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Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 1/2)
There, I said it. In the circles that I reside in, calling someone a “nimby” comes with a clearly negative connotation, such a strong negative connotation that it stands alone as an argument in favor of any given development or policy change. To make sure that I’m thinking clearly and not just embracing the term because I’m a contrarian (although I am admittedly a contrarian), I turned to Wikipedia to make sure I had a sound working definition:
Well, now that I’ve got a clear definition, yes, that’s exactly me. I support good things in my neighborhood and I’m against bad things in my neighborhood. I even embrace the implied hypocrisy of saying that I don’t care if other people want to have bad things in their neighborhoods, it’s really up to them whether they accept or refuse those things. In the event that such a thing is truly necessary for both neighborhoods to succeed and that one of us must accept the bad thing, I embrace Coaseian negotiated handling of the externalities.
Let’s move on to some concrete examples of my nimbyism. The first one that pops to mind are the frequent local proposals for homeless shelters, family shelters, and similar structures and aid organizations. One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect. Without regard to whether such organizations are actually helpful or not, should I want to accept such a similar proposed structure in my backyard? The answer that I give is a fervent no, that inviting the indigent to my neighborhood will make it a worse place to live in just about every conceivable way. I want indigent populations removed from my neighborhood as soon as practicable and legal for the police to do so, for the incredibly obvious reason that this makes my neighborhood a better place to live. Some people feel quite differently from me on this - perfect! Since I don’t want drug addicts and crazy people in the park across the street and others say they don’t mind, we have a Pareto optimal solution. If they actually do feel that there is a cost, we’ll have to come to some sort of Coaseian handling of externalities, but I’ll at least have extracted the concession that it actually does suck to have hobos in your park.
Moving on to one that’s a little less plain to see and that is even more galling to those that think the nimbies must be stopped, let’s talk a bit about housing density. Madison currently faces a housing crunch, caused by economic opportunity and geographic constraints. The city has an unusual abundance of high-skill job prospects as the state’s capitol, home to a large and prestigious university, and large software and biotechnology sectors that have spun off of that university. Geographically, the heart of the city is the largest American city situated on an isthmus, just about one mile wide, running between a picturesque pair of lakes. The city has an ordinance protecting the prominence of the state capitol building, keeping the overall aesthetic of the skyline as it has been. It is also famously tedious to deal with when it comes to historical preservation; if you’d like to enjoy some ridiculousness, check out this recent argument about a bar that Al Capone apparently went to. As a result of these factors, that slice of land is a surprisingly expensive place to live for the Midwest.
Despite the prices, I elected to settle here anyway and I really do love this city. I love the beauty of the city, the historic skyline, the lakes, the biking, the fitness culture, the breweries, the cheese, the parks, the huge farmer’s market, and much more. I even love that it’s the kind of place that a fake Indian nonbinary lunatic would set up shop for fun and profit.Others in my city share that love, but think it should be a cheaper place to live, that we should increase housing density, and this is basically a human right. One recent opinion piece on this has a decent enough piece on a rather villainous and peculiar bit of law here:
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Here’s where I bite the bullet and go full nimby - yes! I am in favor of exactly that in my neighborhood. I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. My experiences with poor people and the transiently coupled have shown me that they’re lower quality neighbors. Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois. Back to the distinction between being a nimby and having a broader policy recommendation though - I don’t care if someone else in some other neighborhood would like to get rid of this sort of restriction, it’s not like I have some moral prohibition on there being poor people with roommates, I would just rather that my neighbors be a nice married couple that is going to stick around a while. I’ll even cop to the even more villainous take that I rather like the high property values here in part because they serve as an effective barrier against living around the kind of people I don’t want to live around.
That's not hypocritical at all. The hypocrisy exists only when you demand that other people accept things in their neighborhood, but not in your own.
Note that it's also not hypocritical to demand that certain things be kept away from all neighborhoods. For example, demanding that heavy industry or other very things that cause serious nuisance be kept separate from housing is completely reasonable, if that separation is reasonably possible.
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I wanna make the YIMBY pitch in a bit of a different manner than I think you've been seeing.
BLUF Having a lot more built spaces makes us all much richer.
I want to make a comparison to Japan here. Japan has almost no homelessness. It's not really intensive government intervention and tons of supportive housing or shelters that does that. It's the fact that housing in Japan can be incredibly cheap. For example, you can rent this crappy little apartment for 16,000 yen a month, or $121 US Dollars. Is it a good apartment? No. It's badly located, tiny, in a walkup, and has only the bare basics. However, it is a roof over your head for $121 in Osaka, Japan's second largest city.
Japan is much more land constrained than anywhere in the US, and yet housing there is incredibly cheap. Of course you can spend a lot if you want to be in the most desirable locations, but it's truly a choice there. Unlike the US where being anywhere in commuting range of most major cities means you're paying 40%+ of the median income for a home.
These lower costs go beyond just housing. Food in Japan is much less expensive than the US, largely because commercial rents are also way lower due to lots of building. You can go to a restaurant in a popping area of central Tokyo around Shibuya or Shinjuku and get a good meal at a sit down restaurant for $15 per person. You can of course spend more for luxury stuff, but again, things are largely cheap. Government statistics bear this out, with most Japanese people having boat loads of disposable income.
What you're saying about using costs to exclude people isn't wrong, in the sense that it has the effects you describe. However, on a society-wide level, those effects are the equivalent of us setting billions and billions of dollars on fire in higher costs for housing, goods, and services for everyone.
Is there some sort of gross statistic that bears out this impact on the whole economy, other than your disposable income one? In terms of GDP and GDP growth, Japan looks like bottom of the first world country. The "conventional wisdom" is that Western countries are mostly the same economically.
Oh, Japan has lots of problems, mostly related to an aging population and almost no immigration, as well as a really sclerotic and bureaucratic employment culture that wastes a ton of labor hours for no really good reason. So disposable income is high, but unemployment is also pretty high, and wages are pretty depressed.
I can see what other stats I can pull up on housing spending per capita as percent of income, but not sure entirely where to hunt for it tbh. But that's what I'd be generally looking for, at least to show that housing is not the problem faced by Japanese households as compared to their American counterparts.
