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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.
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.
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.
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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It sounds like you've narrowed down to a specific value difference. While NIMBY isn't particularly strongly associated with conservatism/Republicans in the US (although, the left is often calling out liberals/Democrats, too), I often see people on the left asserting the strawman that the conservative worldview is "I've got mine, screw you." or the related "I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" (I haven't actually seen that article before, but I've certainly seen the line repeated on Twitter a lot; scrolling down, that article also contains "I’ve got mine, so screw you").
I'm not sure there's much to gain by discussing further. You've found the fundamental values difference. Except maybe the YIMBY side could come up with arguments that your positions are actually somehow counterintuitively working against that value, but that seems unlikely. I guess there's the problem cited elsewhere in this thread that if you want businesses near you staffed with low-paid service workers, then those workers have to be able to afford housing of some sort vaguely nearby.
I have to admit, I don't care about other people as a general rule.
I care about some people: my wife and kids, my parents and siblings, close friends, social circle, coworkers (in descending order). Outside of that I care about people based on the value they bring. That can be direct value, e.g. the mailman who delivers packages, or indirect value, e.g. the people working at USPS's sorting center.
But I don't care at all about the people who bring negative net value. The homeless guy drugged out of his mind? If he died tomorrow I literally wouldn't feel sad at all. The single mother welfare-leech churning out 4 kids? Nope. Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother (who I consider her the upper-class equivalent of a welfare-leech)? Gone. Just fucking Thanos snap hordes of inner-city gangs and Women's Studies majors away.
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do. Does human life have intrinsic value? Yeah, some. But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop? And at least that little kid in the slum has the potential to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, whereas the 65 year old homeless drunk who shows up to the ER every two weeks has no chance?
(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)
Law professors at stanford are 'the upper-class equivalent of a welfare leech'?
"Surely we can all agree - we don't have THAT much responsibility to the environment, right? Otherwise we'd have to stop using lead paint, leaded gasoline, maybe stop dumping oil into rivers - and, wow, what a mess that'd be."
What even is this argument? Surely if going to india and 'saving lives at 100/pop' (givewell estimates it at $5k) isn't worth doing, it is so because of ... some aspect of those lives or what saving them entails, and not because we're not already doing it.
The difference is that saving the environment requires a coordinated action, but saving a kid in India does not. Any modestly well-off person from the U.S. can do it. So the fact that they don't is a revealed preference (vs. just a consequence of tragedy of the commons).
EAs use this contradiction to convince people to do more (by pointing out what you would do for someone in front of you). I don't have this contradiction -- I wouldn't do shit for many people in front of me either.
And yes, I stand by my assessment of Barbara Fried. Instead of passing a drug test to demonstrate purity of body, upper-class welfare leeches must pass a similar test put together by a granting agency to demonstrate purity of mind.
Here's her bibliography: https://law.stanford.edu/publications/?primary_author=Barbara%20Fried&page=1
... okay, and the revealed preference of conservatives and reactionaries is that they love porn. this doesn't tell us that porn is good the interesting claim isn't "do most normal people do X", because ... they're normal people, many just imitate what their friends or family or media does, some come up with their own ideas which aren't any better, the interesting claim is "is X worth doing". If the amount of value something has is determined solely by how much other people, at the present moment, value it - i guess handwashing in hospitals was valueless until semmelweis.
Those publications aren't inspiring at a glance, but they're probably better philosophy than the 75th percentile philosophy paper. And she spent a lot of time teaching law too (apparently they both stopped teaching after FTX) - which isn't particularly parasitic. I'm not gonna look too deeply into this, but even if she has much more prestige than she should for a law school teacher, that's hardly welfare leech
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There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).
There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.
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In any society containing modern progressives (ie. postwar ones), you don't exactly get a choice on the matter. These people represent enemy civilians at best and enemy soldiers at worst, in a zero sum war against your basic rights and interests - to stop half way at indifference is to declare the bizzare position of neutrality towards yourself.
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Isn't this more or less what Effective Altruism is trying to do?
Notwithstanding the fact that the most dedicated EAs sometimes suffer burnout, it does seem there's at least some people putting their money where their mouth is in terms of valuing the lives of humans.
Yes, there's definitely some people that care.
