how-the-state-can-help-cities-plan-for-density-with-affordability/ https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/how-the-state-can-help-ci...
• TeeMassive 6y ago
  > We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. These are still the most common kind, given that Republicans tend to value low-density communities while Democrats tend to value denser, more walkable places. That premise is not only a vulgar generalization but it's not even true generally. Blue states and especially deep Blue counties are the worse when it comes to income and social inequality. If you need to convince yourself, look at a map of counties by party with color gradient and compare it with a heat map of any metric of income equality. And anyone who lived in big urban centers, nearly all blue, will tell you that they're the worse when it comes give permission to build new housing and businesses. The "conservative white flight" is a Boomer meme at this point.
• blyry 6y ago
  > results in the construction of “luxury” housing instead of “affordable” housing I'm really hung up on the quotes here. Isn't this because the market rate is currently distorted by the preexisting lack of supply though? So a developer isn't actually building 'reasonable' apartments with a level of furnish that is 'affordable', they've got granite (sorry quartz, granite is out!) countertops and heated tile floors because they can capture more rent than the cost that way? I'm curious to what extent this is due to market distortion via governmental policies, or just developers/capitalism 'spying' a neighborhood near the end of it's natural lifecycle.
  • nerfhammer 6y ago
    So there's the argument that all housing that is affordable now was luxury when it was new. New is at least somewhat inherently luxury. Banning such would be like banning new cars to keep the price of cars down
    • blyry 6y ago
      That makes sense and is a perfect analogy. I was talking about the used car market with friends a few days ago, and we discussed exactly that: the used car market is gentrifying because the insane price of new cars today is slowly but surely reducing the supply of good-condition used cars! I don't have data to back that up, but that was the lunchtime theory, and if you've tried to buy a good condition used truck recently I think there's at least some basis in fact.
• lamontcg 6y ago
  The problem is that if you relax zoning codes you get rich developers at least in the short term. Leftists should think about it in terms of deliberately producing an oversupply to crash the market. Aggressively relax zoning in areas that have already gentrified where that battle is simply lost and never coming back. Massively expand the supply of $1M+ homes until the supply outstrips the demand and developers are stuck with inventory of housing that they can't move without slashing asking prices and taking losses. Watch as property values fall. The problem is that both liberals and conservatives are against that, because they don't want to see their property values fall, and that background of NIMBY'ing is where we are. Without really opening up zoning to generate a glut what you are generally talking about is relaxed zoing in a few areas which will be too little to affect the trajectory of housing markets, but will enrich a lot of rich people. Leftists kinda instinctively know that this economic fantasy of creating a supply glut is just a fantasy, so it does make sense to support things like rent control. But you know keep punching left like they're the biggest problem, and not the people who understand the limitations of the system. (This comment's tone totally changed from the start, but I'll leave it as it is instead of cleaning it up so you can take the journey with me...)
• DevKoala 6y ago
  A NIMBY individual is a NIMBY individual regardless of party affiliation. Also, there is so much land in the USA that if people want to live in solitude outside the cities, they should be free to do so, there is no reason to stigmatize these individuals. Not everybody wants to or needs to be surrounded by others to be happy or a contributing member of society.
• throwaway5752 6y ago
  People have rich sets of conflicts. Many of them don't fit into a political narrative. But politics is a convenient dividing line that exists, to people try to fit new information to the model they understand. Trying to fit attitudes towards zoning and development into a broader political philosophy seems unproductive. "NIMBY" itself has become an insult, rather than any sort of productive and well defined word. Is historical preservation of a building that prevents further development related to political philosophy? Is zoning and capacity planning indicating a lack of infrastructure for a certain number of new people in a given area a political philosophy? Is a rich person deciding they don't want their scenic view disrupted by a new large building or wind farm related to a political philosophy? Ecologists objecting to a new suburban development because it disrupts wildlife? Do they even have consistent motivations? Are they all NIMBYism? My point is that NIMBYism is a word that makes people stupider immediately. It is a nam shub to stop critical thinking on a varied, unrelated issues and creates a binary divide where one does not really exist.
  • tjr225 6y ago
    Agreed. NIMBYs and YIMBYs exist across the political spectrum. This article seems to attempt to make the divide deeper along political lines.