The question is, why do the strengths and problems seem to balance out so much? If you have multiple independent factors, then the total variance sets an upper limit on the effect size of individual factors. So whenever someone says that a factor like housing or regulation or something else that some countries already get right, has a huge potential for economic growth, I look at the small variance between first-world countries, and conclude that either the factor doesnt have that much of an effect, or theres some sort of interaction effect that eats away most of the first-order-effect.
So, I found your claim that Japan actually is doing much better in the whole economy very interesting.
The western world isn't homogeneously wealthy though. Switzerland is really quite rich for example, as is Norway. The US is also relatively wealthy among western nations. Italy is by comparison relatively poor. Japan is a bit of an odd duck in that they had so long with so little inflation that they are in a weird low nominal cost, low wage, but high standards of living dynamic.
Some of the reasons for these variations can't really be generalized as policy, such as Norway's one neat trick of "have a bunch of oil." But lots of places just actually have good policy that produces good outcomes. And Japan is at a minimum proof that you can have a functional and affordable housing market even with extreme land constraints and a high population density if you just allow more construction.
Most of it is within a factor of 2, which corresponds to about 30 years of economic development - and the bigger ones grow slower.
My beef is with the claim that this is keeping the whole economy down.
Maybe we're just using different benchmarks. I don't think wholesale zoning reform would make America like, twice as wealthy overnight. Maybe a 10% GDP boost over a decade at best, and then returning to trend growth rates as the low hanging fruit has been used up. That would be still within the range of wealth of western nations, though putting the US probably right at the top of the pack. "Kinda near top of the pack" to "tied at top of the pack" is achievable in my view.
But like... that's actually a big improvement to people's lives. A 1% increase in GDP is $700 per person on average. If we achieved 10% then, we would be talking thousands of dollars per person in extra income and savings.
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Disposable income after tax and rent is much more useful in predicting actual living standards than GDP per capita is.
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For someone who owns property, as most NIMBYs do, the prospect of cheap housing is a bad one. It's not about keeping homeless people out of sight, it's about keeping rents flowing in and property prices climbing.
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I have no idea why Japan has almost no homelessness, but how sure are you that it's because housing is cheap? While many temporarily homeless are really homeless because rent is too high and incredibly cheap living arrangements aren't available, the mentally ill or drug-addicted homeless might not hold an apartment at $100/mo, or might get kicked out of one. And even though the 'temporarily homeless due to cost of living' outnumber the addicts when you count by 'have you ever been homeless' on a population basis, the latter are less likely to climb out of homelessness, and are much more of the homeless population at any point in time. Compare it to Japan's low crime rate. (Although low rent is good even w/o affecting homelessness ofc)
Housing and mental illness and drug addiction are all very complex, and I'm not super confident in this hypothesis. But I think there's a good case to be made that making housing cheaper will reduce homelessness significantly. There are a lot of people who are borderline unable to care for themselves, where in good circumstances they do well enough, but in bad circumstances they'll totally collapse. You can take a person, and if they have a roof over their head and their own toilet, they'll be able to hold down a job at McDonald's, or doing landscaping, or some other straight forward job. But take away that roof over their head, their life becomes harder enough that they're unable to hold down any job, and they spiral. They turn to drugs to get any semblance of happiness, or maybe because all the other homeless people who become their de facto social circle use drugs. And expensive housing turns them from transitory homeless to a blight on society.
I think Scott's post here makes a good case about cheaper housing being very good good even if it's not the main point of the post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko
This is basically my line of thinking, and why I emphasized how few hours it takes to earn enough to live in that apartment. You can work part time at McDonald's or Yoshinoya or wherever and make enough to have a roof over your head and food in your stomach, no matter where you are in the country. Can you live in a nice apartment in a good location and go out to fancy restaurants on that job? Of course not. But you can get by.
In contrast, even working full time at such a job in a place like NYC puts you deeply in the hole housing-wise, with almost all people working those jobs either in subsidized housing, or sharing apartments among tons of roommates and still spending 50%+ of income on rent.
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In general I am skeptical of any comparisons to foreign countries like Japan or any in western Europe. This is because, for example, Japan has a culture of falling in line, keeping your head down, and being normal that is far more strict than culture in America. So the worst of the worst people in Japan are only doing things like, I don't really know, let's just say maybe talking too loud on the phone once in a while. This is far more tolerable than the worst of the worst in America, which OP describes as:
Not only that, but for Japan especially, they are more hostile to foreigners than America is, so they have far less of an immigration workload to deal with. That means if you're Japanese and you live in Japan and you were raised Japanese from the start, your neighbors are more likely to be just like you and as Japanese as you are, and dealing with the same culture. Having neighbors similar to you is what OP wants:
Of course, it's not all roses. Japanese culture has plenty of downsides (high rate of innocent convictions, peer pressure, work suicides, etc.). But I simply don't understand why any time someone brings up how Japan or the Netherlands has better housing/urban design/transit/etc. they will always, without fail, never mention the important difference between those countries and America: culture. (And other important things too, like law enforcement policies.)
If you want intra-united States comparisons, it's quite clear that homelessness is strongly correlated with housing prices, and has almost no relationship with things like absolute poverty, unemployment, or drug use rates.
I don't think we can or should replicate Japanese culture in the United States. But Japan is a free market country, and housing prices there aren't low because of a culture of collectivism or conformity. Prices are lower because supply is higher. Lots of things are different about the US and Japan. But the dynamics of supply and demand aren't.
Let me clarify my point. I'm generally skeptical of arguments of the form "they did [thing] in [Japan/Europe], why can't we do it here?" that do not take into account culture. Because my answer to that question is culture. If you live in Japan and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing your new neighbors might do is talk on the phone too loudly. If you live in America and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing that could happen is, well, let me just quote OP again:
So then people oppose these projects when they otherwise wouldn't if they had lived in Japan.
You state that "Prices are lower because supply is higher." This I do not have a disagreement with. But you seem to miss the point of why, exactly, supply is higher.
That's a fair argument, but in making it, I think you do need to grapple with the very real economic costs of the policy. Especially considering that we can't exactly excise those people from our society overall, we are paying an enormous cost to try to shove the problem into someone else's backyard. And like any game of musical chairs, someone must lose the fight to not have disruptive people live near them. So in that sense NIMBYism isn't a generalizable policy to reduce these problems in society.