But the vast majority just profess to care and their actions (i.e. revealed preferences) suggest otherwise.
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You're doubtless familiar with the story of the ants and the grasshoppers. Do you recognize a difference between the ants' reply to the Grasshoppers' demands and the phrase, "I've got mine, screw you"? Does it matter how and why the ants got theirs, or is the question of desserts eternally confined to the present state?
What's your evidence that "Caring About Other People" (which people? caring how?) delivers superior outcomes to "not" caring about other people? The policies Progressives describe as "Caring about other people" don't appear to preclude encouraging people to make risky choices, and then standing back and clucking regretfully as the consequences drive them to various forms of ritual public suicide united by thorough degradation and languorous agony. I personally would rather be swiftly dead or permanently jailed than live out the fitful and deranged trajectory of Travis Berge to its bitter conclusion. A system of "caring about other people" that reliably proliferates lots of Berges, and worse, evidently involves a somewhat nonstandard definition of "caring".
So long as such systems exist, it behooves the responsible and the prudent to wall them off from everything of value to the greatest extent possible, for the simple reason that instinctive, atavistic destruction will always be cheaper and easier than the amassment of value, of the good, of virtue. Actual care for others demands as much: those persuing goodness should be protected and encouraged, those pursuing evil should be given every incentive to change their ways, and blocked from executing their designs in the meantime.
...All of which is a long way to make a simple point: The claims you're implicitly making are completely demolished by multiple decades of observed results. "Caring about other people", in the peculiar way Progressives define the phrase, demonstrably makes the world into a rotting sewer.
If the ants say "I've got mine, go build your own, and if you can't do so before winter that isn't my problem" then we are in The Parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, and we are supposed to feel at least somewhat sympathetic to the ants. NIMBYism is where the ants say "I've got mine, and if you build your own I will shoot you" which puts us in a kind of reverse It's a Bug's Life.
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Apologies for the confusion. I had no intention of claiming one set of values is "superior" to another. In fact, I thought I directly stated that the difference in goals meant that debating which approach is "superior" isn't a meaningful conversation to have in this context.
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The innocence project reliably puts out stories of the wrongfully convicted or executed. If you propose a general increase in 'swift death' or 'permanent jail', how do we balance Berges against Cameron Willinghams? Our system reliably proliferates Berges, as it does pedophiles, fraudsters, schizophrenics, people with nine toes ... because out of hundreds of millions of americans, five hundred people who are released and later reoffend is genuinely difficult to avoid.
Not that you don't have a point, but the evidence here isn't enough to claim "progressives demonstrably make the world into a rotting sewer". Especially since crime rates, over the past 400 years, have consistently trended down, as everything's become more progressive. This is one of the issues I take with neoreaction generally - a monarchist claims crime was better under monarchy because of strict order, etc, but I've never seen this really elaborated upon, other than 'I read lots of victorian literature and they say so', yet crime seems to have decreased generally.
I think in cases like Berges, some form of institutionalization is probably a massive improvement over the current method. That is to say, if I knew my life were going to go down Berges' trajectory, I would rather be institutionalized, and failing that I would rather be dead. His fate is viscerally horrifying to me, and the fact that we, from my perspective, encourage and allow such states to play themselves out without meaningful intervention is unconscionable.
Berges didn't need the full weight of the war-on-drugs criminal justice system. He didn't need a SWAT takedown. But neither did he need to be treated to a revolving-door parody of civil consequences. Once it became apparent that he was completely incapable of making good choices under his own power, he should have been locked up in some sort of minimum-security prison, there to either have the opportunity to rebuild some semblance of personal character, or at least be protected and to protect others from his own worst impulses.
Nor is it obvious to me that our society proliferates Bergeses in the same way it proliferates schizophrenics and people with nine toes. I think there is a fairly direct causation from the absurdly permissive social policies, particularly around highly addictive drugs, crime, and vagrancy, and the way his life ended. He lost control, and the social structures around him refused to help him in any way that worked or mattered.
Piss and shit on the streets, everywhere, together with trash, filth, used needles, infectious waste. Rats, and with them outbreaks of vermin-borne plagues. These are some of the highlights of the social experience in west-coast Progressive strongholds. I think "rotting sewer" is a reasonable summation. I don't want to live in such conditions, and I don't want to share a polity with the people who create and sustain them.
