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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29281 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.

Your desires, to have good, respectable, neighbors, to not live near disruptions etc. Are not only acceptable, they're completely expected. My objection to NIMBYism lies not in it's goals but in it's tactics which I believe frequently amount to using government action to appropriate the land value of other private actors for their own benefit. As a libertarian I see this as tantamount to communism.

Let me illustrate this with an example. There is a quiet neighborhood on the edge of town. Next to the neighborhood there is a field owned by a single farmer who grows corn. The neighborhood residents enjoy the quiet seclusion brought by being surrounded by corn and their homes values appreciate due to the relative scarcity of housing in their immediate vicinity. However as the area grows more populous the farmer realizes that his land would be more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn and he begins talking with a local developer to sell the land.

Now let's consider a few ways that the neighborhood residents might respond.

Scenario #1: the residents allow the field to be sold and new houses to be built and welcome their new neighbors

Scenario #2: the residents negotiate with the farmer and pay him a fixed sum of money in order for him to agree to put a restriction on his land that it will not be used except for agricultural purposes for the next 50 years

Scenario #3: the residents collectively buy the land from the farmer and turn it into a private park

Scenario #4: the residents use the fact that they outnumber the farmer to enact coercive government action to block any potential development of the land

In a sense all of 2,3 and 4 could be called NIMBY but my only objection is to #4. However #4 and analogous situations seem to make up the vast majority of NIMBY behavior so I consider myself an opponent of NIMBYism in general. My core belief is that you don't own your neighbors land and even if you have been recieving a benefit from how he has chosen to use that land for a number of years you are not in any way entitled to continue recieving that benefit and any use of government action to coerce your neighbor to use his land in a certain way is effectively theft.

more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn

Though this may be a type of efficiency, removing productive farmland from cultivation to site housing that does not require arable land does not seem an efficient form of land use.

housing that does not require arable land

Housing requires nearby jobs, land nearby jobs is relatively rare, sometimes the value from being nearby jobs vastly outweighs value from being arable. In any case, if we just built dense housing like apartment buildings with no parking lots, pretty little arable land would need to be built over; it's only suburbs or urban sprawl with massive highways that waste tons of arable land.

The market is much better at finding efficient uses than your speculation.

NMBYIsm is seldom used in this context. It's more about people who have no stake, not the contrived farmer example. The pro-NIMBY argument has to do with existing homeowners (stakeholders) suffering an externality with no just compensation.

However as the area grows more populous the farmer realizes that his land would be more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn and he begins talking with a local developer to sell the land.

No, he didn't realize it would be more efficient, he realized it was worth more and wanted to cash in. People don't think in terms of efficiencies, they think in terms of values. Your example could have been from an economics textbook, which has a certain POV that is not relevant to the matter at hand, and does not reflect reality well enough to accept.

Taxation is theft. Theft is OK when enough people agree on it.

No, he didn't realize it would be more efficient, he realized it was worth more and wanted to cash in.

This is a distinction without a difference. The farmer might not be thinking in terms of efficiencies but the forces that make the land more efficiently used as housing are the same forces that make the price higher thus making it more attractive for the farmer to sell. You're also ignoring the primary point. It doesn't matter why the farmer wants to sell what matters is that it's his land not anyone else's so other people have no right to tell him how it can be used.

This is a distinction without a difference.

No it's not. The quality of life benefit that the gently-waving fields of corn provide to the local residents is real! It even gets priced in in the value of the neighbor's homes. It just doesn't get directly converted to the farmer's benefit unless he acts to cannibalize the benefit (by selling the cornfield to someone who will build something "worse" there). This is a problem with conflating increased price with higher efficiency/benefit - at least insofar as we want people to be incentivized to provide and/or do things that their neighbors like and/or enjoy.

I've accounted for this. If the current residents are enjoying so much benefit from the farmland that it's actually more efficient to leave it undeveloped then there will be a price at which scenario #2 can be cleared

Our entire system is based on price = efficiency. That’s the American system. While the farmer might not be a trained economists it’s still the entire basis of our system higher price = higher efficient use

(For some good you could say higher marginal efficiency; oxygen is super important but the marginal oxygen is worthless type arguments).

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