And indeed because these policies are economically harmful and waste scarce resources, they cause a lot of those harms to be worse. Being homeless makes you more likely to fall into drug use, and in general homeless people are more disruptive to society even if they otherwise engage in the exact same conduct.
It also makes us waste a bunch of resources. So we see park benches that are expensive and uncomfortable so that they can't be slept on. Any store with a large parking lot needing to have tons of security patrols to weed out car sleepers. Tons of fuel wasted and traffic added by people commuting from 60+ miles out of the city to get to their jobs.
There is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma issue to all of this. If we have a freer housing market, we will still see poor and near-homeless people congregate in the least desirable areas where rents are cheapest. But if one very small place on its own adds a bunch of housing, without it being at least a region wide policy change, it does likely impact that one place for the worse, at least on some dimensions.
That's why I think setting policy at a higher level of government makes sense for zoning and density. When you have to consider the whole market, you end up with it being such a clearly costly choice that it's hard to justify keeping current planning patterns.
I think your mistake is characterizing it as "wasteful" for people to pay to price out undesirable people from their neighborhoods. People pay that premium for a reason: they think it's worth spending a lot of extra money to not have to live around those people.
In other words, the nimbies you're responding to are essentially saying "we'd rather give up a lot of money than live around those people" and your response is essentially "but that's a lot of money that could be used otherwise". Which... well, yes, of course, but people derive value from that money.
Your musical chairs point - that someone has to live near these people - is trivially true. But a basic principle of living in a free market liberal society is that people get to selfishly make themselves better off if they're able to afford it. Perhaps we'd be better off if people donated more of their wealth to alleviate the burdens of the less fortunate, but human nature is what it is. Why single out housing as the one domain where people shouldn't be able to use their wealth to obtain things they want at the expense of others?
Ok but how much money exactly does it take to price out undesirables and who/what else are you pricing out at the point the price actually gets to? If you have multiple children have you decided which one will get the house and which one(s) will be priced out of the neighborhood they grew up in?
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The thing is that these are not free market transactions we are talking about. They are government regulations.
It's not that NIMBYs want to only build single family homes on the land they own. That's all well and good. And even at scale if you want to build a whole town as a giant HoA / condo thing like The Villages in Florida, you can do that.
The problem is that these are regulations telling other people what they can and can't do with their land. My proposal is that we should remove these regulations and adopt a free(er) market in buildings where people can build on the land that they own without needing to have the town or city approve each and every detail at their discretion.
Inasmuch as the government is making laws which make its people on average poorer, and I'm advocating to change those laws, I think it's appropriate to characterize those laws as wasteful.
This sounds like a good idea. Let's apply it to the rest of society first, and then apply it here last. Reasonable?
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This post reminded me of a Dilbert comic. It's even a good one. We can keep up the current race to the bottom: the old BANANA acronym we all know and love. Old people seeing fabulous gains on stuff they bought in the eighties, anyone born then or younger getting the shaft.
Or we can not do that, and maintain the environment of when the most ardent of NIMBYs were young. I can but hope and pray it will become so.
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If they've always been around what they are inflation adjusted sure, but if they've doubled and tripled you have to contend with the fact that the population is going to be continuously aging rather than staying similar. If you want a place to actually be frozen in time you need to maintain the difficulty of entry as low as it was in the past.
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This would only be true if such neighborhoods were closed off from pedestrians, which they often are not. Mentally ill people rummaging through garbage early in the morning or other problems occur even in expensive areas.
Affordable housing is not right. This is something that seems to be lost on the media. What makes certain areas desirable also generally makes them expensive.
What happens when enough boomers die so that they no longer outnumber the disposessed millenials and zoomers that decide that it is?
In the spirit of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," some significant portion of millennials (and maybe "old" zoomers?) stand to get significant inheritances once those boomers die off. As such, I suspect that they will swiftly swap IMBY camps as their skin in the game changes, and "X is a right" will keep on being so much political fluff.
I agree with this to an extent but even taking inheiratance into account I would imagine there will still be a significant paradigm shift in the post boomer political enviornment regarding housing.
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Not in the suburbs! I know OP was focused on city living, but still, I want to put a good word in for my preferred environment. Source: I live in a suburb, not even a particularly expensive one (by Bay Area standards anyway), and it's blissfully isolated from all manner of city problems, including a wide swathe of undesirables undertaking undesirable behavior. One perk of the car-centric setup is that you need to minimally have your shit together to own a car, and it wouldn't be practical to live here without one. (For whatever reason the hooligans who steal vehicles don't penetrate here often — perhaps it's not a particularly lucrative environment for thievery?)
The suburban version of hobos rummaging through your trash is the metal scavengers getting out earlier than the trash truck on bulk pickup day. They tend to not leave as much of a mess though.
Those guys perform an actual public service, as they take larger metal items the trash collectors won't.
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I have long thought large parts of North American cities should be much denser, but something that I noticed these new YIMBYs don't seem to recognize at all is that buildings have major externalities. That is why zoning laws exist. Letting people build whatever they want is not optimal.
They say that NIMBYs just want to restrict the housing supply in order to inflate their property values, but this makes no sense. If that's what they wanted to do, they would try to stop housing construction everywhere but their own neighbourhoods. Being allowed to develop their own properties would maximize their property values, but restricting the supply would depend on stopping development everywhere else.
That's not what a NIMBY does. That's what an OIMBY does (Only In My Backyard).
An explanation that matches their behaviour much better is that they want to preserve the value of their property by preventing the construction of buildlings with negative externalities. I have a lot of very serious NIMBYs in my family and they typically complain about things like preserving the character of the neighbourhood or discouraging transients from moving into the neighbourhood. They never talk about preserving property values. They don't want their property values to go up because they never plan to sell and don't their property taxes to go up.
Zoning restrictions are probably not the best way of dealing with negative externalities, but that does seem to be what they are used for and it's an important purpose. If they're removed, something else should be put in place to deal with the problems they're intended to solve.
This does not make sense. If my $1-4 million home goes up even just 10% that is more than enough to pay taxes just by borrowing against it
Financially, sure, but the person in question is probably quite attached to owning their property outright. Yes, if the value goes up, and you have to borrow against it to pay taxes, you're technically richer, but I doubt most homeowners would be very happy about it.
