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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I think you're too focused on trying to win obvious rhetorical concessions against very online urbanist YIMBYs and not really dealing with the issues at hand. Except for some urbanists and WEIRD people, I think most people would love to live in a suburban neighborhood in a beautiful location with people of only their socioeconomic class and culture and a short commute to work with easily available parking. I'm on the YIMBY side, but I have no issue admitting I would absolutely love that living situation, but the issue is that maintaining such environments in the face of economic headwinds isn't done through Coasean negotiations but through government restrictions on property rights that create deadweight economic loss.

YIMBY's are mostly progressives trying to convince blue city governments so they make arguments about egalitarianism and diversity but I don't think economic development is inherently progressive or egalitarian. Logically as a city increases in population some part of it will have to increase in density or it will sprawl infinitely. The point of YIMBYism/fewer restrictions on property rights is to let the market decide where density increases, not which neighborhood is better at lobbying the local political system.

Now you may say, my backyard is special and I value it over economic efficiency because I discount the value of future/geographically distant people who may want to move there. But if everyone applies this logic to their backyard we make it impossible to increase housing density anywhere, we underproduce an important commodity, and we get a housing affordability crisis. That's great for you because it increases the value of an asset you own, but it's bad for society as a whole because it reduces economic dynamism which libertarian economists are keen to remind us has diffuse benefits

For example, the value produced by biotech firms gets siphoned off by Madison area homeowners who used control of local government to enact regulations that restrict housing supply, raising prices, so that biotech firms have to offer higher wages to induce skilled workers to move there. This slows the creation of an agglomeration effect in biotech and reduces the margins of biotech firms, slowing the rate of innovation which would be beneficial to society as a whole.

Economic geography changes all the time; the places where young talented people want to move changes as different innovative fields develop new industry clusters, the places where hardworking blue-collar people migrate from or to changes as different extractive or manufacturing industries rise and fall. If we want a dynamic economy we have to accept there will be large population transfers and we need a system of housing production that facilitates such transfers. The people who live in a place affected by such a transfer will resist the change to the place they live, they'll want subsidies for public services in half-empty cities, or to ban housing to be built for newcomers where the market determines it should be built. If everyone is allowed to impose regulation or appropriate public funds in order to preserve the character of the place they live in the way it was when they got there we get sclerosis and massive deadweight loss. You don't have to train yourself to be a self-denying online YIMBY who insists that there's no downside to living next to a homeless shelter, but you do need to come up with an argument for why NIMBYism isn't just everybody defecting in a prisoner's dilemma.

The point of YIMBYism/fewer restrictions on property rights is to let the market decide where density increases, not which neighborhood is better at lobbying the local political system.

Essentially nobody really wants the market to decide; online YIMBYs just say that to try to recruit online libertarians. But they just want opposite restrictions. Parking maximums instead of minimums, setback restrictions, tax schemes favorable to density, etc.