    • AgentME 6y ago
      There are different reasons one would be NIMBY. The article specifies "left-NIMBY" because it's specifically trying to address a specific set of reasons that are commonly associated with a subset of the left.
      • tjr225 6y ago
        Oh dang, for some reason I thought the article was titled “The Left-YIMBY Canon.” Guess I’ve got egg on my face and I even read the dang thing.
  • graeme 6y ago
    The article pretty clearly said it was talking about a pretty specific set of beliefs belonging to an urban type of NIMBY. I’m sure you’ve seen this on forums for example: “ Allowing private developers to build market-rate housing results in the construction of “luxury” housing instead of “affordable” housing.” “In addition to lining the pockets of developers, this “luxury” housing raises rents in an area, leading to gentrification and displacement.” From the article. And the title of the article says canon, because these are taken as axiomatic. If someone wants a particular wetland or beautiful historical building preserved, that’s one thing. But there are people who truly believe that building housing raises rents! It’s crazy and widespread. The article is describing that.
• Tiktaalik 6y ago
  The article speaks in generalities and in doing so ignores the concrete impacts of development on people, and loses track of the core underlying forces that explain the real and reasonable reasons why progressives may oppose new housing. What is often happening here is that low income progressives in old rent controlled housing are literally being faced with being evicted and displaced for new developments that they cannot afford. It should be no wonder why someone would oppose being thrown out of their home, or why a project kitty corner to them would bring fears that "they're next." The underlying problem is that the neighbourhoods that developers are seeking to build in are ones with cheap land, which not coincidentally is where the most working class, poor and most vulnerable people live. If we saw developers going to rich low density mansion districts to redevelop into apartments you certainly wouldn't see "Left-NIMBYs" complaining! Of course this never happens. So you have the Left YIMBYs that can afford these new market priced condos upset and wondering why low income progressives won't roll over and let themselves evicted. Maybe wealthy left YIMBYs should focus their activism on redeveloping other areas of cities that wouldn't harm the working class and poor?
  • kmeisthax 6y ago
    The problem is that the conversation never gets this far. By the time you start talking about upzoning a neighborhood with actual money in it, everyone who lives there will be screaming for the head of the head of the local city planning commissioner on a pike, and whatever land developer was interested in the project will quietly look for another poor neighborhood to pull a Robert Moses on. A lot of city governments are effectively gentleman's clubs: they serve the interests of the people who can afford to live and vote there, not the interests of the people as a whole. State or federal prohibitions on certain zoning restrictions might be a way to go around that, as the people who can't afford to live in certain cities would still be able to outvote those who can. I keep hearing California proposing to force city governments' hands on density; but it keeps getting stymied for stupid reasons. Having a "no reducing affordable housing units" rule should still be allowed, but a "no dense housing" rule should be banned as a clear attempt at fixing prices within a neighborhood.
    • Tiktaalik 6y ago
• throwaway2245 6y ago
  As someone who has been an active part of a left-wing political party, the bullet-points of the "Left-Nimby Canon" here are very recognisable, despite the article's bias. I met plenty of left-wing homeowners who supported building in an abstract sense. But, they would take any housing that was actually proposed near them, and present a pile of reasonable concerns, effectively lobbying to block it.
• hedora 6y ago
  I’ve noticed that Left-NIMBYs tend to be anti-roads when asked (as opposed to anti-mass transit). In the SF bay area, that leads to repeated, expensive right-NIMBY projects that either further sabotage mass transit: - instead of building parallel, incompatible tracks, why can’t we synchronize all 6 train systems so it is possible to transfer between them at rush hour? - Why do we have bike lanes on most bridges, but only half of the bay bridge between SF and Oakland? - no bart to marin, no closed loop bart or left-NIMBY projects to sabotage the road network: - removing surface street lanes on trunk roads - switching normal lanes to toll lanes - kicking cars with two-people in them out of the HOV lane - setting light cycles to two minutes during rush hour - discouraging left lane fast, right lane slow. And so on.
  • carapace 6y ago
    > Why do we have bike lanes on most bridges, but only half of the bay bridge between SF and Oakland? The general unspoken idea I've heard for that one is simple racism: the Bay Bridge terminates in West Oakland. Same reason BART doesn't go to Marin (the folks in Marin don't want SFians invading.) The limit is reached in the town of Bolinas, who infamously removed their highway signs so not even the rest of the Marin folk (let alone lesser Californians) could find them.