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Market price pretty much solves your issue with not wanting a homeless shelter next door. So long as it’s paid for/funded with market rationality. The local government probably builds the homesless shelter as long as they are rational - building the homeless shelter as cheaply as possible then it won’t be put in your backyard. It will be put in a poor persons backyard or around those who would rather have cheaper rent and a homeless shelter than people who are willing to pay a higher price to not live around homeless people.
What evidence have you ever seen from local government to indicate that rationality is prevalent or even present in most of their actions?
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Reminds me of the meme that rich celebrities should welcome illegal immigrants to their homes and neighborhoods. They never take up the offer.
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This is one of the wildest takes I've ever seen. I don't know of a single homeless shelter that was built according to this principle. They are almost always built to convenience the homeless in their preferred activities of panhandling, boozing, and harassing productive citizens.
You guys are probably right. I’m just close to a market absolutists and the issue here isn’t markets it’s politics encouraging nimbysm. No one by market principles would locate a homeless shelter on expensive real estate.
Well, no one by market principles would tolerate the current state of homelessness at all. It only exists because of publicly owned commons that are not policed as they would be if they were privately held. In addition, many of the public institutions that claim to have a monopoly on violence in a local area, would attack and imprison anyone who does take rational action with regard to their own private property.
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The local government connives with some developer to give them a tax break on another project in exchange for the developer ceding the space for the homeless shelter, so they don't actually care about the cost of the lot.
Possible. But if you elect good leaders that want to provide public services efficiently then not an issue.
This isn’t an issue with nimby it’s an issue with your government.
This IS efficient from the point of view of the government. They pay nothing.
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This is a more difficult problem than the original one he's grappling with, though.
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YIMBYs aren't advocating for new homeless shelters, they're advocating for more residential development, generally - and, at the margin, those units will be filled by normal people who are able to pay slightly less than current residents are, not the homeless. (Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk) Maybe if somewhere went full YIMBY rents would drop a lot, but that seems unlikely imo. YIMBYs claim more housing will help with homelessness not because poor druggies will be able to live alongside rich families, but because increases in stocks everywhere means more rich-ish people can live near you, freeing up units in middle-class areas for middle-class people, who'll put less pressure on poorer areas ... etc.
Coase's theorem relies on zero transaction costs, which are not present IRL when negotiating between diffuse collections of residents and state and local governments. And it guarantees pareto efficiency, which (by definition) leaves massive improvements on the table if a few people are very stubborn, e.g. strongly prefer 'not in my backyard' even over being paid.
So is it that high prices, specifically, keep out the wrong kinds of people? That would still allow a lot of building that might only lower prices somewhat. And is it really worth spending 25-35% of everyone's income on rent to maintain that? Even if [high rent, no building, good communities] is better than [low rent, lots of building, bad communities], there must be a way to achieve 'good communities' without banning building - although not necessarily a politically viable one.
I think the definition of YIMBY/NIMBY has changed a bit. When I first heard it in my highschool class, my teacher was ranting about progressives who were like "Homeless shelters are so important! We need to do more for the poor!" but who would blanche and try to stop any such projects if they were being built nearby their own home. The initial emphasis was originally Not In My Backyard, it was about hypocrisy. But the counter-movement that's emerged, YIMBY's, is more Yes in My Backyard, they're more about just getting stuff built in general and tearing down red tape, they aren't actually organizing to build homeless shelters nearby themselves.
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"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards. While the developer makes a lot of money on these due to the high-density, the price paid per household is almost always lower than the area average, the area loses some of its greenery, and the average social class of the area falls.
I think getting rid of the affordable housing requirement would result in some developers focusing on large high-density, high-cost, high-quality condos near in-demand areas, but the affordable housing requirement puts a limit on unit sizes and quality overall, and makes NIMBY the equilibrium position of a neighborhood.
I'm a YIMBY and I think that so-called affordable housing requirements should be abolished. All houses are potentially affordable given a healthy market.
Yup. This is the way things are done in the rest of the world. If there is "affordable housing" it takes the form of little tiny apartments (like ... 6 square meters) which anyone can afford because they are minimalist. (Americans might call these tenements, and they are illegal.) Developers outside of the US seem to prevent claims of gentrification by grandfathering old tenants/owners into the new, larger units built on the same land.
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I don't know about percentages, but in my portion of a major NIMBY city, development usually does not tear down single family homes, but instead tears down poor-quality 1- or 2- story apartment buildings (often of the dingbat variety, which does not age well at all) and puts up in their place 10-12 story (4-5 of which is above-ground parking) stickbuilt cookie cutter "luxury" apartment blocks with rents that are far higher than the units replaced (because newer and nicer amenities, and often larger individual units).
The new units may be more expensive, but the net effect is still to depress prices generally. Yuppies move into the new "luxury" units, freeing up the mid-level housing they used to occupy for the middle class, in turn freeing up cheap housing for the poor.
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Jesus, are those stickbuilt things really up to 12 storeys now? We're going to have a lot of deaths when one of those burns. Or are they only 6-7 wood above concrete?
6-7 stories above 4-5 concrete parking-garage floors.
Are you sure? The limit prescribed by the US's International Building Code for apartment buildings (occupancy R-2) has not been increased beyond five stories of heavy timber (type IV-HT) or four stories of dimensional lumber (type V) on top of a concrete podium, with a total building height of 85 feet for heavy timber or 70 feet for dimensional lumber.
But maybe your city uses a different code.
I think there may be a difference with newer engineered timber buildings, e.g.: https://www.fox6now.com/news/worlds-tallest-mass-timber-building-milwaukee-ascent
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I think an engineer (def. local authorities sufficiently lobbied) can override this sort of thing -- it's expensive, but definitely is not physically unpossible:
https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/real-estate/tallest-wood-residential-tower-world-vancouver-bc-1943876
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I could be wrong and it could just be 5 above the parking. Regardless, they're tall. And expensive. And generally replacing old apartment/condo units instead of single-family homes.
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This is one of those mexican standoff tragedy of the commons situations for me.
EG, I am strongly for NIMBY policies on homelessness until I am assured that YIMBY policies will be adopted state/nation wide.