As for crime...I'm wondering if you've checked the stats lately. Here's 1900 to 2000. Here's the recent years, including the eye-popping 30% increase in 2020 that correlated with a major Progressive push to reform policing. I don't see how one matches those figures to a claim of "crime generally going down." We are currently sitting somewhere around five times the murder rate we enjoyed prior to the first modern Progressive era of the 1920s-30s, and the downward slope we enjoyed following the massive increase of the second progressive era of the 1960s-70s seems to be well and truly over.
Worse, one must consider the staggeringly massive investments and restructurings our society has made over the last century, all in an explicit attempt to solve the problem of violent crime. From militarized policing, mass-incarceration, ubiquitous surveillance, forensic science, to trauma medicine, to the increasingly regimented and invasive educational and psychological interventions, we've expended vast sums of money and human lives, and done massive, highly questionable modifications to our core social institutions, many of them with their own harmful side effects. And all this, by our best evidence, could only partially slow the long-term increase, and that to only a limited degree. Now we're headed back up again, quite rapidly, with our previous policy options thoroughly expended. When the murder rate skyrocketed in 2020, that was with a century of crime-suppression and harm-mitigation techniques, many of them ruinously expensive, already in place or expended.
So now... what?
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I apologise in advance for posting in response to your comment rather than any of these other ones, but it seemed as good a place as any.
Put simply: NIMBYism is not a position where we just don't care about other people. That would be the maximised libertarian one, where people get to do as they like. NIMBYs care about what other people do lots and lots, be they OP or anyone else. So, by all means, please do - please do go for a regime that doesn't care about people. I think it would be better than a system that cares too much or one that is actively malicious.
I agree, and that in fact was my entire point. The person I responded to chose the "NIMBYs don't care about others" framing. I'm attempting to point out that they're using an extremely non-central definition of "caring" that delivers nonsensical results.
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It's not just progressives who fall into this trap. I have seen many on the right who are preoccupied with other people, too. I think both sides have a tendency to moralize , but about different things.
That's fine if people want to make stupid choices. Just don't make me pay for the externalities or make me have to pretend that these are values to aspire to.
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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.
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.
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While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
Most people, even YIMBYs, support the right of a community to impose some restrictions on activities with large externalities. Only the most extremist libertarians think anyone has the right to build a fish cannery or paper mill in a residential area.
Why does this have to be an extreme libertarian position? The free market essentially solves the problem associated with this. Neighborhoods that stink of fish will be cheaper to live in and those who are not okay with that can pay for the privilege.
I live in a city that does indeed allow the unthinkable idea of fish canning (slaughterhouse) plants in the middle of the city, they just get surrounded by dirt-cheap housing and businesses (and people do live there). It's still cheaper overall to live in a place that doesn't smell like meat because not fucking with the markets really does wonders.
The issue of course, and I'm broadly on the YIMBY side, is that the moment that slughterhouse gets plopped down it imposes economic costs on some with diffuse benefits for all. The people who paid not cheap prices for their houses are out a significant portion of their largest asset and the diffuse beneficiaries will not compensate them.
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between projects which impose a true negative externality on neighbors and projects which merely remove a previous positive externality. A slaughterhouse really is making things specifically worse and I think that should be compensated but residents who currently enjoy the seclusion brought by the woody area behind their neighborhood and thus are lobbying to disallow bulldozing it to build more houses can fuck right off.
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Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners? It's not like a fish canning factory can just plop out of nowhere, large disruptive projects take years/decades to build and the intention to build as such is broadcasted well in advance.
We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.
I think you'll find people quite unwilling to just eat huge unfair economic hits like this. They'll lobby whatever powers they can to prevent their loss and ultimately they will succeed, even if they have to go to extreme lengths. If you don't let them do it through cities they'll do it through some other scheme. You're talking about taking the equivalent of several years of work away from people's net worth, they'll bomb the construction if it comes to that.
The ONLY reason the middle class has jumped head first into real estate investment is because of the government consistently enacting zoning regulations to deliberately benefit homeowners at the expense of everyone else, which likewise benefits a community’s most consistent voters. Anyone else who borrowed an amount of money 3-4x their salary as part of a 30-year loan, wiped down the countertops, then cried crocodile tears when their “investment” didn’t make them millionaires, would rightly be told they were an irresponsible idiot.
