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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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