Exemplified by the problems certain areas are having now: Some section of the nation are too cowardly to imprison or execute the homeless but poor enough in spirit to harass indigents until they fuck off somewhere else; all the way down the chain until they reach somewhere that has principles instead of standards which instantly becomes fucking awful.
If we could coordinate such that everywhere adopted YIMBY polices at once, it would be pretty much fine. Since we can't, I'm going to vote to give the brain fried PTSD'd out veteran a buss ticket back to el paso and they can go to hell.
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Your desires, to have good, respectable, neighbors, to not live near disruptions etc. Are not only acceptable, they're completely expected. My objection to NIMBYism lies not in it's goals but in it's tactics which I believe frequently amount to using government action to appropriate the land value of other private actors for their own benefit. As a libertarian I see this as tantamount to communism.
Let me illustrate this with an example. There is a quiet neighborhood on the edge of town. Next to the neighborhood there is a field owned by a single farmer who grows corn. The neighborhood residents enjoy the quiet seclusion brought by being surrounded by corn and their homes values appreciate due to the relative scarcity of housing in their immediate vicinity. However as the area grows more populous the farmer realizes that his land would be more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn and he begins talking with a local developer to sell the land.
Now let's consider a few ways that the neighborhood residents might respond.
Scenario #1: the residents allow the field to be sold and new houses to be built and welcome their new neighbors
Scenario #2: the residents negotiate with the farmer and pay him a fixed sum of money in order for him to agree to put a restriction on his land that it will not be used except for agricultural purposes for the next 50 years
Scenario #3: the residents collectively buy the land from the farmer and turn it into a private park
Scenario #4: the residents use the fact that they outnumber the farmer to enact coercive government action to block any potential development of the land
In a sense all of 2,3 and 4 could be called NIMBY but my only objection is to #4. However #4 and analogous situations seem to make up the vast majority of NIMBY behavior so I consider myself an opponent of NIMBYism in general. My core belief is that you don't own your neighbors land and even if you have been recieving a benefit from how he has chosen to use that land for a number of years you are not in any way entitled to continue recieving that benefit and any use of government action to coerce your neighbor to use his land in a certain way is effectively theft.
Though this may be a type of efficiency, removing productive farmland from cultivation to site housing that does not require arable land does not seem an efficient form of land use.
Housing requires nearby jobs, land nearby jobs is relatively rare, sometimes the value from being nearby jobs vastly outweighs value from being arable. In any case, if we just built dense housing like apartment buildings with no parking lots, pretty little arable land would need to be built over; it's only suburbs or urban sprawl with massive highways that waste tons of arable land.
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The market is much better at finding efficient uses than your speculation.
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NMBYIsm is seldom used in this context. It's more about people who have no stake, not the contrived farmer example. The pro-NIMBY argument has to do with existing homeowners (stakeholders) suffering an externality with no just compensation.
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No, he didn't realize it would be more efficient, he realized it was worth more and wanted to cash in. People don't think in terms of efficiencies, they think in terms of values. Your example could have been from an economics textbook, which has a certain POV that is not relevant to the matter at hand, and does not reflect reality well enough to accept.
Taxation is theft. Theft is OK when enough people agree on it.
This is a distinction without a difference. The farmer might not be thinking in terms of efficiencies but the forces that make the land more efficiently used as housing are the same forces that make the price higher thus making it more attractive for the farmer to sell. You're also ignoring the primary point. It doesn't matter why the farmer wants to sell what matters is that it's his land not anyone else's so other people have no right to tell him how it can be used.
No it's not. The quality of life benefit that the gently-waving fields of corn provide to the local residents is real! It even gets priced in in the value of the neighbor's homes. It just doesn't get directly converted to the farmer's benefit unless he acts to cannibalize the benefit (by selling the cornfield to someone who will build something "worse" there). This is a problem with conflating increased price with higher efficiency/benefit - at least insofar as we want people to be incentivized to provide and/or do things that their neighbors like and/or enjoy.
I've accounted for this. If the current residents are enjoying so much benefit from the farmland that it's actually more efficient to leave it undeveloped then there will be a price at which scenario #2 can be cleared
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Our entire system is based on price = efficiency. That’s the American system. While the farmer might not be a trained economists it’s still the entire basis of our system higher price = higher efficient use
(For some good you could say higher marginal efficiency; oxygen is super important but the marginal oxygen is worthless type arguments).
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I think all of this is fine with the caveat that you understand you are probably outnumbered by poorer people and its possible they will win the democratic fight. You can advocate and vote for your interests and they can do the same.
That might mean they win in your city over your objections and allow more densely zoned homes.
In other words the choosier you are of your neighbors and allies, the fewer neighbors and allies you have. This is a trade off. Of course your allies may be individually wealthier and more influential. This too is a trade off.
As long as you are willing to accept being overriden if your preferences lack enough support then i don't personally see an issue with your position.
Pragmatically you may want to not be too exclusive to try and bleed off support from the other side, but thats not really relevant to the values part.
I think poor people care much more about separating themselves from even poorer people then about getting to be with the richer people. Horrible-to-be-around-ness also follows the power law.
Imagine the top 0.01% of horrible-to-be-around-ness.
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Eh, I don’t think the homeless actually represent any sort of voting bloc. And in representative democracy, wealthy landowners with local business ties and tons of skin in the game curry way more favor with politicians than those with nothing to lose.
If the politicians desire to turn a nice city into an indigent shithole, then I suppose that’s what they will have when people of means vote with their feet. See also, Detroit.
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This becomes untrue if democracy is sufficiently local.
And becomes even truer if democracy becomes sufficiently global. If either of those things happen then yes, the calculus changes.
Why does the democracy need to be global? Why can't Dense State A vote to invade Rural State B regardless? A has a bigger population and they're pretty big fans of the idea, and since they outnumber B, why does B's opinion on being colonized matter at all? Who's going to enforce otherwise?
California is in the process of stripping local zoning from almost everywhere (in terms of land area; the exceptions, as I recall, are the cities you've actually heard of). A is happy to piss all over B, and there's jack diddly B can do about it if outsiders are sufficiently uncaring of them. Being too selective of your allies and neighbors isn't the problem; the problem is the larger structure with no skin in your game but all of the power over it.