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It's not just homeowners, concentrated benefits / diffuse costs are a general problem - overfishing may benefit you, personally, now, but takes a bit away from other fishers now, and from you in the future, and persistent overfishing would necessitate regulation.
Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?
In a world where homeowners are hapless agency-less simpletons, yes. But it's not a wise long-term strategy for the potential slaughterhouse owner, people will wisen up to his tactics. There are countless ways businesses can extract money out of you now too, but competition fixes that issue just fine.
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Might as well ask why people are allowed to have a say in the way their city/state/nation is run. Because we've accepted that from other principles. If you want to argue for the god-emperor to make every zoning decision, be my guest. Until then, let people who live there decide how they want to live, and suffer or reap the consequences.
This is contradictory to letting people use their land that they own the way they like. People can decide how they live as long as they bear the cost of it instead of politically strongarming others into making decisions that benefit them.
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Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally. If the majority of people in the neighborhood think that inviting more hobos to hang out is the right thing to do and should probably be considered a new amenity, well, tough shit for me. As much as I'd like to be the dictator of my own fiefdom, I'd settle for collaborative local control of policies. I suppose equally implicit is that I reject the idea that anyone that owns a given yard can do as they like with it, free from government interference.
But then what is the point of even owning property? If others want veto power over what I do with the land that I own, then they can buy it from me. If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.
But like, they can. Nonetheless, people choose to own property, because it still affords greater freedom to do [whatever] than renting. The set of things you're allowed to do when you're renting is smaller than the set of things you're allowed to do as a landowner / homeowner. This remains true even though the latter set does not contain "literally anything conceivable."
I don't agree. It's why I will never buy a house in an HOA: the entire point is to do what I want. As soon as neighborhood Karens are telling me what I can and can't do on the land I own, ownership is meaningless.
Idk where you live, but as far as I know, almost everywhere has a building code, at least in the US. I suppose a sufficiently rural area might offer more leeway.
Building codes do limit what you can do with your land (and are a non-trivial part of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate as they may include restrictions that greatly reduce density like parking or setback requirements), but HOAs have a reputation for having arbitrary and detailed restrictions on the use of your land like "your house may be painted one of these 4 colors".
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What defines a "community"? Is it your neighborhood? Your street? Literally just your family? The town? The state? The country? Right now most of these laws are passed at the municipal level, but municipalities can range in size from millions of people to a handful, and as current events in California indicate, if you change from town to state, you can get very different policies.
In general I don't think that "collective ownership" is a good framework for coordination problems. At some point, a plot of land (or building, etc) needs a person who is going to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome; rule by committee or democracy is marked by lots of public choice problems. A market with individual owners, and Coasian bargaining for externalities, is usually going to be better at capturing everyone's preferences given all of the relevant costs and other information. Complete bans are a very heavy-handed and unnecessarily extreme solution.
It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not. You might not want to live next to an unmarried couple, but are you willing to pay for all of the costs that come with forcing neighborhoods to be that way?
To take your argument about NIMBYism more generally: In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people. Highly-paid software engineers need to find multiple roommates just to live near the center of their industry. Professionals with families and white-collar jobs are forced to live an hour commute from downtown, because "home values" are literally sacred. In the most extreme cases, it exacerbates the very homeless problem it attempts to, well, not solve, but avoid. And it imposes, on other people, very similar externalities to the ones you are trying to avoid. Cars are a good example: NIMBYism inevitably requires lots of driving because everything is low-density and stores are required by law to be far away from homes. Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US, and a substantial portion of those deaths are not drivers. They're also very loud, they pollute, etc.
This is a non-sequitur / isolated demand at best, and wrong at worst. It sounds sensible to argue for the principle that you must pay for all the costs of services you use, except in practice no one has ever truly done that and it's much more practical to get people to pay for a portion of stuff they use. For example, on average 50% of road funding comes from gas taxes, and 50% of transit fares are subsidized. Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".
In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.