• ggm 6y ago
  Nuclear power is a left friendly technology, as long as you define "left" to include statist, centralised economic planning. (which a lot of "left" people don't do) It is odd how the only people I can have conversations of merit about Nuclear power with, are generally rightist Statists, Even most economists now decry Nuclear power, unless untenably evil neocons. (who I avoid) But there is a small cohort of statist, vaguely right wing people I otherwise disagree with almost all the time, but we can talk about nukes. Not people on the left (of which btw, I am one)
  • hedora 6y ago
    I’ve noticed that pro-nuclear people tend to be more data driven and anti-nuclear tend to be more tribal: Standard anti nuclear arguments from the left: - diverting resources from wind and solar is folly - corrupt energy corporations will always run unsafe plants - nuclear proliferation - US regulations make the technology fundamentally unprofitable (despite many counter-examples in other countries) Anti nuclear arguments from the right: - Coal = jobs - Scientists can’t be trusted to make nuclear work. - government regulations ruined it, and are unchangable Data driven arguments: - meltdowns are bad, but infrequent. Even if safety never improves, coal plants dump more radiation per kwh. - waiting the last 30-40 years to decarbonize electricity generation was much more harmful to the environment than nuclear plants would have been (even with multiple meltdowns, and it wouldn’t have cost much to avoid that). - france and china have successful nuclear industries, and france did it with now-obsolete technology. I haven’t seen much correlation between being on the left or right and being pro- or anti-nuclear. I have noticed that pro-nuclear people tend to have a more balanced take on covid (by “balanced”, I mean somewhere between “masks are a hoax” and “full-on panic”)
    • ggm 6y ago
      oddly, here in Australia, for much of the union movement (== left) coal = jobs == vote for rightists, in some areas. overall, i do tend to agree with the economists soft-left who point out with the cost of capital close to 0, we can do all the economically less "efficient" stuff in wind, solar, batteries, because we can afford to, and actually need to, under the new MMT/Keynesian pump-priming. The same investment in nuclear wouldn't be net beneficial in the same way because less immediacy in the spend, and so less effective economic levers for the right-now economic problem: out the other side, we'd have an amazing modern supply network built out of a mixture of sources, and maybe thats ok? I see huge correlations being leftist in general, and anti nuclear. There is a small c conservative movement who believe in the integrity of the land and oppose nuclear because its just not how fox-hunting people of tory bent, envisage the land being run. But, they are a tiny minority. Most of the active anti nuclear people are either declared centre-left or lefterward of center-left (IMHO) I can't speak to the covid question. I haven't explored it.
• carapace 6y ago
  I tend to bring this up on threads like this, so I apologize if you've heard this before. https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme... Using data going back to 1948 (!) we find: > Overall, [rents] went up 6.6% every year. Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago. Fischer concludes: > Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
  • kapuasuite 6y ago
    To be fair, land use restrictions began tightening much earlier than 1948 - NYC’s first zoning code was passed in 1916, for example.
• spamizbad 6y ago
  Just anecdotal evidence, but I do think the author is wrong in suggesting YIMBYs are open to affordable housing. My neighborhood in Chicago had a controversial affordable housing complex get built. It was a mix of affordable and market-rate units, with a priority for veterans, seniors, and those with disabilities to take the affordable units. This was not section-8 housing, or government housing. The prospect of its construction ended up fracturing an unofficially YIMBY neighborhood group, splitting it in two: Those who wanted 100% market-rate units and felt the affordable apartments would "end up like the next Cabrini green". It culminated in several individuals, one YIMBY-aligned individual launching unsuccessful lawsuits, and ultimately culminated in the alderman who approved the project losing in a massive landslide to a neighborhood that had reelected him twice.
  • jboog 6y ago
    The author never made the claim that 100% of YIMBYs everywhere support affordable housing so I'm not sure why you're posting this anecdote.