Your realpolitik might be true, in some sense; that doesn't make it good.
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A lot of the problem with NIMBYism is the hypocrisy. If you believe that it's a moral imperative to help the homeless, that people who don't like the homeless are evil, and that the homeless are pleasant people to live next to who don't cause problems anyway, then not wanting a homeless shelter in your backyard shows that you are being hypocritical and that your actions don't match the moral condemnation you are ready to hold over people's heads. That's very different from admitting that the homeless are smelly, rude, commit a lot of crime, and unworthy of respect and then not wanting a homeless shelter near you--of course you don't! You just explained why!
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I think you are fighting a strawman of yimbyism. Of course everyone wants to live in pleasant neighborhoods with friendly stable people and not drug addict criminals! The nimbys don't have a monopoly of that desire.
Since you cited Coase. There's a very obvious path of reasoning that leads to one not being a "nimby", that is being for free markets. If you believe in the power of the market to allocate scarce resources among agents with infinite wants most effectively. Then dense housing will be built where dense housing is in demand because there is no stronger force in the universe than people wanting to make money. Using any form of political leverage to oppose such developments let that be through onerous zoning regulations or whatever is interfering with the free market, and as such creating economic deadweight losses.
Your preferred mode of living would still be available in a world without rampant nimbyism of the likes present in America. It's not like there are no good neighborhoods with high-earning residents in Japan, or Korea or Finland or the UAE. But you won't have housing prices so ridiculously high that you start dun goofing the birth rates. If there is a demand for the type of living arrangement you so revere, it will exist even in a yimby world, you will have to pay for the privilege though (you already are in aggregate and directly). I've said it before and I will say it again, there is some serious bullshit afoot if random housing in your city costs more to rent than renting a much superior arrangement in the tallest building in the world in pure luxury.
That is only part of it. the NIMBY debate is about people who exact an externality without the counterparty being justly compensated. Yes, land is being used sub optimally, then optimization should mean all parties are compensated, which is consistent with a free market approach. You want to build an apparent complex in my nice neighborhood, fine, but you owe me the difference of what my home would otherwise be worth.
It's not that surprising. Think of how hard it is to transport goods to the top floors of a skyscraper. Prices are driven by connivence, proximity to jobs etc.
Does the inverse also apply? If you want that apartment complex to remain a parking lot, you owe the owner the difference of what his parking lot would be worth if it were turned into apartments? If you're really so committed to maintaining your neighborhood, you should be willing to put your money where your mouth is and outbid every property developer.
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Uh, have you seen the birth rates in those places? Korea is 0.81. Japan is 1.34. Finland is 1.37. The UAE is 1.46. The US is 1.64. It's not NIMBY or the housing prices for that matter.
No, it isn't. Real estate is largely about location, and as a location, Dubai is a problem in many ways.
YES!! I did not imply that these places did not have bad birth rates, I should have put them in separate paragraphs to make the point and avoid confusion. My point was that these places have the kind of neighborhoods OP wants, AND the income to cost of housing ratio is a lot lower!
Housing prices being one of the many anti correlates to birth rates is another point. But it makes a lot of mechanistic sense.
Price is determined by demand and supply (and not much else), location influences demand. If NYC built more houses, the prices would be lower, this is really not a controversial statement to make. I gave the example of Dubai because I live here, and because housing gets built in abundance and it has some of the lowest housing to income ratios.
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Wouldn't all the workers moving to higher-productivity cities lower the salaries of workers living in those cities? The glut of workers vying for jobs would probably bring the price down more than several thousand dollars for every worker.
They'd be coming from other places reducing labor supply and raising wages there. Even if migration lowers the urban wage by introducing more people as long as it's a higher wage than where they were migrating from it's possible for the average to still increase. Also the mechanism by which you restrict or increase the urban labor supply is by raising or lowering housing supply which effects rents. So if there's a ton of new houses built and a whole bunch of people can move to the city and flip burgers even if that depresses the wages of existing burger flippers they benefit from lowered rent, or the absence of a rent increase, since new housing was built.
But the main argument is that agglomeration allows specialization which increases productivity, and wages are downstream of productivity. If a bunch more skilled people move to the city they can specialize in their most productive niche due to economies of scale. Because they're incredibly specialized and productive unskilled people can earn higher wages selling services to them. You could draw in so many unskilled people that there's no longer an urban rural unskilled wage difference once you adjust for rent, but it would still be a lower average wage then if the unskilled people were selling services to less specialized skilled people.
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And that wouldn't matter because on aggregate products will be cheaper (And ultimately everyone is richer on balance). I think @Ecgtheow said it a lot better than I could in another comment in this post.
This is why unions are better. People teaming up to offer lump some deals drive up the overall price when individual workers would sell cheaper. Same thing housing. If a group hangs up to ban the entire construction of new housing it can drive up home prices. But our system is based on having defectors drive down the price in nearly every business and transactions going to marginal value. Many individuals homeowners would gladly sell off their yard for cash and allowing building in it etc.
They are defecting if you consider getting something and holding onto it and not allowing more of it to be made cooperating. There is another mode of doing things, which is doing things better and doing/building more things.
From a bird's eye view, you want the price of things to go down over time, you want more competition, more things, more goods, more services, and more houses. If your mode of operating is to not grow the pie but instead defend your share then sure, large swathes of humanity operates under those principles.
That’s my point individuals will defect. Sort of a prisoners dilemma where if everyone cooperates to restrict supply of land they can cause the valué to skyrocket in a booming jobs market. But individually a lot of people who paid $500k for their house now worth $1.5 would gladly sell off their backyard for cash.
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That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I was an econ major.
It does matter. There are winners and losers. The people two states over who get to save two cents at a time are better off, and the people put out of work are tens of thousands of dollars worse off, but there are enough pennies to balance the tens of thousands of dollars, so it's all a wash!
The world doesn't work that way, and while it can be modeled in such a fashion, you should not confuse that model with reality.
This hyperbole doesn't add anything to your argument--it just undermines your credibility and makes you guilty of unnecessary antagonism. Don't do this.
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Arguably that is exactly the economic decisions that have been taken over the last few decades. Outsourcing manufacturing makes everything cheaper for all consumers but hollowed out steel works and manufacturing in the rust belt.