This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability. First off, anti-police sentiment has been on the rise, resulting in less police and less police funding, so traffic enforcement goes down and along with it traffic safety. (Cue the arguments from activists about how pretextual traffic stops are just harassing minorities and resulted in the death of George Floyd and whatnot.) And of course with less police, there's more homicides. Next, judges and prosecutors release people that probably shouldn't be released, so you get cases where police end up pursuing a six-time felon whose license is suspended which hasn't stopped him from actually driving in the slightest.
I mean, yes, you can argue cars are just a bad of an externality as the homeless. But personally I'm like, well people have been railing against the police these past few years, what else did you expect?
I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines. If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.
I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.
(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)
The numbers in the linked video are actually from a separate organization, Urban3. I don't really think that the linked comment "shows ST to be dishonest." gattsuru seems to agree that funding is coming from the state and local government, which is also something that ST has pointed out. They then complain about the fact that ST's comparison between 2 lots is (misleading? inaccurate?) because one lot has more businesses than the other, when in fact that is the whole point. Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income. Overall I would describe this as "someone disagrees with them" not "they're being dishonest."
Why does it "ring hollow"? I agree that reckless driving doesn't get enough enforcement; I've previously complained about that. But I think this problem long predates BLM protests and backlash against police. Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing. Even the use of the term "car accident" is arguably misleading; we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory. What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame. Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.
I am also skeptical that enforcement has/would have a big effect, but I would love to see some empirical research. However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.
Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.
Funnily enough, most urbanist discourse I've seen online is against privatization of trains and in favor of nationalization, e.g. so Amtrak will actually gain the right-of-way over freight rail that they ostensibly have on paper but isn't meaningfully enforced.
I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control. More to the point, all planning decisions go through a committee and people will argue over what the best possible plan is, which indeed may include some people having to give up something in order to benefit others as you said (that's called compromise). This is true even if public services aren't provided to you at below cost.
Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.
Yes, you should. But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations (well, as long as you aren't Myanmar and build a 20-lane highway in the middle of nowhere). It seems hard to believe that this analysis is getting applied evenly to, say, buses in Tulsa, Oklahoma that are running at basically empty capacity (and will even waive your fare for the rest of the day), which I would consider not effective and incredibly wasteful in fact.
Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:
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I should've been clearer; this is also part of my point. Courts seem to let just about anyone out on bond these days no matter how bad of a crime they were arrested for. San Francisco recently had its prosecutor recalled because he kept just not prosecuting crimes. And this all stems from rhetoric of "restorative justice" along with complaints about minorities being unfairly persecuted.
My point is people will kill someone and then just get out of jail and then do it again, no matter if they did the killing by running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife. Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.
Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver. And personally, someone being dependent on someone else is the least of my worries if it's because they killed another person.
I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.
I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.
It seemed to me to be the argument that the OP of this thread was making. NIMBYism means keeping people he doesn't like out of his neighborhood, which sounds good. That's why I said what I did--if public services are subsidized out of general tax funds, because they provide benefits to everyone, then that contradicts the use of government policy to serve particular citizens at the expense of others. But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.
What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.
It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested. I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.
Ok. That might be right, and I think I've seen this basic claim before, but I don't have time to check it all now. I think what happened is that the parish's actual spending is too low to pay for all the costs, and what they should have been spending was higher. In any event, the amount given still seems to be quite a lot for only the local taxes for an area with below-average income.
I think we're still talking past each other. My point was that these situations are similar in the sense of imposing negative externalities on others.
I think we agree, but my claim is that in practice it's not common enough to revoke a license (which doesn't even stop a lot of people) because it's seen as such a severe punishment. It shouldn't stop the courts from imposing it, but it should. If you drive dangerously and kill someone, you should just be in prison.
Traffic calming is certainly not a panacea, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Not having ever driven drunk, I couldn't guess at whether it would be effective in that particular case.
As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).
It's not isolated. Tax all the externalities (noise, congestion, pollution, danger, etc.) and let the market sort it out, sure. I think the externalities are much larger for cars than for almost any other mode of transit, and if we did that, cars would be much more expensive. But what we're currently doing doesn't make sense.
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Not really.. Pedestrian deaths declined from 1979 (8096) to 2009 (4109) Non-pedestrian deaths dropped precipitously starting after 2005, more or less plateaued from 2010 to 2014, rose again until 2016, then fell until 2019. This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.
