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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

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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