Now you can certainly argue as to whether that was a good thing ( I would lean towards yes but some of the value should have been redistributed to the losers) But it is basically the essence of the neo-liberal economics of the past 50 years or so. So it is definitely reflective of reality as it stands.
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I don't care about what you majored in.
Arguing for maximally free markets is hardly a novel economic stance to hold. And yes I do think 10 people imposing anti-free-market policies to shift 2 pennies from 1000 people so that they could be 2 dollars richer is morally wrong. This is the standard free-market maximalist stance. Also, half the pennies get lost in thin air (DWL) the moment they make their deal with the devil (market restrictions) so they are 1 dollar richer each. I want there to be the most dollars in the world, not some people having a lot of them at the cost of others having less, sue me.
That's definitely a position.
There's a problem with basically lying about how "rising tide rises all boats" instead of admitting that you have this position and honestly telling the people who are getting fucked that they are getting fucked at least, not to mention actual redistributive efforts in their favor.
There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers. Because when you don't ask them directly they are very good at making it seem that the fact that their models only look at the GDP and such is OK because everything else is unimportant.
Was it this one? It's about immigration, not tariffs, but otherwise seems to match pretty closely.
OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!
How did you find it?
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I don't think this applies meaningfully to any of my three examples, where the externalities are born by current residents rather than the agents accruing the benefits (in the first case, there essentially isn't an economic benefit).
You picked four of the absolute lowest fertility countries in the world to illustrate this point? I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates.
I will concede citing fertility rates doesn't make much sense since that metric is far too confounded. But a strong argument could be made that housing prices are variable in that, Bryan Caplan has a lot to say on the matter.
As for your examples, how so?
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You are absolutely wrong. Population density and it's associated costs are maybe the biggest difference in variation between tfr of developed countries.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693032/
This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
You can easily see this within the US as well. Places like NYC have abnormally low birth rates, especially among native populations.
Russia and France have the same sub-replacement TFR as the Maldives and Qatar, two countries famous for having no free space at all. Next to the latter two are equally cramped Djibouti and the Seychelles, both with above-average TFR.
It makes sense that Djibouti would have a high fertility.
...what do you mean, specifically?
I just checked, and Djibouti's TFR is 2.522, according to this. This is actually interesting when one compares it to Somalia (note: Djibouti's population is majority Somali and overwhelmingly Muslim) with a TFR of 5.661, ie. over the double the rate in Djibouti. Just the effect of Djibouti's (obviously) greater urbanization?
I was making a childish pun about the pronunciation of the name Djibouti.
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Russia and France modernized post WW2. Qatar is currently modernizing and therefore is only just now dropping below replacement. It's where France was in the 50+ years ago in the cycle. Obviously modernization is the main trend here that dominates all other, but Qatar doesn't seem to be an outlier at all. UAE is already sub 1.5. Saudi Arabia seems to be behind on the curve, but its still quickly trending below 2.1. It may be the case that in 20 years Qatar's TFR will still be 1.80, but it doesn't seem that way.
Wait.... Really? By what measurements? I always imagined they were as modern as the US or England prior to WWII and I'm surprised to hear that they weren't.
Basically all industrialized countries went through the modernization that led to declining birth rates post WW2, but France definitely lagged behind Germany and the UK economically before the 2nd world war.
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I think this can be explained by demographics, like immigration and high Muslim population in France. Religiosity seems to be correlated with birth rates. Look at the Mormons for example.
Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.
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If that paper is correct that high density = low birth rates then NIMBY is a good thing. It reduces the number of people that can afford to move into crowded megacities where birth rates plummet.
This is a complete tangent. But I want some more opinions on this matter. I understand the general two themes of
lower birth rate = Less young people to take care of old people
less young people = less productive working people
I these negative consequences of a lower birthrate; however, resources in any country (or planet) are necessarily finite. So even if there is space now for there to be a higher birthrate in most of these countries, at some point there won't be. At some point it will be NECESSARY to have a lower birth rate (Alternatively a higher death rate, but i don't like that alternative) to account for the resource constraints. And the first issue issue is also a transitory one in many respects as long as the birth rate is at or above replacement, the number of people in the space will eventually stabalise to a consistent level and there will once again be enough young people to support the old. And both could potentially become obsolete someday with the increase in mechanical automation of labor.
TL;DR Can someone give me an argument against the fact that at some point we will eventually need a lower birth rate in at least some parts of the world at a given time.
Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity, and the human population is more realistically limited by the resources of the solar system on any time scale where the Earth's carrying capacity is an issue. If Human population was about to trend to 40 billion, then Malthusian carrying capacity might become an issue. 9 billion? Not even close.
The biggest issue right now is that modern welfare systems are basically ponzi schemes. The eventual solution will be obvious--drastically cut spending, but that's difficult to achieve in democracies where the people paying are outnumbered by the people being paid.
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This just seems like a kind of pointless worry as we don't actually have a high enough birthrate to replace ourselves. It's not at some point we're going to need to dip below positive so that we don't run out of space, it's we crossed that point decades ago and are so far on the other side that things are going to get weird. Unless you're talking on a global context, at which point housing policy in specific countries is not really an important factor.
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If we accept that NIMBY policies lead to lower density, then sure. I don't think that's the case. Very few places have an incentive to build up and not out, but regulations increases costs for both.
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Or conversely, low costs per area will allow bigger houses to be cheaper.
YIMBYs don't want bigger houses; they want more houses in the same space.
YIMBYs want the government not to force people into building one kind of house. It is a position of permissiveness, not forcibly changed direction.
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Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 2/2)
Zooming out to a somewhat ridiculous degree, I find that I extend my position on this all the way up and down the ladder of my preferences and politics. When I consider immigration, for example, it’s not that I’m against all immigration to my country or that I think other countries should necessarily restrict free flow of movement, it’s that I want my nation’s policy to reflect what will be good for our (rather large) neighborhood. We should identify what is good for our neighborhood and choose to do that. In the event that cooperation with other neighborhoods is required, we should sort this out by negotiations to price externalities. There are going to be some pretty obvious agreements about what’s good for the neighborhood and these disagreements can occur between reasonable and well-meaning people, but we’re going to have a tough time getting the terms of debate to even begin to make sense if we can’t agree on whether the improvement of our neighborhood is the priority.