Certainly we have it; it's what determines who is "at fault" in an accident. Even no-fault states apply it to some sorts of damages. Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)? Negligence doesn't result in that.
That's still over a 50% increase in pedestrian deaths over about 10 years, enough to push it to the highest raw level since 1990, especially since the EU saw a substantial decline over the past decade. And the chance from 2020 to 2021 was massive.
It's not the only factor, but it's definitely one. SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians than other cars, and the same factors that make a vehicle safe for its occupants can make others unsafe, encouraging an arms race.
I'm confused by this question. The whole point I'm making is that we use the word "accident" for a lot of car crashes that are preventable, because one or more drivers engaged in some sort of irresponsible or reckless behavior. Asking if I want to jail people for accidents is rather sidestepping the issue. If you speed and follow too close on the highway, resulting in a fatality, yeah, you should be in prison. That's manslaughter; the lack of intent to kill makes it not murder, but it's still generally a crime to behave recklessly and injure other people. A similar situation is literally one of the examples in the wikipedia page on manslaughter.
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Citation needed. Can you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles, keeps a handle on the vagrant problem, and generally results in superior outcomes? There's lots of NIMBY areas with good economic and social outcomes, but has YIMBY ever actually been implemented at scale in the US?
I mean, yeah? NIMBY-ism is a thing of the past forty years. If anything, the homeless have been more of a political issue since then, not less.
has YIMBY been implemented, though? I know NIMBY has been done, and can observe what the results look like. YIMBY is supposed to make things better. Has that positive effect been demonstrated in a concrete fashion somewhere?
One of the reasons I'm extremely skeptical of Progressive ideas is that I've observed a fundamental pattern to their behavior: they announce a theory that they claim will fix a problem, they implement this theory, the solution doesn't work and the situation gets way, way worse, and they ignore the results completely and just keep pushing the solution. I have observed this pattern express itself in a wide variety of social and political contexts, from the housing projects to educational reform to criminal justice, on time-scales of multiple decades at a minimum.
The best response to such behavior is, when a new plan is proposed, to ask whether it has actually proven itself workable in a similar environment, and whether its claimed benefits have actually materialized. There's fifty states in America, a whole lot of cities, towns and counties, and if YIMBY principles work cleanly and efficiently, at least one of these places should be able to implement them locally and demonstrate the benefits in a concrete fashion.
If the response is that YIMBY is a perfect solution but it only works if we implement it everywhere simultaneously, on the other hand, my recommended policy is that such claims should never under any circumstances be entertained. Any plan that requires hegemony to implement is flatly unacceptable, unless of course it's my tribe that's the hegemon.
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I'm not aware of any that do a good job over the whole metro area, no (good enough to evaluate their effects in this way, at any rate). You could probably point to individual towns or neighborhoods, but these would probably be A) subject to selection bias because they're rare, B) too few in number, and C) surrounded by other places with different policies. Not Just Bikes made a video about a streetcar suburb of Toronto which seems pretty nice, and if there are any crowds of druggies, they haven't stopped housing prices there from rising faster than in the rest of the city (because of course, such places are mostly illegal to build now, so the supply is constrained).
However, I think you've misunderstood the point of this sentence. Policies generally associated with NIMBYism are not just about keeping vagrants or other obvious problem-causers away. This is clear from looking at the policies themselves, as well as NIMBY arguments, which involve things like property values.
Here's one example: The ski resort town of Vail has been fighting to keep the ski resort of Vail from building employee housing. The reason they give is bighorn sheep range, but they've approved several regular homes to be built in the area and didn't care about any measures the resort offered to protect the sheep. And I think it's pretty clear that resort employee housing is not going to suddenly attract homeless people to one of the most expensive resort towns in the world!
Similarly with opposition to e.g. a duplex or retail or a school. A neighborhood full of million-dollar homes is not suddenly going to be crawling with hobos and criminals because someone put a duplex up going for half a million each side or a small elementary school.
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It seems to me that people associate and conflate nimbyism with multiple different issues. It's understandable, maybe even beneficial, that people might oppose things like housing projects in areas with lots of families. One could argue those things need to go somewhere, but I think ultimately housing projects in modern urban america have been failures. Its time to try something else.