• newbie789 6y ago
  I don’t quite understand the point about building more “yuppie fish tanks” as a way to bring down rent. Having lived in Portland, I did not see a correlation between the construction of market rate housing or luxury housing and the reduction in rent in other neighborhoods. I also don’t understand that “if the government says something is designated as being affordable housing then it will be affordable” is suggested to be a possibly unreliable assumption. I’ve lived in affordable housing and market rate housing. Affordable Housing was uh, much more affordable. Maybe I’m completely misunderstanding this post but the general tone comes off as “anything associated with ‘the left’ is actually diametrically opposed to truth”
  • theptip 6y ago
    If there are 1000 yuppies looking for houses in Portland this year, if they don’t find their fish tank, then they start bidding on the rest of the housing stock, and increase everyone’s rent. If you build fish bowls for them they don’t have a first-order effect on rent prices. This is an attempt to prove the principle of supply and demand (that NIMBYs often reject) from first principles. Of course, the counter-argument from induced demand is “after those 1000 yuppies move in, then 2000 more hear about how good the fish tanks are in Portland and come along and bid up the rest of the housing stock even further”. The degree of induced demand is an empirical question that the author provides some citations around. “Affordable housing” can be a relative term, for example see https://www.housingwire.com/articles/43818-san-franciscos-definition-of-low-income-is-shocking/ https://www.housingwire.com/articles/43818-san-franciscos-de.... It might not be affordable by the current residents. At the end of the article the author points out that YIMBYs are mostly leftists so I don’t think they are making an anti-leftist point.
    • newbie789 6y ago
      Thank you, I suppose the counter argument you cited is anecdotally experienced in Portland. Over the course of a decade I went from a $700/mo 2bd/2ba condo to a $1400 studio. Pretty much every person in my friends group experienced something similar in all four quadrants of the city (proper), Beaverton, Garden Home, Multnomah Village, Tigard, etc. If the Portland fishtanks are driving down the price of rent, I haven’t heard about it myself. I am not, however, an expert on this.
• abeppu 6y ago
  I'm more weirded out by the YIMBYs who are progressive in their national politics, but talk like libertarians about housing and development. Like, some people who would scoff at trickle-down-economics in the context of tax policy seem totally on board with the trickle-down story of housing, where you build more high end condos, and everyone moves to a slightly nicer place, and so there are eventually more affordable older units at the lower price range. Surely housing is the slowest context in which you could hope that that long chain of events finally leads to the desired outcome. If we actually care about housing being plentiful and affordable ... shouldn't we start building at the low end of the market where the need is the most critical?
• sudosysgen 6y ago
  I think this is a really weak argument, for two reasons. Firstly, a 1-2% rent decrease on the short term for a 10% increase in a supply at 500m?? This is pretty ridiculously low, if this is the best that can be done it's barely worth mentioning. The important thing here is that people leaving a city due to unavailability of housing thus stopping the growth in the price of housing is something that we only just see happen, it's a lot less delocalized and it's a long term process, so I really don't see how the real world effect of zero from increased supply is supposed to counteract this second order effect. The second issue is that while in theory neoliberal YIMBYs are often for public housing, when their plans are put into practice this part is completely ignored. If you see a crucial aspect of your plan being ignored, which is also by far the hardest to implement, and yet don't put it front and center to stop this, it's clear that you're okay for trading that off. Which means that the real world effect is for rent to just keep on increasing. Whereas cities with progressive solutions (which also include increasing supply, but fittingly with the weakness of the effect don't make it completely central, often seen much more than 0-2% temporary decreases.
  • AaronFriel 6y ago
    My read is that the 1-2% effect is an average effect of each instance where a parcel was replaced with denser market rate housing. Imagine what the effect size would be if we had enough market rate housing built to increase supply by 100% within 500m. I imagine it's more than 1-2%.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      It's not realistic to increase supply by 100% within 500m. But sure, say we did. Assuming more or less linear increases, instead of 1-2% you get 10-20%. Let's also ignore the large temporary decrease in supply and price stickiness of rent. You "paused" rent increases by 1.5-3.5 years. For something that will likely take more than ten years to accomplish. And then there's not much more that can be done. If instead you increased supply by 30% in affordable housing (which is much more reasonable, and of course you could do more or add some market rate housing on the top), build very strong public transit systems and allowed construction of high density private housing away from the city centre, and implement rent control, you will do much, much more than stopping 1.5-3 years of rent increases and then not being able to do much. You will actually have a durable solution.
• deleted 6y ago
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