8 ms·

This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a socie

This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a society much more welfare oriented with a substantial degree of labor and resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets) but I don't know a single leftist who actually cares about this housing shit except to think that houses should be cheaper by any means necessary. Like the idea that there is an active contingent of leftists trying to construct some kind of defense of the current housing system or critique of reforms (in general) aimed at making it easier to build houses strikes me as truly bizarre. There may be some environmentalists who have housing as a pet peeve or something, and there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way.

tptacek 1y ago
I live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists. The argument isn't that the left broadly construed opposes housing legalization! Just that there's a prominent faction of them that do. Right-NIMBYs are a much bigger problem across the US. Thompson recently recorded a podcast episode with Zephyr Teachout, taking the "we shouldn't do anything before we address antitrust" side of the argument; you can listen to it if you think "the antitrust left" isn't a real thing. Understand: the issue isn't antitrust; it's a totalizing worldview based purely on antitrust. Antitrust is probably super important! But where I live, zoning reform is much more important. Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. They're not talking to the Republicans. Not in the sense they're talking to Democrats, at least. I don't think they could make that much clearer than they have.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If you visit the DSA contingent I doubt you'd find anyone per se against zoning revisions to build more housing. Eg, Mamdani had literally building more housing as a part of his platform. Leftists tend to feel very little solidarity with wealthy progressives and don't really vibe with their political interests, in general. It seems really weird that the specific label of "leftist" is being thrown around in this context. Especially in the context of organizing the Democrats where there is a meaningful and material difference between liberal and leftist.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Again, if you try to collapse this down to "leftists" vs "Derek Thompson", you're totally missing the point. Thompson's rhetorical adversary here are "people who believe we shouldn't do the zoning and envelope reforms required to increase the supply of housing", a subset of whom are on the political left and thus in his target audience: his term for them --- fairly applied! --- is "the antitrust left", but you could (like I do) call them "left-NIMBYs" and be in the same rhetorical place. Most leftists gag over current anti-housing laws (I wish that were true of the right, but right-YIMBYs make up a tiny minority of the political right).
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      Right-YIMBYs are a tiny minority, but have you seen one in person? Truly a majestic, noble creature. You know they will fiercely stand their own ground but at the same time also go to extreme lengths to avoid putting their noses where they don’t belong. Long thought extinct, sightings have been reported.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.
  - cocaclub 1y ago
    Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon. The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
    - majormajor 1y ago
      > Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to. This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more. Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification). It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        I mean, in my local case, the Chesterton's Fence answer is pretty clearly and directly racism.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon. The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs. The most significant way it could be is if they were buying lower density units and replacing them with higher density units, so they'd be selling more units than they're buying and therefore benefit from the price per unit increasing. But in order to benefit from that they'd need to be increasing rather than decreasing the supply, which is contrary to the premise of them doing the opposite. > The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to. Suppose that it would be profitable to buy a single family home and replace it 10 condo units, except that there is a law prohibiting you from doing that. Then it would be more profitable not to build those units, since doing so is illegal. But who is to blame for this?
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Politics is local and there's nothing more local than your housing values
- woooooo 1y ago
  > Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala. People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.
  - lanfeust6 1y ago
    > People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. Housing is that. This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.
    - woooooo 1y ago
      Its about the message. Centering the message on something that has indirect, timelagged effects and isnt even actionable at the federal level is terrible messaging strategy for the national party. "The dairy industry ran ads saying milk was good for you for 20 years and sales went down. Then they tried 'got milk' and sales went up" https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl
      - lanfeust6 1y ago
        "Build more" is direct and actionable. Regulatory reform is only one dimension. Up north, Carney ran on a platform of building 500k homes annually, approx double the rate of housing starts. That's direct and done at the federal level, with billions in financing. It's impossible to be less timelagged than that by way of policy. So-called "affordable housing" qua government funding development (price controls after the fact notwithstanding) still entails hoop jumping and waiting for approvals, they don't spring up the next day. The effects of zoning reform where they're implemented are reflected quickly as well. See: Minneapolis. The general trend I see is that the left attacks the "Abundance agenda" without having read about it. Either that or the fact that it isn't just about market solutions is deliberately ignored.
- grafmax 1y ago
  > Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. “Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China. It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-wing populism. Which is only making our problems worse. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before society cracks. There’s a good chance it doesn’t end well for the financial backers of “abundance.”
  - LargeWu 1y ago
    "Abundance" directly addresses climate change in the book. The scenario it describes is that we need to electrify at a pace far beyond what we're doing today in order to find off climate change, but large scale clean energy projects are often stymied by red tape and legal challenges. Also lack of government investment in scientific research.
Alive-in-2025 1y ago
Excellent comment. I agree that not many leftists support the current housing system. Probably only some existing home owners are excited about how it works today - they may want home prices to stay high. I'm lucky to be a home owner but I also see that the current system is incredibly destructive, having not enough homes and very high home purchase prices is really hard on people. We should not have to spend so much of our income pursing a home.
svachalek 1y ago
"there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way" People tend to call the Democrats the left, as they're at least somewhat leftward of the Republicans. It's at least easier for discussion purposes than speaking of the right and the other right.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  Yeah, I get it. But we also use liberal and I think in this particular case its worth drawing the distinction between these two "camps" of the democratic party.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - tptacek 1y ago
      No. Republicans believe in full privatization of schools, Social Security, and Medicare, in flat taxation, the abolition of the regulatory state, the replacement of government-provided services with cash vouchers, and policymaking devolved out to the states. Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs. I've gone out of my way here not to make value judgements; Republicans have coherent arguments for why all these policies are better. "Republicans who don't hate minorities" is not a good way to describe liberals, who make up the majority of the Democratic party, the "other" American party that opposes the Republicans.
      - jordanb 1y ago
        > Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs. Liberals fucking love charter schools, 401ks, they voted against the Illinois progressive income tax (Biden won Illinois big when that got defeated). I could go on. You're so far off the scent.
    - nathan_compton 1y ago
lanfeust6 1y ago
> houses should be cheaper by any means necessary. That's basically the position Klein has in the book Abundance, but everywhere I go online the left automatically comes out hostile to it or anything that embraces market solutions. Your anecdote might be true but beyond your small sample size it doesn't seem representative. Broadly, they want populist solutions. This is why Sanders and Warren gave a lukewarm criticism of tariffs, and why they like price controls for grocery stores despite their having small margins, and risk of food shortages it could bring.
energy123 1y ago
Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY. Explain?
- yen223 1y ago
  In the last election, Australia's Green Party was the only party whose housing plan involves actually building homes. The major parties went with throwing more money at the problem.
  - energy123 1y ago
    Talk vs action. The Australian Greens opposed Australia's build-to-rent legislation. They didn't oppose the entire legislation. They opposed the one part of the legislation that would have helped the problem.
  - athrun 1y ago
    Aside from the fact that the few policies they made explicit in their platform would actually be counter-productive to getting more supply (such as National-level rent freezes), they also don't have a good track record at the local level when it comes to housing. I've been very involved in council-level politics where repeatedly the Greens members were aligning themselves with the right-wing members ("ratepayers rights"-type groups) when it came to delaying/blocking development permits, enforcing parking requirements, preventing/delaying rezoning, etc. They fundamentally don't understand the issue at all. All talk, no substance. And that's before we get to the CFMEU matter, which I think was the final blow for them during the last election.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  UK Greens aren't NIMBYs. They're against doing more of what's being done across UK cities already - which is building generic boxy blocks of cheap housing that look like they fell out of Minecraft, and selling them for unreasonable prices. Many of the flats end up in the hands of landlords, who charge even more unreasonable rents. There is no sense in which that's a workable long-term solution to the housing problem. The Green pitch is "That's clearly not working, let's not do more of it." Which has nothing in common with "We don't want anyone to build anything anywhere."
