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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29291 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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:

NIMBY (or nimby),[1] an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard",[2][3] is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that such residents are only opposing the development because it is close to them and that they would tolerate or support it if it were built farther away. The residents are often called nimbys, and their viewpoint is called nimbyism. The opposite movement is known as YIMBY for "yes in my back yard".[4]

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:

An ordinance the Madison Common Council adopted in 1966 defines a “family” as “an individual, or two (2) or more persons related by blood, marriage, domestic partnership, or legal adoption, living together as a single housekeeping unit, in a dwelling unit, including foster children,” though city ordinance does carve out some exceptions for roomers, children, group homes of people with disabilities, and so on. The implication for renters is that, depending on the zoning of an area, it might be technically illegal for more than two unrelated people to live in an apartment together. Restrictions are also tougher for renters than for people who own homes. In our scenario, if one of us had been able to buy a home, it would have been legal for us to live together, but as renters, it would be illegal in most residential districts to share a home.

…

The neighborhoods with the greatest opposition to this change are already some of the most expensive in the city. Homes currently for sale in Dudgeon Monroe, Vilas, Greenbush, and Wingra Park range between $625,000 and $1.3 million for a 4 bedroom home. They’re not your typical target neighborhoods for student housing. UW-Madison undergrads are a smart bunch, but likely very few of them have the time, money, and energy to hollow out your neighborhood of expensive homes. Most of them are perfectly decent neighbors, too, by the way.

…

The fact that the current ordinance doesn’t relate to use, but is more about who, is an indicator that it is designed to be discriminatory. While more explicit restrictions against poor people, young people, unmarried people, or students living in certain homes would certainly violate fair housing laws, these thinly-veiled discriminatory ordinances seem to fly under the legal radar. Still, one could argue it does violate city protections based on marital status, income, as well as student status. It actually could be cause for a lawsuit. Some municipalities’ family definitions have been struck down by courts in various locations around the US, and the Attorney General of Wisconsin in 1974 wrote an opinion that these ordinances “are of questionable constitutionality” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s discriminatory enough that housing is so gosh-darned expensive—do we really need unjust zoning ordinances on top of the price tag?

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.

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.

A study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimated that the housing restrictions brought on by NIMBY activists are costing US workers $1 trillion in reduced wages, (several thousand dollars for every worker), by making it unaffordable to relocate to higher-productivity cities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, it isn't. Real estate is largely about location, and as a location, Dubai is a problem in many ways.

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.

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.

No, it isn't. Real estate is largely about location, and as a location, Dubai is a problem in many ways.

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.

A study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimated that the housing restrictions brought on by NIMBY activists are costing US workers $1 trillion in reduced wages, (several thousand dollars for every worker), by making it unaffordable to relocate to higher-productivity cities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I was an econ major.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Was it this one? It's about immigration, not tariffs, but otherwise seems to match pretty closely.

It appears I might just be totally miscalibrated on this topic. I checked the IGM Economic Experts Panel. Although most of the expert economists surveyed believed immigration was a net good for America, they did say (50% agree to only 9% disagree) that “unless they were compensated by others, many low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year”. I’m having trouble seeing the difference between this statement (which economists seem very convinced is true) and “you should worry about immigrants stealing your job” (which everyone seems very convinced is false). It might be something like – immigration generally makes “the economy better”, but there’s no guarantee that these gains are evently distributed, and so it can be bad for low-skilled workers in particular? I don’t know, this would still represent a pretty big update, but given that I was told all top economists think one thing, and now I have a survey of all top economists saying the other, I guess big updates are unavoidable. Interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this.

OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!

How did you find it?

More comments

If you believe in the power of the market to allocate scarce resources among agents with infinite wants most effectively.

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).

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

France modernized post WW2.

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.

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.

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.

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

  1. lower birth rate = Less young people to take care of old people

  2. 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.

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.

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.

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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