Then there's the more common somewhat related problem of regulatory burden, where people oppose construction of basic housing, apartments, businesses, or infrastructure, through arcane laws that basically upend the function of property rights (I can do with my property as I will). This seems less defensable and ultimately is one of the main cruxes of the housing crisis in high cost west coast cities.
Then there's this recent left leaning obsession with dense urban living that gets thrown in (without any logical connection IMO). The claim is that it's more environmentally friendly, would lead to more equitable or equal outcomes, and also just seems to be an aesthetic choice. The method to achieve this seems to be scrapping suburban infrastructure, regulating away cars, and generally centralizing government authority so people cannot resist. There are a lot of obvious reasons not to do this (dense urban areas have poorer outcomes than suburbs in income inequality, mental health, self reported happiness, crime and basically every metric you can think of outside of average income, which may or may not still exist when adjusted for cost of living) If it isn't obvious I think the value of this argument approaches nill, and is just signal boosted by the location and recruiting pool of media conglomerates. If anything, as the internet makes your location more and more economically irrelevant, it seems that dense urban living makes less sense than ever.
The YIMBYs and the dense-urban-living people are the same people with different hats (or masks) on. No YIMBYs are out there supporting my right to build a 10-foot fence or run a business from my house; they only support relaxation of regulations in as much as that relaxation results in densification.
Definitely not true, because I'm a YIMBY and am totally opposed to dense urbanification. You could call most of the republican party functionally YIMBY (anti construction regulation) but anti urbanification, they just don't use those terms. There's a pretty clear connection between how red an area is and its lack of housing regulation.
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Many of the twitter YIMBYs I'm vaguely aware of tend to be neoliberal/market-leaning, and they're generally supportive of 'mixed use development', i.e. being allowed to run small-scale businesses in residential areas (or build homes in business areas). IT's claimed to revitalize neighborhoods, lead to local businesses you can walk to and socialize around.
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The idea of trying to hide and defending ones farm is one of the worst ideas in the American right. Chicago has African levels of murder and the people who built it vote democrat and have BLM profiles on their linkedin since they isolated themselves in suburbia. This is the same mistake the French elite made by moving to Versailles. If you isolate yourself from society, cohesion will plummet. If people don't interact there is no understanding left. This will rip society apart and create a soulless city. American cities tend to lack public spaces, life on the streets and genuine culture and instead have stroads and strip malls. A walkable mixed use development is much more likely to have a living culture with less fat people and a stronger identity as people actually interact with each other and have chances to form a collective identity. If you are nothing but an atomized consumer isolated from the others, bringing in cheap foreign labour seems much more appealing than if they have to live next door.
A healthy society should be one large community in which different classes play different roles but fundamentally are one team. How are people going to identify with each other if they live in isolated enclaves? The goal should be to maximize skin in the game as people climb the social ladder. Greek and Roman aristocrats went into battle first, the same should apply today with the added requirement that they use public transit and drink tap water. Low skin in the game for the top is a dangerous direction for a society to wander.
American sprawling cities are the most woke and most pro multicultural places on Earth. Even places in Europe that are considered multicultural are as white as Boston. The idea that suburbia would lead to a better society for right wing people seems to be empirically false. It seems to lead to generic urban sprawl in which the top third is isolated from the rest of the society and slowly loses its connection to the rest.
I agree that outer-ring suburbs are about the worst in terms of optimizing atomic quality of life vs. community, but you seem to completely exclude the existence of small towns, which seem to me to offer superior sense of community along with low cost of living and the most egalitarian of lifestyles (due largely to the lack of high-end amenities, granted.) The main downside is lack of economic opportunity, but there's no inherent reason we couldn't make that a social priority as opposed to densification.
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For what it's worth, my choice was already a unit in a multifamily dwelling in a relatively dense area of the city (although Madison is not an especially dense city as a whole. My preferred style of living are places like the row homes in Alexandria. I agree completely with preferring an interconnected community, walkability, bikeability, and a firm sense of city identity as important. I'm not interested in Retvrn-style politics of retreat, I'm interested in asserting the legitimacy of communities being able to say no to larger, non-local governments imposing deterioration on them in a way that no should accept for their neighborhood. I just have no particular desire to impose this preference on suburbanites - if they don't want this in their backyard, they get to say no, and that's fine.
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