cocaclub 1y ago
My guess is that the "leftist critique" isn't one of not wanting new houses built, but of not wanting extensive government subsidies and political energy to go to builders and other groups who will not solve the problem, a la our storied history with broadband subsidies. This pitched debate may very well simply represent an attempt to forestall action by bogging efforts down in debate over what's effective or correct, of course. It's worked for any number of groups looking to forestall what seems like an obvious and inevitable solution: reducing lead exposure by banning its use in consumer products, reducing tobacco-related illness by making it difficult and more uncomfortable to partake, and, in our case, making housing affordable by letting prices fall.
crtified 1y ago
It's a disturbing trend that extremely complex issues are framed as a 'symptom' of broad political leanings. At the very least, it's a distraction and disservice to their own good argument, when an otherwise-intelligent narrative constantly reverts back to the polarisation "it's mostly those Others, from the Other Side". Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.
- epidemiology 1y ago
  This is one of those extremely important points that we say every once in a while and then forget to emphasize. Opposing good ideas or supporting bad ideas because they somehow get tagged into weird ideological buckets along with completely unrelated issues is a big reason why our political system is so dysfunctional.
mgfist 1y ago
You can just look at the empirical evidence. Where are homes being built? Primarily Texas, Florida, Nevada, Arizona. Where are they not being built? New York, California, Illinois. Do with that information what you please.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
> resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets The economy is too complex to be planned in details and such attempts at control have failed again and again. I think some people also miss that, crucially, the market is not an external force, it is just the aggregate of each individual's need, decision, and desires. SO in a way a working market is as free and democratic as can be.
- LargeWu 1y ago
  I like to say the market is undefeated thoughout history. You can add regulations or limitations that incentivize the market one way or another to achieve social goals, but these distortions add up. And when there are too many distortions in the market, it stops acting how you want it to act, and starts acting how it will. And usually, that means negative unintended consequences.
screye 1y ago
If the problem is in our midst, we must acknowledge it. Local boards in blue cities (California in particular) have blocked new housing for decades using every tool at their disposal. Places that lean left have anomalous rent growth. Places that lean left approve fewer new houses. Places that lean left have anomalously high building costs. This is a matter of written record. Embarrassingly, the only US city to buck this trend is Austin, a city in red-Texas known for a recent influx of radicalized right wingers. > yuppies who want to defend their housing prices Yuppies, but definition, are young professionals. They don't own houses, they rent. They are the ones paying the high rental costs as neighborhoods gentrify. They want more housing. The 35+ home owning population is the one that blocks new housing. > I don't associate this position with leftism in any way The leftist - YIMBY conflict shows up on 3 fronts. First, Leftists have issues with the free-market. They reject market-housing solutions as a way to create new housing. Second, Leftists like Govts and regulation. YIMBY wants less regulation, so they can maximize for space and price. Regulated Govt built housing is both more expensive and worse than what free markets already provide. Third, and the most important, is a subtle accusation: "Leftists act just as selfish as everyone else, once they are the ones in power". Having come from an ex-socialist country, I have a deeply rooted belief in this accusation. Not that leftists are worse people, but that people are people, and systems should work around their imperfections rather than having expectations of ideological virtue. The anti-trust left is a nice way to point a sub-section of the left which uses regulation, social outrage and critiques of free-market as a way to get personally beneficial outcomes, at the expense of the wider population. I understand - #NotAllLeftists. YIMBY & abundance advocates themselves have left-sympathies. But the anti-trust left is a non-trivial number and the conversation must start from acknowledging that they exist.
Nimitz14 1y ago
What is it like living a life completely ignorant of reality? If you'd like to learn, feel free to ask chatgpt on the leftish pushback against abundance. Or historical examples of leftists blocking housing projects. Or environmentalists prioritizing niche interests over those of the general community. There are many, many examples.