In all of these cases, the counterargument, as I understand it, is that while these things might be good for the current residents of my neighborhood, they’re not good for the potential future residents of my neighborhood. This is where I find it difficult to rebut the argument on its own terms, as it is evidently coming from a perspective of utilitarianism with little or no discount as one moves out the concentric ring of association. I don’t share that perspective and feel little or no responsibility to make my neighborhood more accessible to those that aren’t presently members.
In pondering this a bit yesterday, the part that I find most interesting in the efficacy of “nimby” as a sneer word against an opposing position. How did it come to be that even people that hold fundamentally nimby positions mostly recoil from being called nimbies? I think I found something like an answer in a recent Reddit thread on the putative housing shortage in Madison:
I think that’s it - progressivism demands the sort of egalitarianism that precludes one from saying that their backyard holds any particular value to them relative to other backyards. If something is good, then it must be good everywhere, which means that you must accept it in your backyard. Opposition to development is (correctly, I think) identified as anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, and classist.
In any case, I expect that people will continue to want good things in their neighborhood and not want bad things in their neighborhood. I hope that they regain the inclination to reply simply, “not in my backyard”.
So your homeless shelter doesn't get built near your neighbourhood, or anywhere else in your city. Now what? You've addressed the point that such shelters will impose externalities on those living near them, but shelters themselves are not the cause, the homeless people are. And the lack of shelters will not actually remove those homeless people.
Perhaps they simply congregate in your city centre, making it increasingly unpleasant to be in as happened in many major American cities. Maybe they just start congregating in a random place, pitching their tents in some neighbourhood for no apparent reason - and perhaps they pick your neighbourhood, and you've got the problem anyway. What's the solution to this?
Obviously, with the homeless there are non-housing related options: you could try and simply ship them away to some other area, or have the police be much harsher on vagrancy and imprison many of them. In the first case, what's to stop these other areas from sending them back, or the homeless themselves from simply returning? Will you end up in an expensive cycle of carting the homeless back and forth? For the second, what about prison capacity? I can't imagine prison construction is any more popular than shelter construction, so where do you plan to build the extra prisons needed for the homeless population?
Admittedly, this example only applies to homeless shelters, and there are other examples like loud or foul smelling factories which might be better.
Let's turn to the housing question instead. As many of the other replies have noted, there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice neighbourhood, filled with familiar people. A lot of poor people are just unpleasant to be around and bring issues with them, and high housing prices do act as a barrier. But I think nimbys making this argument are not being logical or following the idea through to its conclusion.
I assume you're a homeowner in Madison, right? Maybe your house is worth $1 million or something. But I'm also going to assume that this is not a particularly large or impressive house, given the pressures on housing costs you mentioned? If we remove those restrictions and start heavily increasing density in the area, then perhaps your area will become less pleasant, with more bad people around.
Except: you'll still have the capacity to afford $1 million in housing. That's not going to vanish just because there are more houses in the area. Even in the yimby paradise of Japan, they succeeded in keeping property prices at the same level for ~20 years, not actually in lowering them - and if there was some unprecedented success in lowering housing costs, this would almost certainly take many years to accomplish, given existing homeowners time to realize value.
So now, instead of living in your $1 million 3 bed suburban house surrounded by other $1m suburban houses, you move to a $1 million 6 bed McMansion, surrounded by other McMansions. Your ability to spend money to preserve a certain living situation has not changed. What that money can buy has improved.
There is an argument that this only applies up to a limit: if you're already wealthy and can afford a 20 room mansion, there's no real room to move up. But putting aside the fact that this is a tiny niche of the population, if you have that kind of money there is already a solution: just buy land. Give yourself a couple of acres around your house. Don't want an apartment complex to block your view? Buy the land there, pay an appropriate fee to cover the loss to society.
You... do see the problem here, right? "You can buy a better house somewhere else!" is the opposite of convincing to someone that likes their neighborhood and the people in it. Are they supposed to concede and coordinate everyone moving at the same time to somewhere else, with different amenities, different aesthetics, etc etc?
People aren't fungible. Neighborhoods aren't fungible. "Sell your house and become the rich equivalent of a hermit" is... certainly an argument that applies in some cases, I'm sure, but not here.
Do you actually believe this? Do people really consider that "ABC Street", with its rows of one story suburban houses 10 minutes from nearby amenities is somehow different from "XYZ Street" with its rows of one story suburban houses 10 minutes from nearby amenities?
After all, if there is one constant in the property market, it is that people are constantly on the lookout for bigger, better housing. Do people's revealed preferences suggest that a large number of people really think that their neighbourhood is the only one that is nice and with good people?
I will accept there are a handful of places that you really can't replicate: a New York brownstone, a London Georgian terrace. But these places are already incredibly expensive and desirable. No amount of new building will make these areas any less desirable and expensive.
And if you want to talk aesthetics in particular, in some cases it is the nimby restrictions which cause the shortage of these types of housing! I can't talk for the US, but here in the UK the rise of the generic tower block and hideous "Deanobox" is overwhelmingly driven by property regulations.
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If but NIMBYs acknowledged this, I would have a much easier life. I would have loved to live close to my mother, grandmother, aunt, brothers, nephew, niece, and high school friends - but couldn't, because I'm priced out of living anywhere near them due to vastly risen costs. My brothers now moved far off, too. NIMBYism is exactly why I can't afford to live where I want: the salary that was enough in the 90s is nowhere close to being sufficient today.
In my experience they're the only ones that acknowledge this; they just don't acknowledge that sometimes it cuts both ways or else they consider that an unfortunate but necessary tradeoff.
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Well, they do in fact acknowledge this, and that is why they don't want to sell their house and become the rich equivalent of a hermit. Nothing you said in this comment has addressed your interlocutor's comment in any way. I find this move of attempting to turn your interlocutor's argument against themselves to be logically confusing.
It's not an attempt to turn the argument against itself, it's the reality my brothers and I live in. The NIMBY's got theirs, and it means neighborhoods full of young families in their late 20s/early 30s are filled with people in their 50s. It has changed, and there is nowhere to go that doesn't involve upending my life wholesale.
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