tptacek 1y ago

I live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists. The argument isn't that the left broadly construed opposes housing legalization! Just that there's a prominent faction of them that do. Right-NIMBYs are a much bigger problem across the US. Thompson recently recorded a podcast episode with Zephyr Teachout, taking the "we shouldn't do anything before we address antitrust" side of the argument; you can listen to it if you think "the antitrust left" isn't a real thing. Understand: the issue isn't antitrust; it's a totalizing worldview based purely on antitrust. Antitrust is probably super important! But where I live, zoning reform is much more important. Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. They're not talking to the Republicans. Not in the sense they're talking to Democrats, at least. I don't think they could make that much clearer than they have.

nathan_compton 1y ago
I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If you visit the DSA contingent I doubt you'd find anyone per se against zoning revisions to build more housing. Eg, Mamdani had literally building more housing as a part of his platform. Leftists tend to feel very little solidarity with wealthy progressives and don't really vibe with their political interests, in general. It seems really weird that the specific label of "leftist" is being thrown around in this context. Especially in the context of organizing the Democrats where there is a meaningful and material difference between liberal and leftist.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Again, if you try to collapse this down to "leftists" vs "Derek Thompson", you're totally missing the point. Thompson's rhetorical adversary here are "people who believe we shouldn't do the zoning and envelope reforms required to increase the supply of housing", a subset of whom are on the political left and thus in his target audience: his term for them --- fairly applied! --- is "the antitrust left", but you could (like I do) call them "left-NIMBYs" and be in the same rhetorical place. Most leftists gag over current anti-housing laws (I wish that were true of the right, but right-YIMBYs make up a tiny minority of the political right).
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Right-YIMBYs are a tiny minority, but have you seen one in person? Truly a majestic, noble creature. You know they will fiercely stand their own ground but at the same time also go to extreme lengths to avoid putting their noses where they don’t belong. Long thought extinct, sightings have been reported.
crooked-v 1y ago
Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.
- cocaclub 1y ago
  Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon. The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    > Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to. This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more. Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification). It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      I mean, in my local case, the Chesterton's Fence answer is pretty clearly and directly racism.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon. The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs. The most significant way it could be is if they were buying lower density units and replacing them with higher density units, so they'd be selling more units than they're buying and therefore benefit from the price per unit increasing. But in order to benefit from that they'd need to be increasing rather than decreasing the supply, which is contrary to the premise of them doing the opposite. > The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to. Suppose that it would be profitable to buy a single family home and replace it 10 condo units, except that there is a law prohibiting you from doing that. Then it would be more profitable not to build those units, since doing so is illegal. But who is to blame for this?
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Politics is local and there's nothing more local than your housing values
woooooo 1y ago
> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala. People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.
- lanfeust6 1y ago
  > People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. Housing is that. This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.
  - woooooo 1y ago
    Its about the message. Centering the message on something that has indirect, timelagged effects and isnt even actionable at the federal level is terrible messaging strategy for the national party. "The dairy industry ran ads saying milk was good for you for 20 years and sales went down. Then they tried 'got milk' and sales went up" https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl
    - lanfeust6 1y ago
      "Build more" is direct and actionable. Regulatory reform is only one dimension. Up north, Carney ran on a platform of building 500k homes annually, approx double the rate of housing starts. That's direct and done at the federal level, with billions in financing. It's impossible to be less timelagged than that by way of policy. So-called "affordable housing" qua government funding development (price controls after the fact notwithstanding) still entails hoop jumping and waiting for approvals, they don't spring up the next day. The effects of zoning reform where they're implemented are reflected quickly as well. See: Minneapolis. The general trend I see is that the left attacks the "Abundance agenda" without having read about it. Either that or the fact that it isn't just about market solutions is deliberately ignored.
grafmax 1y ago
> Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. “Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China. It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-wing populism. Which is only making our problems worse. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before society cracks. There’s a good chance it doesn’t end well for the financial backers of “abundance.”
- LargeWu 1y ago
  "Abundance" directly addresses climate change in the book. The scenario it describes is that we need to electrify at a pace far beyond what we're doing today in order to find off climate change, but large scale clean energy projects are often stymied by red tape and legal challenges. Also lack of government investment in scientific research.

Alive-in-2025 1y ago

Excellent comment. I agree that not many leftists support the current housing system. Probably only some existing home owners are excited about how it works today - they may want home prices to stay high. I'm lucky to be a home owner but I also see that the current system is incredibly destructive, having not enough homes and very high home purchase prices is really hard on people. We should not have to spend so much of our income pursing a home.

svachalek 1y ago

"there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way" People tend to call the Democrats the left, as they're at least somewhat leftward of the Republicans. It's at least easier for discussion purposes than speaking of the right and the other right.

nathan_compton 1y ago
Yeah, I get it. But we also use liberal and I think in this particular case its worth drawing the distinction between these two "camps" of the democratic party.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 1y ago
    No. Republicans believe in full privatization of schools, Social Security, and Medicare, in flat taxation, the abolition of the regulatory state, the replacement of government-provided services with cash vouchers, and policymaking devolved out to the states. Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs. I've gone out of my way here not to make value judgements; Republicans have coherent arguments for why all these policies are better. "Republicans who don't hate minorities" is not a good way to describe liberals, who make up the majority of the Democratic party, the "other" American party that opposes the Republicans.
    - jordanb 1y ago
      > Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs. Liberals fucking love charter schools, 401ks, they voted against the Illinois progressive income tax (Biden won Illinois big when that got defeated). I could go on. You're so far off the scent.
  - nathan_compton 1y ago

lanfeust6 1y ago

> houses should be cheaper by any means necessary. That's basically the position Klein has in the book Abundance, but everywhere I go online the left automatically comes out hostile to it or anything that embraces market solutions. Your anecdote might be true but beyond your small sample size it doesn't seem representative. Broadly, they want populist solutions. This is why Sanders and Warren gave a lukewarm criticism of tariffs, and why they like price controls for grocery stores despite their having small margins, and risk of food shortages it could bring.

energy123 1y ago

Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY. Explain?

yen223 1y ago
In the last election, Australia's Green Party was the only party whose housing plan involves actually building homes. The major parties went with throwing more money at the problem.
- energy123 1y ago
  Talk vs action. The Australian Greens opposed Australia's build-to-rent legislation. They didn't oppose the entire legislation. They opposed the one part of the legislation that would have helped the problem.
- athrun 1y ago
  Aside from the fact that the few policies they made explicit in their platform would actually be counter-productive to getting more supply (such as National-level rent freezes), they also don't have a good track record at the local level when it comes to housing. I've been very involved in council-level politics where repeatedly the Greens members were aligning themselves with the right-wing members ("ratepayers rights"-type groups) when it came to delaying/blocking development permits, enforcing parking requirements, preventing/delaying rezoning, etc. They fundamentally don't understand the issue at all. All talk, no substance. And that's before we get to the CFMEU matter, which I think was the final blow for them during the last election.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
UK Greens aren't NIMBYs. They're against doing more of what's being done across UK cities already - which is building generic boxy blocks of cheap housing that look like they fell out of Minecraft, and selling them for unreasonable prices. Many of the flats end up in the hands of landlords, who charge even more unreasonable rents. There is no sense in which that's a workable long-term solution to the housing problem. The Green pitch is "That's clearly not working, let's not do more of it." Which has nothing in common with "We don't want anyone to build anything anywhere."

cocaclub 1y ago

My guess is that the "leftist critique" isn't one of not wanting new houses built, but of not wanting extensive government subsidies and political energy to go to builders and other groups who will not solve the problem, a la our storied history with broadband subsidies. This pitched debate may very well simply represent an attempt to forestall action by bogging efforts down in debate over what's effective or correct, of course. It's worked for any number of groups looking to forestall what seems like an obvious and inevitable solution: reducing lead exposure by banning its use in consumer products, reducing tobacco-related illness by making it difficult and more uncomfortable to partake, and, in our case, making housing affordable by letting prices fall.

crtified 1y ago

It's a disturbing trend that extremely complex issues are framed as a 'symptom' of broad political leanings. At the very least, it's a distraction and disservice to their own good argument, when an otherwise-intelligent narrative constantly reverts back to the polarisation "it's mostly those Others, from the Other Side". Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.

epidemiology 1y ago
This is one of those extremely important points that we say every once in a while and then forget to emphasize. Opposing good ideas or supporting bad ideas because they somehow get tagged into weird ideological buckets along with completely unrelated issues is a big reason why our political system is so dysfunctional.

mgfist 1y ago

You can just look at the empirical evidence. Where are homes being built? Primarily Texas, Florida, Nevada, Arizona. Where are they not being built? New York, California, Illinois. Do with that information what you please.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

> resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets The economy is too complex to be planned in details and such attempts at control have failed again and again. I think some people also miss that, crucially, the market is not an external force, it is just the aggregate of each individual's need, decision, and desires. SO in a way a working market is as free and democratic as can be.

LargeWu 1y ago
I like to say the market is undefeated thoughout history. You can add regulations or limitations that incentivize the market one way or another to achieve social goals, but these distortions add up. And when there are too many distortions in the market, it stops acting how you want it to act, and starts acting how it will. And usually, that means negative unintended consequences.

screye 1y ago

If the problem is in our midst, we must acknowledge it. Local boards in blue cities (California in particular) have blocked new housing for decades using every tool at their disposal. Places that lean left have anomalous rent growth. Places that lean left approve fewer new houses. Places that lean left have anomalously high building costs. This is a matter of written record. Embarrassingly, the only US city to buck this trend is Austin, a city in red-Texas known for a recent influx of radicalized right wingers. > yuppies who want to defend their housing prices Yuppies, but definition, are young professionals. They don't own houses, they rent. They are the ones paying the high rental costs as neighborhoods gentrify. They want more housing. The 35+ home owning population is the one that blocks new housing. > I don't associate this position with leftism in any way The leftist - YIMBY conflict shows up on 3 fronts. First, Leftists have issues with the free-market. They reject market-housing solutions as a way to create new housing. Second, Leftists like Govts and regulation. YIMBY wants less regulation, so they can maximize for space and price. Regulated Govt built housing is both more expensive and worse than what free markets already provide. Third, and the most important, is a subtle accusation: "Leftists act just as selfish as everyone else, once they are the ones in power". Having come from an ex-socialist country, I have a deeply rooted belief in this accusation. Not that leftists are worse people, but that people are people, and systems should work around their imperfections rather than having expectations of ideological virtue. The anti-trust left is a nice way to point a sub-section of the left which uses regulation, social outrage and critiques of free-market as a way to get personally beneficial outcomes, at the expense of the wider population. I understand - #NotAllLeftists. YIMBY & abundance advocates themselves have left-sympathies. But the anti-trust left is a non-trivial number and the conversation must start from acknowledging that they exist.

Nimitz14 1y ago

What is it like living a life completely ignorant of reality? If you'd like to learn, feel free to ask chatgpt on the leftish pushback against abundance. Or historical examples of leftists blocking housing projects. Or environmentalists prioritizing niche interests over those of the general community. There are many, many examples.